Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
I’ve come across a few good reports recently on energy efficiency and sustainability in the workplace. I might write about more of these, but the first that I think is worth a look is Greening Work Styles: An Analysis of Energy Behaviour Programs in the Workplace from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.
Greensense View® is designed to spearhead a behavior change program, providing engaging, relevant feedback to building occupants such as the Head to Head module pictured
- setting the tone with the strong support of upper management,
- building a team with a project committee and peer champions on board,
- utilising communication tools to reach target audiences, and
- engaging building occupants by means of social norms, feedback, benign peer pressure and competition, as well as through performance-linked rewards.
The report also provided some great specific examples of that tactics and collateral used in each program: copies of posters, branding and logos, specific initiatives, rewards, real-time tracking tools, pledges and commitment schemes, and so on. There are some good ideas there.
The report also identified one area that needed more work across each case study, which was a good evaluation framework. It noted that “the absence of any evaluation framework for energy behavior programs may explain the lack of the evaluation information needed to assess the effectiveness of these programs, a substantial shortcoming that may lead to their exclusion from other, more technologically-focused energy efficiency programs.”
I think the last point is a good one. We know programs focused purely on behaviour change can deliver good savings, and while there are some good studies that demonstrate this, it is much harder to try and quantify the potential benefits in advance, compared with opportunities like lighting refits, or recommissioning HVAC systems.
When we help our customers with behaviour change programs, we always use Greensense View®. Not only does it provide a great way to engage employees and provide immediate feedback on improvements, it provides an important record of energy use before and after the program, and does enable rigorous evaluation.
City of Gosnells Administration Building uses Greensense View (5-Star rating)
A Green Building is a sustainable one. A building that enhances the natural environment and our well being; that does not diminish it.
Green Buildings are designed to be sustainable, and it is well recognised that the design and planning must encompass the total lifecycle of the building.
We know that no matter how sustainable a building may have been in its design and construction, it can only remain so if it is operated responsibly and maintained properly, and, if those who visit and occupy the building are engaged and informed as willing collaborators in creating a sustainable outcome.
Green rating schemes recognise this fact, awarding points for occupant education and engagement. We know that you can’t create a smart, green building with uninformed and unengaged occupants. But do we actually know how to effectively inform and engage?
Our vision at Greensense is that buildings should talk to their occupants, that they should engage them in a conversation about sustainability, that the ‘heartbeat’ of the building should be loud enough for everyone to hear.
On a hot day, when the building is working hard to keep people comfortable, they should know. The building should be able to remind people to use the stairs, applaud them when they recycle more, and let them know when performance is off kilter (Hey, last night I used more electricity than normal, what’s going on?).
In a really smart building, the occupants should be engaged to maximise the buildings performance, for example, letting you know the sea breeze is coming in and its time to open the windows, or that tomorrow is going to be really hot, so make sure you dress for the weather so I can keep the inside and outside temperature more in balance.
The building should be able to engage occupants in friendly competition. Lets have a challenge to see which floor can save the most electricity this month. Remember to switch off your computers at night, I’ll be watching!
Lastly, the building, should share its performance data with others. Buildings exist within a common local environment, they exist within a commercial context, usually as part of a portfolio under common management, or owned by a common group. While rating schemes like NABERS provide a degree of comparability between buildings, more timely, higher resolution and more contextual data is much more powerful in identifying opportunities and anomalies and enabling richer more informative benchmarks.
If you’re in the business of creating sustainable buildings, we’d love to talk. We’ve been doing this for a while now, so get in contact, and we can help you build a rich and fulfilling relationship between your buildings and their occupants.
Greensense View will be a key feature of the new SA4 student accommodation for ANU
Seven weeks ago, we kicked off the Perth Solar City Bring It Down Challenge, where seven schools were challenged to bring down their energy use over seven weeks.
This morning, the results are in, and I’m pleased to congratulate Mundaring Christian College who achieved a stunning 54% reduction in energy use. On Friday, Peter Collier, the Minister for Energy will visit the school to present their award, which will include $10,000 for an eco-makeover at the school.
