19 minute read
The Warren Report
Andrew Warren is chairman of the British Energy Efficiency Federation
10.20
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This drive must go beyond six months
With the Green Homes Grant about to launch, the Government must come up with a longer-term strategy on energy saving if it wants to create thousands of new jobs T he biggest governmentfunded drive to improve the energy efficiency of English homes in thirty years gets underway this month. A support 140,000 green jobs.” The grants on offer are worth up to £10,000 per home for lowincome households in fuel poverty, and £5,000 for anybody else. All installers must be accredited with TrustMark. Initially, national newspaper and websites were told that measure of its priority is that, just before permitted measures would be very wide-ranging. As well it launched, the Prime Minister used part as insulation and heat pumps, these would include double, of his five-minute address to a United triple and secondary glazing of doors and windows, appliance Nations Heads of Government meeting thermostats and smart heating controls, modern lighting in New York, to laud the key role of systems and high-efficiency condensing boilers. massively improving energy efficiency in However, a final definitive eligible product list has been combating the threat of climate change. published on the relevant government website: “Simple Energy
As part of the UK’s commitment to Advice”. It identifies primary and secondary energy-saving achieve net zero carbon emissions by measures. This list entirely excludes any assistance for the 2050, he described a “huge”, a “very, very installation of both lighting systems or new gas boilers of any ambitious” programme, “retrofitting our kind. Both of these energy-saving options have considerable homes, and our commercial premises.” numbers of trained and skilled installers already available. All of We would, the PM promised, “be these people can now play no part in the process. changing the windows, changing the boilers, changing the lagging.” Three categories of primary measures for heating
With an enormous giggle, Boris There are three categories of “primary” measures on the heating Johnson re-emphasised to the (virtually) side. These are low-carbon heat, predominantly air source and assembled dignitaries: “We will never be ground source heat pumps. Last year just 44,000 heat pumps lagging on lagging.” were installed in homes in Britain – including new homes. Plus
Agreed, that is far from a new joke. I 600 biomass pellet boilers. can recall Classic FM presenter, David In contrast, around 1.6m condensing gas boilers were put in, Mellor, producing precisely the same with very different training required. It is reckoned that there line almost 40 years ago when a youthful are still at least 5m elderly gas boilers still in use, mostly around junior energy minister. But there is no 50 per cent rather than 95 per cent efficient. This grant scheme question of the serious intent behind its ignores them. latest enunciation. While the Government website states clearly that “for low-
Back in July, Chancellor Rishi Sunak carbon heating to be installed, households will need to have set out a £2bn Green Homes grant adequate insulation,” it is unclear how this requirement - seldom scheme, part of a wider “over £3bn” plan currently promoted by heat pump manufacturers - is to be to upgrade homes and public buildings. enforced. When first announced, the plan was set Then there are those in the glazing and heating controls to improve 600,000 existing homes and industries, again including thousands of trained, experienced sustain 100,000 jobs. operatives. They are only permitted to install “secondary
Last month Treasury Minister Kemi measures.” Such measures qualify for funding only if at least one Badenoch announced that, by including of the primary measures has already been commissioned. And, an extra 50,000 public sector buildings crucially, “secondary measures” can only be “subsidised up to the improvements, this initiative “could cash amount of subsidy provided for a primary measure.”
So, even though grants may be available worth up to £5,000 per home, if a household receives just £1,000 to pay for primary measures, they are blocked from claiming a penny more than a maximum of £1,000 towards any “secondary measures.” In all cases, the householder must pay at least one-third of the costs.
All of which leaves “lagging”- or as it is more usually called, insulation – to deliver the big numbers. The vast majority of English homes remain seriously underinsulated. But, while only a very small percentage are fully insulated, most have at least got some insulation. The last national government scheme, operating in the 1970s and 1980s, concentrated entirely upon loft insulation.
Much of it was installed on a DIY basis. It isn’t very thick. And most such insulation will have moved around subsequently, leaving large gaps through which the heat escapes. Symptomatic of this relative unprofessionalism is the fact that, until this January, there was no nationally recognised loft insulation guarantee. And the Green Homes grant scheme is entirely about creating jobs, not DIY.
What about cavity wall insulation? Eight years ago, over half a million existing homes had it installed. Last year, the total was just 43,000. Solid wall insulation numbers are trickier, somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 homes were reckoned to have been improved in that way last year.
To expand both these and other markets will undoubtedly be possible. But to reach those official numbers of 140,000 new jobs and improve 650,000 buildings, it will require an awful lot of hiring and an awful lot of training. All for a scheme currently set to conclude on March 31.
