Last night I got to spend time with two of my closest friends.  We were showing off the well-insulated basement of our new home, and my friend relayed the story of his contrasting clients.  For one client he is upgrading the basement and planned to use closed cell spray foam as the insulation material.  The client became concerned about off-gassing just before the application and put the project on hold.  A different client (an elderly couple) is selling their home and moving into a new trailer.  Tom went to install the baseboard trim for them as a favor.  When he arrived on site he found the new trailer to be virtually uninhabitable for him and his crew without the windows open.  On the kitchen counter he found this label:

Warning Label

Energy Efficiency and Air Quality Are Both Possible

Who is the bad guy here?  The energy efficiency measures that make the homes reasonably tight so occupants don’t end up paying exorbitant energy costs appear to be blamed in this warning for increasing the risks from formaldehyde exposure.  The fundamental tenant for construction should be to maximize the health of the built environment.  We are building these structures primarily for human occupancy.  Humans need clean air free from harmful chemicals, we need natural light, and we need shelter that maintains comfortable temperatures when the outside environment is reaching new extremes — not toxic living environments. Basic indoor air quality should be a given.

Why is it acceptable to us as a society to allow businesses to build homes that require warning labels?  Non-toxic materials exist and the incremental cost is insignificant compared to the health costs of creating environments for people to live in that will make them sick.  What kind of society puts profits over human wellbeing?  Do you want to live in a home like this?  Do you want your children or your elderly parents to live in a formaldehyde intensive environment?

We have become numb to the callous treatment of people with few options and limited access to the mechanisms of change.

Lack of Regulation

On a less egregious front, I continue to be shocked by the poor quality windows and doors that we persist in selling to people and incorporating into our buildings in the US.  It is almost as if we dare ourselves to be as bad as we can be, just because we hate regulation. Without regulation, the Cuyahoga River would still burn periodically. Without regulation, the acidification of our northeast rivers, lakes and forests would be occurring even faster.

As an alternative to these toxic mobile homes, Efficiency Vermont has partnered with Vermod, a mobile home manufacturer in White River Junction, VT to develop high performance modular homes.  These homes hit all of the marks – low VOC materials, high performance envelope, and energy recovery ventilation systems.  They do cost more to purchase than the typical toxic, inefficient homes, but they cost less to own due to lower energy costs.

We can do the right thing, but it becomes increasingly apparent that as a society we won’t do it unless either the market or the regulators demand it.  Given the warning label above it seems like it is time to mandate minimum indoor air quality standards for new homes.

The post Toxic Living Environments – Why Are They Legal? appeared first on Building Energy Resilience.

Commercial buildings have complex systems, end uses, and operations making managing their energy use a challenge.  “Big data” is the trend in the building energy industry, but operators do not have time to analyze operating data. We need to provide building operators with easily digestible information including:

1. Target
2. Performance
3. Alarms

Set Targets

Set targets.

We need to establish useful targets that operators can see and use.  These targets are a very limited number of key operating metrics, displayed graphically.  Targets can include:

• Building peak demand, which will help operators minimize the impact of demand charges on the bill.
• System performance such as chiller plant kW/ton, which will help operators see when their chiller plant is using too much energy to meet building loads.
• Fan system kW/CFM, which is similar to the chiller plant target and helps the operators see the impacts of set point changes on energy use.
• For combined heat and power plants, key metrics include the overall efficiency, which captures the electric efficiency and heat recovery rate vs. the fuel input to the system, and the capacity factor (how much the plant is operating).

Track Performance

Graphical displays should show current operating characteristics relative to the target (or maximum).  Colors can help operators see when systems are moving into the red zone and approaching the operating limit.  In the background management reports can be generated to show a facilities director how his/her team is doing on a regular basis against the metrics. Operator performance reviews should include discussion of the key metrics and their performance relative to managing systems within spec.

