Taking Action Now

Our blog highlights news of our project partners, important updates, and a range of suggestions to quicken the pace of energy improvement, helping you reduce the financial and environmental costs in your buildings.

CO2 Accounting in Energy Stewards

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Kevin Little

Energy Stewards® reports carbon dioxide (CO2) associated with your building’s use of energy. Where do the numbers come from and how good are they?

Energy Stewards uses the ENERGY STAR calculations for CO2 emissions. In this post, we’ll touch on the major ideas. For technical details, check here.

You see CO2 information in two places in Energy Stewards: (1) On the home page, there’s an estimate of tons CO2 over the last 12 months and the % change in CO2 from baseline.

(2) On the “Details” page , you see the plot of estimated tons CO2, month by month.

Actually, the ENERGY STAR adjusts the CO2 emissions numbers to account for a little bit of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxides (N2O), which are potent greenhouse gases–for example, a kilogram of methane has the same greenhouse impact as 20 kilograms of CO2.

ENERGY STAR reports CO2e, “CO2 equivalent” mass, as a result of the adjustments. For simplicity, Energy Stewards just uses the label CO2.

ENERGY STAR calculates CO2 emissions in different ways depending on the type of energy. For electricity, ENERGY STAR estimates the emissions associated with electricity generation using your building’s zip code!

The U.S. is divided into non-overlapping sections, corresponding to parts of the national electric “grid”, as shown in the map to the left. ENERGY STAR matches zip code to map region.

Different regions have different mixes of electrical generation sources (from coal plants, nuclear power stations, hydroelectric generators, etc.) Because greenhouse gas emissions depend on the sources of electrical generation, this means that different regions have different average amounts of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour.

ENERGY STAR of course uses average numbers—at any given moment, the power plants “on line” determine the amount of gases emitted but the averages are a good place to start. Also, the numbers are a few years old (as of February 2012, the arithmetic is based on data about power plant sources from 2007) so new power plants don’t yet show up in the numbers.

For other sources of energy, like natural gas, ENERGY STAR uses a table of values that describes the components of greenhouse gases that you get when you burn the fuel; to the left, we show an excerpt from the p. 3 of the technical documentation with the numbers for natural gas, fuel oil (No. 2) and wood. You can see the relatively small adjustments made for methane (CH4) and nitrous oxides (N2O).

The table numbers do not account for the actual condition of your furnace but are based on average performance characteristics of commercial combustion equipment.

More importantly, the CO2 calculations only cover combustion and do not look at the life cycle environmental costs of the fuel.

in the last five years, extraction of natural gas by hydraulic fracturing (aka “fracking”) has increased dramatically in the U.S. This increase has driven down the dollar price of natural gas and made it a more attractive fuel for both heating and electricity generation.

For natural gas, the actual extraction conditions makes a big difference in greenhouse gas impact. Fracking releases some methane. No one knows how much. But it is not zero. As we said earlier, methane is a potent GHG, with more than 20 times the climate changing impact of CO2.

Thus, the ENERGY STAR calculations that focus only on the combustion of natural gas and not the entire production history underestimate the total greenhouse gas emissions associated with the use of the fuel. At this point, there are only educated guesses for the extraction impacts.

Similarly, the emissions associated with the extraction and transport of fuel used to make electricity are also excluded from the electricity CO2 calculations.

Does this make the GHG emissions numbers reported by ENERGY STAR and used by Energy Stewards useless?

No, for two reasons.

(1) Treat the numbers reported as “at least this much CO2″. Despite their apparent precision (e.g. “277.3 tons of CO2″) the numbers are underestimates , perhaps by as much as 25% or more.

(2) The ENERGY STAR method is consistent with other protocols used around the world (see page 1 of the technical documentation), so you can use the numbers for relative comparisons (e.g. % change from baseline).

The 19^th century scientist Lord Kelvin said the more you know what’s wrong with a number, the more useful it becomes. That’s our attitude in working with CO2 numbers.

Energy Stewards helps you to think about and account for your building’s impact on the climate by tracking CO2 as well as dollars over time.

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Making Sense of Water Use

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Kevin Little

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which runs the ENERGY STAR® system, cares about water. The EPA water portal, WaterSense, gives practical advice to help businesses and homeowners use water more intelligently.

While there is not yet a national benchmarking system for water used in commercial buildings, the Portfolio Manager web tool allows you to track water use. The Energy Stewards® web platform does, too. You can manage water records in Energy Stewards or Portfolio Manager; we’ll synch up your records. Your building’s monthly water use shows up on the Detail Graphs Page in Energy Stewards.

