Tanya Barham, the CEO of Community Energy Labs, is featured on the Grist 50 list of leaders in the U.S. who are working on solutions for a sustainable future.
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Tanya Barham, the CEO of Community Energy Labs, is featured on the Grist 50 list of leaders in the U.S. who are working on solutions for a sustainable future. Grist states that it reviews thousands of nominees before whittling down the final list. Barham’s company works on helping schools and other public agencies create more energy efficient buildings. Barham joins us with details of the company.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. For almost 25 years, the Seattle-based nonprofit news source Grist has focused on the urgent problem of climate change and ways to tackle it. They recently put out a list of 50 people in the US who they have identified as “fixers”, leaders in a wide variety of fields who are all working on solutions for a more sustainable future. Portland’s Tanya Barham is one of them. Barham is the CEO of Community Energy Labs, which focuses on helping schools and other public buildings use energy more efficiently. Tanya Barham, welcome back to the show.
Tanya Barham: Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Miller: It’s great to have you on. Why are you focused on building energy use?
Barham: That’s a great question. I’m not sure if you’re aware or if most folks are aware [that] 40% of global carbon emissions comes from buildings. And most of that comes from electricity use, not just energy use. So even as we decarbonise by reducing direct combustion of gas or propane, even as we electrify, we still have this carbon footprint that comes from the interaction with the grid. And so it makes sense to electrify everything and then clean up the grid, right? But that actually requires some physical bridging between buildings and the grid, for safety and reliability reasons, and a whole number of reasons. If you run everything electrical in your house, you pop the circuit breaker, right? Well, the grid is just a circuit. So when everything’s electric for safety reasons, we need to coordinate those things up and there is a lot of complexity in how to do that with buildings. They’re the main driver of peak load for the grid. They’re the main driver of carbon emissions. And that’s why I wanted to focus on buildings.
Miller: What are the biggest energy users within buildings? I would just imagine it’s heating and cooling. Is that right?
Barham: Bing bing bing bing, Dave gets an A! Yeah, heating and cooling applications are the largest drivers of energy use. In most building applications, that’d be lighting first. All of us can do something about lighting, that’s pretty easy, we can replace it with much more efficient lighting. But then heating and cooling applications, anything that heats or cools water or air. So that’s gonna be your furnace, that’s gonna be your water heater.
Miller: How did you decide to focus on one particular piece of this, which is the controls for energy use? If I understand correctly, you’re not going out there trying to convince schools to switch to heat pumps. A lot of people are doing that, talking about it and working on that. But you’re focused on something very specific, the controls of existing infrastructure.
Barham: Yeah, that’s a great question. I have a long history here in Portland. The Pacific Northwest is, of course, a wonderful place to grow up as an environmentalist. So my history is working with Bonneville Environmental Foundation. We started the Solar for Our Schools program, which is now a nationwide program, right over there in West Linn. I worked at PECI, twice, the first time doing HVAC diagnostics. So I know a lot about the grid side, about energy efficiency programs, about solar and renewables. And I also worked briefly at PGE working on their virtual power plants.
One thing that I noticed is that when we would call for what’s called demand side flexibility, when the grid would ask the things that use power from the grid to be flexible in their energy use, that flexibility didn’t always show up. And so I wanted to go really deep on why.
Miller: When you say that you were asking for flexibility and it wasn’t coming, who were you asking? And what were they saying?
Barham: Flexibility can come from a lot of different places, right? If you think about it, most of us come home, if we have an electric car, we might plug in our car, we might turn on all of our devices. And this creates peaks in energy usage. And electricity needs to be used at the moment that it’s generated. It has to be consumed. You see in places like California, where there’s a move toward electricity that you can’t just ramp up and down, there’s more solar, there’s more wind, that it changes when things are available. Matching that supply and demand is really important for grid operators.
However, we in our homes are so used to what’s called baseload generation that we just turn on the light when we want to turn on the light. We wanna be warm when we want to be warm. And there actually is a lot of flexibility in when and how much energy we use. And that’s one of the reasons people love heat pumps. Heat pumps are different than the existing technology, where it’s “Oh, the water is cold? Okay, just heat it up at the max possible heat and then you have warm water.” Whereas heat pumps slowly ramp up over the day, so that you’re sipping rather than guzzling that electricity.
There’s a lot that goes on that we don’t know about the grid. And what flexibility looks like was a lot of different things. In some cases, we would use batteries. That tends to be very expensive flexibility. In other cases, we would have industrial customers. One example of flexibility would be- I believe that there’s like the Ross Island Quarry over on Macadam or MLK? And it literally would be like you call the building operator and be like “Joe, turn off the rock chipper!” There was that kind of flexibility, a big load.