Establish Alarms

Setting up alarms to alert operators via their cell phones when operations are approaching limits or targets is key to enabling them to monitor and manage system performance. No building operator has time to sit and stare at a screen to manage building systems. The graphical screens need to support them in understanding where they are, and diagnosing issues so that they can effectively problem solve without unknowingly sabotaging energy performance.

Customer-Facing Tools to Manage Energy Use Work and Drive Better Building Operations

One building with an ice storage system is managing peak demand as a key metric. They have a large screen on the wall in their operations room showing their maximum allowable peak demand for their half-million square foot facility. In order to manage to peak, the operators have developed an understanding of how all loads in the building contribute. They noticed that at 3:30 in the afternoon in the summer was when they were setting peak and dug into understanding what factors were driving the peak. It turns out all of the elevators in the building were active during that period and driving peak as workers went outside for cigarette breaks. In order to reduce impact on peak, the operators shut down one elevator in each bank during that time meaning people had to wait a little longer for the elevator, but the building peak electric consumption stayed well below the target.

The Barriers

There are some key barriers to advancing this approach for building performance. There are a lot of systems out there that seem to provide this type of service. The challenge can be to find and implement a simple system that makes the data useful.  Submetering of energy use and loads at the major equipment level will enable performance metrics for the key systems. This costs money and involves programming in order to obtain useful targets, tracking, and alarms. Operators may resist having performance metrics at first. Once they learn how to use the metrics to manage the building, and as long as the metrics make sense and are realistic, they will come to embrace these effective tools for improving building performance.

Do you have any great examples of tools that work well to manage customer energy use by providing clear targets, tracking, and alarms for a small number of key parameters?  If so, we’d like to know about them so we can build the body of evidence to continue to advance this approach to building performance optimization.

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I find myself using a variety of resources to support my energy program evaluation, measurement, verification, research, and development activities over the course of the year. The Internet offers what can seem like an overwhelming wealth of information to use when you want to be sure you are following best practices, are keeping current with the knowledge in the industry and to inform your work more generally — but there’s also a lot of noise out there. Much of the best evaluation work and resources available are the work of teams that include technical, social science, and regulatory experts who collaborate to develop guides, studies, and data to further the effectiveness of energy efficiency programs and third-party evaluations. I’m guessing that for many of our readers that is your goal too, so here are my top three EMV resources picks — and why.

Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships EM&V Forum

I participate in the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships (NEEP) EM&V Forum, a group of stakeholders who meet regularly guided by the expert facilitation and planning of NEEP’s Elizabeth Titus and her team. The stakeholders include representatives from program administrators and regulatory/oversight bodies who come together to identify areas where collaborative research can cost effectively provide useful information to the region’s energy efficiency programs.  Recent studies that I’ve been involved with include:

• The VFD load shape study, in which meter data for hundreds of sites was used to develop standardized load shapes that programs can use to more accurately estimate savings from VFD measures
• A commercial refrigeration load shape study – currently drawing to a conclusion this study will use data from dozens of refrigeration sites to develop accurate load profiles for typical refrigeration measures such as ECM motors and controls on evaporator fans (2 measures) and door heater controls.

This is just one type of study available on NEEP’s website, which also addresses residential measures and a variety of technology and guidance. I appreciate the NEEP studies because of the diversity of fields represented by contributors, as well as the practical cold-climate data difficult to find anywhere else.

California Measurement Advisory Council (CALMAC)

I just love the CALMAC database.  It isn’t pretty, but it is tremendously useful with a powerful search function that delivers summaries of the studies and guides and enables them to be easily downloaded without the need to input any pesky user data. I spent the first ten years of my career designing commercial and institutional buildings out of two major mechanical, electrical, plumbing (MEP) firms in San Francisco so I do have a soft spot for California.

California has been a leader in energy efficiency since the 1980s. Early in my career I was working on a tenant fit-up for AT&T in a new high-rise building and received plans from the Texas-based architect showing his lighting concept, which included five watts/square foot of incandescent lighting in the lobby and over 3.5 watts/sq ft of lighting over the space. Title 24, the only energy code in existence in the U.S. at the time, mandated a 2 w/sq ft maximum for office lighting. The architect simply did not believe that we couldn’t “just make it work”!

