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 MoreWS-Calendar
Podcasting Open Source Smart Energy
The week before Christmas, I was interviewed by Phil Windley of itconversations.org. The conversation started out about schedules for the internet of things, but was published under the title Open Source Smart Energy. I was coming off a cold, and sounded like a frog croaking, but I enjoyed it, especially because the interview also let me meet Udell, whose work I have long admired. The conversation covered many of the high points of smart energy, including enterprise interaction, demand response, microgrids, and transactive energy.
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...
Read MoreConverging with the Internet of Things
Service integration is coming to the world of Calendars. Calendars are coming to the Internet of Things. These two trends have the potential to open up whole new classes of easy integration in buildings and in personal devices. This integration got its initial acceleration from the needs of smart energy. The long term reach, though, is much farther.
Traditional e-calendars are store, copy, and forward messages. There are five copies of a meeting for five...