You can view Mundaring Christian College’s energy use in real-time on their Greensense View Dashboard.
Every school in the competition made dramatic energy savings. The average weekly reduction was 26%. Together the schools saved over 64,500 kWh of electricity and a 33% reduction against their combined weekly historical baselines. This is enough energy to power 10 average homes and saved almost 60 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
The biggest total energy saving was made by Ballajura Community College. They saved over 23,500kWh on their own, which represented a 16% reduction against their weekly historical baseline.
These savings didn’t require capital investment in new green technology, but were made just by reducing energy waste at the schools. If we’d tried to achieve the same savings using new PV systems, we would have needed more than 310kW of capacity across the schools.
The schools in the competition ranged from one of the largest secondary schools in the state, down to small independent primary schools. So we think the results of this competition are reflective of the kind of energy waste that exists across every school in the state. Tackling this waste could provide huge benefits to the community.
There are about 1050 schools in WA, so if we could scale this achievement out over every school, we could save around 72,000,000 kWh a year. Based on a tariff of 25c per kWh, this saving would be worth around $18,000,000 and would save more than 65,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year.
The savings don’t end here. We will continue to monitor each schools energy use with Greensense View and we’ll provide an update in 6 months on how everyone is going.
Every school dashboard can be viewed from the Bring It Down page on the Perth Solar City web site, or you can click on the schools below to see how they are going:
Upper Swan Primary School
Ballajura Community College
Woodbridge Primary School
Mundaring Christian College
Hillside Christian College
Swan View Senior High School
Weld Square Primary School
Greensense is working with Western Power and the Perth Solar City project to run the Bring It Down challenge.
Seven Perth schools have been challenged to reduce their energy use over seven weeks. The school that makes the biggest saving will win a $10,000 eco-makeover for their school from Perth Solar City. We have provided each school with a real-time energy monitoring system to help them find energy savings and to run the competition.
We have loaded historical data on each schools energy use into Greensense View to calculate a baseline. Each week we award points to the schools based on their energy reduction against their baseline. This way smaller schools like Weld Square Primary School can compete with bigger schools like Ballajura Community College.
The competition will extend over the up coming school holidays, so there is a big incentive for schools to understand and manage their energy use when the school is unoccupied. One of the top tips we gave schools was to develop ‘switch off’ plans for their class rooms and common areas. These apply from lunch breaks, to after school, and from weekends to school holidays.
Every school dashboard can be viewed from the Bring It Down page on the Perth Solar City web site, or you can click on the schools below to see how they are going:
Upper Swan Primary School
Ballajura Community College
Woodbridge Primary School
Mundaring Christian College
Hillside Christian College
Swan View Senior High School
Weld Square Primary School
We’ll be tracking the competition and providing advice to the schools throughout the competition and you can follow the action on our Twitter stream: @GreensenseView.
Greentech Media recently published an article titled “The Rise of Information Based Cleantech”. It explores the value of technology, information, data and automation in building an energy efficient future — the sweet-pot of our technology Greensense View®.
A couple of the key points they discuss are:
Data as a Service
Our energy networks and the energy guzzling equipment that runs on them are still not that smart, but they’re becoming more intelligent as sensors and communications become cheaper and more widely available. This intelligence allows the collection and analysis of massive amounts of data that can be leveraged for monitoring and verification of performance and identification of efficiency opportunities.
Automation
Once we have the data related to energy production, distribution and consumption, the next natural step is to tackle the optimisation of these activities. Information plus automation can lead to significant resource and dollar savings.
Simply put, the data matters. 23% of Australia’s emissions are directly attributable to energy demand in commercial and residential buildings. Everything in our buildings that consumes (or generates) energy can be metered and monitored today. This data significantly improves the overall quality and quantity of our decision making, engages and educates building occupants and fuels innovation and collaboration that ultimately accelerates the move to a more energy efficient future.
The ‘Hawthorne Effect’ is a psychological phenomenon in which subjects in behavioural studies change their performance in response to being observed or surveyed.