CALMAC includes evaluations of California’s various EE programs and includes one of the most widely respected guidelines for evaluation “The California Evaluation Framework,” written by some of the best minds in energy program evaluation and cited by regulators across the country.

The EIA Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS)

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) provides a rich source for evaluation data. I am a huge user of the CBECS data, which happily was finally updated from 2003 to 2012 survey data. This data set provides both the individual data building-by-building, and a variety of data analyses that enable users to understand commercial building energy use by fuel type, end use, building type and region. The EIA publishes other useful information including residential, manufacturing and transportation data. They also publish energy price data as well as price and supply projections.

What’s in your EM&V resource toolbox? Share your favorite in the comments below.

The post EM&V Resources: Many Minds Are Better Than One appeared first on Building Energy Resilience.

Generating Market Demand

The purpose of energy efficiency programs is to cost effectively generate market demand for energy efficiency that would not be achieved without market intervention.  An energy efficiency process evaluation investigates the effectiveness of programmatic interventions through qualitative and quantitative analysis. Marrying the analytical engineering-based approach of impact evaluation with the typically more social science orientation of traditional process evaluation can generate useful, actionable results to help program administrators improve market interventions to increase participation, depth of savings, and market transformation.

The New Construction Market

Looking at the commercial new construction market we see a confluence of events and activities that influence the market’s rate of adoption of energy efficiency.

The new construction market.

Consumers, including building owners, are increasingly aware of the implications of climate change. Architects and engineers have heightened awareness of the need to improve designs to reduce energy and environmental impacts of buildings as evidenced in the AIA’s 2030 Commitment.  You can check out the new reporting tool developed by the AIA by following the trail and using the logins noted in Mike Davis’s recent blog post on the topic.  This is one example of how the market is moving to advance energy efficiency without any intervention from energy efficiency programs.

LED Lighting

Image by Flickr user greenplasticamy

Another example is the rapid adoption of LED lighting.  In general, many people are less than enthusiastic about fluorescent lighting.  LED lighting is cool.  I recall laughing once when someone said screw based compact fluorescent lamps were “sexy.”  I do think some of the beautifully designed LED luminaires actually could rise to that level.  People want them because they are beautiful, new, sleek and provide entirely new ways to light spaces.  The fact that LED lighting is also becoming the leading energy efficiency product is often a bonus point, but not the driver for installing LED lighting.

Knowing the Market to Put the Pieces Together

So how does this relate to process evaluation?  When we are looking at program impacts on the market, (whether it’s program processes or energy savings impacts) we need to understand the market dynamics at play.  I’ve seen evaluation teams conducting process evaluations where the team themselves do not have a solid background in the market they are studying.  While this approach could potentially produce unbiased results it is more likely to result in uninformed findings that are not useful to the program administrators who are typically extremely knowledgeable about the markets they serve and are looking for evaluations to provide insights through qualitative and quantitative research.

Why Energy Efficiency Process Evaluation Needs Market Smarts

A research team that includes social scientists who are skilled in survey design and controlling for bias and engineers who work in and know the market that is being researched will provide programs with the most useful and actionable information on program processes and impacts.

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If you’re the owner or manager of an older commercial building, you may wonder if retrocommissioning is right for your building retrofit. You are not alone.

An aging commercial building infrastructure

The U.S. commercial building infrastructure needs upgrades so aging building assets continue to maintain their value. Over 80% of commercial buildings and 66% of commercial building square footage are more than 20 years old. Older buildings often lack the amenities of modern buildings and as a result have a lower value in the rental and real estate markets. As an owner or property manager of this type of building stock, you may be considering energy efficiency retrofits and wonder what approach is best for your building and its occupants.

Somewhat younger buildings constructed in the last 20 years are more likely to provide higher levels of fresh air (ventilation) and have more sophisticated heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, including centralized digital controls. If you own some of this building stock you may think the buildings are reasonably efficient, but you may be having other issues such as comfort complaints or high maintenance costs.

