Energy Star ranks buildings that are entered on a scale from 1 to 100. 100 is the best performer, with any building 75 or better awarded Energy Star status, bronze plaque, plus bragging rights. Not to mention happier occupants and lower tenant turnover.

This will make owner/operators happy. The only folks who might be unhappy will be the leasing agents.

A study of 60 commercial buildings found that more than half suffered from control problems. In addition, 40% had problems with HVAC equipment and one-third had sensors that were not operating properly. An astonishing 15% of the buildings studied were actually missing specified equipment. Approximately one-quarter of them had energy management control systems (EMCS), economizers, and/or variable speed drives that did not run properly.

Holy chimney smokes, Batman, where did the specified equipment go? Did The Joker steal them?

Source:http://www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings

US Department of Energy paper- “Building Commissioning – The Key to Quality Assurance”
File name: PECI_BldgCxQA1_0500(rebuild America).pdf

The government failed to ask for equity, or payback and the banks give themselves a pat on the back with big bonuses for being so damn shrewd.

While the backbone of our economy, small businesses, struggle to survive. And now the top 6 banks have control over the assets exceeding 60% of our gross national product!

Bill Moyers revealing discussion of what we suspected all along. We’ve been had! Its collusion between the banks and the feds!
Now they borrow $ trillions at the Federal reserve for pennies, and lend it back to the government for $billions in risk free interest. Its a process that bleeds the middle class while mollycoddling the rich. The banks need major major reform, something along the lines of breaking them up. The Federal Reserve needs to become a publicly controlled, public entity. Everything we know about banking has been proven wrong, so lets get moving on it.

“What is always astonishing to me, is how the U.S. citizen is willing to diminish the possibility that the United States will be a leader in the technologies of the future,”

she said.

“…it…has implications for the world. Because the world would profit from the technical and intellectual capacity that is in the United States.”

Seeking to learn from the private sector, her team is meeting with the CEOs of some Fortune 500 companies. They want to learn how companies like Unilever and Dell implement energy conservation and reduce carbon based consumption in their buildings and processes.

Gridlock. It is pathetic that we will not agree on a national energy policy. We need innovation and smart new investment in energy, like other large economies. We are shortsighted. What we have, is a crippled basket of weak “push” incentives. This needs serious reform. We need a more level playing field between the old infrastructure and the new, altogether in a free market. No more playing favorites!


Big Oil continues to buy senators and congressmen (Senator Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), leading climate change ignoramus denier, and the energy efficiency industries’ nemesis is an example. Its hard to be heard with big oil paying such powerful, senile and arrogant men like him to stand up for them against us. Unequal Protection.

Smart investors know there is no sense debating this anymore. There are great opportunities in energy now, but not in drilling for oil. Oil/coal/gas infrastructure has been built, it has matured and now its becoming obsolete quickly. (and a resource quickly becoming scarce.) Looking out 20 or 30 years, there is serious money in new technologies like continuous building commissioning or renewable energy. We engineers, commissioning agents and mechanical contractors are making this reality!

Definitions and terms :

California Title 24 -2008 = California Energy code 2008 = CEC 2008 = CalGreen

HERS (Home Energy Rating) is a scale where 0 = zero net-energy, and 100 = average energy consumption in 2000. Its a good approach to resolves the issue of the moving baselines. Architectural Energy Corporation has written some white papers on the subject of energy code benchmarking for both residential and non-residential.


A historical footnote: CEC 2005 = ASHRAE 90.1-2007 = HERS 75.
ASHRAE 90.1-2007 and Cal Energy Code 2008 are NOT equivalent (as I had thought).

ASHRAE-90.1-2007 is the LEED benchmark, however, and LEED-NC requires a 10% minimum improvement. Therefore LEED-NC minimum = HERS 67.5

It is pretty common for LEED buildings to get a 20-30% improvement on ASHRAE 90.1-2007. Those buildings HERS rating = 59 to 52.5

CEC 2008 is CalGreen minimum = HERS 53. About the same as common results in LEED-NC

ASHRAE 90.1-2010 is approximately = HERS 50, (has not been adopted by anyone as of 12/31/2011).
CalGreen Tier 1 = HERS 45
CalGreen Tier 2 = HERS 37.