But then there are also programs like many people might have what’s called flex time rewards, where the utility sends you an email or a text message saying “Hey, we’re forecasting that there’s gonna be a lot of demand for energy and not as much supply. Either our coal fired plant is offline, it tripped off line because it’s too hot out, or for whatever reason, there’s a shortage. We need people to conserve.” And sometimes that’s automatic and sometimes you would ask for it. And what we saw was that it was not always predictable.
So when I looked at the programs that were predictable, like what happens if you just let the utility control your thermostat for example, or your water heater? Because remember, the biggest drivers of this need for energy are your heating and cooling. Well, I was talking to a lot of different people in commercial and residential applications: homeowners, businesses, schools, public buildings. And the same issue kept coming up over and over again. I think the way that one woman answered my question is sort of emblematic for me about why I really decided to focus on this controls piece. I said, “Hey, do you participate in our peak time rewards program?” And her answer was, “Is that program where you will pay me $5 a month to turn off my air conditioning on the hottest day in summer?” And I’m like “Yeah, that’s the one.” And she’s like “No, why would I do that?”
Miller: “That’s why I have my air conditioner.”
Barham: Right. My thought was we are never going to solve this issue of energy flexibility unless we can also guarantee a certain amount of comfort. Unless we as a utility understand that people who are using energy, from the utility perspective, we call them ratepayers, we call it load. But from their perspective they’re like this is my CPAP, this is my oxygen, this is my refrigeration.
Miller: Those are on/off things. It’s worth saying that for your last example, the question could be “what if you have it set to 72 as opposed to 69?” It doesn’t have to be so binary?
Barham: Exactly.
Miller: Why did you end up focusing on very specific customers, places like schools or other public agencies?
Barham: So once I started looking at that, I said we need a solution that can balance comfort, someone needs to be comfortable or they will not participate, with grid needs. So then I started talking to people about decarbonisation, what would they be willing to do, etc. Typically the way that we do that for a homeowner, you can install a single thermostat. And you can get it more or less for free from PGE. Maybe it ends up costing you 200 bucks, maybe you get two of them in your home. If you’re a homeowner or a private entity, there are subsidies. Or you can go out and get a loan. Here in Multnomah County, we’re lucky to have something called property assessed clean energy, where it just becomes part of your property taxes. So that’s all great.
But if you’re a public building owner, you will need to make capital improvements in order to save that energy or get that kind of flexibility. And what I found was that because of their procurement processes, typically if you’re, say, a school district, you need to pass a bond in order to make capital improvements that can get you this kind of energy efficiency and control. Passing that bond is getting harder and harder. Particularly, we work a lot with rural communities, where their bonding capacity is shrinking as the number of people in their community shrinks. Or like everything else it’s been eaten by partisanship, it becomes really difficult to pass a bond measure. So they have no way to finance these energy enhancements, or heat pumps, etc. They need something cheap, fast. And then on top of it all, even if they do put in these heat pumps, you’ve got two rooms in your house. They might have 30 to 120. All of them turn on at once. In order to manage that in a way that isn’t going to pass along something called the demand charge, which is what commercial customers have to pay, they need to sequence when all of those HVAC units start up, in addition to keeping everyone comfortable. Because you might have elders, you might have children.
And so when I said to them “What would it take? How much would it need to cost so that you wouldn’t have to go through a long, drawn out, multiyear bonding or procurement process?” And they said if it costs less than $20,000 to $50,000, and it could reduce our demand charges which are anywhere from 30% to 60% of our bill, and it could be done without interrupting the school day so we can still provide services to the public, elders, students, whatever, we would buy it.
So I went out and said “Well, what technology could do that?” So I really started with the problem first. 30% of commercial buildings in the United States are publicly owned. And because of their procurement, good stewardship of taxpayer dollars unfortunately makes their procurement processes much more difficult than private entities or single homeowners. And so what would be a low cost solution that could deliver both comfort while reducing energy by as much as 20% to 30%?
Miller: Let me give you what I understand to be the short version of the product you have, just to speed things up, because I have so many questions about this. Correct me if this is wrong. But essentially, say a school district buys your product. For a month or more, you have this kind of smart algorithm, machine learning thing which pays attention to the temperature, how much energy is being used, and what the heating and cooling actually means in different places. It learns what the status quo is. And then it figures out a smarter way, a more energy efficient way, to use the existing appliances for heating and cooling in a building. Is that basically right?
