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Energy Management: How To Reduce Costs

As part of the magazine's ongoing coverage of The TFM Show (formerly Facility Forum), this feature showcases one 2002's informative pre-conference roundtables. Moderated by Donna Clapp, editor-in-chief of Business Facilities, this column includes questions asked by members of the audience and answers provided by the session's roundtable of experts , including John Doran of DENSO Sales California, Dave Troyan of The Trane Co., and Pam Rose of Honeywell.

Question: In terms of new construction, what would you recommend for energy efficient office buildings?
Troyan: What we're seeing is a lot of variable air volume systems or VAVs. This approach allows the facility manager to have individual zone control for the various occupants, which can be very helpful in office buildings. It also allows air conditioning units to track with diversity in the building.

Rose: There's also a process called data mining, where millions of bits of data are collected. This process helps identify what can be fine-tuned and points out the potential areas for savings.

Doran: I would actually consider contingency planning. The possibility of the system going off line could be disastrous, so facility managers need to keep other options open, especially during the start up phase. Backup cooling can make things livable until the main system gets back on line if there are problems at start up.

Clapp: What steps can businesses take to conserve energy?
Troyan: One of the first steps is to review the building controls. Take a look at economizers and make sure that you're taking full advantage of outside air cooling, night setbacks, start/stop settings, and things like that. It's certainly more efficient to run your building—whenever you can—with outside air (which economizes) rather than using mechanical cooling.

The second item would be preventive maintenance. I think many building owners try to save money wherever they can, so when they have a tight budget, they cut corners on preventive maintenance. By doing that, they certainly impede and compromise the efficiency of the equipment. So simple things—like replacing filters, cleaning condensers on air cooled equipment, cleaning the tubes on water cooled equipment—these important practices ensure the equipment is operating with maximum efficiency.

Thirdly, you want to conduct an overall building tune up. Commissioning or re-commissioning is something that we don't see that often, but it's becoming more popular. On new buildings we're seeing specs where a third party contractor goes in and commissions buildings to ensure they meet the engineering specifications.

The fourth point is to look at new things, not only in equipment, but also in what we call after market products. You might be able to use after market products to get additional energy conservation out of your system, make a chiller or air handler more efficient, or investigate variable frequency drives (VFDs). Another option is energy storage. Thermal energy storage with either ice or water is also popular.

Finally, facility managers should really consider alternate fuel options. Everybody generally has either electric chillers or electric air conditioners in their buildings, but there are gas fired products available. These could be a good, solid option as well.

Clapp: Can portable cooling be used in a 24/7 environment?
Doran: When you're faced with the ability to control your systems and can cut back, it's important to identify the critical and non-critical areas. Portable cooling gives users additional flexibility.

Consider a wing of a hospital where there are no surgeries scheduled or there is low occupancy for a certain period of time. However, there might be offices or equipment in that area that needs to be cooled.

Portable cooling gives facility managers the option of shutting down or cutting back the main system and using something else to supplement the air conditioning.

Troyan: Certainly, 24/7 means you're running your equipment quite a bit, so it needs to be kept in tip top condition in terms of maintenance. It's also important to consider other strategies like water cooled economizers, VFDs, and much more. These technologies not only increase energy efficiency but also enhance the life of the equipment.

Clapp: Is there an opportunity for customers to save on utility bills?
Rose: Utility bills are notorious for having errors that don't get caught. Most people accept their utility costs as a part of doing business. These bills go to an accounts payable department that codes them and pays them without ever validating the details.

We average about 1% per year in bill error resolution per customer. That may not sound like much, but when you stop and think it's just due to a billing error, it can certainly add up.

An interesting bit of trivia on the utility side: utility companies have a program built in when they're generating the bills on a monthly basis for their customers. If a bill is generated that is 5% or more lower than a bill for the previous 12 month period, that bill gets rejected for manual audit on behalf of the utility before it gets mailed to the customer. Naturally the utilities don't have a similar program for any bill that goes up 5% or more, so they're only checking on their behalf. Just make sure your bill is correct!

Question: Because of 80s energy standards, we've created the wonder of sick building syndrome—a situation that's creating havoc everywhere. How can we try to get more fresh makeup air without sacrificing huge costs?
Troyan: Many times, those sick buildings were never right from the beginning. The systems were installed, but did the contractors really adjust the economizers? Did they really calibrate all the temperatures and controls?

This is a problem that's growing. Today, the big thing is ASHRAE 90.1, the current energy standard. ASHRAE 90.1 not only talks about equipment efficiencies and minimum standards, but it also talks about construction, air leakage, air balancing, and things like that. You can learn more about this standard by going online to www.ashrae.org.

Question: How are we going to get to a point where we have total integration of the data from various systems?
Troyan: On existing buildings, it's a little difficult, because you're stuck with what's in there. Certainly with new buildings, there are a couple of different platforms. You may have heard of the ASHRAE BACnet standard. BACnet operates at a system level. For instance, there are jobs where our products are communicating with Honeywell, Siemens, or Johnson Controls, and it's pretty much at a system level. We may have a BACnet panel that takes information from a chiller, collects it into a data bank, then dumps it into the Honeywell or Johnson Controls gateway.

If you go further down into the individual components, you may be hearing talk about LonWorks. There are many companies that are now being LonWorks certified.

Are we truly plug and play? No. Each application is a little different.

Question: How long before we see everything running on an open architecture like LonWorks?
Troyan: I only see it as slightly more than a year or two away. Just about all of our equipment can be operated in this way.

The new controllers we came out with about a year ago are LonMark certified and operate with their systems. We're starting to see more LonWorks specs.

What I caution my engineers about is there's still an uncertainty in the industry. Not everyone is totally certified, compliant with their architecture, and that sort of thing. However, it's certainly much better than where we were three or four years ago.

Rose: I'd just like to add that the consumer needs to provide us with feedback. Is this what you want? We manufacturers need to listen.