Reference

What is an energy manager ?

Perhaps, it is someone who sees the ravages of storms and heatwaves, drought and floods or disease an malnutrition as things that will come, but that can be kept to a minimum. This someone cares about the reputation of their company, about money, and doing a job well, and about the earth their grandchildren will inherit.

So an energy manager is someone who takes care. We should all care and all be energy managers, but from the professional more is required. What more is there beyond caring ?

A manager lacking the authority to act or delegate is useless.


A little discomfort goes a long way

Sustainable energy - wood stacked for drying
Dried (three-year old ) wood near Niederried
What happens when two worlds collide ?

The nineteenth century and earlier is one,

the future and thereafter is the other.

We can characterize these with numerous technological changes - but the biggest change is inherently human - laziness !

Energy Saving - Balance Temperature - Yes / No?

"Rules of thumb" develop lives of their own.

Some need to be slain at birth; while others have "legs". 

Balance point temperature...

Should we send it to the naughty step - or run it up a flagpole so we can salute it ?


Smart Metered Energy Savings - Size Matters!

How big is too big ?

Suppose,you were a really, really good energy manager.You would know that almost every boiler and chiller on the planet is far too big for the job intended. 

Bigness is not a virtue in efficiency circles. But how big is too big ?

Imagine that your faithful smart meter, diligently logged consumption daily and plotted it on a chart. Really smart energy managers would use kWIQly to do this.  It might look like this.


Graph of Energy Consumption and Savings potential

I think it is fairly clear that on two occasions in the past two years, these boilers have been maintained.  Those monstrous spikes are when the boiler was being fired manually.

So are these boilers "Just big enough for the job required" - or are they "a wee bit more".

I would like to exaggerate and say these boilers are immeasurably over-sized - but they aren't. They are very accurately measurably over-sized.  

The funny thing  in Switzerland and Germany where they are "supposed to be" very environmentally conscious - is that they also REALLY like reliability so they make everything in the heating department way too big.

The inevitable result is inefficient operation. (Boilers are much less efficient on low load).

So if you really need to think for more than a microsecond about whether Smart meters (however badly named) are a smart idea - then I hope this helped a little !

If you would like me to explain why boilers are so inefficienct on low load - just ask - meanwhile here is a much more interesting blog post

How 'nifty' relates to saving energy


Goya : Art expressing the effect of a sleep of reason
Goya : The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
We are IT engineers not linguists, but in terms of human languages between the two of us in the IT team we have a command a command of english, german, dutch, norwegian, french and spanish. 

Being able to communicate effectively is essential for IT staff. They should be encouraged to blog !

We have a thing called DSLs - Domain Specific Languages (so DSL is basically geek jargon for jargon).  

A nifty DSL is apt -and well suited to the task being just as terse and / or expressive as it needs to be - but where does the word "nifty" come from ? ...

LeWeb manages energy in Paris - How so ?

LeWeb Logo
Add caption - Go on try !
Win free trip to their website :)
Hi again fair reader !

I just wanted to let you know that (whether you are in fact fair or not) - We are honoured to have been chosen as one of the sixteen startup finalists for LeWeb in Paris 4th, 5th, 6th December 2012.