One issue with water bills in many parts of the country: the bill covers three, six or even 12 months. This is not very useful for tracking improvements and identifying issues but you can still learn some things from your data. Energy Stewards allocates bills that are longer than a full month by averaging–a three month bill’s totals are converted into a use per day and then each month (say June, with 30 days) gets assigned a proportional amount of use (30 days x average water use/day.)

Here’s an Energy Stewards picture of the water use at a church that has a 90 day billing cycle for water:

The water use appears to be consistent from the 2nd quarter of 2009 through the middle of 2011. Then there’s a small step up in 3rd quarter of 2011 and a larger step up. The change in water use is about 6000 gallons a month, about 200 gallons a day.

The EPA WaterSense site says that 200 gallons a day can come from one leaking toilet! Check out the tips from EPA here. They’re promoting “fix a leak” week in March–the actions on the EPA site are ready to use in an Energy Stewards Action Table, too.

PS The facilities leader at the church saw the bump up in the chart and now has started his detective work. We’ll post his story when he gets to the bottom of the mystery.

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Energy Action Wedgies…Er, Wedges

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Kevin Little

Back in 2004, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow published a basic description in Science of how societies could bend the increasing curve of atmospheric CO2 concentration forecast for the rest of this century. They described 15 technologies, any seven of which, if deployed widely, would be enough to radically reduce the increase of global atmospheric carbon by 2060. They included efficient use of energy by buildings as one of their 15.

They described and illustrated their approach as a series of wedges, which if stacked together, would suffice to hold atmospheric CO2 at a high but perhaps not catastrophic level of 500 ppm by the beginning of the next century. An important message from this article: no one technology will suffice but we will need a collection of different technologies and approaches.

Last month also in Science, we got some updates from the energy policy and big scale action front, somewhat bad news and somewhat good news.

We’ll start with the somewhat bad news. James Williams and a set of colleagues published a study in the 6 January 2012 issue of Science that examined the technical paths for California to achieve its proposed 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels. This dramatic reduction seems to be a real stretch, a transformation that “….demands technologies not yet commercialized, as well as coordination of investment, technology development and infrastructure deployment.”

Williams et al., like Pigala and Socolow, look at stacking up technologies; energy efficiency in buildings leads the way. In their analysis, they presumed that all new residential and commercial buildings are effectively “net zero” users of grid sourced electricity by 2030 (primarily by technology and design changes, which of course need to be supported by smart operations and fast-paced learning, driven by testing and data.)

Given the current state of political divisions and lack of consensus to address future climate impacts, it seems unlikely that political leaders and the voting public in California will jump at the chance to invest and change energy systems to the degree required to achieve the climate goals as analyzed by Williams et al.

But now the somewhat good news. In the 13 January 2012 issue of Science, Shindell et al. published an article that outlined ways to simultaneously mitigate climate change in the next decades while improving health and food security. The 14 measures identified in the article don’t tackle the daunting challenges of CO2 reduction but three other drivers of atmospheric damage: ozone, black carbon (soot), and methane. Reduced air pollution reduces health damage, primarily in developing countries. Methane reductions particularly can play a big part in keeping the atmospheric warming lower by 1/2 degree C in the next 40 years–perhaps giving us collectively a little more time to learn how to live more responsibly and sustainably.

The power of Shindell et al’s arguments is that the benefits from the changes are not “for the future”, asking people to pay now for future benefits that they might never experience.

That seems good advice as we work to improve energy efficiency–to figure out ways to connect to what people value now and to deliver better performance while reducing waste and costs.

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Energy Management–The Next Extreme Sport?

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Kevin Little

A very useful bit of Japanese jargon borrowed by the enthusiasts of Lean Management is “go to the Gemba.” “Gemba” means the place where value is created in a business or organization–the surgical suite or diagnostic imaging center in a hospital, the machine shop or assembly line in a manufacturing company, the front desk in a hotel. To improve performance, you start with understanding how value is created and where there is waste in the operation (the activities and use of resources that a customer will not be happy to pay for.)

Energy use is not the primary purpose of any organization–you use energy to accomplish some other purpose. Many sophisticated organizations apply Lean principles or their equivalent to reduce waste and increase value delivered to their customers. For these organizations, energy management will be a natural part of everyone’s job to increase value.

Even in Lean organizations, energy may be wasted in ways that are hard to see–because, after all, energy use is not the main point of adding value to the customer.

