Viewing posts tagged "Energy Efficiency"

Johnson Controls: What’s Hot in Green Building

Johnson Controls will informally refer to itself as the IBM of green building and in many ways the analogy is apt. Both companies have extensive histories. The Milwaukee-based company just announced another quarterly dividend, the latest in a streak that stretches back to 1887.

And, like IBM, the company is pervasive in its field. Johnson is one of the principal contractors behind the retrofit of the Empire State Building. It also employs 800 LEED-accredited employees. Thus, what the company does will have some impact on the market. (It also received a $299 million grant to develop transportation batteries earlier this year.)

We recently spoke to Don Albinger, vice president of renewable energy solutions. Here's what's on his mind:

• Performance-based contracts continue to gain popularity, particularly with public sector companies like schools or government agencies. In these agreements, a contractor performs a retrofit and then guarantees certain reductions in energy consumption, etc. If they miss, the owner gets a refund. The contracts are similar to energy services contracts, in which the contractor gets paid through a portion of the energy saved, but there are differences.

• Industrial solar steam is taking off. In these systems, heat from the sun is exploited to run industrial boilers. "It is about a 40 percent efficient process. Solar thermal has advantages we need to capitalize on," he said.

• Although biomass has been gathering interest in some parts of the country, it is being challenged by the relatively low price of natural gas.

• One of the next waves in the industry will involve around tying building energy management systems to other enterprise applications. HVAC will be linked to building security applications and both will be integrated into financial and other applications. This will make energy savings and efficiency more dynamic and easier to measure. The company worked on a project like this with the state of Missouri, which has helped cut millions out of operating budgets.

• And of course, customers looking at ways to cut power bills should always think about reducing consumption before putting up solar panels.

"You've got to stop the building from losing energy before you start putting in new capital equipment," he said.

Ontario May Follow California With TV Energy Standards

Two days after California passed energy efficiency regulations for TV, government officials in Ontario say they might go the same direction.

"We're always looking at ways we need to improve standards with appliances," Energy Minister Gerry Phillips told the Star. "Over the next few months we'll be looking at whether we need to set some additional new standards."

Whether and how quickly another government might follow California was one of the big questions following the 5–0 vote by the California Energy Commission to adopt regulations that set standards for energy efficiency. Under the new California rules, TVs measuring 58 inches or less will have to become 33 percent more efficient by 2011 and 49 percent more efficent by 2013.

The annoucement likely already sent members of the Consumer Electronics Association to Expedia to book flights to Canada's home of greentech. The California regulations came after a long, hard battle.

Many TVs already meet that standard. Panasonic already makes plasma TVs, for instance, that consume 142 watts. Hitachi and others have also begun to show off technologies – like automatic shut-off and TVs with energy efficient lighting schemes – that could lead to TVs that consume less than 100 watts. In fact, 1,000 TVs already meet the standard, the CEC pointed out.

True, but it's the unintended consequences that scare manufacturers. Integrating a hard drive into a TV so that it can record TV shows invariably will increase power consumption. However, a TV with a built-in DVR might consume less energy than TVs and DVRs sold separately. The regulations, thus, could increase power consumption. Energy efficiency can also add to the cost of TVs.

Cash for Caulkers: The President Is Mulling Home Energy Efficiency

Cash For Caulkers, now officially called Homestar, is in front of the president, according to the The New York Times.

“It’s one of the top things he’s looking at," said Rahm Emanuel, the President's chief of staff told the paper.

The $23 billion dollar program would essentially provide incentives to homeowners to weatherize and energy retrofit their homes. John Doerr has become the public face for the program, but it emerged from Steve Cowell and Matt Golden, the founder of Recurve (formerly Sustainable Spaces). Matt told us about his work a few weeks ago and the clever caulkers name, but forgot to get around to it. Sorry about that.

"We looked at the state of the construction industry (scary, 17%+ unemployment) and the opportunity for job creation and for hitting our climate goals in retrofitting," Golden wrote us earlier this month. 

Housing is a top priority in the White House. Joe Biden has already launched the Recovery through Retrofit program to make home retrofits easier to finance. It's also no coincidence that Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, formerly run by Department of Energy Secretary Steve Chu, is the nation's premier building energy efficiency research center.

With carbon cap and trade looking like a next year issue, don't be surprised to see energy efficiency bills carved out of the main legislation and passed on their own. This is one of the few green issues that enjoys bipartisan support. It saves energy and creates jobs that are difficult to outsource to China. Someone has to go into the attic. If both programs pass, there could be a stampede to Lowe's.

