Mark Stetz a fellow EVO-ite gave me permission to repost his complete article that he wrote in preparation for a class he is teaching at Greenbuild.  The article already appeared at  consilienceblog.org, but I thought it would be of value to our readers as well. The article address one of the main shortcomings of the LEED certification that I have continued to hear since I joined the energy industry. Buildings and Energy Efficiency: Are Intentions Good Enough? by Mark Stetz, P.E., CMVP, FIGP One of the benefits claimed for LEED-certified buildings is their reduced energy use, resource consumption, and carbon footprint relative to their peers. Designing a building to be energy-efficient, take advantage of solar energy and day lighting, use emerging technologies, and using a commissioning agent seems like a good way to lower energy and resource use. Achieving design goals requires that specialists from many different disciplines work together in a harmonious relationship, but the greatest danger to any relationship is failed expectations. The LEED rating system scores buildings by assigning points based on land, material, water, and energy use over a building’s lifetime. One of the weaknesses of the LEED system is that points are based on design intent and not verified performance. For years, the USGBC claimed that LEED-certified buildings used less energy than the average building, although they had little supporting evidence. This claim was based solely on expectations of superior performance. Critics were quick to argue that the point- and expectation-based rating system would not result in well-designed cost-effective buildings. [1] The USGBC – partly out of curiosity, partly in response to its critics – commissioned a study to investigate how LEED-certified buildings actually operate rather than rely on how the designers and builders think they operate. The 2008 study by Frankel and Turner [2] showed that design intentions are unfortunately often not realized. Of the 552 LEED-certified buildings in existence at the time, only 121 had utility data available for review. Of those 121 buildings, 40% did not meet their energy target and more than 20% had energy use intensities greater than code requirements! While debate continues over the validity of the statistical and evaluation methods used, the report suggests that over half of the buildings met or exceeded expectations. But for a program that emphasizes energy efficiency as one of its key attributes, how is it that 20% of these buildings did not even perform up to code? For conventional buildings, code-compliance is based on design intent rather than post-occupancy verification. Since the Frankel & Turner study did not evaluate individual non-LEED buildings, it is not possible to show how many conventional buildings live up to their design intent. Additional analysis of the same buildings conducted by National Research Council Canada [3] reached similar conclusions, with the good news that on average, LEED buildings do save energy but that individual buildings may not. But no one occupies the average building any more than they have the average 2.3 children. In an attempt to address some of the weaknesses with LEED 2.2, LEED 3.0 – released April 2009 – further emphasizes designing for and achieving energy reductions. The point system has been revamped to make it align more with the USGBC’s goals of energy and carbon reductions. Energy efficiency (EA-1) can now earn a building up to 19 points and the Measurement &Verification credit (EA-5) – which validates energy use - is now worth 3 points. To enable additional post-evaluation research, USGBC will require post-occupancy access to the water and energy bills, access that needs to be maintained even if the building changes owners. Although some critics have suggested that certification be revoked if an individual building ever fails to live up to its claims [4], the USGBC has not yet taken that draconian st

Episode 3 of EVO Insights is an interview that I've wanted to do for a long time. Earlier this week globe trotter Thomas Dreessen and I got to chat about the recently released IEEFP (the International Energy Efficiency Financing Protocol). This is a protocol that has been in the works for a long time and I got to learn a little about its history and about Thomas' hopes for it. Click here  to listen to the show right in your browser or click here to download the episode. Episode 3 Transcription Nathan: Welcome to EVO Insights, episode three. Today we will get a chance to hear from Thomas  Dreessen and learn a little bit more about IEEFP, the newly released International Energy Efficiency Financing Protocol from EVO. We’ll learn a little bit about its history, how it got started and what we are hoping the effects will be around the globe. Hope that you enjoy and remember to check in and give us any feedback that you have at evo-blog.com or evo-world.org. Thanks a lot. Nathan: Hey everybody. Today we have Thomas Dreessen with us who was one of the main people behind the International Energy Efficiency Financing Protocol, the new protocol that was published by EVO this year. Tom how are you doing? Where are you at this morning? Tom: I’m outside of the US, down in the Caribbean, trying to relax a little bit in the middle of me closing a big energy efficiency equity fund in China which I anticipate closing in the next 60 days. Nathan: Oh great, so even in the Caribbean working in China [laughs] the world has gotten small. Tom: Correct. Nathan: Thomas, tell us a little bit about how you got started in energy efficiency and how you ended up at EVO. Tom: I’m one of the founding ESCO members in the U.S. I formed an energy services company back in the early 1980’s when the U.S. industry was just getting started and I came from a financial background. As you may know, the ESCO business model is set up to where the ESCO puts up all of the capital. It goes in the large buildings and industrial sites and puts up all of the capital, has to arrange all the capital and get paid from savings so it’s a very capital intensive process to raise the capital on an on-going basis to implement the business model. I got started in that back in the early 80’s and ended up forming ten ESCO’s in ten different countries and developed projects in 24 countries. When I was doing this, I was the CEO and the financial guy structuring all of the project plans. It became clear to me that the only real cost effective way to fund energy efficiency projects was to bring in and try to get the local banks engaged in providing funding. Otherwise the cost to capital was just way too high to do it on a totally equity basis. Based on that, I started back in the early 2000’s trying to come up with a mechanism of how to bring the local banks into the funding and financing of energy efficiency projects. It became clear to me when I went into all of these different countries that there were common methodologies, common ways for efficiency projects to be evaluated and to be funded. It was also clear to me that the banks had essentially had very little knowledge or capacity on how to evaluate and how to look at finding projects which is really what was the foundation for me to really initiate the idea of an international energy efficiency financial protocol. I did this back in July 2004. The U.N. foundation’s energy future collation sponsored a state quarter workshop in D.C. which represented a broad group of experts in energy efficiency finance and the primary focus was to discuss the barriers to increase use of funds for energy efficiency projects. I threw out this idea of an energy efficiency international financing protocol and they agreed that the local banks clearly lacked guidance and expertise in order to lend money to it and this was a good program, if you will, to start setting up around the world. That was the actual genesis of the IEEFP. Nathan: Sounds like

