Zero Energy Buildings
Musings from the GridWise Architectural Council, Orlando, 2010
After a week at the AHR show, and meeting with ASHRAE, and sitting in on B2G (Building to Grid) summit, I was back in the building zone as I sat in on day one of the GWAC meeting. The GridWise Architectural Council (GWAC) is a voluntary organization of people concerned with the future of energy. The Department of Energy sponsors meetings of the GWAC, a commitment that keeps the group in meeting rooms, coffee, and pastry...
It is easy to think we are playing the end game, but we are really working on the early stages of smart energy.
Smart grids may end at the edges of the grid, they may know no bounds, i.e., ZigBee and SEP, or they may end at the meter. Beyond the meter may be a collection of dumb systems, a minimal collection of defined systems with defined responses, or a micro-grid with its own economy, and own dynamics. I think that every node...
But there’s no way to store energy, he said. What he should have said is that there are few ways to store energy at grid scale. Grids, and microgrids, have two approaches to storing energy. They can store it in something that produces electricity, or they can store it in any format that provides a service to its customers. The closer we get to the end users of energy, the more options we have to store energy. The most critical short term goal of smart grids might be to transfer as many incentives for energy storage to the end nodes of the grid as possible as soon as possible.
Building revenue meters and intelligent systems in buildings should share their energy usage information in real time within the end node in a clear, accessible standard. Customers and/or their energy management systems require live energy usage information to help make decisions in response to grid-centric events such as DR, curtailment, and energy market events. Energy sales and purchases are the basic elements of transactional energy; a common shared understanding of each energy use proximate to the operating decisions that influence energy use is essential to collaborative energy on the smart grid.