How can you learn to see energy waste? It helps to have examples and to see what’s going on–go to the workplace and look for energy waste.

As you know if you’re using Energy Stewards® or have been following our blog, we are big proponents of learning from each other. Shared experiences also can foster friendly competition and inspiration to use energy more efficiently.

So how does this all fit with Extreme Sports and going to the Gemba?

Extreme sports enthusiasts like to show their friends the crazy things they do. One tool they use is a rugged video camera from GoPro. The GoPro camera developers announced a new development at last week’s Consumer Products show. In a month or two, you can hook up the tiny rugged GoPro camera to a small, wearable box that will access a Wi-Fi network. If there is no Wi-Fi network, you can access the web with a smartphone and stream your video. The whole system is on the order of $500 or $600.

With a rugged portable video camera, you can go all kinds of places (the Gemba, for example) and document energy saving opportunities or show a distant expert your situation. You can then share your lessons–either live stream or captured for later study and display if you’re in a mechanical room with no internet access (the latest camera comes with a 32 GB memory card that is really small).

We think on the spot video is now within reach of many learning groups and engineers.

We look forward to seeing your videos soon!

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Successful energy project work–what are the odds?

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Kevin Little

My colleagues at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement have played with DICE in some recent project work. They’re not gambling but are working to increase the odds that improvement projects succeed.

DICE is an acronym for the essential elements associated with successful big projects. It is described in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article by Harold Sirkin, Perry Keenan and Alan Jackson.

As defined by the authors, D = Duration: time between milestone reviews–the shorter the better; I = integrity: project teams’ skill; C = Commitment: senior executives’ and line managers’ dedication to the program; E = Effort: the extra work employees must do to adopt new processes–the less the better.

While the DICE creators developed, checked and confirmed the elements against a range of large projects–those aimed at “transforming” part or all of a business–the DICE scale looks like a good guide when you want to deploy or upgrade your energy management program.

D: Maintain a regular review process, at least monthly–actions and results (actual performance).

I: Equip the people who are in the lead to manage energy with the right tools. Give access to expert help when they need it. Make sure the key people can understand energy units and patterns of energy use.

C: Engage senior leaders of the organization with energy information (the flip side: if senior leaders in your organization have essentially no interest in energy management, this will make front-line and mid-level efforts hard to start and hard to sustain.)

E: Make it easy for people to do the right things in managing energy–minimize the extra effort to keep track of information and focus on high leverage actions.

Of course, we built Energy Stewards® to help you roll the DICE:

D: use the Action Table and relative performance of buildings in your portfolio at least once a month as part of a review of progress;

I and E: study the graphs and tables, which make it easy to see which buildings are improving and which are not;

C: Keep senior managers in the loop, you can build a big picture report from summary numbers (or built custom reports when you take advantage of the ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager tools).

We think the DICE approach can help you increase the odds that your energy management work actually pays off!

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Lake Mendota as a Climate Indicator

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Kevin Little

It’s clear to us at Rapid Improvement Associates that our climate is changing. Based on the evidence we’ve seen, our collective use of fossil fuels is a major driving force of climate change.

Lake Mendota open water and ice, 8 January 2012

Right here in Madison, WI, we have a sensitive indicator of climate —how long our local lakes freeze over each winter. Starting in the 1850’s, researchers at the University of Wisconsin have measured the number of days our local lakes are frozen. Over the last 150 years, the largest lake, Mendota, is typically frozen by mid-December. As of January 8, 2012 Lake Mendota still had open water.

John Magnuson, Emeritus Professor of Zoology and Limnology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has an intimate knowledge of the history of Lake Mendota. He has also described our human tendency to remember only the recent past and our difficulty in understanding changes that occur in places far from home.

These seem to be two manifestations of the mental bias named by Daniel Kahneman as “What You See is All There Is” –see the “Brains at work” post on 4 January 2012. Our brains are really challenged to deal with changes in climate, given the way we typically process information.

Nevertheless, we can use what Kahneman calls our System 2 brain to look for appropriate reference sets to help us understand the big picture. Change in climate is a big system issue and hard for our brains to grasp. We need all the help we can get to see the big picture and then act responsibly in light of our understanding.

Ice cover series, Lake Mendota

For example, here’s a reference graph of the length of time in days Lake Mendota was frozen that puts this winter’s late freeze over in historical context (source: Wisconsin State Climatology Office); the vertical axis is the number of days each winter the lake is frozen.