According to Wikipedia, the term was coined in the 1950s based on analysis of a series of experiments on worker productivity conducted at the Hawthorne Works factory in the 1920s.
The experimenters found that the workers’ productivity seemed to improve when any changes were made and slumped when a study was concluded. Ever since, the effect has been seen as a hindrance in behavioural research which experimenters must correct for in the design of their experiments.
The ‘Hawthorne Effect’ has a number of friends and associates. For example, the Pygmalion Effect is an effect where the greater the expectation placed upon people the better they perform. The Novelty Effect is the tendency for performance to initially improve when new technology is instituted, not because of any actual improvement in learning or achievement, but in response to increased interest in the new technology.
While these effects can be problems for researchers, when our goal is to effect behaviour change anyway we can, then these psychological phenomena can help us hit the ground running.
If you are implementing an advanced metering system for example, then don’t keep it a secret! Tell your staff and other stakeholders that you are monitoring energy and water use in real-time (Hawthorne). Tell them you have innovative new systems in place to detect energy and water waste (Novelty). And, tell them you are expecting significant reductions in energy and water use (Pygmalion).
While these kinds of nudges are only the very start of an effective ongoing behavioural change program, they are a cheap and simple way to influence people and to start making positive improvements.
Low-flow shower head to support water conservation
The Productivity Commission recently released the draft report from its inquiry into Australia’s urban water sector. The goal of the inquiry is to “identify opportunities for efficiency gains in the structural, institutional, regulatory and other arrangements that govern the sector.”
Demand management
One of the clear conclusions from the report, which I found surprising, was that there is currently too great a focus on water restrictions, water use efficiency and conservation.
In Chapter 8, the commission sets out its recommendations on “non-price demand management”. Non-price demand management are schemes to reduce water demand that don’t depend on pricing, such as watering restrictions, water efficiency labelling (WELS), and subsidies/requirements for installing more water efficient equipment (like low-flow shower-heads).
The draft findings from the inquiry are firmly in favour of using price to manage demand, rather than these kinds of mechanisms, and include:
- “The use of water restrictions should be limited to times of emergency where a water shortage arises unexpectedly […]. Consumers should instead be able to exercise choice in their water consumption behaviour through an efficient price mechanism.”
- “Neither governments nor regulators should mandate water use efficiency and conservation activities […]”
- “Government education and information campaigns should be refocused to provide more balanced information […] on the relative merits of prices, restrictions and water use efficiency [to manage water demand].”
Effectively the commission is saying that people who are prepared to pay more to use water the way they want should be allowed, and that the cost of supplying water is so cheap that providing a subsidised low-flow showerhead, for example, just isn’t cost effective. For example, the commission cited one report that found that cost per megalitre of water saved ranged from $770 for AAA shower roses, to $9069 for rainwater tanks, to $33 395 for AAA dishwashers, as compared to a price for water of between $750 and $1300 per megalitre.
One of the reasons the Commission is so concerned with these non-price mechanisms is that they enjoy a high-level of support from the community, despite the Commission’s view that they are economically ineffective, and so they represent a barrier to utilising price more to manage demand.
Consumption based charging
Something else I found surprising in the report was the finding that there there are still areas of Australia where water consumers do not face a price that is related to the amount of water they consume. These households get no consumption feedback or price signal to help regulate demand.
One reason for this is multi-residential dwellings where there is shared metering. Apparently this represents about 40% of Sydney households. The commission recommends that “metering technology should be introduced in all new single and multi-unit dwellings” and that utilities “should charge tenants directly for all water charges, both fixed and volumetric”, in the same way that other utility services are charged. The commission is interested in increasing consumption metering, because it is necessary to enable price to be used to manage demand.
Smart metering and real-time feedback
Water Meter with wireless pulse-reading attachment used in Water Corporation trial
The last thing I found surprising in the report was that lack of emphasis on smart metering. The report suggests that “a comprehensive roll out of smart meters would be very costly and unlikely to outweigh the benefits.”.