For businesses to be able confidently to respond to this ambitious programme, Government needs to set out details of a longer-term energy efficiency strategy within a few weeks. In the 2019-2024 Conservative manifesto, a minimum £9.3bn of relevant expenditure was committed.
Confirming its go-ahead should ensure that industry can properly invest. And the Prime Minister will be then permitted to repeat his commitment not to lag on lagging.
Building Energy Management Systems
For further information on Utilidex visitwww.eibi.co.uk/enquiriesand enter ENQUIRY No. 125
Ashley Whichelow (left) is sustainability team leader, Bourne Leisure, Ioana Buzelan (centre), post graduate student at UCL School of Management, and Gabe Friedland, product manager, Utilidex
Models to predict the future
Can machine learning help predict energy use? A project with one of the UK’s largest holiday providers is giving promising results, according to Ashley Whichelow, Ioana Buzelan and Gabe Friedland
The process of setting annual energy budgets and then tracking and reporting on variations can be a challenging activity for organisations with a large energy spend. In most cases not only are organisations tracking their energy consumption and costs, but they are also overlaying investment opportunities in energy efficiency and/or on-site generation, which are set to have an impact on their budgets.
Ordinarily, this entails a large amount of spreadsheet work to create the budget in the first place, and then on-going monthly analysis and discussions to explain why spend either exceeds or is less than what was originally expected. This process is not only time consuming, but also very difficult to pin down and explain the exact reasons as to why budget variations occur.
Utilidex is continually looking at how technologies can be utilised to help answer the challenges of the energy management community. In recent R&D activity, the company worked with University College London’s School of Management via an internship with their MSc Business Analytics course. The aim was to predict commercial electricity consumption in travel, hospitality and the leisure sector using machine learning.
Utilidex, alongside a long-standing client Bourne Leisure, one of the largest providers of holidays and holiday home ownership in the UK, and the UCL School of Management, undertook a research project to explore how data science techniques could help solve energy budgeting inaccuracies and improve the validity of energy management investment cases. Through a mixture of energy monitoring systems, including sub-metering across sites, and a focus on team engagement through sustainable commitment conferences, Bourne had already reduced its carbon emissions by 43 per cent between 2013-2019.
Utilidex delivers a range of integrated software products supporting end customers, consultants and energy suppliers for data management, billing, trading, budgeting and energy management.
The energy management community has traditionally used a historical data set to create an energy forecast and extrapolated demand data forward. At this point they may make an allowance for new projects that might reduce energy consumption and also make provision for additional expansions, such as new site extensions that might cause an increase in demand.
Budget deviations The goal of the research was to understand budget deviations for electricity consumption by explaining how much energy should have been used according to exogenous features. To do this, we examined the impact that weather forecast indicators and seasonality may have on electricity consumption, with a view to create a predictive model for the energy consumption.
With a focus on their explanatory abilities and predictive performance, two widely used machine learning approaches were applied to perform a regression task in a supervised learning setting. They are used for both statistical inference and to predict electricity consumption. This included analysing data with multiple linear regression models, as well as applying decision tree analysis.
Energy mater data was incorporated, with a variety of hourly weather data such as humidity, pressure, cloudiness and wind speed alongside the more traditional temperature and precipitation factors. For the linear regression models, the input data was also transformed creating interactions aiming for better explanation of the consumption variations. Utilidex also explored the significance of seasonality, months of the year, days of the week, bank holidays and seasonal holidays.
The models were trained using three years of data and tested their performance when predicting a specific unseen budgetary month’s consumption.
It was found that linear and non-linear regressors tend to be inconclusive and provide unreliable results when predicting, because they rely on too granular observations and too rigid assumptions, which cannot be addressed entirely with data transformation and feature interaction efforts. Overall, linear regression with interactions and random forest show the best performance, assessed by the fit to the data and prediction error on unseen data. From an inference perspective, it was discovered that seasonality features – months, weekdays, periods of the day – as well as opening times and occupancy tend to have a higher importance than weather indicators when explaining consumption variation. This stronger seasonal effect could be explained by a more general data influence, which overtakes the granular instances and changes of weather indicators at an hourly rate.
Nevertheless, the research is based on a limited dataset which restricts both models and findings from generalising. Linear regression is based on specific and rigid statistical assumptions which tend to easily be violated, while the decision trees tend to easily overfit the data and become computationally more expensive.
The findings motivate further research of more advanced models, which can better forecast power consumption accounting for the exogenous variables specified across time, such as (S)ARIMAX or neural networks. Furthermore, it would be wise to reconsider the influence of factors such as occupancy.