Photo by Flickr user caccamo

What drives building retrofits

Retrofitting older building systems with more modern equipment is not typically driven by energy savings.  Instead equipment change outs are done for the following reasons:

1. Reliability – as equipment ages it breaks more frequently making it less dependable. New equipment that has been commissioned significantly improves the reliability of key building systems.
2. Operating and maintenance headaches – more downtime and more issues with older equipment means your onsite staff, property management team and service technicians must devote increasing amounts of resources – both time and money – to keeping the aging equipment on line as well as responding to complaints from building occupants when services are down.
3. Failure – replace on failure is a common scenario – when a major piece of equipment such as chiller or boiler fail, it is often in the peak of the cooling or heating season. This is because the equipment is working hardest when fully loaded and this often pushes a failing piece of equipment over the edge.  Replace on failure is the worst scenario for the building operator/owner because it does not allow planning for an upgrade that could increase the level of amenity to building occupants and have lower operating costs than the off the shelf equipment.  Good HVAC equipment, designed well and implemented correctly can increase staff productivity as much as 5%.  Replace on failure completely misses this opportunity.

At this point you may be wondering, ok, so what does retrocommissioning have to do with all of this?  Retrocommissioning can provide you with a high-level assessment of your equipment and help you as an owner plan for replacements and upgrades that will fit in your budget and deliver long-term benefits, increasing the value of your building assets.  In addition, retrocommissioning is a great way to diagnose and improve comfort problems and it can help extend equipment life by reducing load on older equipment that isn’t quite at the replacement stage.

Retrocommissioning answers three questions

A retrocommissioning study will help you answer three key questions:

1. What low cost changes can be made now to improve comfort and reliability in my buildings?
2. Are there some moderate cost upgrades that could help extend the life of the existing equipment and reduce operating costs?
3. What are the highest priorities for upgrades, what potential benefits can I gain with a more comprehensive upgrade and what is the planning horizon and order of magnitude investment required to gain those benefits?

A Cx Associates commissioning agent inspects piping.

Retrocommissioning go or no go checklist

A few key metrics you can use to gauge whether a retrocommissioning study would be a good investment to help guide your building retrofit planning include:

1. Are there comfort problems that you want to address?
2. Are you concerned by rising maintenance costs?
3. Is equipment heavily loaded and/or have operators or maintenance technicians told you that equipment is out of capacity and you need to buy a new unit to augment capacity?
4. Does the building have a centralized control system?
5. Is your building over 50,000 square feet?

If you answer yes to at least three of these questions, your building is a good candidate for retrocommissioning.

Next steps

See my earlier blog posts on the retrocommissioning process and contact us if you are interested in a pre-survey for a free RCx assessment with a senior engineer to help you determine your next steps.  The free RCx assessment is in development now and will be available by the end of April 2015.

The post Is Retrocommissioning Right for Your Building Retrofit? appeared first on Building Energy Resilience.

The number one barrier to retrocommissioning is the upfront cost of the engineering study.  In general, building owners cannot easily determine the potential value of such studies or understand the quality and content that is necessary to support an energy efficiency investment.  This makes many customers reluctant to invest $20,000-$70,000 in an engineering study.

The number two barrier to retrocommissioning is the uncertainty and potential lack of persistence of energy savings.  A common RCx measure is to develop reset schedules for static pressure or system temperatures.  These reset schedules are programmed into the building automation system.  And the savings are at risk from the moment they are programmed in – is the program right?  Did the operator override the program?  Did the controller go down and get reprogrammed with a standard program rather than the correct efficient program?

Barrier. Image by Flickr user Nicholas Shore

Addressing these two barriers is essential to developing and delivering a successful retrocommissioning program that will deliver verifiable energy savings for energy efficiency programs by increasing and maintaining the efficacy of building HVAC operations.

