Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
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.
A recent study from Syracuse University found that improving peoples understanding of energy use and savings could pay large dividends.
The study found that most people don’t really understand the energy use associated with activities like switching off lights and appliances, and energy efficiency improvements, like switching to more efficient appliances. On average, participants in the study underestimated energy use and savings of common activities by almost three times, with larger underestimates for high-energy activities.
Greensense View Example Dashboard
We think part of the answer is providing people with real-time feedback on their energy use. That’s why we developed Greensense View. We’re holding an event on Tuesday next week on Smart Technologies and Behavioural Change, if you’d like to find out more.
You can download the full paper from this study (PDF) from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A new report issued today by the WA Auditor General reveals that a program to reduce energy use in WA Government agencies by 12% has only achieved a 0.1% reduction.
For those of you that prefer to think it terms of dollars and cents, that represents over $50 million in wasted energy over the last 7 years, or for the carbon-minded, 350,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
The Energy Smart Program was a brain child of the Gallop government. Introduced in 2002, its goal was to reduce energy consumption by 12% below 2001-02 levels by 2006-07 in agencies with 25 or more full time staff. The report states that whilst some agencies achieved the 12% target, these achievements were “offset by a lack of progress among the larger energy consuming agencies”.
The Auditor General lists a number of reasons for the failure of the scheme. In particular the report singles out the Sustainable Energy Development Office (SEDO), concluding that it was “not sufficiently strategic” in managing the program and using incentives and penalties to encourage agencies to reduce energy consumption.
“There were no consequences for failing to achieve expected results.”
For me this highlights a challenge we see every day at Greensense. Conservation of our resources, whether that’s energy or water, is a pretty abstract concept for most people and for many businesses. Traditionally our consumption of energy is not well understood — I challenge anyone to walk into their office and ask their colleagues how much energy their building consumes during a working day. The silence will be deafening — and, as we all know, its hard to manage a problem if it’s not well understood and good quality data isn’t available. If you don’t believe me, then ask yourself how successful you’d be with a diet if you didn’t weigh yourself regularly.
At Greensense we’re focussed on educating people in the language of energy conservation. Greensense View is all about increasing awareness of how the buildings we use every day are consuming energy and water, and what we can do to ensure they perform at their very best.
Display Energy Certificate
In the UK, all public buildings greater than 1000sqm, such as schools, libraries, council buildings and hosptials are required to publicly display a display energy certificate. The energy certificates are like our NABERS Energy scheme in that they focus on actual energy use.
One government agency is going further. The Department of Energy and Climate Change is showing their energy performance in real-time on their home page. Like Greensense View, the DECC dashboard provides real-time feedback on energy use. For example, when I checked their website as I wrote this blog post, the energy they were using was responsible 231kg CO2e emissions per hour.
Greensense View can provide a public dashboard like this for your building right now. You can contact us to find out more or read more about Greensense View on our site. Greensense View has also just been listed the Energy Smart WA Directory.
The always excellent The Fifth Estate online green property newsletter has another great article this week: Apartment blocks the missing link in sustainability.
The author Lynne Blundell introduces the challenge for apartment blocks, saying:
“High rise apartment blocks, it turns out, are the biggest energy guzzlers in the residential market. But they are falling through the cracks when it comes to energy and water efficiency incentive schemes. It is something that local councils are acutely aware of while state and federal government appear to be turning a blind eye.”
While she provides a strong case that there is a big policy hole and some very specific challenges — such as the strata rules that govern changes to common areas, she mentions some really positive schemes too. Not unusually, it is local government that seems to be showing the way.
City of Sydney is providing funding for Green Strata Wiki to provide an online knowledge base about retrofitting existing apartment buildings. The council is also regularly running workshop for apartment owners with presentations from lawyers, water and energy companies and other sustainability experts.
Willoughby Council is also providing a grants scheme for improving the sustainability of apartments. The Climate Clever scheme has two parts – energy efficiency and solar photovoltaic, which provide dollar-for-dollar matching to successful owners corporations.
Sydney Water is piloting a programme called HiRise, which aims to improve the water-use efficiency of participating buildings by at least 10% by co-funding auditing, sub-metering and water efficiency improvements. According to Sydney water, one of the benefits of sub-metering is detecting leaks: “a leak could waste 73 kilolitres a day, amounting to $136 a day or $49,537 a year.”
One of the big challenges of sustainability upgrades is funding. Efficiency improvements will often pay for themselves over a few years, but owners corporations still need to find some capital upfront. This is still an issue when co-funding is available, such as with the schemes mentioned above.
Sustainability initiatives should start with measurement, whether that is an audit or better still installing sub-meters. A building dashboard. can help the owners corporation track energy and water used in common areas, and allow individual apartment owners to measure their own performance, compared to others in the complex.