For episode 2 of EVO Insights I had a chance to catch up with Steve Kromer and learn a bit more about the Alliance to Save Energy and the recent EE Global conference in Paris, France. Click here to  listen to the show right in your browser or click here to download the episode. Episode 2 Transcription Nathan: Welcome to EVO Insights Episode 2. I'm Nathan Shetterley, and today we'll listen in on an update from Steve Kromer on how the Alliance to Save Energy and EVO are spreading the word about M&V and IPMVP earlier this summer. Nathan: Today we have with us Steve Kromer, who was recently at the EE Global Conference in Paris. Steve, how about you give a little introduction about yourself, and who you are, and why you were in Paris, and then we'll go from there. Steve: Yeah hi Nathan, I'm Steve, Steve Kromer, and I'm in Berkeley, California now. Last week I was in Paris at EE Global. Alliance to Save Energy has recently - they hosted the show there in Paris, and they've begun to emphasize more the evaluation measurement and verification aspect of energy efficiency and along with tracking national efforts in the US to standardize EM&V, they're looking at standardizing international EM&V. And so they hosted a workshop on Monday, and I got to present a couple different times, some on the history of IPMVP, and recent conditions in California. Nathan: Great. And who was at this EE Global conference besides yourself kind of representing IPMVP? What kind of people were there? Steve: So John Cowan also presented at the workshop on Monday. We had a board meeting on Thursday, so along the way just about every board member was somewhere around there, I think. In particular, Alain Streicher and Satish Kumar came in later in the day to the workshop. Nathan: And without giving your whole conference, when you touched on the history of IPMVP, can you give us a little synopsis of what we all missed, staying over here in the States or wherever our listeners may be, but not in Paris? Steve: Well, I guess to a lot of people in this workshop, I guess totally there was probably 50 people towards the end. It seemed like over the course of the day, most of the day long, it filled up. And I guess maybe half the people had heard about IPMVP before, or I don't know, I'm guessing. And there's been a lot of effort in the EU in the last ten years to do similar work on M&V protocols and evaluation protocols under a whole different political structure. But our old friend Paolo Bertoldi was there, and others who have been familiar with IPMVP all along. And I think - I was particularly encouraged by the fact that there seemed to be a consensus that EVO in particular could be an organization to help move things ahead generally, and that IPMVP was still a good starting framework from which to build around to do a more evaluation-type work and standardized evaluation work. Nathan: And how was the reception on that? I know that from my personal experience in Canada, working in Quebec, starting with IPMVP and translating it was kind of the first step. And then - I don't know if the Parisians are going to be able to read the Quebecois French, they kind of make fun of us for that - but besides that, that was a really good first step to moving towards getting kind of a regional protocol out there. How did you feel the response in Paris? Steve: Well, in particular - not so much at the workshop, though I'm not remembering exactly how much of this was discussed there - we met with our new board member from Schneider Electric, Patrick Jullian, and we got a full dose of the recent events in the last year or two of how they've been working to introduce IPMVP in French in France. And particularly for the back story and politics around forming a club, and getting general agreement to support one protocol, and then picking IPMVP, and then doing a translation. Now having a plan to using… …to help circulate it and promote it across the country with the same pur

