District Energy - 2006 Second Quarter

Inside
Insights
How Is Your Energy
Meter Like the
Bathroom Scale?
Steve Tredinnick, PE, Infrastructure Project Engineer/Manager, Affiliated Engineers Inc.

Editor’s Note: “Inside Insights” is a column designed to address ongoing issues of interest to building owners, managers and operating engineers who use district energy services.

So how many of you recall your parents saying, “Don’t run with scissors or you’re going to poke your eye out” or “Your face will freeze like that, then you’ll be sorry”? And of course, there is always the clean underwear adage. Now that I am a parent I never say such silly things (yeah, right), but my all-time favorite saying at the family dinner table is, “Are you going to finish that? Waste not, want not.” After all, I am a child of parents who lived during the Great Depression. Of course after saying that for the past 15 years and finishing what was on my kids’ plates, I am now looking for that magic diet pill to lose a quick 20 to 25 pounds.

Now assuming that I am taking a magic lose-weight-fast pill, or all that Internet spam about hoodia is true, how do I know I am succeeding in losing weight? I need some sort of metric or measuring device – or to be more precise, a bathroom scale. I can use this device to track and benchmark my progress in my never-end-ing weight management struggle. I am not advocating this, but you could do an experiment to see how quickly weight is gained by eating a half gallon of ice cream

every night for a month before bed or how slowly weight comes off when eating only a tossed salad for every meal for many weeks. Yuck! Of course starving yourself may help in the short term, but it’s not much of a long-term solution.

So it is with saving energy in buildings. With escalating and unstable energy prices, building managers are increasingly looking for tools to ‘trim the fat’ and reduce energy usage and costs. Just as in dieting, there are some new-fangled solutions or ‘magic pills’ that work and others that don’t; and most times the high costs are as hard to swallow as the magic pills themselves.

To curb your facility’s appetite for energy, you must be able to measure its caloric intake and manage it wisely. So what can you do? Start benchmarking. You need that metric or measuring device. Most buildings have them, but are you using it to its fullest extent? The energy meter – electric or Btu – is just the device that can be used. Benchmarking energy use measures system efficiency and targets buildings for energy-saving measures. The goal is to obtain a performance

benchmark for future reference. When equipment fails to meet this benchmark, owners may need to improve or increase maintenance procedures (such as cleaning, lubricating, etc.) or work to optimize operating parameters (such as set points, lockout strategies, capacity control strategies) or both. Benchmarking can also improve the decision-making process in the evaluation of potential capital projects.

It is often said, “What you don't know won't hurt you”; nothing could be further from the truth when you operate a building or campus, as Cheryl Gomez knows. Cheryl is director of energy and utilities at the University of Virginia (UVA) and IDEA’s current chair. UVA has implemented a campus submetering program based on the old business management adage, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Still in its infancy, the program allows UVA to use the metered data to benchmark energy usage against similar buildings on campus to identify abnormalities to be addressed, provide a troubleshooting tool and identify production and consumption trends.

Similarly, Ray DuBose, director of energy services at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC), has implemented a strategic energy and water plan that monitors campus electricity, chilled-water and steam usage for buildings. This allows them to analyze equipment usage, maximize sys-

Six Axioms of Good Business Management

• You don’t know what you don’t know..

• You can’t do what you don’t know..

• You don’t know until you measure.

• You don’t measure what you don’t value.

• You don’t value what you don’t measure.

And similarly, the energy manager’s adage:

• If you don’t collect it, you can’t measure it.

• If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

tem efficiency and correct any system problems that occur. Although savings are not yet quantified, the benchmarking assists in troubleshooting and enables them to identify buildings that should be the highest priorities for energy upgrades.