Gaining Real-Time Building Performance Insights: Q&A with WSP

by | Dec 17, 2018

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WSP USA

Cory Mosiman (left) and Josh Radoff (right). Credit: WSP USA

Actual building performance often doesn’t live up to high performance design expectations, say experts Josh Radoff and Cory Mosiman of the engineering and professional services firm WSP USA.

Radoff is WSP USA’s built environment sustainability lead, heading up the company’s Built Ecology team, and Mosiman is a smart building specialist working in WSP’s Building Technologies Systems division.

For the most part, building energy consumption data remains stuck at the gross monthly level, whole building level, or at best floor-by-floor level, Radoff and Mosiman say.

“One of our hopes is that buildings start to have their own performance metrics that vary, either real-time or day-to-day,” Radoff said. “So if a day goes by and the energy occupancy wasn’t what it should be, that should be a trigger for someone.”

Recently we caught up with Mosiman and Radoff to learn about the current hurdles to understanding true building performance, and how their work in a living laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, is providing efficiency insights on a real-time basis.

How does WSP define smart buildings?

Cory Mosiman: We think that “smart” buildings are more user-focused. Whether you’re a building operator, owner, or somebody in the building on a daily basis, smart buildings help them go about their day easier, do their jobs better, and manage the building more effectively.

Josh Radoff: For sustainability, “smart” connects with us because it’s this enabler of things, especially in the existing building space, that we’ve never been able to do before. Also in our design work for new buildings, when you get into occupancy management and space utilization, it changes the way we approach those conversations.

Why did you start focusing on building performance, especially around energy?

Radoff: I was touring the Bullitt Center in Seattle and, at another point, Rocky Mountain Institute’s new headquarters building in Basalt. These are the best of the best in terms of energy use intensity (EUI). Part of me was thinking they are amazing buildings — and yet they appeared to be sparsely occupied. EUI as a metric seemed kind of flat.

We also looked into the Energy Star algorithm to understand the inputs and outputs and how they work. We’re trying to understand LEED’s new Arc platform. There’s this missing piece: no one is able to say how efficient their building is on a real-time occupancy basis. An important chapter in our sustainability progress is incorporating “smart” so that we can manage buildings in a way that’s informed by what’s actually happening in them.

What are the biggest challenges in making buildings truly smart and energy efficient?

Mosiman: Everybody talks about data. The biggest challenge right now is finding value in the data, and that’s something we’re continuously working on in, trying to understand, and help other people understand.

When you are starting to look at data across disparate systems, how do you design a holistic approach? There are open-source efforts to coordinate metadata schemas across different groups and stakeholders — mechanical, electrical, contractors, systems integrators, all these people — so we know what the other person is talking about. Not only that, but you need to provide a mechanism for machine-to-machine communication and portable analytics across buildings, enabling portfolio-level consistency.

What is the ThinkBOLDR living laboratory?

Mosiman: The ThinkBOLDR lab is WSP’s attempt to help clients navigate this new world of IoT. We had a lot of clients coming to us saying, “I have vendors knocking on my door, they sound like they’re selling the same thing. I don’t know enough about the technologies to make a distinction. Can you help?”

The living lab started about three years ago, and was coordinated as WSP moved into a new space in Boulder, Colorado. It’s looking at different vendor systems, installing them in our actual office space, doing the systems integration ourselves, and looking at the challenges we’re trying to help clients address.

Could you share some of the efforts you’re undertaking there?

Mosiman: One was to prove out that a room booking system could coordinate with a lighting control system to help manage a conference room space in a more intelligent way. The room booking would talk to the occupancy sensor in the conference room. It’s also looking at the Outlook calendar on the back end, and booking the room or canceling the meeting if nobody shows up for it. A client came to us and said we want to do something like this, but don’t want to spec it on a project until we know it works.

Radoff: We can do things like marry actual occupancy of the space with actual power usage, and that gives us great visibility in terms of what’s driving usage. Then we set up SkySpark, a data integration platform, to do energy management and monitoring-based commissioning.

We started deploying air quality sensors that are Reset-certified. We’ve been trying out different monitors in the space that can measure total VOCs, carbon dioxide, and particulate matter in addition to temperature and humidity. With a centralized data aggregation program like SkySpark, we can have real resolution.

Did you learn anything interesting from this aggregate system?

Radoff: Recently we saw a spike in CO2 and wanted to find out why. We had a big gathering of our leadership from around the country looking at the lab after 5 pm when the HVAC turned off. We were able to use data to say there may be an issue with the assumed scheduling of the ventilation system here.

Where do you both see building performance heading, particularly with energy management?

Radoff: Cory and I have been developing a metric called ONEUI, which stands for “occupancy normalized energy use intensity.” It’s also a response to ennui from our inability to produce and use the data that actually drives building performance. The only reason we use EUI is because we can measure square footage. But if we have real-time occupancy information, then we can do occupancy normalized energy use intensity. So a building that’s packed with people, regardless of its Energy Star score, might look a lot better.

New metrics specific to portfolios or buildings, using smart energy management — having sensors in spaces looking at power by space, time of day, time of the week — and monitoring-based commissioning will be core elements of a holistic management strategy going forward.

Mosiman: Sensor technology is becoming so inexpensive that we can deploy it at a much higher spatial resolution. When you start looking at energy consumption at 15-minute intervals and you have energy consumption disaggregated and coordinated from the design side, you can quickly pinpoint what exactly is causing 35 or 50% of your energy consumption. Then you can come up with a strategy that is much easier to implement. You don’t have to wait for a month or a year — you can see if it’s changed in a few days.

We need more people who are comfortable with data analysis, data communication, and what to do with the data. This is a cool opportunity for us at WSP because we have all of those people working to solve things that have been elusive. We now have a much better approach to get results.

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