Executive Housekeeping Today - January 2009 - (Page 19)

the green scene Smart Grids, Smart Meters, and Smart Energy Imagine the benefits if all our communities and individual buildings generated their own energy. The giant step toward sustainability promised by the installation of solar panels and wind turbines used to generate power, and the “smart grids” and “smart meters” that distribute and measure the energy, is something to get excited about. What are the real, practical, and environmental problems associated with our current system of a one-way pipe from the utility to the buildings we inhabit? Let’s just name a few—the threat of power outages during in-opportune times, at places such as hospitals; the increasing costs of energy consumption, especially at peak hours; and the negative environmental impacts of large power plants that create the energy we currently consume. With a move to “distributed generation” of our energy, buildings will become on-site generators of energy—no more risk of power loss over the presently overly-taxed grid infrastructure. This is also important for those in remote areas where energy must travel over long and aging transmission lines, which lose as much as 30 percent of the energy due to resistance in the transmission lines. The costsavings is obvious, as is the reduction in carbon emissions with this drastic reduction in purchasing energy from power plants that, for “No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.” - Helen Keller i by Stephen Ashkin the most part, burn coal to create energy for the consumer. Executive housekeepers can help implement an energy-efficient system for their building where everything from lighting fixtures to cleaning equipment and appliances are only using energy when they need it and not soaking up expensive energy at peak times. Smart meters can be on site, so you can monitor your energy use in real time, which will not only create a more efficient system of pricing, but will allow for you and other building managers to audit how and when you are using your energy. Instead of being billed by your utility at a flat rate for power, you can set a varying rate—so if you run your washing machines and dryers at night, you could pay much less than the rate for air-conditioning during daytime peak hours. There will obviously be a learning curve as we develop and finetune the hardware and software necessary to manage energy consumption, but those kinks are being investigated as we speak. Hopefully, soon we will be able to communicate with individual appliances, managing and monitoring their use and energy consumption from a monitor. Other hurdles include the need to improve battery technology to better store the energy we harness and to increase the capacity of the batteries. Another bridge to cross, yet one that will be inspiring to witness, will be when our buildings’ fleet of plug-in hybrid vehicles are connected to our building’s smart grid. Some experts say business fleets of hybrid vehicles are a decade away, but the advent of this change in how energy flows to our building, and then used by our building and its inhabitants and vehicles, will be a watershed moment in business energy consumption. This is when our “smart grid” is truly in place—restructuring what is now a model where power plants directly send us our power, we consume it, and they bill us; concurrently, we consume petroleum from a completely separate entity, and pay that bill as well. All the while, we are doing harm to our environment and working harder, longer hours to pay the increased energy costs. With our move to the distributed generation, we move toward a sense of self-reliance and responsibility toward balancing energy use versus what we can harness. Now that we can measure our own consumption and our ability to generate and store energy, it is the time when true sustainability is in sight. There will be interesting times, when we arrive to work and check in with our smart meter to see where we stand for the day, week, and year. In these days as an executive housekeeper, we will be (continued on page 25) January 2009/Executive Housekeeping Today 9

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Executive Housekeeping Today - January 2009

Executive Housekeeping Today - January 2009 Contents Executive Corner Start With the Seal: CRI Seal of Approval Offers Proven Effectiveness 2008 IHW Celebrations! Frugal Housekeeper What’s in Your Janitor Closet? Feature Article Let the “Recognition Games” Begin! The Green Scene Product Highlights New Members Joint IEHA/ISSA Members REH/CEH Members Advertisers' Index Calendar of Events Inside IEHA What IEHA Has Done For Me

Executive Housekeeping Today - January 2009

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