Copenhagen's Seawater Cooling Delivers Energy And Carbon Savings

Copenhagen, Denmark – Situated in wind-swept, cloud-covered northern Europe, Copenhagen is probably not the first city to come to mind in need of air-conditioning. Summer high temperatures rarely exceed the mid-70s Fahrenheit, but, in buildings with large server rooms or where many people work or shop, there is a need for indoor cooling.

Copenhagen’s elegant solution is a district cooling system that takes advantage of free cooling provided by seawater drawn from the city’s harbor. Two years ago, Copenhagen Energy opened the city’s first district cooling plant, a 10-megawatt (MW) facility located on the site of a retired power plant on Adelgade, in the historic inner city.

The new cooling network complements the city’s existing district heating system, the world’s largest, which covers 98% of Copenhagen. On a recent reporting trip to Denmark, I was given a tour of the plant by Thomas Grinde, an engineer with Copenhagen Energy.

When the temperature of the water in Copenhagen Harbor is sufficiently cold, Grinde explained, the district cooling system draws water from an intake pipe located near the Royal Danish Playhouse and Nyhavn canal. Every degree saved by pre-cooling with seawater saves 15% on electricity at the chiller. (Mussels and other small sea life, in case you were wondering, are separated at the intake and re-established in suitable habitat, he says.)

The Adelgade plant is designed for three methods of cooling (more information about the district cooling system is available here [p. 35-37], and in this video):

1) Free cooling – Seawater temperature is below 5.5 degrees Celsius [42°F] and cooling demand low (less than 2,400kW). All cooling demands are covered by free cooling heat exchangers.

2) Combined operation – Seawater temperature is between 5.5°C and 11.5°C [52.7°F]. Heat exchangers are used for pre-cooling of the cooled water, before it is fully cooled by chillers to the desired temperature.

3) Chiller cooling – Seawater temperature is above 11.5°C. The seawater is too warm to be used for free cooling so absorption and compression chillers provide all cooling. Free cooling exchanges are bypassed completely.

The insulated pipes that carry chilled water to commercial and industrial buildings for indoor cooling can be located in the same underground tunnels that carry steam for the district heating system or in entirely new networks. The aim, Grinde says, is to target co-located buildings (department stores, commercial buildings, hotels, and facilities with data centers) with cooling demands of 150 kilowatts (kW) or more. Copenhagen Energy does not plan to offer district cooling to residential customers.

The decision to integrate the already efficient district heating and cooling systems into one network begets additional efficiencies. In summer, when space heating demand falls, surplus heat from Copenhagen’s combined heat and power (CHP) plants is re-directed to the steam-powered district cooling chillers. Sending steam to the district cooling plant helps balance the two systems and compensates for the lack of free seawater cooling.

Customers with large cooling needs pay a fee to connect to the network, Grinde told me, and they subscribe to the service based on their expected and actual load. The upfront fees help pay for the build-out of the system. Copenhagen Energy paid for the $14-million Adelgade cooling plant with proceeds from the sale of its electricity assets to state majority-owned DONG Energy.

There are additional benefits, Grinde explained, citing the example of hotels. Conventional compressor-based air-conditioning is not just more noisy, expensive, and energy-intensive than district cooling; it also takes up more space. Adopting district cooling opens up a parking space in the basement where the compressor once stood and opens up rooftop space that had been occupied by cooling towers. Grinde said he knew of one hotel that had installed a rooftop employee canteen in this found space.The City of Copenhagen expects district cooling will prevent the release of 14,000 tons of CO₂annually by reducing carbon emissions by 67% and electricity consumption by 80% compared to conventional cooling.

The City of Copenhagen expects cooling demand to increase in the coming decades. Peak summer high temperatures, mild compared to warmer climes, are expected to rise by 2% to 3% by 2050, with average daily temperatures rising as well. Thomas Grinde told me that Copenhagen Energy estimates that winter cooling demand will eventually increase to about 40% of the summer load.

Copenhagen Energy envisions the need for as many as seven district cooling zones. The city’s second cooling plant, located near the central train station, is scheduled to come online in May 2013.

Note: This is the second in a series of posts on clean energy and climate solutions in Denmark. Other installments looked at Denmark’s newcommunity wind shareholder plan, the Project Zero carbon-neutrality plan, Copenhagen’s success as a cleantech leader, and what other cities can learn from Copenhagen’s climate adaptation plan. The reporting for this post was supported by a grant from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs International Press Initiative.

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This article is available online at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2012/10/24/copenhagens-seawater-cooling-delivers-energy-and-carbon-savings/

Cities Enticed by Pay-if-You-Save Energy Deals

October 23, 2012

By JIM WITKIN

NY Times

WHEN the city of Brea, Calif., about 25 miles southeast of Los Angeles, set out to reduce its carbon emissions and save money on energy costs, the challenge was the same faced by many other cities nationwide: allocating the funds to pay for the program.

