The Globe and Mail

So — smart buildings. What does that mean, and what’s it got to do with lowering the CO2 footprint? One immediately imagines Bill Gates wandering around his massive mansion, lights softly beckoning his entrance by coming up, saying their goodbyes with a slow dimming and the stereo automatically sensing what room he’s in (and what mood!) and playing the right sonata at just the right volume. A wave of his hand changes the LCD paintings on the wall to some impressionist theme. The house knows he’s on the way home and turns the heat on, and the fridge knows he’s out of Steamwhistle and discretely orders some more via some encoded command in FTP. Well, something like that is what I mean, but a little simpler and more strictly focused on energy use ...

That all the appliances, lights, and energy sources (like each rooms individual heating/cooling controls, and the solar panels on the roof) can be controlled, and information about their operation accessed, from a central spot is the main idea — call this central spot the Energy-CPU. Essentially all the relevant devices are linked together with a ‘’twisted-pair’ of wires, over which signals can be sent (one protocol is called I-LON) to the Energy-CPU, which can both provide information from, and control signals to, the individual devices. One example of such software can be found at www.echelon.com. Stuff is metered, and stuff is controlled, essentially.

How much automatic control, and how much control can be input by an alert front desk clerk is an open question, but the goals are the same — minimize energy use based on how the building is currently occupied, and generate information about how all the various devices are performing. There are limits as to the size of building that could use this stuff — obviously an Energy-CPU running 24/7/365 to control three 25-W bathroom bulbs is a little over-kill ... but we’ll need a CPU anyway, so maybe we can kill two birds with one stone.

There are as many levels of intelligence available in an Energy-CPU as there are newspapers in Europe. At the high end, for example, office buildings can have each lighting fixture controlled by work-space, type of activity, time-of-day, etc (check out www.encelium.com). A hotel could have the lights and heat turned on 83.4 minutes prior to expected check-in, etc. Here, I will focus on reducing the automatic control strategies (i.e. what the Energy-CPU is figuring out on my behalf) in favour of generating human control/access over all systems. The clerk at the front desk can figure out what to do, they are on duty anyway, and the Energy-CPU can remind them of something if necessary.

On the information-gathering (metering) side, one wants all the solar-thermal stuff, the Powerpipes, the main geothermal heat-pump system and all the individual units to be able to send signals about their operation, and about how much energy is being used/generated/etc. In my case, this will be mainly to gather information about the CO2 I’m saving (and quantify it as best as possible), but it’s also useful just to keep an eye on things. I want to be able to quantify all the thermal and energy flows in the building — particularly as a part of what I want to be a very public argument that we can reduce our footprint — in the real estate segment in particular, by economic arguments alone.

On the control side, we will want to:
- only allow lights on in the rooms if someone is checked in
- only allow heat (over a minimum) or cooling is someone is checked in
- turn the cooling off if someone has opened the window!
- have the lights in common areas on some kind of timer after-hours
- have some sort of on-peak/off-peak smart metering, so we can shift what electrical use we can to off-peak hours at cheaper rates (and baseline nuclear production)

It seems a clerk can handle the first two items, and a very simple timer/clock the next two, and some intelligence is required for the last.

On the monitoring side, we will want to:
- quantify the thermal energy generated by the geothermal heat pump
- quantify the solar thermal energy generated on the roof
- quantify the electrical generation of the solar PV
- monitor the guests decisions about temperature selection

An estimated cost for this system (echelon, etc.) was given to me as being between 20K to 40K if installed/designed right into the building at the start. Here’s a company that does this sort of thing and here’s an energy integrator that deals with this sort of thing, along with providing all sorts of HVAC equipment. There are many others.

I don’t know how much of that cost is the basic signaling structure (devices that can talk, wires to connect) and how much is the intelligent software making choices the front-desk clerk can. Seems worth it to me at the lower end. 40K is getting a bit high ... but there will certainly be some of this kind of intelligence/monitoring built in.

Here’s another cheap-and-cheerful way to reduce your electrical costs — and perhaps your actual energy use as well. Regenergy.com builds this neat little device that you put on to each of your large consuming electrical equipment (compressors, pumps, fans, etc). Each device (controller) talks to each other to make sure that only so many of the heavy electrical users are active at the same time. Since the utilities often charge at your peak demand rate, if you can spread the activity of all the units over time, you take the peak down and voila — less cents per kilowatt hour! The little devices talk to each other, and act as semi-autonomous units, and they’ve got some neat intellectual property in that decision-making process — they call it a ‘swarm-logic algorithm. To lower over-all energy use (not just cost) you can dial each controller down to a lower load (percentage of time it’s on) — that’s the cheap-and-cheerful ‘echelon’ application. These guys promise they can lower your costs 5% to 15% at no cost, since they rent you the equipment and the savings are net of the rental.

Neat — but I need something somewhere between full-on Echelon, and Regenergy.