Sub-metering can also open the door to a big financial benefit, which can help address the funding challenge.
Most residential apartment blocks in WA are on the standard residential electricity tariff with each apartment owner individually billed by Synergy. However, except for small apartment blocks, the total electricity used by these buildings will be above the ‘contestable level’ of 50,000kWh per year. This means the Owners Corporation could enter into a supply contract with another retailer at commercial rates.
Multi-residential buildings are quite attractive to retailers because the load profile is different to other commercial buildings and significant discounts on the standard residential tarrif are available. The discount can be as much as 40% in some cases. The owners corporation then needs to charge individual apartment owners for the electricity use along with their strata fees.
Our wireless sub-meters and energy monitoring dashboard can enable this kind of solution, help make apartment blocks more sustainable, and save money through efficiency and lower electricity prices.
There are a number of worthwhile programmes in progress at the moment which have taken my interest, and I thought I would share some of them with you. While climate change issues seem to have taken a back step to health and taxes in the political arena, it’s nice to see some of these programmes taking place to keep our mind on things we can all be doing.
During May, here in Western Australia, daysofchange.org has been running a very comprehensive multi-channel campaign on broad sustainability changes that everyone can make in their lives both at home and work . One of the things I like about this programme is that it gives you the opportunity to state the actions you are already undertaking, as well as pledge to make new improvements in your life. If you haven’t been to their web site to fill out your profile, it’s not too late!
Another programme starting this week has a more specific focus — International Green IT Awareness Week www.greenitweek.org. This event promises some very practical presentations as well as good resources on the event website. You might like to send a link to your IT Manager.
The web sites both post tips about improvements you can make. Even though the audiences are very different for these programmes, one of the themes you can see on both these web sites is the monitoring of energy consumption. Our Greensense View product is designed specifically to help organisations tackle this issue. We believe this is a great way to drive energy efficiency programmes that save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A Negawatt is the opposite of a Megawatt. It’s a unit of energy we didn’t have to generate due to energy efficiency.
Negawatt power is cheaper and greener then wind, solar or tidal power. It’s been estimated that every kilowatt of savings at the plug actually contributes 3 kilowatts of savings in total due to energy losses from generation, distribution and consumption.
According to modelling from the International Energy Association, energy efficiency offers the biggest scope for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It can contribute more abatement than renewable energy, more than carbon capture and storage and more than nuclear power.
The IEA goes on to say in their report:
Energy-effiency investments in buildings, industry and transport usually have short pay-back periods and negative net abatement costs, as the fuel-cost savings over the lifetime of capital stock often outweigh the additional capital costs of the efficiency measure, even when future savings are discounted.
While the recent name change of the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency probably has more to do with the Government’s backflip on the ETS the focus on energy efficiency is welcome.
Greensense View is one way we are supporting energy efficiency. Contact us, if you’d like to find out more.
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.
We will be introducing our new technology for sustainability, Greensense View, at the Energising WA Conference this week.
About Greensense View
Greensense View is a real-time energy and sustainability dashboard. Greensense View can monitor electricity consumption, on-site green power generation, local weather, indoor and outdoor temperature, all in real-time. Greensense View presents the information back to stakeholders in an engaging way that encourages energy conservation.
The sensors communicate wirelessly with a radio mesh network based on Zigbee PRO and can support hundreds of sensors spanning a building, a campus, or a neighborhood. We provide network gateways that log sensor data and send it to our hosted software service located in our secure Perth data center.
While Greensense View can help improve your environmental performance, there are economic benefits too. Electricity prices are set to soar in Western Australia and there is good research that shows 5 to 15% energy-efficiency improvements just from giving people direct feedback on their energy use.
Starter packs
We are offering three starter packs as part of our launch of Greensense View. The prices below exclude GST and installation and are valid until the 30th of June 2010. The price also includes the first years annual subscription fee. All three starter kits can be expanded with additional sensors. Depending on the area your network needs to span, you may need range extenders or an additional network gateway.
Basic Kit — $5,000
The basic kit includes a single-phase electricity sensor, a weather data feed, and a network gateway.
Enhanced Kit — $8,000
The enhanced kit can monitor two separate three-phase electrical circuits. It includes two three-phase electricity sensors, a rugged outdoor temperature sensor, a weather data feed and a network gateway.
Campus Kit — $10,000
The campus kit can monitor three separate three-phase electrical circuits — for example, allowing you to compare performance between three buildings on a campus or three floors within a commercial building. It includes three three-phase electricity sensors, a rugged outdoor temperature sensor, a weather data feed and a network gateway.