Finding projects to make city buildings more energy efficient was far easier. So the city turned to a form of financing that has become common among government agencies at all levels: an energy-savings performance contract that requires no upfront costs and allows the city to pay for the project over time using the savings on utility bills.

“There is no other way we could have undertaken this scope of project in this efficient a manner or time frame,” said Charlie View, Brea’s director of public works. The project included installing high-efficiency lighting systems in 14 city buildings and 4,000 street lamps, updating heating and cooling systems at six buildings and installing 1.8 megawatts of solar panels at three sites.

An energy service company, Chevron Energy Solutions, a unit of the Chevron Corporation, performed all the work and provided all the new equipment. The company’s contract with the city guarantees the project will deliver a certain level of savings on energy costs. If the project fails to perform to the guarantee, the energy service company is on the hook to make up the difference. If savings exceed the guarantee, the city keeps the excess.

The project, completed in 2011, is expected to save the city 40 percent on energy costs and $13 million over the next 25 years. Performance shows the project is exceeding these estimates by about 10 percent, said Mr. View. From the savings, the city will pay off two bonds issued to finance the project; the payback period is about 20 years, which is common for these types of projects.

The business model and performance-based contracting offered by energy service companies are not new; the market began to form in the early 1980s after the energy crises of the previous decade, which saw prices rise drastically. Today, about 35 large energy service companies offering contracts with guaranteed savings as their core business model dominate the market, according to the National Association of Energy Service Companies, a trade association.

What has changed is the growing appeal of the model among public entities. Now, 80 to 90 percent of energy service company revenues come from projects with municipalities, public universities and schools, hospitals and federal government agencies.

“Most public facilities in most parts of the country are starved for any kind of investment for improvements,” said Don Gilligan, the trade association president. Many of these aging buildings are wasting 25 to 35 percent of what they pay on their energy bills, he estimated.

“A performance contract allows them to redirect the money they currently spend on wasted energy to pay for the capital cost of an improvement with no tax increases,” he said. “That is a very big payment stream and a very attractive driver for public institutions.”

At the federal level, since 1998, 25 agencies have used performance contracts on about 580 projects, saving $13.4 billion and enough energy to power a city of 900,000 residents for a year, according to the Federal Energy Management Program.

Wide use of performance-based contracts has also required a reworking of purchasing policies for public agencies. Long-term agreements with vendors were outside the bounds of traditional procurement rules, so legislation authorizing the use of performance contracts for federal agencies was enacted as part of the Energy Policy Act of 1992. Now almost all states have passed similar legislation.

Unlike some aspects of energy policy, the legislation has generally received bipartisan support, said Charles H. Goldman, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., who has studied the market since 2000. The energy service company market “is an example of a successful private sector industry that is relatively self-sustaining and doesn’t rely on a lot of incentives or subsidies outside the basic economics of these projects,” he said.

Today, energy service companies account for 10 to 15 percent of the jobs created among companies that provide energy efficiency improvements, and many of these jobs are local, Mr. Goldman said, because there “are often provisions in the contracts that strongly encourage the use of local small businesses as subcontractors.”

Still, performance-based contracts are not suitable for every market, every project or every type of building, said Brittany Gibson, an analyst with Pike Research, an energy research and consulting company — notably for residential or private commercial property owners, for a variety of reasons.

In the commercial sector, the hurdle is often the so-called split-incentive problem, she said. Renters in commercial buildings typically pay their own energy bills. This reduces the incentive for building owners to commit to long-term contracts to pay for energy-efficiency improvements because the owners do not benefit from the savings.

Yet in the public sector, opportunity abounds, she said. Based on a study completed this year, Pike Research is expecting the energy services market to grow annually by 11 to 14 percent through the end of the decade, reaching an estimated $13 billion to $16.5 billion by 2020.

Driving this growth, said Ms. Gibson, are federal and state policies that set aggressive energy conservation goals for their buildings. At the same time, she said she expected capital budgets for such projects to remain tight.

In 2007, for example, Congress passed a law requiring all federal agencies to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings 30 percent by 2015. And in December 2011, President Obama directed agencies to spend $2 billion on energy efficiency projects through the end of 2013, specifically using performance-based contracts. Suitable projects should be easy to find; federal agencies occupy nearly half a million buildings.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 29, 2012

An article on Wednesday, about the popularity of energy efficiency programs guaranteed by utility companies, misstated the origin of a mandate on energy use in buildings that house federal agencies and described the mandate itself incorrectly. The mandate requires a 30 percent increase in energy efficiency by 2015, not a 30 percent reduction in energy consumption by that time, and it resulted from a law passed by Congress in 2007, not an executive order signed by President Obama in 2009.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/energy-environment/energy-service-contracts-a-boon-for-public-agencies.html?_r=0

Toxic brew of Superstorm Sandy floodwater and fuel oil stinks up Manhattan Beach apt. building

Toxic brew of Superstorm Sandy floodwater and fuel oil stinks up apt. building

BY LORE CROGHAN / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2012, 

It’s the stinkiest building in Brooklyn, disgusted tenants charge.