There is a marked change from the beginning of the series in the mid-19^th century to the beginning of the 21^st century: winters as measured by the ice coverage are becoming shorter. Given that Lake Mendota still was open on January 8, this year’s experience will continue the trend.

What can we do? Of the many possibilities, using energy more intelligently in our buildings is something we can do today—we can save some money, reduce fossil fuel burning that drives atmospheric carbon, and build up our reasoning skills. That’s why we developed Energy Stewards®.

Here’s our advice. Look for the right reference sets in your work—for buildings, look at energy use over time and look to compare performance across similar buildings. For climate, find an indicator that makes sense to your locale like the ice series here in Madison. You’re likely to learn something useful and inspire meaningful action.

More information about Lake Mendota and its role as a climate sensor:

1. An accessible summary of presentation by John Magnuson from 2006 is posted here.

2. The ice data series may be found here.

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Brains at work: how we really think

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Kevin Little

Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman has a new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, pitched to the general reader rather than a narrow academic audience. He discusses 50 years of research, much of it his, that clearly shows that almost all people make judgments that are not strictly logical or logically consistent.

What’s that got to do with managing energy in the short or long run?

Managing energy use in buildings involves judgments and decisions so whatever you can do to improve the way you think will help you out.

Here are a few specific connections:

1. The “what you see is all there is” bias. This is “out of sight out of mind” with a twist—if you are paying attention to something, you forget about everything else.

For instance, when most people who are not energy experts think about energy use in buildings, they may focus on lights and plug-in items like printers and computers. The opportunities to manage the relatively invisible heating, ventilation and cooling systems may be overlooked.

We may focus on one building at one point in time without having a useful reference set. That’s why Energy Stewards® is designed to use ENERGY STAR® benchmark ratings and to present tables and graphs that make it easy to compare performance over time, within a specific building and across buildings.

2. Two systems drive our thinking. “System 1” is fast, intuitive, good at finding patterns, dominant and the source of many of the judgment errors described by Kahneman. “System 2” is capable of logical argument and statistical reasoning that can avoid logical errors, with training. Unfortunately System 2 is lazy and slow and usually defers to System 1.

We can work with System 1 and encourage System 2 by the way we present information. For example, your System 1 can probably find the two unusual buildings in this Energy Stewards’ display of ENERGY STAR ratings. Then System 2 might wonder if the two buildings have the right reference set before System 1 generates a compelling story of why things are the way they seem.

Which buildings are different in terms of ENERGY STAR scores?

3. Get some help from your friends. Groups can be better than individuals in terms of holding each other to commitments and to seeing things a little bit differently. It’s usually easier to see the flaws in a friend’s thinking than our own. And we may not all suffer from the same biases at the same time.

Energy Stewards aims to help people work together to generate good stories of energy management and to develop a reference set of effective experiences. We’ll keep looking for ways to align our product with the way people actually think and work.

Interested in learning a bit more about Thinking, Fast and Slow? Here are links to recent reviews in Business Week and The Guardian, in the United Kingdom.

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Friends in Healthcare Improvement

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Kevin Little

Today 5700 people gathered in Orlando to hear patient and hospital stories and explore new methods to improve healthcare around the world. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (www.ihi.org) is holding its annual conference.

From the IHI website: “An independent not-for profit-organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, IHI focuses on motivating and building the will for change; identifying and testing new models of care in partnership with both patients and health care professionals; and ensuring the broadest possible adoption of best practices and effective innovations.”

The founder of IHI, Don Berwick, MD, recently completed 17 months as head of the Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services (CMS). He is a remarkable leader who has dedicated himself to changing the way healthcare is organized and delivered—to promote health, to engage patients and families, to build skills of providers to make tomorrow’s care more effective and efficient, every day.

Joe Nocera in today’s New York Times summarizes Dr. Berwick’s impact at CMS in Berwick’s short 17 months at the agency. Berwick led his team to deliver new regulations that promise to drive change in the near term and inspiring federal employees to make a difference.

We’ve used what we’ve learned from the IHI and its advisors in the design of Energy Stewards(®)–to link data to actions and to work to build links among users who are motivated to improve performance.

So, if you think that changing the way we use energy is a big challenge, healthcare is equally challenging. There are folks who are tackling the way healthcare is designed and health is promoted. These people use data to drive change and work to test what actually works. The leaders in healthcare improvement are eager to learn every day. They are convinced our communities can be better.

There is recent grim news about the increasing rates of carbon emissions, with sobering implications for climate change. We certainly need to move a mountain but we have allies and colleagues in healthcare who can inspire us with effective methods to change and improve the way we do business.