Barham: I would say that’s it. We like to say that our technology enables clean, all electric, self driving buildings. So it can be used in a gas application as well. Essentially it does what no other technology on the market is doing. It is delivering comfort. It can guarantee comfort while reducing energy consumption by up to 23%.
Miller: So that’s my question. How do you do that? Those kinds of energy consumption savings, how are they realized without a huge blow to comfort?
Barham: What we do is very, very different. I worry about doing this live on air because I’m like, how deep am I going? And am I going to lose everybody?
Miller: We’ve got smart listeners. And five minutes. So keep that in mind too.
Barham: You just interrupt me if you need to. I think about it like cruise control, or spinning plates. There are two types of controls on the market right now that are prevalent. So there’s something called building automation systems, or you might have a smart thermostat, and they tend to use what’s called a set point. So for each zone in a building, they’re looking at the set point, and then they’re measuring the indoor air temperature and trying to heat or cool so that you maintain that set point. They’ll use something called either rules based control, or proportional integral derivative control.
Our controller is different. It uses physics to solve this problem. So essentially what we do is we set up a very simple physics based model of the building. We look at blueprints of these commercial buildings, and we feed those into a machine learning algorithm that sets up a very simple physics based model of the building that models how heat is transferred between, let’s say, the sun and the southern wall, between each room or zone in the building. And it takes a guess at what the thermodynamics or the physics are of that building. Then during that month that you were talking about, typically during unoccupied periods, it really depends on the application. We do work with some low to moderate income multi family housing in addition to schools so it’s a little different there. But let’s say in the school example, on the weekend, the robot will make adjustments. It knows what it thinks [how] the thermal dynamics work in the building, but it’ll change the set points around just to see what happens to the indoor air temperature when it turns equipment on and off. And it will refine its model so that it now says “I understand how much I’m paying in terms of kilowatts,” which you can then translate into carbon or money. “I understand how much I pay for every degree or heating and cooling in this specific room, and how that works throughout the whole building and the whole campus.”
We then give it a test. We say you need to tell us what the indoor air temperature of this room will be over the next 6-24 hours. And when it passes that test, when we apply its answers retroactively to what really happened in the building, and it is accurately predicting the thermal dynamics of the building at 90% accuracy, then we allow it to use that model to also control the building. And it’s updating its controls every five minutes. It’s sampling and making decisions and forward predictions every five minutes for every zone in the building.
Think about that. A human would never have the ability to keep updating their strategy every five minutes in 125 zones. But it’s a computer, it never tires of this job. It’s the perfect job. I say that machine learning is like a toddler. If you would say to a toddler, “Every time the sun comes out, turn on this fan; every time the sun goes down, turn off the fan,” a toddler would love that job. So if it’s a job that a toddler would love to do, it’s the perfect job for AI.
Miller: What you’ve just described is the mechanism of how the AI works. But I guess it still makes me wonder what the version of waste is that’s happening right now. Is it that furnaces are on when they don’t need to be on to achieve the same level of comfort? What is the real world difference in the heating or cooling that that automation is making possible?
Barham: Let’s just take one room, for example. Say your set point is 70 degrees. When this room gets more than 70 degrees, turn on mechanical cooling. Use a mechanical element, which is gonna drive your energy cost, to cool this room. That calculation has no understanding of how the room might heat up or cool down or store energy. It doesn’t understand the thermal dynamics of the building or the envelope. It just knows this room is cold, I’m gonna try to, based on my rules that I’ve been taught, try to bring the temperature back up to a level and then I’m gonna wait until it hits that threshold again and then start cooling again.
Well when you do that with no awareness of what’s happening in all the other rooms, what you’ll have is multiple compressors running at the same time driving up the overall energy consumption. And, they might be applying too much heating or cooling. Whereas if you have an idea of how heat is transferred, a school is a great example, we know every single day that at noon kids are gonna leave the classroom and go to lunch. So it reduces the cooling load, for example, in a classroom. And so what happens is the energy goes way down. But every day at one o’clock, everybody comes back in. And a typical system can’t predict what’s gonna happen. But we know all of a sudden the cooling load is gonna go way up. So you see this huge spike. And so this actually can prevent that.
What you’re saying is, how does that work? Well, it works because it actually knows what’s going to happen in advance and can move things around to achieve the same objective with less mechanical cooling.
Miller: What would it take to have what you’re describing just be a standard part of HVAC controls?
Barham: Greater awareness. I think knowing that it’s out there. Right now we have a pilot with the Department of Energy, another one with the United States Department of Agriculture, and several pilots with California and Washington utilities. I think greater awareness is actually the only thing. Because on a purely economic basis, it makes total sense to all the folks that we talk to.
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