The Future of Energy Efficiency: Rosenfeld Symposium Recap
May 2, 2019
Last week I was fortunate and grateful to participate in a symposium event at Berkeley Labs honoring the great Art Rosenfeld, the ‘father’ of energy efficiency.
The leadership of Art Rosenfeld, with the support, energy, and commitment of numerous people, many of whom were present, led to tremendous achievements. These included the successful implementation of appliance efficiency standards leading to massive cumulative energy savings, among many other significant impacts. You can learn more about this legacy here: https://eta.lbl.gov/about-us/arthur-rosenfeld-legacy. And here is an excellent 5 minute youtube video: https://youtu.be/K0sQ-KtI1sI.
The event this week was chock full of great speakers and distinguished attendees. I enjoyed listening to Commissioner McAllister from the California Energy Commission reflect on Art Rosenfeld’s curious mind, and his reputation at the CEC for always being interested to learn from others and share his ideas to drive things forward. Robert Socolow, well-known for his work on climate stabilization wedges, offered a key note in which he used a horse race to reflect on our progress advancing solutions to address climate change. He commented that while solar and wind had, beyond expectations, moved to the front of the pack, energy efficiency was close behind and, in the spirit of a horse race, on the outside and still ready to make a move.
I enjoyed sharing a panel with the wonderful Jessica Granderson of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Charlotte Matthews of Sidewalk Labs, and Prabal Dutta of UC Berkeley. We shared our thoughts on Analytics and Connected Technologies in Buildings. Prabal highlighted new technologies to embed very small plug load sensors into outlets to measure plug loads and Charlotte spoke about Sidewalk Labs efforts to further automated user feedback and response in the built environment. I shared the KGS Buildings experience connecting buildings to a global FDD platform. With the reference point that our Clockworks solution had found thousands of equipment with faults worth millions of avoidable energy costs in just one year, with a base of just 125,000 equipment, I posed the question how will the world be different and how we will manage facilities differently when such knowledge is possible across millions of equipment.
When accurate scalable fault detection can connect millions of equipment, aggregate and analyze tens of millions of data points, streaming every 5 minutes from around the world, how will we mine buildings for energy efficiency? How will utilities think about sourcing savings differently? How will facility management and building service companies better serve their customers and be measured on their success? How will owners manage more buildings, more complexity, reducing energy and extending equipment life despite a scarcity of trained technicians? How will knowledge about system performance and faults affect lease terms, property insurance, and asset value?
These are the questions that inspire me, and many in our industry, to keep working towards the future in which buildings everywhere will be connected, information silos will be broken down and automated intelligence will drive a more efficient built environment!
Till next time.
The KGS Buildings Team
Automated Analytics. Smarter Facilities