Nauseating fumes from a nasty cocktail of fuel oil and seawater are making them gag at 301 Oriental Blvd. in Manhattan Beach.

Superstorm Sandy is to blame — and a landlord who’s maddeningly slow in cleaning up and repairing the apartment house, several said.

“Every night my head hurts,” said tenant Marissa Anastasia, 74, whose health is fragile after suffering a brain aneurysm four years ago. “When I wake up in the morning I can’t breathe.”

The stink that won’t go away is a new twist in the tales of woe coming from hard-hit Brooklyn waterfront neighborhoods where thousands struggle with storm damage.

The killer storm flooded the Oriental Blvd. building’s basement up to the ceiling and sprang leaks in oil stored for the boiler, leaving behind 8,700 gallons of toxic brew.

Nearly three weeks after the savage storm the stench lingers in the six-story property because work crews still haven’t finished cleaning the sludge out of the basement.

Numerous tenants are holed up at 301 Oriental — among them a wheelchair-bound 90-plus-year-old — despite a letter from the landlord that warned, “If you choose to stay in the building you are doing so at your own risk.”

Breathing fumes from spilled heating oil can cause difficulty in concentrating, dizziness, headaches, increased blood pressure, nausea and irritated eyes, nose and throat, health experts say.

In addition to the foul odor the 49-unit building has no electricity and an emergency boiler provides heat and hot water only briefly in the morning and evening.

Anastasia and her husband don’t have money for a hotel or family they can stay with and don’t want to impose on friends whose home they visit at night to watch TV.

“When I get up in the morning I feel dizzy,” said Alex, 66, a school custodian.

“Our throats are so sore we’re hardly even talking.”

The fuel fumes at the 1930s-vintage building aren’t as overpowering as they were the first week after Sandy hit but they’re still giving Mike Vosburgh frequent migraines.

“There are times I go in solitude and cry,” said the retired postal service supervisor, 61.

His sister Sue, 57, said the darkness, cold and stink have made their home feel “like a war zone.”

Tamara Berlyavsky kept the windows open in her freezing apartment when she and her husband and daughter tried sleeping there.

“It smelled like a gas station,” she said.

After four nights they decided it was too dangerous to be there and bailed out. Though they’re staying at a friend’s house now her clothes still reek.

“I was in a meeting and was embarrassed,” the civil engineer said. “I told people, ‘Don’t smell me.’”

Landlord Tomas Rosenthal of Hampshire Properties said in a statement that he called in cleanup crews, plumbers and electricians right after the storm and is “doing his outmost to provide relief and restore all services as fast as possible.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/stinkiest-building-brooklyn-tenants-charge-article-1.1203371#ixzz2ChNVkBHw

Preparing the power grid for the next Sandy

Steve Hargreaves 

CNNMoney 

November 7, 2012

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Hurricane Sandy left over eight million people along the East Coast without power. More than a week later, hundreds of thousands are still in the dark.

With a warming planet, it's likely there will be more Sandy-strength storms in the years to come.

At a press conference last week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the city needs to "not only rebuild, but rebuild stronger and smarter."

So how should the nation prepare?

Weather isn't the only reason to update the grid.

Power outages cost the nation between $80 billion and $180 billion each year, according to research by Massoud Amin, a senior member of Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

And they're getting worse. The number of major outages has doubled in the last 10 years.

"We're over harvesting the farm," said Amin. "We're trying to extract more and more from the same infrastructure."

Amin's solution is to build a more robust grid by adding more power plants, transmission lines, sensors and computing power -- basically expanding what has become known as the "smart grid."

Smart grid technology would enable the grid to quickly and automatically identify problem areas and isolate them from the grid at large, preventing broader outages, said Amin. It can also quickly locate problems, making repairs easier and faster.

It's not cheap -- he estimates the upgrades could cost in the vicinity of half a trillion dollars spread over a decade or two. But he expects them to save nearly $50 billion a year.

"Our infrastructure is a model of engineering, but for the 20th century," he said. "We need to bring it up to the 21st century."

Amin's plan is part of what the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) refers to as hardening -- basically making the existing stuff stronger.

That could include smart grid technology, but it could also include less sophisticated things like building higher water barriers around power substations, spraying sensitive equipment with water resistant coatings, or building telephone polls out of concrete, which can withstand winds twice as strong.

It could also include trimming more trees near power lines, or burying the lines underground -- although that's a pricey proposition and is not well suited to flood or earthquake-prone areas.

EPRI also recommends planning that goes beyond making things stronger.

To speed rebuilding after an outage, it's currently lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration to allow the use of drones to inspect utility lines -- something it says France already does. It's also working on apps that allow citizens to report the exact location of damaged equipment.

Still, outages will persist.

"You can never build a cost effective infrastructure that you can guarantee will stand up to the wrath of mother nature," said Arshad Mansoor, a senior vice president at EPRI.

