Advanced Multipoint Submetering Opportunities for NYC Building Professionals

Webinar Outline

• The Energy Terrain• Technology Transition• Changing Skillets: Players and Opportunities• The Triacta Opportunity?• Deployment• Reliability• Communication Standards• Management• Regulatory Compliance• Summary

Content/Narrative

The Energy Terrain

• LL88• CDFA Title 24 Part 11• Benchmarking• Negawatts• Demand Response• Intelligent buildings• Proactive investment• Price signal• User pay

The rising cost of energy continues to be a key issue for property managers. As result, new energy management concepts and language are coming to the fore.

It’s nice to imagine a world awash in new fossil fuel resources — but we all know that we need to work on a cleaner and more sustainable future.

The long term solution is the development of new sources of clean energy — and governments and business are busy working towards that end.

But the near term solution is NegaWatts — the lack of consumption — and refraining from building the wrong type of energy generation.

And here’s where today’s opportunity for building professionals lies.

The best tools for creating NegaWatts are User Pay, and Price Signal. There is a catch though … you need to be able to attribute consumption to the right parties, accurately and traceably, and you need to be able to understand the nature of overall building consumption to be able to change habits and processes.

The tool for that is the simple electrical meter. Why?

Technology Transition

We live in a world where new buildings can be built from scratch incorporating the latest technologies — but we also live in a world where most of the existing building fleet does not have adequate technology installed to accomplish the job at hand.

There is a massive requirement to retrofit to make this happen, but the retrofit path is fraught with high costs and potentially harmful technology choices.

Fortunately — among the choices of doing nothing, using antiquated tools, or pursuing expensive and overly featured building automation tools — a lightweight overlay solution has emerged that effectively addresses the issue:

Networked, multi-point meters.

The multi-point meter solution is purpose-built to address retrofit applications.

It is designed to be cost effective.

It is designed to look deeply into the electrical network of a building and query electrical use — at the circuit level as opposed to the black-box overall building consumption level many older buildings find themselves stuck with today.

It’s been deployed and proven to be effective. And it available today at a low cost.

Still, even with this proven track-record, multipoint meters are poorly utilised by facility managers and property owners.

But this is beginning to change.

Regulations are key, and they are starting to happen.

New laws such as NYSERDA LL88 and California Building Code Title 24 part 11 are now specifying the use of meters to facilitate the conservation of energy.

The good news…

It’s still early days and there is a “first mover” opportunity for companies that are aware of the impending market shift and establish themselves as competent (if not expert) in the metering solutions available.

These solutions are not all “created equally” and some are better at fitting into this new energy environment than others.

An environment which requires communications protocols, open systems compatibility and fluid information flow.

Changing Skill sets, Players and Opportunities

Here’s how things lie today…

• Electricity management requires IT centric metering platforms and Energy Management Software to fulfil the promise of the Price Signal effective

• Energy Management Software vendors are springing up all over

• Energy Management Software vendors and Property Manager’s need reliable, easy to deploy metering platforms as the foundation for their efforts

• Metering platforms must match the information technology sophistication of Building Automation — but be simple and easy to deploy

• The electrical contractor is ultimately the key to deploying these systems and must be competent

• FEW electrical contractors are competent in these new systems or see the requirement — and many are just plain afraid.

The door of opportunity is open for Electrical Contractors, System Integrators and Energy Management companies (including the traditional ESCO) who want to aggressively siege the opportunity — to provide solid, reliable IT capable metering platforms.

What is the Opportunity?

• Electrical Contractors — win business that requires more than just a spot meter here or there, and that opens up the doors value added service potential

• Energy Management Software vendors — take the problem of accurate and granular data out of the equation by ensuring the right metering fabric is put in place. That is one with advanced IT characteristics that they know how to manage.

• Energy Service Companies (ESCO) — go beyond “rule of thumb estimations” by using a real time, accurate measurement instruments.

• System Integrators — be able to branch into the adjacent market of electricity from the Building Automation world.

The overall opportunity for owners and property managers is to ensure that whatever project they pursue, they acquire a long-lived, future-proofed building information asset that can be employed by multiple stake holders.

Why Triacta?

The new electricity world is about data visibility — system wide.

It’s about easy-to-deploy, cost effective granular metering fabrics.

It’s about reliable, long term operation.

It’s about the ability to fluidly direct information to any service provider — through open systems that avoid “lock-in” services.

It’s about standards compatibility and regulatory compliance. When $ are involved, an instrument of weights and measures standards is required

It is also about looking beyond a single building footprint to entire property fleets.

Triacta’s PowerHawk platform is a utility class, revenue-grade, multi-point, cloud-based meter management and service provisioning platform designed to facilitate large scale building energy visibility for billing, energy management and measurement and verification purposes.

How does the PowerHawk platform address these points?

Deployment

It is one thing to walk in and install a manually read single point meter on a panel, or in a suite.

It is a different level of complexity, though, installing a multi-point system in a brand new building, and still more in a retrofit situation.

PowerHawk meters are designed to easily integrate with existing electrical panels. Current Transformers (CTs) are the link between in-panel breakers and meter point inputs via colour coded cabling that ensures easy matching between the meter and what is required to be measured.

By using accurate single line drawings or making a site visit, the electrical system of a building can be modelled with the PowerHawk Manager’s hierarchical representation tool — which matches meters to panels, services, and physical building characteristics.

The cloud-based PowerHawk Manager generates an installation record for the contractor to wire into the panel — using colour coding for proper circuit association. Once the CTs are wired, the contractor simply plugs the cable into the meter.

The installation record also serve as a permanent record (both in the data base as well as affixed to the electrical panel) for traceability and, if required, future diagnostics.

