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FEBRUA RY 2016 | 49 Energy Management PHOTOGRAPHY iSTOCK Energy management technologies are seeing a surge of interest by GODFREY BUDD P erhaps one of the more significant indicators of today's focus on building energy usage and management, compared to just a few years ago, is the extent to which energy modelling techniques are now being deployed. "When I started working, after graduation, energy modelling was mostly only being done on LEED buildings – colleges, hospitals and a few high-rise office towers. Now we're seeing about 90 per cent of the projects that go through our office will have a modelling component," says John Buxton, an energy modelling specialist and EIT at Williams Engineering Canada, who has consulted for building projects across B.C. and Alberta since beginning his professional career about seven years ago. Partly as a result of recent legislation regarding energy performance and the adoption by industry of the new national energy code, "We're seeing a shift away from business-as-usual and a stronger focus on energy efficiency. There are cost implications to this so there has been some pushback," Buxton says. The prodding to improve efficiencies is coming from many directions these days. Besides provincial and federal building codes, municipalities have been passing by- laws and utilities have been offering incentives to either require or encourage the adoption of more energy-saving practices. Energy modelling can go well beyond bench-marking for compliance, Buxton and other experts say. Although many clients initially request energy modelling for code compliance, many soon find it useful for optimizing design to improve energy efficiency. The ability of the software to simulate various scenarios of design and energy use can both inform and speed up a decision-making process. Armed with a lap- top, building design and the energy model that has been developed for the project, an engineer can sit down with the design team, owner and construction manager, and review the key inputs to the model. Changes can be made to the energy model, based on suggestions from the group. "We can examine, during the meeting, how the proposed changes would affect the energy usage of the building. The construc- tion manager on hand would likely be able to ballpark the costs of the changes. Some changes might be at no cost, so those would be a no brainer. But the key is that with all the stakeholders in the meeting, and all the information available, an owner can make the decision during the meeting," Buxton says. One of the most cost-effective ways of reducing energy costs, Buxton says, is by adding ventilation heat recovery. "It can save 10 to 15 per cent on total energy con- sumption of the building. Depending on the type of building and HVAC system, it can be a really low-cost item." Heat recovery from a range of sources, including electrical rooms, elevator machine rooms, waste-water and electrical power from a roof-top solar PV array will help cut energy consumption at the Shannon Mews condo complex in Vancouver, says George Steeves, president of Sterling Cooper Consultants Inc. Energy modelling and energy management are important areas of focus for the full-service mechanical engineering firm. Six of its 40 employees work on energy modelling and one Sterling Cooper alumnus, who still occasionally works on proj- ects with the firm, now teaches energy modelling at BCIT. Having grown up and gone mainstream so fast, energy modelling could be hav- ing a few growing pains, despite its undoubted value and success. "There are various Glowing Pains software programs for energy modelling, and you can be very precise, but some of the software is not up to speed as it sometimes can't be made to match the design concept of a project," Steeves says. He believes the energy modelling sector would benefit from oversight and regu- lation so that adequate standards are in place. Steeves suggests that this deficiency sometimes means that people doing energy modelling might have only the shakiest grasp of some of the technical issues they are dealing with: "Modellers can model a system, a heat pump, for example, without understanding what it is," he explains. The result has been that energy modelling, which Steeves says can do very accurate work, has fallen into disrepute in some circles. Overall, however, the tide appears to be turning in favour of energy modelling as a useful tool for design choices that, among other things, support superior energy management systems for buildings. Electrical utilities are among those facing a potential challenge in energy man- agement as municipalities and other government levels begin mandating that a percentage of parking stalls in large buildings are equipped with charging infra- structure for electric vehicles (EV). "The Canadian Electrical Code (CEC) says that the load for a car charger must be at 100 per cent," notes Steven Nemetz, president of Nemetz (S/A) & Associates Ltd. Like New York, Seattle and a growing number of major centres across the con- tinent, Vancouver now requires developers to make 20 per cent of their parking stalls electric car ready. At six kilowatts (kW) per unit, that would increase the main transformer load by 480 kW in a building with a total of 400 stalls, or about 15 per cent for the main transformer, says Nemetz. One solution is to install a load-miser program to regulate the percentage of the total building load capacity available for car charging. For example, this could allow the first 50 per cent of vehicles to be charged at once. "Then the automated system applies a charge to the next vehicle in the electrical line," Nemetz says. In cities that require all new building parking stalls to be EV ready, the extra load capacity requirement for a building with 400 stalls would be an additional 2.4 megawatts. Nemetz says that in such circumstances a load miser program becomes essential. One of the increasingly robust technologies supporting energy management is known as submetering. It began mostly as a way to monitor individual tenant con- sumption of electricity, but now often includes collection of water and gas data from their respective meters. Also, the functionality of today's more advanced systems has broadened in scope to deliver device-level submetering for identifying oppor- tunities to improve operational efficiency, detection of equipment or system failure, and bench-marking for energy efficiency. "Our system is designed to connect to IT systems and the Internet. Also, any building automation system can pull the required info from our system. The data collected from it goes to the cloud from which it's accessible, depending on the agreement, to financial systems, corporate C-suite stakeholders, CFOs, billing sys- tems and energy management software. This enables a range of measures that pro- mote energy conservation and minimize waste," says Gord Echlin, VP sales and marketing at Triacta Power Solutions, a division of Enercare Connections Inc.

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