To better cope when the power goes out, Mansoor recommends consumers prepare themselves with things like crank-powered radios and solar cell phone chargers.

He's also urging car companies to make vehicles that can double as generators. After all, the engine and alternator are already there, so all that would be needed are outlets for a few power strips.

Even better than building infrastructure that can withstand water is keeping the water out to begin with.

For years some have been urging New York City -- and other coastal areas -- to build massive sea barriers that can be quickly closed to keep out a storm surge -- similar to what exists in London, Rotterdam and Providence, R.I.

There's also an idea for a giant inflatable plug that could be stuffed in subway and road tunnels, which often contain power and water infrastructure as well.

Yet others urge caution in putting so much faith in technological fixes which often don't pan out.

"The 20th century is full of ambitious engineering projects that gave us false hope," said Bill Solecki, head of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities at Hunter College.

In the Netherlands, spaces like parks and parking garages are specifically designed to take on water in the event of a flood, diverting it from more crucial areas, said Daniel Yeh, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida Tampa.

To make buildings without grid power more resilient, Yeh suggested greater deployment of rooftop wind and solar systems, as well as devices that can collect rainwater for drinking or bathing.

For new construction, designers should consider the possibility that buildings might not always have electricity, Yeh said. Too many buildings nowadays are designed with the assumption that air conditioning will always be available. Some don't even have windows that open. Buildings should instead be constructed with an eye toward natural air flow and shading, said Yeh.

Others argue that such measures are a side show to what really has to be done -- limiting the amount of heat-trapping gases entering the atmosphere each year.

"The best way to do this is to grab the bull by the horns and deal with the issue, which is the changing climate in the long run" New York's Democrat Senator Charles Schumer said at a press conference last week.

But even if limiting greenhouse gases is desirable -- a subject for debate -- gathering the political will to do so isn't likely to happen any time soon.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/07/news/economy/power-grid-sandy/index.html

Sandy and the smart grid: who won?

Post-mortem premature, as recovery continues

Phil Carson | Nov 18, 2012

Intelligent Utility Daily

If you're thinking I'm writing too much on Hurricane Sandy and the grid, you've got it backwards: the conversation is just beginning. Though a post-mortem on utility performance and the smart grid's role, if any, is premature, we can outline a few issues.

(You may be informed and/or amused by my posts last week, which included: "Hurricane Sandy: Testing Grid Assumptions," "After Storm, Power Sector at Crossroads," "Sandy: The Power Sector's 9/11," "Grid Design, Resiliency and Power at the Edge" and "Utilities and Us: Toward an Energy `Ecosystem.'")

Hurricane Sandy delivered an unprecedented physical assault on Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern utilities and not just the power sector. The conversation now developing, as utilities report to regulators and stakeholders assess the event and utilities' performances, will encompass energy fuels from natural gas to nuclear, and it will include telecom and water. Power is a big part of the picture and an enabler for other services such as drinking water, heating/cooling and communications, but let's keep in context. 

Those assessments will weigh preparation and planning, infrastructure health, the role of technology, people and processes. Do business continuity plans need a reset in the face of extreme weather? Should additional funds and efforts be expended to harden infrastructure and improve resiliency? Do end-use customers bear some responsibility for preparations and resilience in anticipation of extended outages after a massive storm?  

In the power sector, one question is: did smart grid technology aid in preparation, response and recovery from the hurricane? Another question: is the first question a fair one?

The short answer, taking the second first, is: of course! Stakeholders want to know whether their investments have been productive. We're all shelling out big time to modernize the grid. Didn't many utilities sell advanced metering infrastructure on the promise of customers "saving money" and increased reliability for the system? The first claim, based more on active energy management in the face of dynamic prices than the result of mere awareness of energy use data, remains somewhat theoretical as dynamic pricing remains scarce.  

The answer to the first question is that it's premature to say, but fair to conclude that generalizations are difficult. Where sea water flooded a substation vault, smart grid technology as we know it is of little use. Where tree damage in, say, leafy New Jersey—the suburbs raison d'etre—affected as much as one-third the shady canopy, the damage was so extensive that we'll all be fascinated whether millions of last gasps from smart meters really mattered. Did data from smart grid systems really enable utilities to better deploy field crews? 

The claim that smart grid technologies will increase reliability, in the face of massive physical destruction, was capped, and potentially knee-capped, by Sandy. Sure, under normal conditions—a line damaged by a single falling tree or a maintenance action with unintended consequences—smart grid technology should help pinpoint, isolate and address an outage, even a cause, and lead to more targeted and thus swifter restoration action. But a hurricane with the size and force of Sandy led to so many toppled trees, so much flooding and so much chaos, that recovery composed a cat's cradle of challenges that took time to untangle. Are automated switches and reclosers much help when large sections of the grid are purposefully taken down prior to the storm's impact to lessen damage?  

Utility leaders understandably have been busy overseeing the recovery and reporting in the aftermath of one of the worst storms to affect that large a population. Like a year ago, resignations are taking place. But I don't see any major utility figure taking to the airwaves and op-ed pages to address the lessons of the storm. 

