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Charting 25 Years of Conservation Progress New Technologies and Attitudes Deliver Energy Management Results
April, 2008
By Marion Fraser
Remember the mid-1980s: $10,000 bought you a desktop PC with 256 k of ram; receptionists answered telephones; faxes curled into a scroll on the floor. De-lamping, replacing 40 W tubes with energy saving 34s, and manual control systems were ubiquitous.
In the mid 1980s, more than a decade after the OPEC oil embargo had driven oil prices up fourfold, electricity and natural gas were battling each other for space heating market share. Rising electricity prices and falling natural gas prices should have made the battle one-sided, but "lowest first cost" not operating costs drove most decisions.
Rules-of-thumb, off the shelf designs and repeating what worked well in the past was the hallmark of good engineering design. Architecturally, a small cadre of professionals were giving us new bank towers and dramatically tall buildings and other structures.
Increasingly, however, building owners and managers were looking for ways to reduce operating costs. They had few tools to help them, but gradually new technologies came into play: "run around" (or California) heat pumps; direct digital control systems; and improved air sealing.
By 1989, Ontario Hydro was offering a set of incentive programs to the commercial market: Energy Efficient Lighting with both product and redesign incentives; Savings by Design for new construction and major renovations; and Thermal Cool Storage - all paying an average of $300 per kW reduced.
Technologies that were not necessarily new, surfaced and found new applications such as: motion sensors; electronic ballasts; high-efficiency motors; heat recovery; window film; ground source heat pumps; T8 lighting; variable speed drives; and high performance windows.
Many of these products were installed and many kWs and kWhs of electricity were saved. Ontario Hydro's programs reduced demand by 1200 MW system from 1989 to 1994 before the programs were cancelled in 1993.
In British Columbia, Manitoba and California, comparable programs have continued although waxing and waning in response to economic conditions, political whim and environmental fashion. It appears, though, that incentives and new technologies are not enough to alter the fundamental fact that energy management has traditionally been an afterthought, not just for the commercial sector but also for the entire North American economy.
It is now 2008 and, while energy management remains an afterthought for a lot of organizations, many companies, developers, property managers, tenants and customers are demanding higher standards. Terms like sustainability and carbon footprint are now mainstream. Former US Vice President Al Gore's efforts got him an Oscar and a Nobel peace prize. As never before, the desire for addressing the environmental impacts of energy use is palpable.
More consumers are coming to understand that energy management is a continuous improvement process that must be managed on an ongoing basis. In the past, Ontario Hydro programs affected some isolated decisions with an offer of incentives, but did not generally alter the way in which energy management decisions were made. Nor did they enable the right information flows for those decisions to be made on an informed and timely basis.
Think back to 1990 when the Internet was still a fringe technology. Energy monitoring was a task that yielded tons of data, but little useful information.
Now, BOMA Canada's Go Green program puts energy management into a decision making process, organizing the data and enabling comparisons among properties. The Canada Green Building Council is developing a major enhancement to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), which will extend certification to all phases of the lifecycle of a building with a major emphasis on performance management and benchmarking.
Smart metering, sub-metering and timely access to load data and energy profiles can enable real-time decision making in response to price signals, market changes and tenant requirements. Meta-control systems like the Hartmann-Loop for chillers installed at Humber College in Toronto can optimize all system components for higher efficiency at all levels of output.
The Ontario government's Energy Conservation Leadership Act will require public sector buildings to develop and maintain energy management plans. Although the legislation includes the potential for setting targets, one size doesn't fit all and energy savings targets are site specific. That said, the Canada Green Building Council estimates that it is possible and cost effective to reduce energy consumption in Canadian buildings by an average of 50%.
Many Canadian businesses have invested a great deal of resources into supply chain management, but most left energy out of that equation. Paying the utility bill was an accounts payable function and no one ever got fired for paying the hydro bill. The potential for real savings exists and saving energy has the added advantage of saving the environment.
Marion Fraser is the President of Fraser & Company, energy consultants. She has 25 years experience in the energy management and commercial buildings sectors, and most recently served as the Senior Policy Advisor to the Ontario Minister of Energy from 2003 to 2008.
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