Avoiding Temperature Tantrums

Energy experts offer strategies for gaining the upper hand over rising costs and disastrous shortages by building more options into their temperature control systems.

 

The year 2003 has proven to be a primer on what can go wrong with energy costs and reliable energy supplies, based on spiking fuel prices and a blackout throughout the Northeast and Midwest that plunged millions back to the Stone Age - and the year isn't over yet.

For companies entrusted with that huge chunk of the nation's food supply requiring temperature control, unexpected price spikes and service interruptions now have to be expected.  And industry experts who spend most of their time pondering what's next on the energy front have a host of suggestions for easing some of the angst associated with energy woes.  These are the people who manage energy consumption for their clients, like eNERGYSolve, in Somerset, N.J., and those who design and construct facilities that offer a hedge against blackouts and brownouts, like C.E. Doyle, in Campbellsport, WI., and Composite Technologies Corp., of Boone, Iowa, with its patented Thermomass Building System.

Energy savings and the creation of backup programs to provide reliable service can be achieved in several different ways, says S. Lynn Sutcliffe, CEO of eNERGYSolve.

A key element of this kind of analysis is a company's history of energy use. Based on each individual facility, often in different regional markets; the costs associated with current suppliers; existing conservation measures; and the ability of backup systems to deal with service interruptions or reduce the impact of short-term price spikes.

"In procurement, we look for areas where energy - gas and electricity - is deregulated or where it's possible to negotiate lower rates based on high volume.  In some cases our clients can use a co-gen system, a combined heat and power (CHP) that uses an absorption chiller to convert waste heat like steam or hot water, which can be converted instantaneously and used for heating and cooling.  It's a system that produces free energy and for a company operating at 30 to 40 percent efficiency, co-gen moves that efficiency rate to 70 to 80 percent," he explains.

"With this kind of system [a company] can cool at night and ride out a four or eight-hour period without any danger, and sell that saved energy back to the grid.  And in the frozen food industry, all those savings drop to the bottom line.  We are willing to even own the equipment - install onsite generators with absorption chillers.  Some PRWs are already using this," says Sutcliffe.

Errors in utility bills and late payment fees can be fertile ground for energy savings.  The bill paying services offered by eNERGYSolve include bill verification, on-time payments, contacting utilities when bills don't arrive on time, and downloading all that monthly data to a Web site where clients can see long-term trends in consumption and costs.

"Billing errors are almost always in the utility's favor, and although some errors are minor, one or two percent of them can be huge.  What we have found is that a bill might be dated the 15th of the month and be due the 31st, but it may not arrive until the 25th, and many people don't know how to negotiate with their utility.  We go to the utility and have them send bills in time for us to pay them.  For one company, we saved $800,000 in late fees," he notes.

Decisions about building design and construction materials are, of course, often dictated by a client's need for the lowest available costs, especially if the facility is likely to be leased of sold a few years later.  However, companies that plan long-term ownership of a facility are more likely to consider "tilt-up" style construction featuring Thermomass insulated concrete panels, says Dan Doyle, vice president of C.E. Doyle, design/build contractors who promote these insulated concrete panels for efficient freezer/cooler design.

"Because of current economic factors, owners need the fallback position of getting the lowest building price, but for customers who have built with Thermomass, they come back to us when they are building again," he says.  The Thermomass panels can deliver energy savings of as much as 67 percent, but 25 to 50 percent is not unrealistic on any project, explains Craig Olson, project engineer for C.E. Doyle.

Above and beyond energy savings generated by the high insulation values from these concrete "sandwiches," the ability of these structures to hold their temperatures also translates into lower equipment cost for cooling and heating.  "When we are working with HVAC contractors we will tell them to reduce their heating and cooling [equipment] sizes by a significant factor.  We have one 120,000-square foot facility being heated by two Cambridge units," Olson says.

Cost Differential Narrows

The comparative costs of using traditional steel and concrete versus Thermomass panels have continued to narrow in recent years, says Doyle.  "Masonry construction costs are now relatively close to tilt-up, and with steel the spread has gotten a lot less.  We used to talk about 20 to 25 percent more, but now it's more like 5 to 15 percent.  The payback is usually in the five to 10 years [in reduced energy expenses]," he explains.

These panels consist of concrete with a pre-formed layer of Styrofoam and fiber composite connectors.  The outer concrete layer, or wythe, is typically two to three inches thick, with six to eight inches of insulation, with the inner layer of concrete ranging from 5 to 10 inches thick depending on structural considerations.  The two layers of concrete are held together by the connectors.

The panels are designed without the thermal bridging that transfers heat and cold, and are available in a variety of sizes limited only by access to the appropriate crane to lift them into place.  The largest size installed to date is 62 feet high.  The panels are load-bearing and can be double load-bearing when, for example a chilled storage unit is positioned next to a freezer.  The interior finish provides a durable surface that resists damage from fork lifts and has a minimum four hour rating.

"With the high efficiency of the panels, a freezer unit can maintain temperature for 24 hours in times of blackouts or other power outages,"  says Robert Long, executive vice president and founder of Composite Technologies.  For those times when a freezer fails, he says a unit that goes down on Friday can wait until Monday for repairs. "We get calls from customers who tell us they've been able to reduce the size of their cooling units and the number of cooling units that have to be started up.  That's why our company continues to grow.  Most of the business we get is from word of mouth.  Once an owner uses our system, they come back.  We've built 10 dry storage buildings for Save-A-Lot and we have two more under construction today," he notes.

 While the nation's current resources for generating electricity are sufficient to meet demand, natural gas reserves are declining and that situation is not helped by increased use of the energy resource, Sutcliffe observes.  Another dimension to questions about the reliable availability of natural gas is the gradual aging of the delivery system, with some pipelines showing their age and in need of repair or replacement.

More troubling is the transmission system that delivers electricity, a network of regional systems that has been "Balkanized," complicating efforts by federal regulators to ensure a reliable, national delivery system.  "Some transmission systems are in really bad shape and some are getting there.  The utilities are not making the investment," he says, noting the recent regional failures that cascaded to create the August 2003 blackout.