In many jurisdictions, water meters are manually read only a couple of times a year, and bills are issued quarterly, in many cases ‘smoothed’ to reduce seasonal spikes in costs. So consumers get very little feedback from their bill on their consumption.
In the energy sector, there is a big focus on rolling out smart metering. It enables real-time pricing, better feedback on energy consumption, and, lower meter reading costs. In relation to feedback, one of our main areas of interest with Greensense View, there is lots of evidence that real-time feedback directly leads to a reduction in demand of 5% to 15%.
There have been dozens of trials and research projects that have replicated this finding, but there appears to be less research into the effect of real-time feedback on water consumption. We have a number of customers getting real-time feedback on water consumption using Greensense View, so we are gathering good quality data of our own.
The Water Corporation currently has a smart metering trial underway in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, which should provide some interesting findings, but won’t provide customers with real-time feedback (at least not yet). The Water Corporation trial will be collecting 30 minute interval data, which will be downloaded daily, and provided to customers on request.
It will be very interesting to see the final report from the Productivity Commission, and how it shapes water management policy in Australia. While I see the benefit in using price signals to manage demand, I think it would be a shame to see other water conservation measures rolled-back. And I’m hopeful we will see more smart metering rolled out in the water sector over the next decade than the report would suggest.
We were thrilled last night when Greensense View was awarded Best Product at the WAITTA Awards.
Photo Supplied by www.absoluteandalivephotography.com.au
We’d like to thank all our customers who have embraced the sustainability challenge and recognise the whole team — and especially Phil Marshall, our Product Development Manager — who’ve all been working very hard for the last three years to make our vision for Greensense View a reality.
We’ve been thrilled with the response Greensense View has gotten in the last 12 months, and we have some really fantastic customer implementations in the pipeline that we’re looking forward to unveiling.
As a winner in the WAITTA Awards, we will go forward to compete in the iAwards, a national ICT Award, and then, fingers crossed, on to the Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards in Thailand.
This Friday March 11th 2011, the WA Branch of the Facilities Management Association of Australia, will be hosting the WA Facilities Management Expo at the Mercure Hotel.
Greensense will be there, exhibiting our Sustainability Dashboard, Greensense View, which is a great tool for Facilities Managers to understand the resource use within their facilities, to identify opportunities to improve resource efficiency and to drive behavioural change amongst tenants and other facility users.
If you’re going to the Expo, or are going to be nearby, why not pop in and see us. It starts at 2:30pm and more details can be found here.
Click to watch the interview
A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned our energy saving project at Pattersons Oval. Since then Derek, our MD, and Geoff Glass, the Director of Facilities at WA Football Commission were interviewed about the project by The West.
You can click on the photo to the right and hear about how the increasing cost of electricity in Western Australia means that systems like Greensense View make great economic sense. If you’d like any more information about the project, feel free to contact us or e-mail Derek directly.
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.
Whilst most businesses and employees here in WA will have been enjoying last Monday off for the Queens Birthday public holiday, for many of our commercial buildings it was business as usual. The building management system (BMS) that manages the air conditioning, turns on the lights or powers up the lifts, is often blissfully unaware that its a public holiday and the building is actually empty. Significant energy (and dollars) are wasted as a result.
I took a moment to look over some data from one or two of the Greensense View® dashboards of our clients, and sure enough it didn’t take long to find an example of a BMS hard at work when it should be taking the day off. The image below shows the energy profile for one of our clients for the current week. Remember that Monday 27 was a public holiday.
The facility in question is a fairly typical office building. In this chart, we are separating out electricity used by the air conditioning system (the green data series) from general power used by office lighting, pcs and so on. You can clearly see that on Monday the air con fired up a little after 7am, just as it normally would, and ran through until the end of the business day, even though the office was empty. When you consider there are around 10 public holidays in WA each year, the wasted energy for this building alone would total more than $1000 a year.
So whilst a correctly configured and maintained BMS can be vital in helping to run a building efficiently, an incorrectly configured system can be worse than none at all. Naturally, when a building is being run for us by a computer, we often stop questioning what exactly is going on and simply trust that the computer is doing the right thing. This example highlights that this is not always the case and there are often good opportunities available to reduce energy waste simply by ensuring the computers we use to run our buildings are doing the right thing.