I got a chance to speak with Pierre Langlois at the end of last year and decided to use it as the 1st of a few pilot episodes of our new EVO Insights podcast show. If you're interested in the role of measurement and verification and energy efficiency in the future of the Kyoto Protocol I really recommend it. We used Skype, and there are a couple places were we cut out, but over all very interesting and informative.Click here to listen to the show right in your browser or click here to download the episode. Episode 1 Transcription: Nathan: Welcome to the first ever episode of EVO Insights. I’m Nathan Shetterley, I’ll be your host. EVO Insights is a concept we’ve been kicking around on the web committee for a while now and we’re hoping it’ll be your chance to get to know some of the key players at the Efficiency Valuation Organization and see what they’ve been up to lately. We want it to be your show, not ours, so please give us your feedback at evo-blog.com or evo-world.org. Toady we’ll hear a phone interview that I had with Pierre Langlois in late 2008 where we’ll get to talk about the Kyoto protocol, what’s coming in the future and how IPMVP and EVO can play a role. I hope you’ll enjoy. Today I’m with Pierre Langlois from Econoler International and also Vice Chair of EVO and we’re going to be talking a little bit about Kyoto and energy efficiency and how IPMVP falls into all that. So, how you doing today Pierre? Pierre: Well, pretty good. Nathan: How are things in Quebec, how’s the weather up there? Pierre: Err, well, pretty cold and chilly. Winter is coming up so I guess in a few days we’ll start to see snow. Nathan: Well hopefully in the States we’ll have a couple more weeks before we see that. Pierre, I wanted to talk a little bit today about energy efficiency in Kyoto. For the person who’s just out there and knows Kyoto, they know it’s about reducing carbon and I think most people would think energy efficiency is part of that, but how does that really work with Kyoto and energy efficiency? Is it the same thing as sort of a clean energy project, or how would that work? Pierre: Yeah, well, (gap where unclear over phone), would be then both for renewable energy and other types of projects and the focus would be done for energy efficiency. Unfortunately, as of today, if you look at the CDM small scale board in the UNFCCC essentially there’s less than 2% of the projects that are focusing on energy efficiency and even a very small portion of those 2% are related to demand side energy efficiency, most of it is related to supply side energy efficiency. So energy efficiency in the production sites, essentially the one using coal, and one of the main reasons for that, well there’s a couple of areas that are related to that, so, technically, the problem financing could be applicable for energy efficiency but in reality it’s pretty complicated and we can go into the details of the areas to use in problem financing to benefit energy efficiency projects. Nathan: Yeah, so going directly into that, for the energy efficiency projects that we have now, and I just sort of read over some of the Kyoto protocol today, it was one of the main things. Going into that I guess the first thing was the financial barrier. Why would there be a financial barrier on energy efficiency projects versus a clean energy project? You know, the money’s being put there, it’s the same money, so what’s the problem there? Pierre: Well, you get to one of the… …two issues really… …energy efficiency really there are… …and the transaction costs to be able to get a carbon financing deal out of an energy efficiency project is still quite high and the process is quite complicated. So why it prevents quite small scale projects to be integrated into the CDM mechanics and the GI mechanics. As an example, a typical energy efficiency project in an industry might be one hundred thousand dollars and the potential carbon credits that could be obtained out of a project like that m

Via ACEEE.org: Washington, D.C.: A federal agency Thursday ordered the operator of the nation’s largest marketplace for electric power to allow energy efficiency projects to compete directly with electric power plants.  The new head-to-head competition was ordered to begin with an auction this May to purchase the resources needed to meet peak power demands during the summer of 2012.   The auction will be run by PJM Interconnection, Inc., which coordinates electric grid operations serving 51 million people in 13 states and the District of Columbia, and operates the nation's largest competitive wholesale electricity market.  “This is a major breakthrough for consumers,” said Steven Nadel, Executive Director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).  “New investments in energy efficiency should help lower the cost of meeting the peak demand for power on hot summer days.  The PJM auction will provide a new source of funding for efficiency projects, allowing the savings to consumers to grow.” The article goes on to explain that this will change the way energy efficiency is thought about, shift the light from only energy savings to include the contributions to reducing peak demand. -- Nathan Shetterley ([email protected]) EVO New Media Director

I received the follow in an email chain and want to share it with you. These types of misconception about energy efficiency are everywhere, hopefully this brief presentation will help shed some light on the subject. We have a very interesting debate going on at the moment.  The issue is how a company should measure its overall energy efficiency savings, should they use energy intensities, indicator benchmarks, or total energy reduction.  From an M&V point of view we are quite clear on it, but there is quite uncertainty in the market on how it should be done. You have one school that supports energy intensity.  Duirng the past few years with the economic boom they ran maximum production.  This reduced the energy intensities and they were claiming energy efficiency.  Now with the drop in production they are all operating at higher energy intensities, thus they have "lost all energy efficiency".  The other schools look at overall energy use, and now they are claiming "savings"??? Attached is a presentation I made to try and illustrate to them how energy efficiency savings should be determined.  I hope you find this interesting. Definition of Energy Efficiency v3r1 Publish at Scribd or explore others: Academic Work Energy Efficiency -- Nathan Shetterley ([email protected]) EVO New Media Director