Those lessons, off the top of my head, would include: 

• An unprecedented physical assault on perhaps 10 states will have huge repercussions, including damage that must be addressed first, simply to enable the restoration of power. 
• Grid modernization, a task measured by generations, is underway, but the process will continue for years and will require large, continuing investments. 
• The process of building a "smart grid" has just begun, with the deployment of sensors and controls, but the integration of systems and the application of data analytics that will produce real advantages is still years and many dollars away. 
• While the first century of the electric grid was characterized by spreading service to the most people at the lowest cost, the second century, beginning now, will be characterized by the digitization and increased hardening and resiliency of the grid.
• Finally, (not sure a utility leader will say this) is that the grid, by nature, is vulnerable and the reliability and resiliency of a ubiquitous electricity supply will rely on all of us taking steps in concert. That includes the embrace and development of non-utility-based energy supplies and practices.   

Though utilities and vendors may well come forward with claims that smart meters, advanced metering infrastructure and outage management systems aided their response to the hurricane, I'd be skeptical at best. Let's not let a major catastrophe and, thus, an opportunity to learn from what might become the new norm of extreme weather, lead us into a rerun of the smart grid hype cycle. 

Let's scrutinize any claims and demand well-reviewed evidence for any technology that played a role in hardening and resilience during Hurricane Sandy. And let's begin an honest conversation about the limits of technology in extreme weather events and the long road for a smarter, modern grid and what elements deserve tactical and strategic investments. That will include the growing awareness among utilities that societal players must take matters into their own hands to ensure resilience in the face of future threats to the grid. 

Utilities will come to see investments by, say, cities and towns, the military, front line responders like police and fire and medical personnel, hospitals, universities and, eventually, building owners and homeowners in creating microgrids, even pico-grids, and distributed energy resources as beneficial. Utilities don't have the capital to do it all, nor will a centralized grid ever achieve the reliability that self-sufficient nodes can add. Coastal cities will need civic buildings that achieve self-sufficiency so they can double as storm shelters when the next big one hits. Electric vehicles may even gain market traction if they serve as mobile storage units. Handheld, hand-cranked units that inexpensively combine lights and radios and are capable of recharging cell phones will be developed and will sell like hot cakes next time around. 

Lots of angles to explore here, with a historic opportunity to reassess electricity's value to society and how we go about securing that value under duress.

Later this week, we'll look to the experts for an explanation of the integration and data analysis challenges that will mark the maturation of the smart grid, as well as alternative visions to the utility-centric, centralized grid model that suffered so badly at Sandy's hands. 

http://www.intelligentutility.com/article/12/11/sandy-and-smart-grid-who-won

Old grid meets new weather

Monday, November 19, 2012

Philly.com

By Llewellyn King

Better stock up on flashlights, batteries, nonperishable food, and potable water, because there is likely to be an electrical blackout in your future.

Three weeks after Superstorm Sandy tore up the Mid-Atlantic coast of the United States, many are still without power. The question is: Can the electric power system we have deal with the New Weather? The answer is plainly no.

This is one of those situations in which no one is to blame and everyone is to blame.

Our electric power system is complex and uneven. Some of it is state-of-the-art, and some of it dates back a century.

In New England, according to the utility National Grid, one transformer dates to 1909. Many of the large transformers that are essential to the operation of the power system are 45 years old and operating beyond their planned life expectancy.

Wooden poles, which snap in high winds, are still the standard for residential service here, though Western Europe and industrialized Asia use steel and steel-reinforced concrete poles. The wooden pole business even has a lobby and its own trade association. A hundred thousand wooden poles were rushed to the East Coast after Sandy.

Most people are likely to lose their power from high winds that snap poles or, more commonly, fell trees. Nick Puga of Bates White, an economic consulting firm, points out that many residential communities were built in open farm fields over the past 40 years, and the first thing new homeowners do is plant trees. Quick-growing, shallow-rooted varieties have sprung up near power lines.

But even in older residential communities, trees are a huge problem. People love them - the bigger, the older, the more spreading, the better. Residents fight with power companies over trimming.

Steve Mitnick, a longtime utility consultant, believes power companies are woefully unprepared for major weather changes. Mitnick does not lay the blame wholly on the utilities; the forces that have shaped electric infrastructure, including regulators, customers, and politicians, are also to blame.

The pressure, Mitnick says, has been for low rates. This produced a philosophy that relies more on swift response to outages than on engineering against weather damage.

The utilities are especially proud of what they call mutual assistance, under which crews are rushed from other utilities to those that have outages. For Sandy, maintenance crews sped to the East Coast with equipment from across the country and Canada. This works when the damage is limited to downed lines. But when it is bigger, as with recent storms, the imported crews are often at a loss, not knowing the local infrastructure or the whereabouts of trunk lines and transformers.