Many people install solar PV systems at their home or work, but do not have an easy way to monitor its performance. Most solar inverters only have a very small display and these are often very difficult to use and identifying short term or long term trends is extremely difficult.
Our Greensense View® dashboard can be used to monitor green power solar generation by displaying power being generated in real-time, as well as long term trends, on simple, easy-to-understand charts. This is of immense value for engaging with people on many different levels, but better still is that behind the scenes we collect additional technical information that can be used to manage the performance of a solar installation and diagnose issues.
One of our customers has a 30kW solar PV system. They are using Greensense View® to monitor on-site energy generation and consumption of electricity from the grid. Their dashboard was clearly showing that the solar panels were not performing as expected, and were not producing electricity on some fine, sunny days when you’d normally expect energy production to be at its highest.
The chart below shows two consecutive sunny days. The first day shows a normal profile. The energy produced is a nice curve peaking in the middle of the day. On the next day, just before 9am the system stops producing energy, and stays off until almost 3pm, missing the best part of the day.
In fact we can quantify this loss exactly. On the first day, 160.5 kWh of energy were produced, and on the second day only 37.5 kWh were produced. On the second day additional electricity had to be purchased from the grid to make up the shortfall from the on-site generation. The additional cost for that one day of lost generation was approximately $42, based on Synergy R3 Tariff peak-time. If you extrapolate this out over a year, this behaviour could have a direct cost of over $15,000, dramatically increasing the payback time for the solar panels.
So you can see that it is important to measure and monitor these systems to ensure the return on investment is achieved as expected and that corporate emissions reductions expected from the installation of this equipment are actually being met.
We narrowed down the problem for them by analysing the data we had been collecting. The issue in this case was a voltage cut-out. To be connected to the grid, the grid owner, in this case Western Power, needs to approve the inverter and there are obviously criteria that need to be met in this process. One of these criteria is cut-out at a low or high voltage threshold. The inverters need to automatically shut down if the voltage goes above 254 V and can switch themselves back when it returns below this level.
The chart below shows generation on one of the three phases overlaid with the voltage for that phase. It can be clearly seen that when the voltage rises above 254 V the inverter stops supplying electricity.
High voltages can also be damaging for other equipment on site as well, so the potential loss from leaving this unresolved is significantly greater.
Without Greensense View® monitoring the system in real-time, these problems can go undetected for long periods of time. Identifying the problem is half the solution, so armed with the right information, the client can now take remedial action.
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.
Greensense View, our technology for real time monitoring of sustainability performance, has been built around a foundation that if building users have real-time, relevant information on their electricity, gas and water use, that information will drive behaviour change that results in greater resource efficiency.
A key part to this is the idea of behavioural change or behavioural economics. We believe that, while investment in technology and infrastructure are an important part of energy efficiency, a lot of benefit can be gained by engaging with your facility occupants and getting back to basic behavioural changes. Greensense View supports this by providing real time information that gives a baseline, and allows facility occupants to receive immediate feedback on how any changes impact energy use.
With that in mind — we want to introduce you to the Nudge. The Nudge was an idea originally conceived by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. A Nudge is about self consciously moving people in a direction that will make their lives better. It is a mechanism to promote desirable outcomes while respecting individual choices. We have used the Nudge as a concept in Greensense View and supporting the energy efficiency initiatives we are involved in with our clients.
We present four types of nudges that we believe should be used in combination to achieve the desired outcomes. There are:
1. Fun: this is abut positively engaging with your building occupants and finding innovative and fun ways to drive change, often with incentives.
2. The Stick: this about using policy or punishment to drive change.
3. Compelled: this is about creating a social norm, where everyone changes because everyone else is moving that way.
4. Informed: this is about providing information that causes someone to change their behaviour because of a new insight to the situation.
Here are some great example of nudges that use some or all of the above techniques:
For more information on how the Nudge and Greensense View work together please contact us.
