Brian Patterson Addresses Quest for Net Zero Energy Buildings in APEC Plenary Presentation
Brian Patterson, Chairman of the Emerge Alliance, gave a plenary talk at the Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC) on the "Quest of Net Zero Energy Building." According to Patterson, the nation’s quest for Net Zero Energy Buildings "is likely to change a great deal about the way we approach designing and constructing buildings in the future. From the use of a broadened integration team in early planning and the heightened use of BIM tools, to the consideration of a diverse pallet of energy efficient building solutions and site-based power generation and storage, the days of incremental improvement of older technologies may not meet the challenge."
The following are some of the highlights of a summary of his presentation that Patterson has provided as an exclusive to PowerPulse.net.
"Energy consumption, like population, is growing faster than conservation alone will satisfy. It’s time to take a more responsible ‘User’ centered view of the issue, a view that will lead us to some fundamentally new conclusions. We need a power system that will 1) grow, shrink, rearrange and otherwise change dynamically, 2) self-organize as a network as well as reconfigure/respond to user needs and complement needs of the existing grid structure, 3) and most of all, avoid the negative nonlinear dynamic that dominates the current macro power system, albeit having acquired new brains.
"Sound familiar? It should. We just built a system just like this and called it the Internet. So now what we need is the Internet on steroids, maybe we could call it the Energy Net or Enernet?
"The secret was to let it develop virally, that is, in independent layers. We can borrow this learning and apply it to the EnerNet. Personal power domains, room-level nanogrids, building- and campus-level microgrids, and even community-level grids can be added to complement the existing levels of grids managed by our public utilities. If we set a few basic standards, we can do it. And in less time than it took to create the Internet.
"But now is the time to act. Our current 100-year-old electrical power system is full of mismatches. New, distributed sources of power generation and storage are natively direct-current (dc), while the legacy infrastructure is almost entirely alternating-current (ac). Today’s digital world needs dc power on the user side, which currently requires most power be converted from ac to dc. If storage is a factor, this means multiple conversions of the same original power. Could we find a better way of wasting power?
"But let’s not relive the Edison – Westinghouse battle of the currents. Let’s think in terms of hybrid systems that focus on minimizing conversion loss and improving overall reliability at the user level. This means change, real change in the way we deal with power at the building level. We need logical solutions to the problem of the growing mismatches in our power systems.
"One such solution is to make greater use of DC in our power systems. By simply making thoughtful and deliberate changes in the number and level of power conversions in our systems, with a keener eye on the real needs at the device level, we can save a significant amount of energy. And while we’re at it, we can make site-based renewable power generation and storage easier and more efficient to integrate.
"But first, we must set standards that define critical interconnection interfaces between layers. We need to agree on communication protocols, not just one, but how the many will talk to one another, just as hundreds of software protocols co-exist within the Internet. We need to build off the Internet, adding to it an Enernet of devices that can share information with people and other devices.
"And it takes a industry to build a building, so creating, or perhaps adapting, an ecosystem that can support those new standards is likely to become everyone’s job. To help organize this effort, an open industry, non-profit organization called the EMerge Alliance was founded by companies like Johnson Controls, OSRAM-SYLVANIA and Armstrong World Industries. These pioneers have been joined by companies like Philips, Emerson, Intel, Legrand, Tyco Electronics, Cooper, Acuity Brands, Crestron, Hubbell, Ideal, Leviton, Steelcase and a steady flow of other companies and organizations willing to lift this plow-share."