It is dangerous, difficult work that deserves recognition. But it is an imperfect system when the damage is urban rather than rural or suburban. There were reports of out-of-state utility workers looking lost in lower Manhattan.

What I find depressing is that we have come to accept the storm-related blackout as inevitable. This is part of our sad acceptance of declining infrastructure, from crowded roads to slow trains to failing water supplies. Once we had the best of these.

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20121119_Old_grid_meets_new_weather.html

Can Energy-consumption Data Change Consumer Behavior?

By Knowledge@WhartonNov. 16, 2012

Time magazine

Do you know how much energy you consume every 15 minutes? Most would say that’s a hard — if not impossible — question to answer, but San Francisco-based utility provider Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) now has access to that information for 30,000 of its residential customers, thanks to its “SmartMeter” program. PG&E’s SmartMeters are its prime vehicle to fulfill its mandate from the state of California to get people to use less energy.

For 36 months (January 1, 2009, through December 31, 2011), PG&E has used SmartMeters to collect consumer energy-use data in Northern California. The devices measure residential customers’ electricity and gas usage at daily, hourly and 15-minute intervals. The goal of the program, according to PG&E, is to help customers better understand their energy usage and find ways to save on their energy bills. According to the PG&E website, customers who participate in the program have the ability to be notified by email, text message or phone when their utility use “is moving toward a higher-cost tier.”

The energy consumption data will supplement existing information on customers’ demographics, billings and payments, call center reports and utility pricing, among other variables. The company states that by studying all of this information, it hopes to gain insights into how its SmartMeter platform might be used “to engage customers, reduce energy consumption and offer customers appealing alternative pricing schemes.”

But with so much data to sort through, that’s a tall order. PG&E has partnered with the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI) to lead the effort, which will help identify academic research groups across the world to study the data. Peter Fader, Wharton marketing professor and WCAI co-director, notes that the PG&E project has wider implications for businesses that increasingly use data analytics to extract business intelligence, by offering a model on how to determine the volume and quality of information they need to track in order “to change behavior in meaningful ways.”

“This is a unique data set, and we don’t know of any other that has this level of granular data,” noted WCAI research director Ben Adams during a webinar announcing the research project earlier this month. In addition to energy usage data, researchers will get information about PG&E’s energy efficiency rebates, demand response programs and special rate plans that were available to the customers covered in the data. PG&E will safeguard customer privacy and sign nondisclosure agreements with researchers, company executives said at the webinar.

Studying data collected by the meters will help the company figure out “which message to send to which household at which time in order to get them to conserve energy,” says Fader. “Our job is to find the right academics out there who will help them answer [these] questions.” Those who are selected will receive PG&E’s data sets, and are expected to spend a year studying them before they file their findings and recommendations.

http://business.time.com/2012/11/16/can-energy-consumption-data-change-consumer-behavior/#ixzz2CgwrzJfl

Energy Efficiency’s Next Great Leap: Predicting the Weather

By Hannah Miller | November 19th, 2012

Triple Pundit

A small metal box in the basement of the InterContinental Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco is thinking about the weather. And what time of day it is. And when the sun will rise and set.

This box, part of the first installation of the new Stem Energy system, is paired with a battery, and will be using all that atmospheric and environmental data to make a second-by-second decision about whether the hotel should pull from the meter for its energy, or run on battery power. It’s a new online, data-driven energy management system designed to reduce peak usage based on the type of multi-variable modeling used in the financial industry.

And best of all, these meter-battery hookups require no action by users to maintain it or to hook it up to the HVAC system – nor any behavioral change, no turning lights off or the thermostat down. They just sit there (there’s no charge to rent them) and mint money, the savings split between Stem and the customer. (In the case of InterContinental, a 50-50 split.)

On Thursday night, Stem CEO Salim Khan, founder Brian Thompson, and InterContinental‘s Harry Hobbs led tours and had a kickoff event for the installations in the two hotels in SF, one of them a razor-sharp new Gold LEED hotel, and the other an 85-year old masterpiece. Under Hobbs’ leadership, both hotels have instituted major efficiency measures over several years, but the Stem system “has really filled a gap,” according to Hobbs: Specifically, knowing to the second when to switch to battery power to save on peak usage charges.

For a hotel like the Mark Hopkins, with an average monthly electricity bill of $60,000, this is no small matter. (They get calls from the utility to turn down the AC during peak demand in the city). Hobbs said he expected the Stem system to cut their bill by 15 percent.

Stem was founded in 2009 by Thompson, whose background is in e-commerce and investment banking. One of the main problems in renewables is predicting when energy will be available – based on weather patterns, cloud cover, etc. – and Thompson sought to apply the sophisticated financial models developed for e-commerce to the field of energy. Reports of past demand in the buildings are combined with data from Weather Underground’s API, for example, to create a predictive model to run the system.

What he came up with was a cloud-based algorithm that applied not just to solar, but to all energy consumption, regardless of source. They partnered with LA-based CODA, manufacturer of EV car batteries and storage cells; based on mostly work of mouth, they are almost to their capacity for orders in 2013, mostly to mid-size commercial buildings like hotels, restaurants and gas stations.

