Ever notice that when politicians tour a factory they remove their sportcoats? If you’ve walked an industrial plant you know it can be a pretty sweaty experience. An energy engineer knows this heat can represent a big energy efficiency opportunity.
The most common waste heat recovery application reuses flue or stack heat to produce hot water. With heat exchangers tightly coupled to machines the heat can be captured into water and transported into another hot water process thereby reducing boiler loads. Where an industrial process is less continuous, hot water storage tanks (energy storage) can be added, which cost more, but enable the time shifting use of the waste heat. Where an industrial process produces extremely high temperatures exhaust (1000 degree +) a potentially more powerful opportunity exists – turning this heat into steam, a much higher density energy source than hot water.
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Topics:
waste heat recovery,
ORC,
Stirling,
Organic Rankine Cycle,
Industrial Waste Heat Recapture
Labor Day typically marks the time when our year-end project installation schedule becomes more clear. Our corporate customers, often operating on a fiscal-calendar year for budgeting, also exhibit end-of-year psychology and “get it done by year end” becomes a priority. Normal product lead times, procurement contracts, permits, and even potential interruptions from winter weather means by Labor Day our construction year is pretty much set.
This year many cleantech project developers have even more tension leading up to their 2011 New Year’s party planning. With Section 1603, the US Federal program for renewable Grants in Lieu of an Investment Tax Credit (ITC), set to expire at the end of 2010, projects which are not at least 5% underway by year end will miss the proverbial party.
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Topics:
Grant in Lieu of Investment Tax Credit,
Solar PV,
Power Purchase Agreement,
Clean Energy grants,
Section 1603,
Renewable Energy
Recently in conducting our corporate energy assessments, we’ve come across more frequent situations where our customers are incurring high demand charges from their utilities. In most cases they haven’t known the relative size of these charges, nor that they can often be reduced or even avoided.
As we dig in, studying interval data from their utility bills and correlating usage with their operations, we typically discover that large loads (ventilation, chillers, machinery) can be time shifted an hour or two with limited impact to the overall business. Depending on the size of the load, time of day and the utility’s demand charge rate, this can have huge dollar savings impact.
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Topics:
Energy Cost,
Demand charges,
Time shifting energy use,
Demand Charge Reduction,
real time electricity pricing
Recently a customer had us model the energy production and financial return for a new 2MW cogen system at their manufacturing site in the United Kingdom.
Our analysis considered their contract cost for kWh and natural gas, the system’s energy production in kWh and therms, its full installation and annual maintenance cost and their UK tax benefits, including a reduced carbon tax from the UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment. All in, the capital investment had a simple payback of 2.3 years.
When we built the system’s 10 year PPA model there was one big question – what escalation rate for kWh and gas should we use?
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Topics:
escalation rate,
cost of electricity,
PPA,
Solar PV,
escalator,
United Kingdom - carbon tax,
energy contracts,
Combined Heat & Power,
Power Purchase Agreement,
Energy Cost
Attendees witnessed a dramatic shift at this week’s Lightfair 2010, the lighting industry’s most visible, 20th annual conference and tradeshow – LED’s have become the dominant lighting technology in virtually every session, presentation and vendor booth. Goodbye fluorescent, halogen, high intensity discharge, induction, you’re all passe’, OLEDs your time will come….
While Lightfair 2009 was a coming out party for LED’s, this year EVERY possible lighting application, from 2 watt dimmable candelabras to 200 watt street lighting, was on display. LED chip performance has increased another 30% since last year and manufacturers have seen the proverbial light. UL’s engineering teams are now overwhelmed with the volume of pending new applications they need to review.
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Topics:
LED lighting,
LM79,
Lightfair 2010,
commercial led lighting,
SSL,
LightFair,
LM80,
L70,
industrial led lighting
Now that Digital Lumens (DL) is out of stealth mode it makes sense for us to start covering some of our learnings with LED high wattage applications.
Beginning last year we conducted a series of DL test trials with our customers. Recently we exhibited at the IARW show as a “coming out” party, showing both the now shipping DL system and a short video from our first large installation at a yet-to-be-announced freezer cold storage facility.
Prior to our DL tests we had learned that operating managers had three general concerns about LED high wattage applications – (1) light level performance, (2) cost and (3) glare.
Digging into each….
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Topics:
Energy Efficiency,
LED lighting,
commercial led lighting,
industrial led lighting,
Digital Lumens,
cold storage
Today I’m attending and speaking at the SolarTech Conference in San Ramon, CA.
The conference format broke the day into working sessions covering all major areas relating to Solar PV: permitting, finance, installation, interconnection, and a new one for the market – energy efficiency (which I’ll come back to later). At the end of the day, the entire audience voted on the key initiatives for each of working session and these rankings become the basis for 2010 SolarTech working agenda. Makes great sense.
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Topics:
Property Assessed Clean Energy,
PPA,
Solar PV,
energy audit,
Power Purchase Agreement,
PACE,
whole building assessment,
Clean Energy grants
This morning Jeffrey Hollender, the Chairman of Seventh Generation, gave the keynote for our Green Enterprise 2010 Seminar.
One powerful concept he described was “full cost” sustainability accounting whereby companies are required to include their external environmental costs (ie. things like pollution or resource consumption) into their corporate earnings.
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Topics:
green products,
Enterprise Carbon Accounting,
Green product design,
Enterprise Carbon Accounting (ECA),
Green Enterprise 2010,
Carbon Accounting,
Wal-Mart Sustainability Index
We’ve excited to announce our next Groom Energy seminar, entitled Green Enterprise 2010, which will be held April 15th at the Embassy Suites Hotel near Boston’s Logan Airport.
As with our previous seminars our target audience remains corporate energy and sustainability managers who wish to hear and discuss best practices, case study based observations.
Last year our first two seminars had a direct focus on the emerging market for Enterprise Carbon Accounting (ECA), a market we had identified and about which we published research. Our February 25th Boston ECA event featured Mindy Lubber from Ceres who likened climate impact to an off balance sheet risk which should be disclosed by public companies. Our follow-on May 14th San Francisco ECA event was highlighted by a practical case study panel with presentations from Applied Materials, HP, Intuit and Sony.
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Topics:
sustainability manager,
Enterprise Carbon Accounting,
Enterprise Carbon Accounting (ECA),
Green Enterprise 2010,
Carbon Accounting,
Wal-Mart Sustainability Index,
Wal-Mart Supplier Workshop,
greening the supply chain
In 2006 Groom Energy engineers began testing the latest general illumination LED fixtures with our early adopter customers. Our demonstrations proved that these products were still too expensive, couldn’t produce enough foot-candles and had no track record to support their 100,000 hour operating life claims. More importantly, none of the them took advantage of what LEDs do best – intelligent control.
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Topics:
LED lighting,
commercial led lighting,
industrial led lighting,
Digital Lumens,
venture capital,
High Bay LED lighting,
Flybridge Capital,
Groom Energy,
GroomLED,
Stata Venture Partners,
Black Coral Capital