Modelling the design in the PowerHawk Manager also allows meter configurations to be downloaded into the meter at time of installation — when communication to the internet is established and the meter automatically “homes” back to the PowerHawk Manager.

Communication with the meters is also simple — utilising existing building automation protocols or a simple LAN (Wireless or Wired) connection directly to the internet — sending information to the PowerHawk Manager (or server of choice). More on this later.

Commissioning of meters — ensuring that they are connected properly, measuring correctly, and associated with the right circuits — can be performed by direct application of loads while viewing the effects on the meter in real-time.

Reliability

An often overlooked criteria for choosing a multi-point meter is longevity.

Buildings are built for decades of use, and an installed metering platform should be too.

PowerHawk meters are designed with high reliability in mind — not only in terms of “time before failure”, but also in terms of measurement accuracy.

Triacta meters maintain calibration for at least 10 years without an issue.

Communication Standards

For decades submeters (single point or multipoint) have relied on older communication methodologies to collect information.

Typically this has taken the form of an RS-485 interface leading back to a proprietary collector using proprietary communication standards which often ends up defaulting back to the manual reading of the meters, and ultimately disuse.

A slightly better scenario is the use of the MODBUS protocol over RS-485 — which allows for the use of third party data collectors.

This approach allows for some flexibility, but still requires an on-premise collector that pools information in a manner that is typical only accessible locally — on the facility manager’s Personal Computer.

Much has been made lately of the convergence in the Intelligent Building of all information over IP … Internet Protocol.

This approach has a strong acceleration effect on information visibility and flexibility — with many systems using a common communication highway.

It is also creates one very short hop to making information available to the internet itself — and being able to make the information available globally to many parties.

Despite this type of break-through, it is still common practice to make meters slaves to “polling” collector boxes, even when Internet Protocol is used, using protocols such as MODBUS TCPIP and BACnet IP.

This adds more complexity to the deployment, and creates one more opportunity for vendor solution lock-in.

PowerHawk meters can support MODBUS RS-485 interface communication SIMULTANEOUS with ethernet IP connection.

On the IP side, the PowerHawk meter can be a slave to multiple Building Automation Systems (BAS) masters — using MODBUS TCPIP or BACnet IP protocols.

But, most importantly, the meters are built to be connected directly to a network — having their own IP address that lets them immediately report to the PowerHawk Manager cloud server, or any other energy management server or dashboard.

And this reporting can take place while the meter is ALSO being queried by any number of on premise Building Automation Systems — making meter data available anyway it is needed.

Management

Most metering systems use a client/server style of management system — installed on an “on-premises” local server, communicating to the meter via MODBUS RTU.

Programming of the meters are almost exclusively performed via direct RS-232 connection.

Some companies are moving to a “manager of manager’s” architecture, where a cloud-based application can talk to the on-premise manager to give non-local visibility. This is typically still an after-thought bandaid.

Triacta’s approach is to go “all in” — with a cloud-based server, the PowerHawk Manager.

The PowerHawk Manager communicates directly with meters via Internet Protocol, and performs the following tasks:

• Creates a hierarchical representation of the meter network which can view the meter points from many different perspectives:

• building physical• payee• services orientation

• Provides user accounts at any point in the hierarchy with scope of control and visibility limited to all branches below

• Allows for remote programming of meters, so they can be shipped directly onsite

• Provides a comprehensive set of meter diagnostics for monitoring meter network health

• Establishes a Meter/Network/Building Asset management and topology that can be exported or imported via XML for interaction with other dashboard and energy management applications

• Provides graphical representations of voltage, power, current, reactive power

• Can be the rates and tariff engine for billing• including coincident demand calculation for apportioning demand charges among

multiple tenants

• The generation of installation records

• The emailing or FTP of reports for energy consumption and billing for external use

The PowerHawk Manager’s cloud-based approach offers many advantages, especially to service providers and value added resellers that would like to offer higher touch/sticky post installations services to their customers. This includes:

• Using the PowerHawk Manager to act as an independent data repository for customers to guarantee a lock-in free relationship. Customers are becoming highly attuned to “openness” and highly suspicious of solutions that lock them in permanently to a vendor. Lock in can happen when proprietary standards are used, when the service provider acquires and “holds” the customers data. This is why Triacta pushes compliance with standards, non-proprietary communications, and guarantees that the customer owns their data, even if it resides on the PowerHawk Manager servers.

• The PowerHawk Manager can be used to complement other Service Applications, not displacing them, focusing on the meter-specific features and allowing partners to deliver their own niche expertise in concert.

Regulatory Regime Compliance

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of a meter to be used for either billing customers or conforming to building regulations is the use of a meter that complies with industry standards.

When using meters for these purposes, regulators have either already specified that the meter complies with certain specifications or will likely do so in the near future.

When money changes hands based on the information generated by a meter, then the regulator and the service provider have a responsibility to ensure that there is an assurance that the data will be accurate, reliable and traceable, over a broad range of environmental conditions that typically apply in the expected use case of the device.

Triacta has been operating in this mode since its inception (13 years), and its meters have always been designed to comply with the most stringent regulatory regimes.

PowerHawk meters have been designed to fully meet ANSI Standard c12.20, class 0.5 accuracy, and approved by California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA - responsible for instruments of weights and measures in California), New York Public Services Commission, Measurement Canada and the Philippines Energy Regulatory Commission.

Summary

We are at an inflection point in building management — where the requirement for a flexible metering platform is recognised as an indispensable tool for multiple stakeholders in the energy value chain.

Triacta’s PowerHawk Platform has been designed to fit:

• the technical requirements of metering• the requirements of easy deployment in both the new build and retro fit environment• the requirements of being an enabling technology for partners to build value for themselves

and their customers.