A significant wedge between those seeking to maintain the current regulated prices accompanied by DR and those looking to move to transactive energy for a self-regulating grid is the notion that retail customers are all mere price takers. A price taker watches the market and either buys or does not buy; he takes the prices the market offers. Some see that this “lack of power” can only be addressed by regulating the prices offered. This leads back to today’s model...
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Commercial Use of Live Energy Models
Many building owners are suspicious of energy performance contractors because the performance contractor is both a player and a score keeper. Because a significant effort is required to understand the information in building systems, there are significant start-up costs. These costs, both in money and time, require that each contract include a significant minimum contract lengths over which to amortize the up-front costs. These up-front costs make it uneconomical for energy contracting to use a third party auditor to verify results.If the owner selects a new a new performance contractor, the up-front costs will be incurred again.
Read MoreThe Path to Smart Energy
For the last two years I have been so immersed in smart energy that I sometimes lose track of the big picture myself. This post goes back to basics.
Read MoreThe power industry of North America has provided its customers with the greatest life style that any civilization has ever had. The old service model assumes an ever-present supply of power that is predictable, abundant, and inexpensive. World-wide, our plans are to reduce the power supplied by predictable an inexpensive power sources, to replace them with power sources that are intermittent and less predictable, and that are widely distributed across the grid, including within homes, businesses, and neighborhoods. The old service model will not survive...
Operational BIM Schedules and Pre-Design Programming
Facility Programming is an important early step in step in the Integrated Design Process. Programming is defined in the Whole Building Design Guidelines (WBDG) as “the research and decision-making process that identifies the scope of work to be designed.” Programming is the first part of the design cycle, during which systems and space requirements are identified by the activities they will support. If the design process is compliant with the formal BIM process (BuildingSmart, NBIMS, etc.), then these systems and spaces are identified as described in the IFCs.
BIM is a collection of information sets and models with identified interfaces / information exchanges between them. A model that is of growing interest is the building’s energy model, which is today derived from...
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