More information
You can read more on the site about our innovative real-time energy dashboard or contact us for more information. And if you’re attending the Energising WA, visit us at stand number 1.
Platform Screenshot for “Lego Town”
Local government has an important leadership role to play in responding to the challenges of climate change through community engagement, adaptation and emissions abatement strategies. This process begins with effective measurement and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and energy production.
The Western Australian Local Government Association has recognised a significant gap in Local Governments’ ability to collect and report greenhouse gas emissions data following the termination of the Cities for Climate Protection Program and the absence of a dedicated Local Government reporting system.
To ensure that councils have a robust and consistent reporting framework with which they can meet both their mandatory and voluntary reporting requirements we have worked with WALGA, to develop a sector-wide Greenhouse Gas Reporting and Abatement Platform that is specific to Local Government needs.
The platform allows councils to track and monitor their emissions and energy use, providing a simple to use interface to input raw data such as electricity consumed or fuel purchased. The platform then completes all required calculations to determine the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from council activities. The resulting emissions data can be visualised and analysed using interactive charts, enabling councils to quickly identify trends and highlight emissions or energy intensive parts of their operations.
Mark Wong from the City of Geraldton-Greenough was involved in the pilot.
“The Platform has provided a simple, yet effective means of capturing the City’s emissions profile from a host of Local Government facilities that the City owns and operates. In addition to achieving various compliance and reporting obligations, the platform has helped identify the larger emitters and energy intensive areas, making Officers aware of potential financial savings in these areas through efficiency improvement measures.”
We’re very proud to be involved in this initiative and we’ll be working closely with WALGA to roll-out the platform across the state in 2010. The platform is suitable for other associations or industry groups that have an interest in working together to manage greenhouse gas emissions.
Greensense provides a range of technology solutions for emissions reporting and real time energy monitoring. For more information please contact me on +61 403 068 271.
There is currently a significant gap in Local Governments’ ability to collect and report greenhouse gas emissions with the termination of the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) Program and the absence of a dedicated Local Government reporting system.
Additionally mandatory reporting requirements through the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Scheme have put some Local Governments and Regional Councils in a position of having to report emissions data to the Federal Government.
To ensure that Local Governments have a robust and consistent reporting framework with which to meet their mandatory or voluntary reporting requirements, Greensense and WALGA, have partnered to develop a Greenhouse Gas Reporting and Abatement Platform for Local Governments.
WALGA is inviting its Members to participate in the platform from its inception and seeks Expressions of Interest to participate in the pilot program from October 2009, or join the roll out of the program from January 2010.
For further information or to register an Expression of Interest for the pilot program please contact either the Climate Change Coordinator at WALGA, Melanie Bainbridge on 9213 2039 or email mbainbridge@walga.asn.au or Greensense Managing Director, Derek Gerrard, on 0403 068 271 or email derek@greensense.com.au
Have you ever heard about the plumber and his pipes or the mechanic and his car? That’s right — someone with a great skill who never seems to use it to look after their own stuff. Well at Greensense we are not like that — we are good at helping companies adapt to climate change and we are good at doing it in our own business. Ultimately we believe the environmental impacts that we are causing should compel us to action. Our actions match our words.
Now there are lots of initiatives we could talk about — and likely future blog posts — but for today it is our virtual office. We often get asked whether we have offices and how we operate, so here is an insight into part of the working life at Greensense.
Firstly we don’t have our own facilities — part of trying to minimise our environmental impact and save emissions. We meet as a team once a week in a hired room in the city close to public transport. As such we really need to rely on a robust, virtual office to allow us to operate during the course of the week. If you are interested in some of the energy and emission savings that are being forecasted from operating this way you can read more about it here.
We have made significant investment in finding the best Software As A Service (SaaS) solution for our business (which you may have also heard referred to as cloud computing or the virtual office). All our technology is run this way and yes — it really works — saving energy, saving emissions, building flexible work patterns and improving efficiencies. Our solutions are listed below so you can take a look. The caveat here is that we are not endorsing any of these solutions — they are suitable for us but you need to look at your own requirements before working out whether they are suitable for you.
Financials — for employee tracking, invoicing, accounts payable, order book tracking etc we use Saasu.
Knowledge Sharing — we have an internal blog site for knowledge sharing and use the same technology for our external website — WordPress.
Document Management — for file sharing, back up, versioning, synchronising etc we use Dropbox
CRM — for managing our sales and customer details we use PipelineDeals
Mail, Messaging and Calendars all comes from Google
and finally our timesheeting and resource allocation comes from ClickTime.
We all have the ability to change to make a difference. If you would like any help on practical things you can do within your organisation to minimise environmental impact then let us know.