“The Stem system… well, it’s a battery…and…” said Thompson, mic in hand at the event, speaking to a Greenbuild crowd. “This feels like the early days of the Internet when no nobody knows what it is and I am trying to explain what Mosaic is.”

Stem employs 45 people currently, and found its first customer through the SF Community Power, a nonprofit that runs efficiency programs with groups like small businesses and low-income residents, Thompson said.

The systems in the InterContinentals required permits and were treated like a solar system by PG&E, which has been very supportive, according to Stem staff.

Hobbs, who is on the Sustainability Committee for the InterContinental chain, hopes that sustainability and luxury can be seen as something to go together.

“I’m encouraging the rest of the hospitality industry to get on board,” he said. “There is a lot of room for improvement.”

http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/11/cloud-computing-energy-efficiency-stem/

Hurricane Power Outages After Sandy Not Extraordinary, According To Report Analyzing Katrina, Past Storms

By JONATHAN FAHEY 11/16/12 

AP

NEW YORK -- As the number of nights without power stretched on for thousands left in the dark after Superstorm Sandy, patience understandably turned to anger and outrage.

But an Associated Press analysis of outage times from other big hurricanes and tropical storms suggests that, on the whole, the response to Sandy by utility companies, especially in hardest-hit New York and New Jersey, was typical – or even a little faster than elsewhere after other huge storms.

The AP, with the assistance of Ventyx, a software company that helps utilities manage their grids, used U.S. Energy Department data to determine how many days it took to restore 95 percent of the peak number of customers left without power after major hurricanes since 2004, including Ivan, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Ike and Irene.

After Sandy, New York utilities restored power to at least 95 percent of customers 13 days after the peak number of outages was reported. New Jersey reached that same level in 11 days and West Virginia in 10 days.

Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005 and Ike in 2008 all resulted in longer outages for customers in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Florida.

The longest stretch to 95 percent restoration since 2004 was Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, where local utilities had power restored to only three-quarters of their customers after 23 days before Hurricane Rita hit and caused additional outages.

Rita left Texas customers in the dark for 16 days; Katrina knocked out power to Mississippi customers for 15 days; Wilma and Ike knocked Florida and Texas out for 14 days each before power was restored to 95 percent of those who lost it, according to the federal data.

New York and New Jersey recovered far faster after last year's Hurricane Irene. It took seven days for New York to restore 95 percent of customers and six days for New Jersey. But the number of outages in each state was less than half than from Sandy.

The restoration target of 95 percent allowed the AP to compare responses to the largest number of recent storms using Energy Department data, and is considered by industry experts to provide a meaningful picture of the speed with which utilities restored service to the vast majority of customers.

A week or two without power is, without question, a difficult and frustrating hardship. There's the spoiled food in the fridge and the dark nights. There's the fire danger from relying on candles. No electricity also can mean no heat. In tall apartment buildings, it means no elevator service, a serious problem for the infirm or elderly who can't navigate stairs. For those who rely on mobile phones for communication, it means no way to charge phones – and therefore no way to communicate with loved ones or emergency services.

Michael Redpath of Toms River, N.J. was without power for 15 days before getting it back this week. He and his wife stayed in their home for the first week after Sandy because their friends also had lost power. As some power in the region was restored, and Redpath's wife got sick from too many nights in the cold, they started staying over with friends.

"It's just so disorienting to be without power, to be out of your house and to not know what's going on," he says.

Determining the quality of a utility's restoration efforts after an outage is difficult to do, experts say. That's because every storm generates a unique cocktail of mayhem that differs from location to location.

Just because New York and New Jersey utilities restored power in a range that is normal by historical standards does not prove that all of the utilities in the region performed equally well, or that they performed better or worse than their peers responding to outages in other states, or that there isn't plenty of room for improvement.

Frustrated residents, business owners and state and local officials lashed out at their electric utilities. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York formed a commission to investigate the responses of utilities in his state, and the operations chief of one utility, the Long Island Power Authority, resigned.

Cuomo called LIPA "beyond repair" and also expressed frustration with the performance of Consolidated Edison, the electric utility for New York City and Westchester County to the north.

Also, a positive general performance doesn't create any goodwill for those still suffering.

Sam Kusack, who owns an architectural metal fabrication shop in Red Hook, Brooklyn, was still without power Thursday, 17 days after going dark. Red Hook is in an isolated section of Brooklyn, and Con Edison only began laying new underground wires near his shop this week.

Workers told him power would be back by Friday, but, Kusack said, the utility had called him several times in the early days of the crisis to say his power would soon be restored. Those calls stopped long ago, and Kusack has continued to rely on a generator that gobbles expensive diesel fuel.

"It was a big storm, but it's been a while," he said. "It's tough to run a company on a generator, with no power. I have 25 employees, and a payroll to meet."

