Module5:CommercialSectorEnergyLecture

Today were going to talk about the Energy sector of our nations economy that deals with commercial buildings.

Module5:CommercialSectorEnergyLecture

These are offices, retail stores, restaurants, schools, universities places where we work, places where shop (shopping malls, things like that). Inside these buildings the typical major areas of energy use are heating, ventilation, and air conditioning environmental control. So, the word comfortable, where we work and buy our things. Lighting, so we can see what were doing. Plug loads, and appliances.

Module5:CommercialSectorEnergyLecture

So when you look at the commercial energy sector in the United States, it consumes about 36% of all electricity production. About 18.5% of all primary energies in this country. About 3/4ths of all that electricity used in commercial buildings is used just in three places: heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, computers, and electronic devices. So, what were going to see in the next part of this module are some typical buildings, typical retail shops, restaurants, and places where we work and for enertainment. Well see our energies used there and how we can save energy in these places.

Module5:CommercialSectorEnergyLecture

(No slides video transcript) Here we are on the outside of Hough Hall, one of our newer buildings on the campus of the University of Florida and we're in the commercial energy sector of the United States of America. And that includes offices restaurants, grocery stores, retail businesses. And this is a good example of an office space. And we're going to go inside in a minute and see what kind of new things are in this building that makes it operate energy efficiently and smoothly. Here's one of the common rooms in our new building and one of the things they do in this type of buildings is use daylighting. And that is, sensors in the ceiling, that detect if there's enough light to operate this room without turning the lights on. And it automatically turns lights on and off depending on how much light is outside coming in. So, you and I don't have to remember to flick the switch all the time because we always forget, the building does it automatically. And here we are in another common area in the same building and we have an entire glass wall here that provides daylighting for this entire common area. One of the other things I'd like to point out are the lights in this hallway down here. These are new energy-efficient lights in the ceiling, and they save a lot of money over time over the typical lights in our older buildings here on campus. Okay, we've looked in other parts of the building, let's take a look at an office and see how energy efficiencies of our new offices are. Okay, now, inside a typical office, it's designed for energy-efficient design, there are a lot of different things going on. First of all, there's daylighting, there's a window in the office, so when you have good lighting, you don't have to turn lights on. Second of all is the position of lights. If you look over on the desk, there's task lighting so you can light only the surface that's needed. And the ceiling lights, lights are off right now. The other thing you could do is look at all the computer and the peripheral electronic devices in this room. You can have them on power management to shut down or go to sleep when people are out of the office. And furthermore, there are actually sensors on the wall that will tell when you're out of the office, to turn things off when you're not here. So, all in all, it's a system of controls, design, and personal behavior that make this one of the very most efficient offices on campus. [SOUND] Another thing you have to worry about when you use daylighting is the fact that, here in Florida, the sun gets pretty hot. What we have here is a window with a western exposure. And if you look very carefully, you've got a screen that you can pull down that still lets enough light in to see by, but cuts out that really bright afternoon sun in the western exposures. Here we are in the inside of the building and this plaque represents the, the accomplishment of the building in terms of energy and environmental design. In fact, that's what LEED stands for, Leadership and Energy and Environmental Design. The gold rating is next to the top, so it's a pretty good
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accomplishment for our campus. Many types of businesses make up the commercial sector. What we're going to look at today is a, a grocery store, a local storefront retail type of business it's a startup in the last year. And so, many of the pieces of equipment inside are, are used and we'll take a look and see how that affects the energy bill. One of the biggest energy users in a grocery store are display cases. These are older models because this is a startup grocery store. It's a cooperative grocery store, like we talked about earlier. And the heat is rejected from this case, making the vegetables and fruits cool, but right into the building. It needs to be removed by air conditioning. Newer ones have the heat rejected outside, so it's not like a double load. And, and you'll find out in just a second, these are also very noisy. As you come down here, you can also see the lights in here. These lights are older lights, not very efficient. Those can be replaced or a whole new model case can be put in here, probably using half the energy they used to. Okay, one of the other things we want to talk about here is also the lighting. You know, one of the things in a restaurant and also in a grocery store is you want to see the colors that are being displayed, the greens of the green peppers, the reds of the tomatoes. Good lights for that, like also in a jewelry store, are halogen lights. They're also not very energy-efficient. Some of the newer LEDs have good color rendition and are also much more energy-efficient. So, that's one of the recommendations we'll be making here. [NOISE] Okay, behind the scenes is one of the interesting parts of any store. So, you start looking at how they use energy in the backrooms. What's neat about this place is you have a cooler here that's both a freezer and a cooler. The walk-in cooler part is like a foyer to the freezer. So, the very coldest air is in back, so you're not dumping all the nice frozen air right into the hot part of the store. So, it's energy-efficient, it also has gotten, when they closed one of the local hospitals so they got a pretty good price on it, too. And as you can see, it's pretty big. So, inside any kind of retail establishment, you control your environment for the customers' well-being. So, in here, we have an air handler system that keeps the building cool in the summertime and warm in the, in the wintertime. And this one's pretty new, right up above the door here, but as we can see on the outside, the outside unit is probably getting on in age, and we could replace them with new energy-efficient items. Okay. So, the outside air conditioning units for any kind of building, you always look around and find them and look at the condition of them. And these are well-maintained, but they are getting fairly old. Newer models are much more efficient. You can probably save up to 40% of your air conditioning bill by replacing those. We are out back of the grocery store we just walked through, and over my shoulder, you can see something that's you're going to see more of the future.

