Energy efficiency, system performance, and equipment life-cycle extension
Andy Vaillencourt, CEA, is the founder and principal engineer of SRG Energy Services. He is a second-generation energy professional who walked his first facility at the age of twelve. What follows is his account of a pattern that shows up in nearly every building he assesses, and why so much of the waste it produces never gets recovered.
Over the life of SRG Energy Services, we have conducted ASHRAE Level 1, 2, and 3 audits across more than a billion square feet of building stock and supported the development of more than a billion dollars in energy projects. That is the lifetime record. This piece is about a much smaller slice of it.
In a single year, across ninety-one buildings, we found several million wasted kilowatt-hours, hundreds of thousands of therms of natural gas that did not need to be burned, and no small quantity of good old number two heating oil that was not helping anyone do anything. Ninety-one buildings. One year. That is the sample this article draws on, and every ratio you are about to read comes from it.
It is not a bad haul, really. Except for one annoying detail. About half of it will never be saved. The customers did not move forward with the Energy Conservation Measures (ECMs), or they could not. The difference is academic at best. The energy will continue to be wasted, and the money spent on it will continue to disappear.
Why?
Because about half of the wasted energy we find is causally related to the poor maintenance of an otherwise healthy building. Deferred maintenance is the hated term that gets tossed around in this case. Any facility operator worth their coveralls will tell you the same thing. If something is not actually broken, it is difficult or impossible to find the funds required to preserve the smooth and efficient operation of the device.
Here is a sample of some of the more pervasive maintenance issues we saw in those ninety-one buildings.
Air Handlers
One-third of the air-handling equipment we surveyed had dirty filters. One-fifth had loose or failing belts. One-fifth had at least one broken damper actuator somewhere in its guts. One in ten motors had an audibly failing bearing. Another one in ten was otherwise structurally or mechanically unsound due to age or lack of maintenance.
Boilers
Half the boilers surveyed were more than twenty-five years old. One in four was more than thirty-five. One in ten was old enough to remember the Carter administration. The oldest boiler we surveyed was installed in 1961. Fewer than one-third of the boilers surveyed were tested annually.
Envelope
Out of ninety-one buildings, none had been evaluated for air leaks or building envelope improvements. Every one of the ninety-one envelopes was unmodified, unimproved, and ignored, regardless of building age.
Controls
One programmable thermostat in ten was actually running a program. The rest were in manual mode, holding a setpoint twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Five percent of all the thermostats we surveyed were either broken, out of calibration, or not connected in any meaningful way to a piece of equipment.
Fewer than one quarter of the buildings surveyed employed functional Energy Management Systems. Of those possessing a functional EMS, fewer than half were being actively monitored and controlled by trained staff. None had been recommissioned in the previous five years. Fifteen percent of all VAV boxes were in some way technologically deficient due to failed sensors, actuators, or other problems. One in six VFDs was found in manual operation.
Fans
Exhaust fans appear to have only two settings. On, and broken. Two out of every three facility personnel did not know where the exhaust fan cutoff switches were.
This list goes on and on. Dozens of buildings hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of energy dollars a year because the property manager or owner does not see the profit in spending money on regular maintenance. For perspective, keep in mind that the typical office building we surveyed was wasting between twenty-five and forty percent of the energy it purchased. Much of that waste is now too difficult or expensive to recover because of deficiencies in the existing equipment. Deficiencies that would not exist had the facility taken a reasoned and long-term approach to maintaining what it already possessed. Now the owners must decide whether to engage in a capital-intensive upgrade with a long payback, or simply continue to bleed that energy as a cost of doing business. We leave it to the reader to speculate on which option is the more popular.
The reasons for this are not hard to understand. Energy wasted by poorly running or otherwise deficient equipment cannot be seen in the monthly bills. The decline happens slowly, and most operators see the utility bills as a basic cost of doing business. Even when failing equipment presents an obvious increase in energy waste, the cost of repair or replacement can be staggering if the device has been allowed to fall too far out of spec. With a limited facilities budget, the wise property manager knows that ownership must pay the electric bill no matter what, so one might as well buy those new carpets the tenants are demanding.
If you need tenants in your building, that rusty hunk of decrepit metal in your boiler room is just not as critical as new paint and pretty furniture. Let it sit and rot until the tenant screams about how cold it is. What is another twenty percent on your gas bill over the course of a year?
If your production cycle does not tolerate shutdowns well, then getting a new process boiler or fixing those exhaust dampers on your dryer may not feel like a good use of money. As the production engineer, you do not really care about the wasted heat anyway. Utility costs are somebody else's department. And if utility costs are your department, good luck getting production to agree to a shutdown so you can make the repairs.
So, nothing changes. Then one day your utility offers you a free energy audit, or the business needs an audit done to comply with a local law or regulation. A competent professional energy auditor walks through your spaces, analyzes your bills, maybe takes a few measurements. When it is all done, there is no hiding how much the lack of regular maintenance has been costing your facility.
But the story does not end there. Next a plan is developed to fix it all. The utility throws some incentive money at the project, the government offers some tax breaks, and in the end you can fix all the problems for a healthy chunk of cash and a return of about eleven percent. It might have been cheaper. Instead of upgrading some equipment or modifying a few controls, many of the recommended changes now require the replacement of something so badly broken there is no saving it. In some cases the existing equipment is simply too old to be modified at all and must be replaced.
It would be nice to say that this is when the work gets done and everyone leaves happy. But it does not. The finance department chokes on that return. All projects need a two-year payback to get approved, so there is no chance any of this work will ever get done.