Summary

National Renewable Energy Labs says HERS 37 is the maximum technically feasible without resorting to onsite energy production methods. The rest of the way to net-zero needs alternatives to the typical gas/oil/electric regime.
Pretty stringent stuff that requires much due diligence. As you get lower and lower in energy intensity, envelope hvac, lighting types and process-loads become more important to the rating game. I am just skimming the surface here.

Here’s a good article on building performance. At the left is a graph: a picture worth a thousand words. There are links to many more reading sources on that page.

I think this covers it for now. Anything else you want to learn? Feel free to contact me.

Hazel Henderson, D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, former US government technology advisor and president of Ethical Markets Media said, “this new total is remarkable in spite of economic uncertainty. It indicates that the global transition away from the 300-year fossil-fueled Industrial Era is accelerating toward the cleaner, greener, information-rich economies of the 21st century.”

The task ahead is to renovate tens of millions of existing buildings. Not replacing them as we did in the last century. Replacing outdated lighting and HVAC systems, training workers, and reaping the savings. Importing less oil. Using the money saved to spend on things more enjoyable.

It makes me sick thinking about what might have been. The free market suffocating by collusion of government, wall street, big oil and big defense. Eisenhower predicted the “military-industrial complex” might corrupt our government. That it has.

If only we had better brains in there. There is time to correct this, however late it is, by the voters getting these clowns out next November. Let us pray they see the truth and act on it.

Oh yeah, Obama should have fired the presidents of all the banks when we GAVE them $1.4 trillion to shore up their balance sheets in 2009. They gave themselves bonuses for being so shrewd as to keep their jobs AND getting bailed out of trouble. All while the middle class loses its homes, savings and upward mobility.

The great recession has exposed the great divide in our society between the average Joe and the powerful rich. And THAT has to be changed, because America cannot stay divided and be a great nation.

Its amazing to me how the media hardly mentions energy efficiency. They are obsessed with the supply side. Drill for more oil and gas, fracture the bedrock, build more pipelines, strip the hills, and keep spewing pollutants.

The politicians and their masters (Big oil) are the worst. They are responsible for this supply side nonsense. 30 years of observation tells me they are stupid, dishonest, and probably both. We need to remove these idiots, no doubt.

Buildings consume around 45% of our national energy budget. Most of it from coal burning electric plants. Only 1/3 of the btu content in coal actually reaches the grid, its a low efficiency technology. (the rest is waste heat) It based on the mid 20th century paradigm of cheap and dirty. The waste is staggering.

Because we waste all this energy, we do not seem to have enough. But we really do have enough. Windows, roofing, better AC units, better lighting and better control of them. Better yet, measure and account for the inefficiency. Its amazing how easy energy can be saved. Putting in a 365/24/7 timeclock or photosensors to turn lights on and off is easy. How many millions of buildings still leave all their lights on all night?

Blame and politicians, not us engineers and scientists. There is a stupid and dishonest narrative promoted by Big oil and Big government. The TV talking heads swallow and regurgitate the supply side story over and over. Never the demand side. They unconsciously support more consumption.

The political clowns who call themselves conservatives are conservative in name only. They are not conserving and they do not promote conservation. Let us review the real facts, not the psuedo-facts. We struggle because we did not do our duty to conserve over the last 30 years.

We can save lots of money NOW without more energy production. Fact: U.S. annual energy budget is approaches $1 trillion. We use $450 billion/year just to light, heat and cool buildings and homes. With the retrofits I mentioned, we could easily cut $150 billion/year. We could add 2 million jobs with that annual revenueEasily. Not doing this is truly a waste. The political crooks say we need to cut waste, why not energy waste? Big oil hates this, it does nothing for their profits.

This is easy stuff. They call it low hanging fruit. My partners and I do it every day in our business, one building at a time.