Just by coincidence, Golden has been writing a series of articles on weatherization and energy efficiency on our website. Here are his two most recent posts.

Sustainable Spaces Renames Itself, Plots National Expansion

Sustainable Spaces is now Recurve and it's going national.

The company, which retrofits homes and small businesses, has largely worked in Northern California (one client had utility bills that came to $6,500 a month before a retrofit) but now it will expand to new geographies. Getting a made-up name from branding consultants is just one of those things you do to celebrate.

How does a residential contractor that's only five years old go national? The company is actually a software vendor in disguise. It has been studying home retrofits and writing applications that, ideally, will take the guesswork out of a home retrofit. Right now, contracting and retrofitting thrive on tribal knowledge: contractors each have their own tricks of the trade and live by them. Under Recurve's paradigm, it will enlist contractor/partners who will then plug variables into a computer – number and size of windows, number of individuals with respiratory problems in house, number of bedrooms, etc. – that will spit out good, better, best retrofit plans using Recurve's software.

The company employs a lot of ex-Googlers. The applications are why we picked Sustainable, whoops, Recurve, as one of the top ten companies in green software.

Behind the scenes, the company has something of a national profile already. Founder Matt Golden spends quite a bit of time lobbying for energy efficiency bills in D.C. and various state capitols.

"Over the past 5 years, the company has enjoyed phenomenal growth in revenue, doubling the business every year on average, mostly by referrals from satisfied clients. In 2009, one of the most challenging in history for the construction industry, Recurve grew revenues by 70% and employed nearly 70 people out of the San Francisco office. Recurve is the only home energy company in Northern California to be accredited by the Building Performance Institute, which sets national quality standards for the industry," the company stated.

Walmart to Outfit New, Renovated Stores With LEDs. 650 Stores in First Year

Walmart, the mega-retailer that helped put energy consumption on the agenda for corporate executives, said it will use light emitting diode lights from Cree in new stores and retrofitted ones. In the first year, that will come to 650 stores alone.

The stores will replace ceramic metal halide lights, those honkers you see in the ceiling of big box retailers. The Cree bulbs will emit the same amount of light as a 70-watt bulb but use 82 percent less power.

LEDs have been talked about for years, but are finally going to start appearing in large numbers. Commercial establishments will install them first. The bulbs cut power, and commercial establishments typically have more bulbs, but the bulbs also cut maintenance. LED bulbs last 50,000 hours, far longer  than vacuum-tube bulbs. That leads to fewer hours the maintenance people have to climb ladders to replace bulbs, order new bulbs, figure out places to stock the ones that just came in the mail, etc.

LEDs will come to the consumer market, but more slowly. Most people, after all, just change their own bulbs so the cost associated with swapping them is minimal.

The quality of light has also improved with LED bulbs – that "alien autopsy" tone of white is vanishing – and the price is coming down. Need more on lighting? Here's a comprehensive report on the subject that, just by coincidence, I wrote.

In the middle of the decade Walmart started looking at its energy bills and determined that it could whack a lot of operating costs through efficiency. Lighting was an early target. By taking out the light bulbs in the coke machines on the premises, the company saved $1 million a year.

LEDs represent the biggest opportunity in lighting. The second biggest (or first, according to some) will be equipment to network lights so they can be automatically dimmed or turned off.

Abbott Cuts Water Use by 1B Gallons a Year

At the end of September, we wrote about how medical supply giant Abbott cut oil and gas consumption by 35 percent compared to a 2006 baseline though, in part, waste heat technologies.

Now, the company says it is saving one billion gallons of water a year, a key milestone considering that some of its facilities are in water-starved Singapore. The company set out to get to 40 percent below its water consumption of 2004 by 2011 but it's already there. Water consumed in manufacturing processes is down 37 percent.

How did the company accomplish it? Through a variety of technologies like installing more water-efficient scrubbers for controlling dust in a Michigan facility or by installing tighter-fitting pipes in other facilities. An Arizona plant implemented leak tags to ensure that leaks are detected and fixed at a more rapid rate.

Conserving water saves energy too – around 5 percent of California's power revolves around transporting water. (The figure climbs to 19 percent if you add heating.) IBM is working on a number of water projects these days as well. Carbon, water and energy are all interrelated, according to IBM.