The initial indication on how energy forecasting could prove more accurate with better techniques is promising although there is a lot more to do. Alongside a wider data range and machine learning approaches we believe there are several ways that the appliance of data science could yield business value for most energy management participants.
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Kas Mohammed is vice president of digital energy, Schneider Electric
Building Energy Management Systems
For further information on Schneider Electric visitwww.eibi.co.uk/enquiriesand enter ENQUIRY No. 127
Engagement with your app
Remote working is part of the new normal. Smart building apps can empower occupants and facility managers alike to make buildings safe and comfortable, says Kas Mohammed
The global pandemic has changed how most businesses operate. Remote working is the clearest example of the ‘new normal’. Many companies are now operating a hybrid working model, with facilities at part capacity, creating new challenges for facility managers who must ensure safety, while enabling productivity.
To meet this challenge, building managers must turn to smart building technology. It has the potential to increase occupant engagement, which in turn, can deliver a range of benefits. The feedback gained through apps plays a vital role in creating a safe and productive building. They allow facility managers to monitor and control occupancy, comfort, energy usage and improve communication. Office spaces can be made safe and sustainable, while improving the health, happiness and productivity of occupants.
Today’s workforce of millennials and Gen Z are also digitally savvy. Increasingly, ‘mobile-first’ professionals expect the same level of connectivity, convenience, and control outside work as they experience at the office.
These trends are driving the development of a new breed of mobile engagement apps that are empowering employees with a digitised workplace experience. These smart apps deliver highvalue, easy-to-access digital services that keep tenants connected and informed, whether working at the office or from home. The most powerful of these apps act as a platform that lets a company integrate a flexible choice of building management, IT, and concierge services into a single, unified portal.
Smart building engagement apps act as a mobile central communication hub – a single ‘source of truth’ where employees can immediately access the latest
Tech savvy: ‘mobile-first’ professionals expect the same level of connectivity outside the office as they experience in the office
information on company and site policy. An app can also integrate COVID-19 information feeds from Government bodies and local sources.
Critical notifications Building managers can deliver critical notifications about changing site situations – sent as either high-visibility push or banner notifications – directly to each user’s phone. In this way, employees know exactly what to expect today and during the week. Facility and HR teams can target communications by all employees or sub-groups, such as departments and teams.
Safety can be further supported before an employee visits the office. The engagement app can be used to complete a health form for a preassessment. Once inside the office, their mobile device will enable a safer, touchless experience. Surfaces they regularly interact with – from elevator buttons, to room comfort controls, audio/visual devices in meeting rooms, and digital badges – can now all be remotely controlled.
In the ‘new normal’, occupants and visitors will need to more efficiently navigate the office. A mobile engagement app can help with every aspect of the office experience.
Engagement apps can deliver a wide range of useful information made available through the integration of multiple data sources – from internal facility, property, security, and HR systems to external news and transportation feeds – all delivered through a singular, convenient view. For example, when drivers arrive at the office, the mobile app can help them quickly locate available parking spaces. It can then be used as a ‘digital passport’ at the security entrance.
Inside the building, the app can be used for wayfinding. If the organisation is using hot-desk flexible workspace scheduling, the employee can quickly locate an available, clean desk. In turn, facility teams can access maps of real-time occupancy throughout the building.
An engagement app can also help navigate to meeting rooms or other points of interest, such as the location of personal protective equipment.
The newest apps can include a full range of comfort control and maintenance features. This includes simple control over temperature, lights, or blinds in an office or meeting room. If there are problems with systems or equipment, the app can be used to communicate with the helpdesk. The employee can also self-report a maintenance issue by using their mobile device to take a picture and submit a ticket directly into the facility management system.
Common activities during the workday are also streamlined. An integrated company directory makes contact with anyone just a tap of a finger away. When it comes time to book a meeting, the app will find and reserve an available room, as well as helping arrange catering for guests and registering them for a site visit.
When concierge services are included, employees can quickly access information and reservations for the cafeteria, fitness club, or transit. They can also use opt-in channels for clubs, communities, or people with common interests, etc. The engagement app will also keep people working from home more closely connected to the office, their co-workers, and community activities.
Engagement apps are helping deepen the employee connection. With unique customising and branding, the app becomes an extension of the smart building workplace and company experience, directly in the hand of each employee.
And extensive data analysis tools can help the administrator see how the app is being used, by persona, location, service, and device. Using this insight, apps can be continuously improved over time by adding or changing services. Organisations should seek an open, agile engagement platform that can dynamically adapt services to the changing needs of the company and its people.