A Roadmap Towards Increased Adoption of Retrocommissioning

1. Develop standardized tools and requirements
2. Build the workforce – RCx providers, controls contractors, and operators need training and capacity development
3. Implement a standardized project protocol that includes the following elements:

1. Project starts with a walk-through assessment to identify the top priority system and the energy opportunities associated with that system. Includes operator, program administrator (PA) engineer, RCx provider, and controls contractor.  RCx provider documents findings in a memo that includes high level estimates of savings, costs, and benefits.  (PA funded)
2. Project development by the RCx provider including system testing, issues identification, and solutions development. Includes more in depth quantification of savings and benefits.
   1. Include performance metrics in the project design and incentives
   2. (PA funded at least partially, but preferably fully funded – risk on PA is priority for addressing the customer barrier.)
3. Project design/specification – these types of projects often don’t require significant plans, but rather need specifications and a detailed sequence of operations.
4. Project implementation support including external project management, where required, and commissioning – from review of submittals and sequences of operation to functional performance testing
5. CxA provides in depth training about the sequences of operation – including ensuring the operators understand the “why” behind each phase of the sequences. Overriding is a topic that must be discussed, but not before the operators understand the logic behind the energy efficient operations.
6. CxA provides continuing monitoring (remote DDC) and support to operators.
7. Measurement and verification – CxA and PA establish baseline energy use by installing permanent metering on systems before installation to acquire and validate meter data and then continuously monitor system energy performance using performance metrics post installation.
8. Incentive design: ideally the energy efficiency programs will cover the full cost of the engineering studies.  This has been proven to be cost effective by several existing programs when it is tied to a requirement that owners implement measures up to a cost of $0.25/square foot not to exceed $25,000.   Additional incentives can be provided for measures over that cost threshold.  This approach overcomes the first cost barrier and, importantly, it gains owner commitment to implement at the outset (like performance contracting) which minimizes the occurrence of subsidized studies that sit on the shelf not saving any energy whatsoever.

There is a clear market demand for retrocommissioning services that provide real results. Implementing retrocommissioning programs that contain these key components will help grow the capacity for identifying and implementing the improvements necessary to improve building operational efficiency and comfort. In addition, it will help build market capacity to undertake the process and better handle the demand from building owners for the services.

The post How to Increase Adoption of Retrocommissioning Through Energy Efficiency Programs appeared first on Building Energy Resilience.

The term retrocommissioning, (commissioning for existing buildings), frequently rises in conversations when commercial building owners, operators and facility managers gather to talk about how to make their HVAC systems work better. There are many reasons why.

Why retrocommissioning?

Buildings account for over 40% of energy consumption in the US, including industrial buildings, and commercial building HVAC equipment accounts for nearly 40% of the energy consumed by commercial buildings[1]. Most existing commercial buildings were not commissioned during original construction, and retrocommissioning offers an ideal opportunity to reduce energy consumption and lower utility bills. For example, the controls in the commercial building HVAC systems we see range from thermostats on the wall, to sophisticated digital building automation systems (BAS).  Many buildings have what we now refer to as “legacy” control systems, which include pneumatic controls as well as older digital systems. Often, older digital systems must be replaced in order to control equipment necessary to meet modern energy efficiency standards.  We also see a lot of pneumatically controlled variable air volume boxes that leave the building operator essentially blind to the actual operation of the equipment and then actuators fail in the open position, meaning that many boxes and fans are continuously (and inefficiently) passing the maximum volume of air.

What is RCx or retrocommissioning?

Retrocommissioning (RCx) is an important means for building owners and operators to assess the current status of their BAS controls, identify short term improvements (the low/no cost measures) that can be made to improve comfort and operating efficiency, and to plan for more costly upgrades. These upgrades might include replacing legacy BAS equipment; replacing outdated central equipment such as fans, boilers and chillers; and intermediate steps such as adding variable speed control to fans and pumps to extend equipment life and lower operating costs.

