Posts Tagged ‘building dashboard’
In a first for stadiums Australia-wide, the West Australian Football Commission has recently installed our real-time energy monitoring platform, Greensense View, to measure and reduce the ground’s energy consumption.
As venue managers, the WAFC implemented this system to identify ways of increasing energy efficiency, reducing environmental impacts and saving costs. The operational savings gained from more responsibly managing Western Australia’s premier sporting facility can then be reinvested into new initiatives and programmes.
Geoff Glass, the WAFC’s Director of Facilities and Planning is encouraged by the project and the opportunities it presents.
“The Greensense project at Patersons Stadium has allowed us as venue managers, to better understand our energy usage and will provide staff with real time feedback on energy consumption. It will also stimulate ideas and ways for all venue occupiers to explore further savings in energy usage and greenhouse emissions,” says Geoff.
The ongoing project will go a long way toward Patersons Stadium achieving maximum returns both economically and environmentally, by first building an informed and effective management. At a time of change for the Stadium, these greener changes are not only ground-breaking for our State’s home of football, but will also inspire and show the way for other AFL and sporting venues Australia-wide.
Everyone knows efficiency is a good thing, right? By being more efficient we can get the same outcome with less resources: the same illumination in our homes with less energy, the same production of widgets in our factory with less waste, the same recreation spaces with less water.
Stanley Jevons isn’t so sure. He was a British economist who in 1865 pointed to the experience of the Scottish iron industry who had significantly improved their efficiency, in terms of coal per tonne, but at the same time actually increased their consumption of coal. This phenomenon has come to be known as Jevons paradox.
Earlier this year, a scientific article by Jeff Tsao looked at the effects of more efficient lighting technology over the last 300 years. He found that introduction of more efficient lighting had actually increased the energy consumption associated with lighting. Exactly as Jevons would have predicted.
As we are able to produce more light with less energy and less cost, we take the opportunity to increase the amount of light we generate. More efficient lighting has enabled us to literally ‘light up the night’ and provided us much more amenity and enabled 24 hour lifestyles. The conclusion of Tsao’s paper is that we should expect the transition to LED lighting to increase, rather than decrease, energy consumption.
You shouldn’t draw the conclusion that efficiency improvements are bad. Producing more with less is what has enabled economic growth, and what is helping to lift millions out of poverty. But, when one of our goals is to improve sustainability and reduce resource use, we can’t expect an efficiency improvement alone to achieve that end.
What else do you need to do? How can you beat Jevons paradox?
The answer is to restrict the use of the resource, while the efficiency improvement allows you to still achieve the output you need. This restriction might be in the form of a cap, like the cap on greenhouse gas emissions in an emissions trading scheme. It might be a price increase that acts as a countervailing force to the efficiency improvement. Or, it might be a monitoring and reporting/disclosure scheme like NABERS.
In practical terms, this means that when you are making investments in improving efficiency, you should also give thought to how you will monitor and restrict resource use. Our real-time resource monitoring solution, Greensense View, might be part of the solution. Feel free to contact us and find out how.
The Greensense View® product suite is now registered under the National Solar for Schools scheme and will be installed in 51 schools across WA this financial year in partnership with a local solar provider.
Greensense View® will be used to monitor the green power generated by the solar installation at the school compared to the “black” power consumed from the grid as part of an education and awareness program delivered as part of the NSSP scheme.
Greensense View® is already being used by a number of other educational institutes include Curtin University, West Coast Institute of Training, Polytechnic West and the Industrial Training Institute arm of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
For more information on how Greensense View® can help your organisation understand and reduce energy and water use contact us.
Globally, the building sector contributes to about 40% of the world’s energy consumption and 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. Within Australia the building sector accounts for 19% of energy consumption and 23% of greenhouse gas emissions. Clearly we need to start making our buildings “healthy” by finding innovative ways to reduce the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions they are responsible for.
The National Strategy on Energy Efficiency (NSEE) has been designed to improve the minimum standards of energy efficiency to households and business by accelerating the introduction and take up of new energy efficient technologies. Part of this involves the creation of an outcomes based National Building Energy Standard-Setting, Assessment and rating Framework. The DCC has just released a discussion paper relating to this with comments closing on the 7th May.
At Greensense, we recognise the need to have “healthy” buildings which is why we have just released Greensense View: our real time, wireless energy sensing and interactive dashboard tool designed to assist in behavioural change of building users to drive energy efficiency. While we support the NSEE we are keen to work with companies who want to start making practical changes now — if that is you then we would love to hear from you.