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New Lights in Old Fixtures

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Kevin Little

Philips Lighting has a line of LED lights called EnduraLEDs that replace incandescent bulbs and compact fluorescent lamps. The model A19 also won the U.S. Department of Energy’s L Prize for innovative energy-saving lamps and is ENERGY STAR® labeled.

Long life (25,000 hours), the A19 produces the same amount of light as a 60-watt incandescent (“standard”) light bulb, drawing 12.5 watts of power. It offers three advantages over compact fluorescent lamps (1) the “color” of the LED is warmer than CFL’s; (2) the LED lamp is dimmable; (3) the LED lamp has no mercury. (EPA calculations indicate that the savings in mercury spewed into the air by fossil-fuel power plants when replacing an incandescent lamp with a CFL is more than the mercury in the CFL itself, however.)

Sounds great, is there a downside? Price tag. The on-line price for the A19 is about $33. The on-line price of a 60-watt equivalent General Electric CFL is $1.50, with claimed 8000 hour life, 13 watts.

The old-fashioned incandescent 60 watt bulb has an even lower purchase price, at $.55 for a Sylvania lamp, with claimed life of 1875 hours.

Let’s review the arithmetic for energy costs:

Power in watts x hours of use = watt-hours. Divide by 1000 to get the unit kilowatt-hours (kWh) that your utility sells you.

Multiply the kilowatt-hours by the unit price.

Example: 60 watt lamp x 100 hours x $0.10/kWh = 6000 watt-hours x $0.10/kWh = $0.60.

Here in the upper Midwest portion of the United States, we also have to throw in about 12 pounds of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere to generate the 6 kWh to run that light bulb. No dollar cost yet on the CO2 but some day the bill will come due.

Using the arithmetic we just reviewed, we can make a table to compare the three lamps.

The CFL and LED lamps are clear winners in terms of energy use and total cost of use over 25,000 hours, which is about 3 years, 24 hours a day. On the other hand, if lamps are used just a few hours a day, it will take many years to get to 25,000 hours of use.

Still, these new LED lamps are a strong competitor to CFL’s and incandescents in any application that requires dimmable lamps, has the lights on many hours a day and requires long-life to reduce the effort to replace lamps. Retail stores and restaurants may be able to make a narrow economic argument in favor of LEDs right now even if they are not counting the carbon impact of replacing dimmable incandescent lamps with the energy sipping LEDs.

Generally, the price tag of the LEDs will come down over time. Even at the price today, when I look at the economic, environmental and aesthetic factors all together, the LED lamps are looking attractive. I’m going to get some to try. How about you?

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Not all energy audits are the same

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Kevin Little

ASHRAE, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, just published a new edition of Procedures for Commercial Building Audits. Co-authored by our colleague Dick Pearson, P.E. and ASHRAE Fellow, the book contains a wealth of practical information about energy use in commercial buildings.

You can use the reference to help you understand what you get (or should be getting) when you engage a consultant to conduct an energy audit of one of your buildings.

The book defines four levels of effort:

(1) Preliminary Energy-Use Analysis (PEA)–the PEA assembles the basic energy data from monthly energy records, including energy intensity (total annual energy use/sq ft) and energy cost index (total annual energy cost/sq ft). Energy Stewards provides you with the elements of the PEA.

(2) Level 1 Audit “Walk Through Survey”–includes the PEA and a brief-on site survey that identifies no-cost/low cost interventions and a list of capital interventions worth more study.

(3) Level 2 Audit “Energy Survey and Analysis”–looks at specific end uses of energy and presents a comprehensive list of energy efficiency measures and changes to operation and maintenance procedures. It can include a list of capital interventions, with recommendations for additional analysis to refine preliminary cost estimates.

(4) Level 3 Audit “Detailed Analysis of Capital-Intensive Modifications”–just as the name implies, this level is analysis that includes engineering and economic calculations, with detailed cost and savings projections. It often include simulation of energy use under certain conditions.

While Dick Pearson is a national expert on energy audits, he recommends that any building operator can start a process of a “reverse energy audit”–(1) assemble and track the data used in the PEA; (2) begin to adjust the building’s energy systems to use energy more intelligently. The reverse audit can save money and reduce climate impact immediately, with the added benefit that you are better prepared to understand and use the recommendations of a consultant auditor.

There are many sources of ideas for better building operations. A comprehensive checklist is available from the University of Washington Extension here. Your local utility has checklists, too. These are all candidates for action items in your Energy Stewards Action Table.

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Energy Stewards^®