How to proceed with retrocommissioning

One issue we see with retrocommissioning is that most utility programs and building operators want to go all in with a comprehensive upfront assessment of building systems, which is referred to as Phase 1 of a RCx project. A comprehensive assessment requires a significant investment of time and money before everyone on the project team has a good handle on the scope and potential of the overall project.  A much more productive approach is a joint Phase 1 RCx planning process that includes the building operator, controls contractor, utility energy efficiency program engineer, and a highly qualified RCx provider.  The walk through should be focused on identifying the starting point for RCx and the scope and potential savings associated with the work.  After this initial assessment is done, the RCx provider should then prepare a cost estimate for the in-depth investigation of the targeted scope of work.  That way everyone is on the same page from the beginning, the operator and controls contractors have some buy-in to the project, and the scope of work and priorities are clearly delineated.

Image by Flickr user Highways Agency

This approach is most likely to yield a successful project that can be working hard for you while your team moves on to the investigation of the next system on the list.

Not at all commissioning agents are familiar or comfortable with a joint Phase 1 RCx planning process. To help you select a highly qualified commissioning provider to make your building HVAC systems perform better, just download this checklist.

[1] http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2009/06/02/working-toward-the-very-low-energy-consumption-building-of-the-future/

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Who knows technology?

I should know better than to presume anything when someone is speaking about their “furnace,” because what they most frequently mean is “the thing that makes heat.”  I was recently asked about a home heater replacement by a relative who is the chief engineer at a major communications company.  His question was, “should I replace my furnace to save energy?”  I inquired about the efficiency and he replied 88%, which is pretty good for an oil-fired furnace, so I told them that was probably the best they could do.  Then I was asked, “what about our hot water heater?,” which was described as “a tankless type fed off the furnace.”  At that point I realized that my friend wasn’t using accurate language and that was causing me to give him bad advice.  He in fact has a high-mass oil boiler with an indirect fired hot water tank, and since the boiler is near the end of its useful life, he does have an opportunity to replace it with a higher performance boiler.

Photo by Rob Ireton

I need to remember that design and energy professionals, contractors and distributors are the folks who actually distinguish between the various types of heating equipment.  The vast majority of people lump equipment into one big category and use the term of art with which they are most comfortable to describe it.  I would be interested in a study of how or why people select their preferred names for equipment out of the proverbial hat.

Are Commercial Customers More Knowledgeable?

Home owners can’t be expected to be as savvy regarding equipment as commercial building owners and operators, right?  Well, a recent study by DNV GL into the Massachusetts commercial market certainly caused me to raise my eyebrows.  This was an initial investigation during which over 900 telephone surveys were conducted in order to identify sites where actual on-site inspections could occur and to collect customer-reported information about their buildings.  Large customers clearly have building operators who know their buildings and the systems in them.  However, medium and small businesses reported some interesting information that raises questions about whether the respondents were drawing answers from the hat, or accurately reporting information about their buildings.  Here are some noteworthy examples of suspect self-reports:

• 24% of small grocery store owners reported having split-system heat pumps for heating and cooling.  Because of the age of the MA building stock and the relative newness of split-system heat pump heating technology (compressor outdoors and condensing unit inside) it is highly unlikely that the market penetration of this technology approaches even 10% in this market segment.
• 17% of small health care facilities reported having split-system heat pumps for heating while only 13% reported having this system type for cooling.
• 30% of small groceries reported not knowing their heating system and 54% reported not knowing the type of their air conditioning equipment – these people clearly know what they don’t know!
• Over 40% of mid-sized grocery stores and 50% of medium offices reported having T-12 fluorescent lamps.  No medium-sized health care facilities reported T-12 lamps.  Another recent study focused on T-12 lighting in MA has found that the market for these lamps is virtually non-existent except for very small customers so it seems strange that there was such a high self-report of T-12 technology in medium groceries and offices which also had fairly credible reporting on heating and cooling system types.
• This survey also found that some Massachusetts businesses reported having evaporative (swamp) coolers, which is extremely rare in the Northeast’s humid climate.

