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retrofit

Strategic Energy Management is Elvis

By Energy Rant No Comments
You’ve been there – on the phone trying to get some help from a car dealership, appliance store, online retailer. The menu choices are unclear, especially for auto stores (hit zero). It makes me cringe when I hear my Mom say she called Dell for help with her computer. Yikes, Mom. This isn’t the plumber on Main Street. Maybe Dell isn’t bad, but hearing my Mom say she was on the line “with them” for two hours, I have my conceptions. I would expect no help from an organization like that. Any help would be above and beyond. So what’s…
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NMEC Hedgehogs and Straw Dogs

By Energy Rant No Comments
As the third in a series, we are going to wrap up the normalized metered energy consumption (NMEC) protocol groundwork this week. See the first and second posts to catch up in case you missed those. The first post covered new construction programs for which NMEC doesn’t apply because a baseline of normalized energy use is needed for NMEC. The first post introduced non-routine events (NREs), which are random and not accounted for in any model. The second post explained that NMEC is ideal for residential behavior and weatherization programs. The second post explained that because of several specific NRE…
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NMEC and Routine Monkey Wrenches

By Energy Rant 2 Comments
Normalized metered energy consumption, or NMEC, is another name for the nerdy term, EM&V 2.0. Why the switch? Maybe en-meck spills out of the mouth a little easier. Maybe EM&V 2.0 got the bad rap it deserved as I explained a couple years ago in Whale Bus or Airbus and Automated M&V in Your Dreams. We need not only the user's manuals for how to deploy NMEC; we need protocols for how to apply NMEC, where it works well, and where it doesn’t. NMEC Explained The following would never happen, but I need a way to explain how NMEC works…
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Motivating Efficiency and Incinerating Obstinance

By Energy Rant 3 Comments
A few weeks ago in Complexities of Home Energy Retrofits, I wrote about the many factors to consider when making deep investments in home energy efficiency. You didn’t think I just made all that up, right? The basis for that was an 85-year-old home I recently purchased. Regarding floor space, it forces efficiency. It has 1,200 square feet of finished space on a 770 sf footprint with a full basement. First, I’m going to write about features I changed toward efficiency. Then, I will tell you why. Then, I will write about how the rest of the world might view…
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Commercial HVAC – Retrofit v New Construction: Apples v Poutine

By Energy Rant No Comments
This post is the main course following last week’s appetizer that covered some complexities of deep energy retrofits for homes. The thrust of that post was that even retrofitting homes requires considerations of many things that have nothing to do with energy – just to achieve desired energy results. This week, we are advancing the subject to commercial buildings. Case Study: 100 Year Old School Let’s start again with a 100-year-old middle school shown nearby. This building has already had a deep energy retrofit, and I’ll explain how to tell later (below). I pulled this building out of my memory…
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Complexities of Home Energy Retrofits

By Energy Rant 6 Comments
As luck would have it, in recent memory, I’ve been to a couple t-shirt nights at MLB games. Yippy. This isn’t like the free shirts they give out at marathons, where you can take whatever size you need – you know, something that fits. No. Baseball franchises provide one crappy size, extra-large. It fits some of us, but the rest of us have a shirt that might as well go directly to the local Goodwill store. Some deep energy retrofit programs are like the crappy extra-large t-shirt. Let us get started with homes, to which everyone can relate and understand.…
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Efficiency by Baby Steps and Giant Bounds

By Energy Rant 2 Comments
This post features concepts everyone can use to identify terrific savings opportunities, even if you did not take beloved calculus and thermodynamics. Let’s review a general hierarchy of typical energy efficiency families: 1. Shut it off 2. Slow it down, set it back (temperature, etc.) 3. Reduce waste 4. Retrofit or replace with efficient equipment Those are all wonderful and probably capture over 98% of portfolio savings. Even newer programs like behavioral, retro-commissioning, and strategic energy management merely pursue these items. What’s left? Smart design. I.e., 5. Don’t be stupid Or for the glass half full message, it would be…
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Investor Confidence Project – Inoculation Against Hucksters

By Energy Rant One Comment
Led by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Investor Confidence Project (ICP) provides a platform of quality assurance checks and balances for energy efficiency project developers, quality assurance providers, investors (lending companies), and building owners. It could be the greatest mechanism for deep and wide energy savings since the T8 light bulb. I was first introduced to the Investor Confidence Project as I was reviewing abstracts for AESP’s 2016 Spring Conference in Philadelphia. The following snippets are from the abstract summary. There are many investors and tons of capital waiting to be poured into energy efficiency projects. The problem is that…
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f(x) where x = Energy Cost

By Energy Efficiency, Energy Rant, Government One Comment
It has been a while since I’ve picked on an economist for his or her seemingly foolish statements and theories (other than the Ben Bernanke but I’ll get back to him later). Ed Dolan, university / government wonk, states in an interview that there is no lock-step relationship between economic growth and energy cost.  Rather, the world’s best performing economies have substantially increased their energy efficiency in terms of energy consumption per gross domestic product (GDP).  He states while the OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) - about 35 mostly free countries – increased efficiency by an average…
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Oh Behave

By Energy Efficiency 8 Comments
I swear we were introduced to the food pyramid when I was in grade school but a little web searching gives me just a couple – the one from 1992 and the new and improved one in 2005.The 1992 edition is shown in Figure 1.  If you can’t read it, good. The 2005 vertical colorful edition with the stickman and skewers for hands and feet is shown in Figure 2. For 2011 (Figure 3), the USDA has switched to this brilliant “plate” that looks like a pie chart developed by a group of kindergarteners employed by Microsoft, except I really…
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