Occupy Wall Street and the Tea party protests indicate growing anxiety. The people have grievances. They have a right to petition to have those grievances addressed. For decades, federal government has been less and less responsive to the needs of the middle class. Issues which have needed addressing for decades now threaten our very freedom, if not our way of life.

Big government and big business have unintentionally worked against progressive change for years. The pressure for change has built up to a head. The main reasons:

• Healthcare costs have skyrocketed, a drag to our economy, bankrupting many families. We spend much more on medical with less results than other industrial nations. Big drug and Big insurance have us by ‘the you know what’. Not a free market. if it were, I bet costs would come down.

• Energy policy has been controlled by lobbyists for more than 30 years. The land is strip mined, our water is being fouled and now our climate is deteriorating before our eyes. Politics may trump science (so far). But unfortunately, politics cannot trump nature. Politics cannot trump and our imperative to change our energy infrastructure. Big government in cahoots with Big Oil and big Coal, of course, are pouring millions of dollars into maintaining the dying status quo!
• Housing and commercial real estate values were pumped up and crashed. Commodities skyrocket and plunge. Dot com stocks boom and bust. Bubbles are damaging to our economy and add no value to the GNP. Allowing banks to speculate and pump up their trading over the last 30 years was a ruinous mistake. These cycles of wealth destruction put a hurt on Main Street! The great recession has smashed us small business entrepreneurs.
• Government manipulation and corruption: The revolving door between government and big business. Elected representatives and their assistants leave office and work for the same big corporations they oversee as congressmen, and then run for President, ala Newt Gingrich or a Mitt Romney.
• Huge super PACS (political action committees) spend vast sums of money to influence public opinion. The super-rich minority spends $billions anonymously, which can speak with more power and more loudly than anyone ever did before. Money rules. Not a democracy at all.
• Big banks received a bailout from the government, and even MORE! access to cheap credit from the Federal Reserve. Then they gave themselves multi million dollar bonuses. No pain at all! While millions lose their jobs, homes and small businesses gets their credit lines chopped. (I smell fraud.)

  Meanwhile the middle class has taken the hit. Lost home equity, jobs, savings and hope. The top 1% has experienced exponential income growth since 1975 while the 99% has barely budged. Economists tell us this is because government policy, tax structure, and massive borrowing by both private and public sector has become more and more skewed to give the top 1% and big corporations an unequal advantage in many many ways.

  
  Between 1947 and 1975, “middle class” income and the 1% income tracked together and our economy grew beautifully year after year. My father moved from a shabby 4 story walk up to a nice house in the suburbs. The difference between then and now is that income taxes were steeply more progressive. The top 1% paid a few more percentage points. The middle class was paid enought to buy what they made!!! (Henry Ford, that great capitalist, promoted that concept)

• Congress is useless and can’t legislate their way past 1993. They are beholden to the modern election machine of finance and wealthy special interests. The laws we need never get passed. The laws they pass are preposterous and their attitude is despicable. They won’t act responsibly. They must be voted out so we can get some reality again.

I don’t blame President Obama, not when he has a do-nothing congress opposing his every move. I am happy about the newly announced government/business/institution collaboration to energy retrofit 1.6 billion square feet of buildings. I think someone said its the equivalent of 1200 Empire State buildings. My favorite living President Bill Clinton is working on this too. It means the better part of 100,000 jobs and since it requires no public money, only public policy, its an awesome solution!

The Energy Savings predicted were overstated by an order of magnitude, however. They claimed a $4.4 billion improvement will generate $40 billion in energy savings a year. whoops! [What is it about politics that makes counting so difficult?]

In the building efficiency business usually expect a 1-2 year payback, for a savings more like $4 billion / year, not to mention the reduced carbon emissions. Damn good, a better investment than most anything else I can think of! No wonder these companies are on board, it only makes good investment sense!!! {full disclosure: some of the team are clients of mine} Oh yeah, this makes us less dependent on imported foreign oil!

How can we deal with these issues? There’s a lot of work to do, but I am optimistic. Americans are resourceful. I have every expectation that next year will be a good one for all.