Photo by Flickr user albertogp123

Team work is the answer

Social scientists and engineers working together on survey development is the first step to ensuring that the language that is used is both relevant to a particular market sector and to hone survey questions to help lay-people more accurately report equipment types and know when they don’t know.  For instance, perhaps with heating we should start by asking:

Where does heat enter your work space?

• ceiling
• floor
• box on wall
• baseboard
• other

People may be more likely to be able to pin-point the source of their heat and then subsequently describe the delivery device, which would give researchers a reasonably accurate idea of the heat source.  While this line of questioning is likely to take more time, it is also likely to yield more accurate responses.

Understanding technology and human behavior is essential to knowing our markets and the ways that we as energy efficiency providers can most effectively influence them.  Collaborations between social scientists and engineers to design ever-improving surveys will help us learn more about the opportunities that remain — and the drivers that can help us reach them.

The post Is It a Heat Pump, Boiler or Furnace? – A Case for Engineer/Social Scientist Collaboration on Market Research appeared first on Building Energy Resilience.

My business partner, Matt Napolitan and I each spent 10 years working at major, international engineering firms.  I worked for nationally ranked 11^th  Syska Hennessy Group in their San Francisco office and Matt worked for 14^th ranked Buro Happold out of their New York office.  We now operate a 10-person engineering consulting firm in Burlington, Vermont. We know both large, big-city engineering and local, Vermont engineering.

Is bigger better?

We are always surprised when our clients seek out large engineering firms from Boston and New York to design or commission new construction projects at public institutions in Vermont.  We understand that large projects require the staffing resources needed to deliver the project on schedule and that larger firms give the impression of having more capacity and ability to deliver.  But smaller, local firms often care more, may actually have more staff  dedicated to the project, and can be more nimble and responsive.

Consider the following:

1.  Small firms care more about these projects.  For a small firm, a large engineering project is often a significant percentage of annual billing and therefore the staff and principals are closely focused on making the project happen and getting it right.  At large firms these projects are just one of many projects and are run through the production mill.  The key difference is the level of engagement of the firm’s most senior staff on which the firm’s reputation has been built.  With large firms there is virtually no principal involvement; with small firms there is significant principal involvement.
   

   A CxA engineer getting into his work.

2. Small firms may have greater effective depth.  Our firm does building commissioning.  Eight members of our staff are commissioning engineers.  Both of our principals each have over 10 years’ experience in building engineering design and have over eight years’ experience in building commissioning.  Larger firms often have an actual commissioning department of a couple of people.  They draw in other engineers to fill the gaps “as needed” but they market their full staff, the majority of whom do not have applied commissioning experience, as resources for commissioning projects.  If you go with the large firm because of depth, you may actually have a very shallow pool of commissioning expertise.
3. Regional firms have more advanced expertise in energy efficiency.  As commissioning engineers we have the opportunity to see a lot of different engineering designs.  We consistently see a few firms with the greatest savvy in energy efficiency.  One noteworthy firm in this regard is Kohler and Lewis Engineering.  We’ve had the chance to commission their work on several noteworthy low-energy projects, including the award winning Bennington State Office Building.  Out of state engineers often haven’t had the advantage of working in an environment like Vermont, where there are high standards of practice set by peers including people like Bill Maclay, Andy Shapiro, and Marc Rosenbaum, who lead the country in thinking about energy efficiency and influence local designers because they are typically involved in the most innovative projects.  In addition, these people follow up on projects, know how they perform and help identify the causes of lower than predicted performance.  National and international firms are often churning out projects in volume and therefore rarely incorporate a feedback loop that enables them to build on their successes and learn from their mistakes.
   

   (Photo by Peterson Consulting, Owners Rep for Champlain College Res-Tri Project)

4. Keeping high paying jobs and STEM graduates in state.  We have been looking for a Senior Engineer with a competitive salary range for over a year.  If consulting engineering and commissioning projects are farmed out of state, then in-state firms won’t be able to hire the graduates from Vermont’s engineering schools and these people will leave the state and may visit when they are doing site visits for a project.  This drives jobs and tax revenue out of state.