The fact that it has taken utilities roughly the same amount of time to restore the vast majority of customers as after similar-sized storms suggests that restoring power after an enormous weather event is simply a long, difficult process.

"The work is no magic, it's hard, grueling work," says Arshad Mansoor of the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded technology research group.

Sandy's most prominent feature was its enormous footprint and record number of outages. All told, Sandy caused 8.5 million power outages across 21 states, the highest outage total ever.

The Edison Electric Institute, an industry group, estimates 67,000 workers from utilities and other firms in several states worked to restore power, but they faced a huge volume of work. For example, New Jersey's biggest utility, Public Service Electric & Gas, had to cut down 41,000 trees, replace 2,500 poles and install 1,000 new transformers. At its peak, 77 percent of PSE&G'S 2.2 million customers lost power.

Sandy also dumped 2-to-3 feet of snow in West Virginia, knocking power out to a quarter of that state's customers. And efforts to restore power along coastal properties were complicated by a storm surge that flooded dozens of substations on Long Island, in New York City and in New Jersey. For example, a storm surge and subsequent explosion at a substation on the East Side of Manhattan plunged the lower third of that borough into darkness.

Equipment in all of those substations had to be cleaned or replaced before the substations could be re-energized. Only then could utilities see if the lines between each substation and the thousands of customers each one serves also had to be repaired.

Utilities first fix problems that affect the largest number of customers, then work their way down to smaller problems affecting handfuls of customers. With Sandy and other big storms there are also thousands of customers who cannot get power because their homes are damaged and it is not possible or safe for the utility to restore power.

This restoration approach is reasonable, experts say, but it leads to intense frustration when those last few in the dark see their neighbors back to normal. Customers are generally understanding for two days without power, utility officials say. Then they are not.

Those last few homes and businesses, such as Kusack's firm, are often the hardest to restore; on many occasions, the days turn into weeks. After Con Edison restored power to nearly all of its customers 10 days after the storm, it said it was facing 3,600 restoration jobs in Westchester County that involved 11 or fewer customers each. LIPA said midday Thursday that 2,942 customers were still without power, not including those in flooded areas who cannot receive power until their own equipment is repaired and certified.

This is all part of a utility's job, of course. Delivering power reliably is the single most important task for an electric utility. Without question, some do a better job of planning, managing logistics and communication with customers and local officials than others.

"Not every utility is the same, not every utility is in the same state of readiness," says David Wright, president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

EPRI's Mansoor said one indication that planning in the region affected by Sandy was good is that utilities did not run low on workers, poles, transformers, or other supplies. "Crews were available, spare parts were available," he said. "That was not an issue in this recovery."

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has defended the response of the utilities in his state, and perhaps for good reason. Sixty-five percent of New Jersey utility customers lost power, 2.6 million homes and businesses. Compared with other big storms, New Jersey's utilities restored power to most customers in the shortest amount of time for a state with such a high percentage of outages.

A common complaint from residents throughout the region: The lack of accurate communication about when power would be restored.

Redpath, who is served by Jersey Central Power & Light, said he understands that the restoration job was enormous and would have understood if it took utilities three or four weeks to restore power. But for an entire week he was told almost daily that power would be restored the next day. He said he just happened to discover the power had finally been restored when he noticed the lights were on his neighbor's porch while driving by.

"I think (JCP&L) did a phenomenal job of marshaling resources, and the people on the ground did a phenomenal job," he said. "The problem was a combination of misinformation and no information. We would have managed differently if we knew what to expect."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/hurricane-power-outages-after-sandy_n_2146393.html

New-energy park slated for former World Expo site

2012-11-17

English EastDay.com

A NEW-energy theme park displaying vintage cars and offering the chance to test drive electric vehicles will open next month at the former World Expo site.

The 2062 New-Energy Theme Park covers 50,000 square meters in the Pudong New Area and will open to the public on December 22, organizers said.

The park will be divided into five sections and feature solar and wind power generation technologies. There will also be biodiesel technologies on display along with exhibits contributed by leading domestic companies in the new energy field.

Admission will be free until the trial opening period ends on December 31.

Beginning on January 1, admission will be 30 yuan (US$4.81), said Gu Yue, a senior organizer of the park.

"Vintage cars consume a lot of energy. We hope to present the evolution of energy development with the display of vintage cars and we expect this to be a highlight of the exhibition," Gu said.

The name of the park, 2062, has a special meaning, organizers said.

"The Mayan Prophecy predicted the end of Earth in 2012, which is not possible. But will human beings change their lifestyles, explore new energies and find better modes of transportation 50 years after the 'doomsday?'" said Zhang Huchao, market manager of Shanghai Foremost Multimedia Co Ltd, which is in charge of the exhibition.

The park's opening is part of a post-Expo development blueprint, which aims to turn the site into a landmark area that incorporates business, exhibition and leisure functions, authorities said yesterday at the China International Travel Mart.

http://english.eastday.com/e/121117/u1a7000862.html