Building Energy Management Systems
For further information on Sontay visitwww.eibi.co.uk/enquiriesand enter ENQUIRY No. 128
Stacey Lucas is commercial and marketing director at Sontay Ltd
Benefitting from clean air
Stacey Lucas looks at the indoor air that we breathe and how better air quality monitoring will be the muchneeded ‘breath of fresh air’ for building users
Facilities managers are continually tasked with keeping buildings not only energy-efficient, but clean and safe for occupants.
The COVID-19 pandemic presents itself as another risk to be mitigated, with building managers now incorporating regular cleaning into their schedules, particularly of air conditioning filters and cartridges that can circulate harmful bacteria if they are unhygienic.
Thankfully, there is plenty of data available to help create a healthy environment, with humidification solutions playing a huge part in decreasing virus transmission. Studies indicate that maintaining a humidity of 50 per cent relative humidity (rh) will reduce transmission. A relative humidity of between 30 per cent and 60 per cent significantly influences the survival rate of viruses (both airborne and not), and reduces the transmission and infectiousness level.
With such a focus on controlled, healthy environments, facilities managers are under increasing pressure to keep occupants safe and comfortable. It is important now more than ever to adopt solutions that will make their work lives easier.
Building sensors, installed as part of an efficient central management system, offer an ingeniously smart and effective way for facilities managers to monitor indoor thermals, as well as giving property owners more control over energy usage; a benefit that not only helps reduce heating and lighting costs, it facilitates a significant reduction in a building’s carbon footprint. Their usage could therefore be a factor in driving environmental-initiatives, such as the UK government’s pledge for carbon-neutral status by 2050.
Sensors can control a myriad of elements that affect our indoor climate including temperature, which in relation to an office environment is found to be comfortable at around 22°C.
However, relative humidity, if not managed correctly can make a room
Sensors can control a myriad of elements that effect our indoor climate
feel hotter or colder than the actual temperature reading. A sensor can overcome this issue by managing humidity levels and ensuring an ideal 50 per cent reading is maintained.
In terms of air quality, airborne volatile organic compounds (VOC), pollutants which are found in paints and other building materials, are known to have a detrimental effect. Air quality sensors are able to measure VOC levels and alert the BMS or occupants of the need to take action when a potentially hazardous reading is recorded to allow for ventilation to kick in.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also focused a lot of attention on the amount of indoor space people should be allowed to share in order to maintain distance and prevent viral spread.
For facilities managers tasked with monitoring the performance of a building, a CO2 sensor with traffic light display provides a clear visual indication of when a workplace or apartment requires ventilation due to deterioration in the indoor air quality. When we exhale we emit CO2, which if left unchecked in a busy office environment for example, can lead to headaches due to increased discomfort levels.
Traffic-light display A CO2 sensor with an LED traffic light-style display can help alleviate this issue. When showing green, for instance, the sensor is indicating that a room isn’t over-occupied and the risk to air quality is low. Should the sensor show amber, it’s a sign that windows require opening or fewer people need to be in the room to maintain the same healthy indoors environment. When the sensor turns red it is a call to action, as it indicates there is not enough ventilation and possible over occupancy in the room. At these last two stages, if a sensor is connected to a building management system, it will activate relevant ventilation procedure.
In the COVID-19 pandemic, these sensors serve another important function particularly in spaces which don’t have modern ventilation or air conditioning systems. Installed on a wall, sensors are a great way of gauging a level of occupancy in a room. If an area such as a classroom is over-occupied, the display on the LED will turn red, indicating there is a high level of CO2 or too many bodies in a single space. This easyto-read visual marker with its traffic light display will enable teachers, for instance, to take it upon themselves to reduce the occupancy of a space to ensure safe distances are kept and open a window or door to aid ventilation. Allowing teachers to react in this way will prevent the risk of viruses passing from one student to the other, all the while improving the air quality within a classroom.
Light level and occupancy sensors offer further relevance to the ongoing pandemic, particularly in relation to a lockdown. Many offices in towns and cities remain empty while lights and other energy sources continued to burn unmonitored within the buildings themselves. An estimated 40 per cent of a building’s energy costs are attributed to light usage. Therefore, installing a sensor which operates lighting based on a building’s occupancy and interior light levels has financial and environmental benefits.
Small but mighty, a building sensor can be a facilities manager’s extra arm, playing a huge part in ensuring properties, particularly workspaces, are managed safely and sustainably for the benefit of occupants. These smart little devices are becoming vital to the way building managers control and maintain a dwelling, ensuring that the spaces we live, teach and work in are always a breath of fresh air.