In fact, the top reason good ECMs get overlooked is a return-on-investment or simple-payback threshold that does not reflect objective reality. The entire energy efficiency industry is constantly trying to find ways to make energy conservation projects fit these thresholds. The most common version is the dreaded and surprisingly ubiquitous mandatory two-year payback. Most of the best ECMs simply cannot pay back in two years, even with incentives and tax breaks. This encourages many ESCOs to inflate savings numbers or lean heavily on generous utility incentive packages. Neither practice is good for the business owner. Inflated savings are undesirable for obvious reasons, and over-reliance on utility incentives puts the business at the mercy of the shifting whims of policy. Most of those policies do not offer incentives for regular maintenance.
A perfect example of this phenomenon is what happens when the payback threshold becomes the only lens. When short simple payback is the deciding criterion, the projects that win are not the ones that fix the building. They are the ones with the best story. Snake-oil technologies thrive in this environment. Refrigerant additives and power-conditioning devices promise enormous savings and deliver nothing, but the pitch is simple and the payback looks spectacular on paper. Independent testing shows these products either do nothing or actively damage equipment, yet they keep selling, because a two-year payback on a cheap bolt-on beats a fifteen-year payback on a boiler plant every time, when the only question asked is: “How fast can I get my money back?”
The same distortion warps sound technologies. Variable frequency drives get pitched as a universal fix even on constant loads where they save almost nothing. Condensing boilers are sold on the assumption they will run at nameplate efficiency in a system that will never let them condense. These measures work, but only in the right context, and the context is exactly what a payback-first selection process throws away.
If energy conservation measures are evaluated in a competitive setting, with short-term financial advantage as the deciding criterion, the facility ends up buying the best-looking spreadsheet rather than the work the building actually needs. As a professional consultant, I can often eliminate a huge amount of unnecessary work if the client tells me up front that this is how they select projects. The client is doing themselves a disservice with this approach, though many do not see it that way. By failing to understand that each ECM must be evaluated against its own criteria and the specific needs of the facility, many businesses miss an opportunity to address fundamental infrastructure flaws that waste energy and erode both profit and productivity for years to come.
It does not have to be this way.
An energy-efficient facility does not have to be a place of blinking lights and dazzling technological marvels. It can simply be a place where all the equipment does its job as designed, in the most efficient way possible for its type and vintage. An old boiler can still be eighty-five percent combustion-efficient if you put the time, money, and work into getting and keeping it there. An air handler is merely a box with some fans and dampers in it. Keep them in good working order, change the filters, put the best controls you can afford on them, and your version will be competitive with the most expensive versions on the market. Insulating pipes and periodically fixing envelope leaks is neither expensive nor difficult if it is done with regularity and things are not allowed to get out of hand.
Half of the wasted energy we find for clients would not exist if the facilities had been properly and aggressively maintained. Worse, the cost of achieving even more energy savings would be a fraction of what it becomes when the existing equipment is already in poor shape. Preventive maintenance is an investment in your facility that pays dividends in more ways than are immediately apparent.
If your goal is to operate a leaner, greener, meaner facility, then there is no magic trick to getting there. A well-maintained facility will not only save operating costs, it will save energy. It will also be easier and cheaper to upgrade in the future if your equipment is in good working order to begin with. There is an element of underlying ethos here too. If you will not spend the bare minimum on keeping your equipment running now, why would you want to spend money on newer technology to help it run better? If you are willing to spend five thousand dollars on a Variable Frequency Drive for an air-handler fan, why can you not spend thirty-six dollars and ninety-five cents on a new fan belt? No matter what your vendor tells you, an expensive burner controller is not going to do much for a boiler that has not been touched since Terminator 2 was in theaters. Demand-control ventilation systems are nice, but if your building envelope has air gaps big enough to put your hand through, then you are just whistling Dixie. Quite literally, if the wind is right. The energy efficiency industry cannot help you if you are not willing to help yourself. This will not stop them from trying.
Step one in any energy management or energy conservation plan is, and always will be, preventive maintenance. From there it moves to aggressive controls, and it ends with far-reaching capital expenditure plans that fold in upgrades as money and technology become available. When the time comes for your enterprise to take a good hard look at its energy consumption, be prepared to look at what you spend on maintenance. A good energy auditor can help you sort out exactly how much your maintenance practices are costing you in wasted energy right now, and more importantly, how much they will cost you moving forward. The truth might hurt a little. That should not stop you from hearing it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andy Vaillencourt, CEA, is a second-generation energy professional who walked his first facility at the age of twelve. Across numerous consulting firms, utilities, and ESCOs, he has provided actionable energy efficiency services for customers in virtually every type of industry. A frequent speaker at energy events and conferences, he explores the often-predatory marketplace of energy conservation in his books, The Energy Efficient Facility and Silver Bullets: And Other Energy Efficiency Myths and Magic.
As founder and principal of SRG Energy Services, Andy continues to serve the energy efficiency marketplace as a trusted consultant, trainer, and building-science subject matter expert. SRG Energy Services is a Connecticut-based engineering consultancy specializing in energy auditing (ASHRAE Levels 1 through 3), Energy Performance Contracting support, retro-commissioning, and mechanical systems forensics. SRG consults for ESCOs, municipalities, school districts, hospitals, and energy managers. It is not an ESCO, and it makes no performance guarantee claims. SRG leads engagements across all levels of ASHRAE energy audits, feasibility studies, operating cost assessments, energy modeling, scoping, pricing, and project management, and provides owner's representation for end users.
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