Time and expertise

One key note is that for professional services the client is buying time and expertise.  I argue that the expertise can be comparable and in fact is often better with local firms.  That means that when large firms undercut local firms when pricing a project, they are offering fewer hours.  Perhaps they are far more efficient, or perhaps they have not included enough hours to actually deliver the scope the client has requested.  For commissioning, which requires travel for which engineers are typically compensated, a significantly lower price from an out-of-state firms means the owner will receive significantly less service.  If the goal of commissioning is simply to check a box, perhaps that is okay.  But if the goal is to ensure the owner’s investment in complex HVAC systems is performing as expected, time on site is essential.

Engineers’ On-site time for commissioning is essential.

Interstate commerce

My recent attempts to build my own high performance house have helped me intimately understand the owner’s perspective.  The owner has a limited budget and a building to construct. We understand the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution limits in-state preferences and restrictions on interstate commerce. Considering paying more for in-state engineering can be a tough sell, especially if differences in the quality of deliverables are not clear.  But making sure in-state engineering firms are included in the procurement process is certainly a step in the right direction.

The post Is Big City Engineering Better than Local Engineering? appeared first on Building Energy Resilience.

Energy efficiency is a tremendous opportunity that we are squandering at the federal level.  While many states have adopted aggressive energy savings goals and have committed the necessary resources to advance both policy and practice toward meeting those goals, little federal action has been taken to advance building and transportation efficiency.  The ACEEE’s 2014 International Energy Efficiency Score Card ranks the US near the bottom of industrialized economies in efficiency.  The countries that are doing worse than we are include Russia, Brazil and Mexico.

Image from 2014 International Energy Efficiency Scorecard, from ACEEE.

A few years ago I attended a conference in California on “Navigating the Coming Carbon Markets” to try to discover how energy efficiency would be valued in a carbon market.  I was shocked to discover that most of the carbon market advocates sincerely believed that energy efficiency already occurred because it is cost effective and therefore it was not deemed to be “additional.”  The reality is that the barriers to energy efficiency are endemic and prevent the widespread adoption of energy efficiency in our homes, businesses and government buildings.

Energy Efficiency Costs More at First

The higher first cost is a commonly cited barrier and one many of us have encountered directly.  I am struggling with the first cost of building a high performance home.  Bank lending will only cover 75% of the construction cost and as the cost per square foot rises above $200 to garner energy efficiency, the cash cost for building is significant.  And, until fossil fuel prices rise further, the project will not have positive cash flow.   Retro-commissioning, a service offered by Cx Associates, requires a high upfront investment in engineering services which is a significant challenge to selling those services.  Most businesses would rather spend $30k on an infrastructure improvement than on an engineering study.

Energy efficiency can have high upfront costs, but the energy savings can be worth it.

Skimming the Cream Makes Future Projects Harder

Even the best energy efficiency programs often fall short because they focus on replacing widgets with more efficient widgets instead of optimizing whole systems.  This type of approach often results in cream skimming – savings with a quick payback are promoted with high levels of incentive, the market readily adopts the more efficient widget, but the entire system in which the widget operates remains inefficient.

Raise the Floor to Increase Efficiency

Raising the floor for building efficiency by instituting performance based codes and standards is one way we can level the playing field and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that result from inefficient buildings.  Setting operational efficiency standards at the building and even system levels would require whole system optimization over time.  This approach would enable early adopters to continue to lead, but would accelerate the adoption curve and reduce energy consumption more rapidly.  It would also create jobs and increase competitiveness.

The USGBC is working to advance the use of building benchmarking and performance based building rating systems.  Many cities and a few states have adopted this approach.  Until we have universal transparency and minimum performance requirements for our buildings we will continue to lag behind the rest of the world in energy efficiency.  This lag impacts our economic competitiveness and the resilience of our buildings and our economy in a warming world.

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