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There's a photovoltaic solar ray on the roof of this building. Unique to Gainesville is a feed-in tariff, where the local utility will pay an investor to produce power from the sun and that's exactly what's happening here. So, even though you probably should make a building as efficient as possible first people have gotten together as an investment and put the solar ray on the building... both in feeding energy during sunlight hours to the building, and a rate of return for the investor. So it's a real good idea here in a local community and right here at our own coop. Here we are at the Jones B-Side Restaurant, it's a local restaurant started here at this location a few months back but they been a local fixture in this town for many years. One of the things they like to do is buy local. That's another way to save energy that we talked about in our agricultural segment that if a food doesn't have to travel as far, it's much more efficient. So, while we're here, let's take a look on the outside of the building to see what else we can find out before we walk inside. So, here you are on the outside of a building. This just happens to be a restaurant, but this could be the same thought process you'd do with anything, a house, a commercial building, a university, it doesn't matter. But what do we see right here? You see a little bit of an overhang on the building, which keeps the sun out of the windows and cuts down on your air conditioning use in the summertime. And we see a brick building, nice structural building. But as we walk around the building this way the first thing that comes to mind over here is this funny thing, a piece of equipment stuck on the wall. That's a gas meter. Now, as an energy auditor, somebody that comes through and helps people save energy, that's my first clue, that they use natural gas in this building. And I need to keep an eye on things that use that so maybe we can save some energy and give some recommendations. Alright, let's keep walking because it's always like a, a mystery hunt when you look at these buildings for the first time. Well, there you have it. There's our electric meter right here. It's one of the new digital meters that dont have the little rotating wheels so you know that they've done some upgrading here. So, you have a digital electric meter and the local utility uses that to figure out how much energy has been, energy has been used. And let's keep walking around the building. Okay, on this side of the building, you can see something that's really nice, especially in our climate. You have an overhang. Now, this overhang shades these windows that happen to be looking in the easterly direction so your morning sun doesn't come in the building to heat the building up. So, you can save a lot of energy by planning your sun angles, your overhangs, and in this case, a nice awning for outdoor eating. So, that's very good. Well, you can see, from this angle, the air conditioning units are on top of the building. Now, that gets them out of the way for vandalism. It doesn't take up valuable real estate in a parking lot, or in a building. But the problem is, that might be one of the hottest parts of the building in the summer so, it makes them kind of
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inefficient. So, one of the things you'd look at is, can we make these units more efficient? Can we move them at a later date? Any time you want to upgrade, and buy new equipment, you want to plan ahead for that. It might take you a couple years of planning but it's a good way to save money is to make these decisions ahead of time. The last thing you want to do is decide what air conditioning unit you want to buy at August 14th in the afternoon when it's 100 degrees out. Well, now, we'll walk outside the building and look and see that everything that was outside, the air conditioning meters, things like that. Lets go inside. But before we do, take a look at these windows. If you take a careful look, you can find out that they are double-pane windows. They're energy-efficient. They're good for this climate. And that's the kind of thing you need. [NOISE] Okay, well, we've done a quick walk through the outside; let's take a look inside the restaurant. And obviously, right off the bat, you see that they've got good daylighting here. And that saves energy right from the beginning because you use the natural day lighting from the sun and you don't have to use much lighting in here. You can see they have some ceiling lights here. Well look at those as a replacement for energy efficiency because I believe they're incandescent and, and halogen, and your LED and your CFLs are much more efficient than that. But the other thing with a, a dining room is the air conditioning and typically as we'll see, you know, you almost always have one system for both the kitchen and the dining room and sometimes that can lead to trouble. Let's go in the kitchen now. [NOISE] This is really the background of any good restaurant, and what we have it a lot of energy use right here. You can see the lights up here. These are older T12 lights and newer versions of these lights can save about half the energy being used for these lights right now. On this side right over here, what we have is a heart of a kitchen, the stove, oven, lot of energy using devices here. They have natural gas at this restaurant here, that's what most good chefs prefer to cook on, and that uses a lot of energy. But here at the end of the kitchen, what we have is their freezer. Now, freezer is the coldest thing in a restaurant and here we have the ovens and stoves, the hottest things in a restaurant. So, one of the things we might recommend here with a lot of room back here, is moving that freezer and back away from this hot area of the kitchen. Let's come around the corner here. It gets kind of tight back here, but it's a good working environment. You got drink boxes here that keep things cool. Come around the corner. [NOISE] On this side over here, we have another stove. Over here, a walk-in cooler. Now, this is built right into the building, so that's not going to move. Okay, but what we find out is that theres a lot of new equipment in the restaurant and grocery store environments that use a lot less energy. So again, a long-term plan might be to upgrade this material or these devices to something that are more energy-efficient. This is startup right before
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the restaurant starts, so as you can imagine, it's pretty busy in here. Okay. If we want to come back here, what we have here is a, like any place, the dishwashing station, where you clean all the dishes. You need hot water for that, to clean the dishes. We come back over here. [NOISE] Yeah, ice machine. All of these use energy also. The back in the corner, we have a hot water heater. [NOISE] That's an electric water heater and what we have at this site is natural gas and electricity so one of the recommendations right here is, is use natural gas for your water heating. It's both cheaper and more energy-efficient. Okay, if you look back up here there's an attic hatchway into the attic, and we'll be looking at that a little bit later to see what the insulation is in this building. That might be a way where we can save energy also. Now, we want to go back here, take a look right here on the wall. That's our thermostat. Now, one thing common to a lot of restaurants is they have one air conditioning system for the entire building. And so, you have patrons out there that are eating dinner, eating lunch eating breakfast. And then, you have workers back here in a hot kitchen, moving, working, a lot of physical activity. So, with one air conditioning and one control, sometimes there's a fight between a too cold dining area and a too hot kitchen area. So, one of the areas, you might have a, a zone control on an updated air conditioning system that could save both energy and make it more comfortable in here also. One of the things you always want to do at places like this is check out the attic. What we have here is a typical commercial building with a roof deck and a drop ceiling below it. Insulation is at the roof deck and the building is a little older so I'd suspect that there's a real lack of insulation. The other problem is the actual attic hatchway itself with a hole there basically lets the air travel freely from kitchen to hot attic and kind of throws away some of your air conditioning. So, we'll be fixing that too in the future.

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So, today weve looked at a local retail grocery store, a restaurant, and some typical office spaces. We saw some very old and outdated technology. We also saw some of the very newest technology. So you can see where our vendors and our industries are taking us in terms of energy savings. Weve got a lot to offer, and some areas we need to move into. So, the current lightning technology is a lot more efficient. The pictures up here represent some lights that you can get on the market right now, but I guarantee you by the time this comes out, the lighting industry will move even further and faster. Newer display cases for restaurants and grocery stores are very much more energy efficient than the ones that have typically been used in the past. Also, the new appliances that we can put into places will save a lot more energy.

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We've looked at the fact that the energy production for commercial spaces in our nations economy uses about 36% of all the electricity and about 18.5% of all primary energy. But, if you break that down even further, the commercial building spaces in this country use 38% percent of all their energy in lighting alone. Lighting uses 38% of electrical energy in commercial building spaces. That is used up in lamps, powering ballasts of the farthest lamps, and it also matters what kind of fixtures and controls you have day lighting, timers, photocells, or just a manual switch.

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But, all in all, a four to one improvement in lighting is possible. In terms of controls and new technologies if you added all those numbers up, that would result in an overall savings for our nations electric production of 10%. 10% - you think, well thats just a small fragment, but 10% of our nations electricity production is more than we get from all of our hydroelectric sources, and more than what we get from our other renewable energy sources. So, doing these upgrades and making our nations commercial buildings more energy efficient in lighting would save a significant amount of our nations energy.

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