David Fisk

Urban Energy Systems

Executive Summary More than 50% of the global population already lives in urban settlements and urban areas are projected to absorb almost all the global population growth to 2050, amounting to some additional three billion people. Over the next decades the increase in rural population in many developing countries will be overshadowed by population flows to cities. Rural populations globally are expected to peak at a level of 3.5 billion people by around 2020 and decline thereafter, albeit with heterogeneous regional trends. This adds urgency in addressing rural energy access, but our common future will be predominantly urban. Most of urban growth will continue to occur in small-to medium-sized urban centers. Growth in these smaller cities poses serious policy challenges, especially in the developing world. In small cities, data and information to guide policy are largely absent, local resources to tackle development challenges are limited, and governance and institutional capacities are weak, requiring serious efforts in capacity building, novel applications of remote sensing, information, and decision support techniques, and new institutional partnerships. While ‘megacities’ with more than 10 million inhabitants have distinctive challenges, their contribution to global urban growth will remain comparatively small. Energy-wise, the world is already predominantly urban. This assessment estimates that between 60–80% of final energy use globally is urban, with a central estimate of 75%. Applying national energy (or GHG inventory) reporting formats to the urban scale and to urban administrative boundaries is often referred to as a ‘production’ accounting approach and underlies the above GEA estimate.

Cyber security, building automation, and the intelligent building

Extending the narrow scope of building management systems to form the ‘intelligent building’ has led to the widespread use of proprietary ‘enterprise’ software platforms and networks in both monitoring and control. The PC user is only too familiar with the vulnerability of networked computers to malicious software. But it is only recently that attention has been paid to the possibility of virus damage to process controllers. The hazard for ‘building management systems’ functionality is real but the risk is difficult to assess. Pressures on system procurement and upgrades aimed at improving functionality bring with them increased exposure to the probability of a successful attack. Most published security protocols may engender a false sense of security. The key defence is to ensure a ‘fall-back’, ‘black start’, ‘dumb capability’ within the intelligent building.

Comparative review of building commissioning regulation: a quality perspective

Building regulations are an important policy instrument available to governments wishing to improve building energy efficiency, which should be a priority to policy-makers wishing to target cost-effective avenues in support of carbon-abatement targets. Meanwhile, building system commissioning has been recognized as a cost-effective measure to cut energy consumption, but in practice commissioning quality can deliver less-than-satisfactory outcomes. Regulation needs to better support commissioning outcomes. A five-grade commissioning scale is developed to assess the quality of commissioning and propose a common language to assist with regulation setting. Using this scale, building regulation and polices related to new and refurbished building commissioning were analysed in comparative case studies between jurisdictions England and California. This study finds that Californian regulations mandate a higher quality of commissioning and regulations that are more enforceable. The crucial elements to support better-commissioned buildings were identified as: outputs-focused regulation (not input based); regulation and process clarity; commissioning agents and building official training; as well as acknowledging the financial burden of upholding more complex building regulations. For the full benefit of commissioning to be realized, policy and regulations for existing buildings will be required.

Smart systems commissioning for energy efficient buildings

The gap between as-designed and as-operating energy consumption of new buildings has been widely recognized. Commissioning for optimal energy performance should be a key process to remedy this but in practice, due to shortages of time and budget, commissioning is often limited to ensuring ‘practical completion’ and minimum year-round energy consumption may not be achieved. Commissioning implementation suffers, historically, from poor availability of real time data. Portable wireless sensor networks offer substantial opportunities to support energy-efficient seasonal commissioning by giving temporary access to additional, continuously and simultaneously monitored data points. This paper describes a strategy to implement ‘smart commissioning’ through portable wireless sensor networks for air conditioning systems. Key requirements for delivering seasonal commissioning strategies of multi-modal systems are discussed. Practical application : The importance of post-occupancy commissioning in delivering good energy and environmental performance of new buildings is now widely recognised through practices such as soft landings. However, troubleshooting can be difficult when the building is occupied and budget to do this limited. The building management system may identify that there is a problem but is very unlikely to be collecting the necessary forensic data to solve it. Portable wireless sensor networks specifically designed for analysing building services can overcome this problem in a convenient and economical way and can help development of new industry tools to close the performance gaps and demonstrate in-use building performance.

Optimising heating system structure using exergy Branch and Bound

To reduce work in assessing alternative system structures in low-energy design, a Branch and Bound method is proposed. The bound is based on exploiting the thermodynamic constraint of exergy destruction along a heat flow path. A novel derivation of exergy in a flow system is provided and used to show its fundamental relationship with temperature and primary energy. The method is applied to two simple systems. Practical application: In novel low-energy design, there can be many structural solutions that meet the client brief, especially at early stages in design, before full simulation/optimisation can be efficiently applied. The technique presented offers an application of the Branch and Bound algorithm that can be implemented on a spread sheet and which usually reduces the number of full structural solutions that have to be produced. It relies on working in exergy as the metric rather than temperature, and the work explains why this approach, common in optimising services components, can be applied to heating systems.

Transport Energy Security. The Unseen Risk

The decline in significance given to energy security in recent years can be associated with increasing trust in the self-balancing security of a global-trading economy. After the events of the first years of the 21st century, that framework now looks more problematic, at least for oil supplies. The underlying level of risk that characterised the oil market of the late 20th century has changed, exacerbated by the increasing inelasticity of demand for oil-based products in the transport sector of the world’s economies, which in its turn reflects the strategic dominance of transport within economies. The prudent course for the international community is to reduce the underlying causes of possible geopolitical constraints by making them more manageable through normal channels. One such constraint that is within every nation’s capability (and self-interest) to reduce is the upward drift in the price inelasticity of domestic oil consumption. This could involve increasing the ability to divert oil used within the domestic economy to transport. Yet for many industrial economies, this option has largely been exhausted and a more radical approach of opening up new energy vectors to supply the transport sector may be needed. Taking preventative action after a security event is generally more straightforward than taking precautionary action to ensure that it never happens. The latter course may only be successful through a coincidence with other interests. The current environment agenda is such a coincident interest with transport fuel security.

Limits to growth may be subtle but still inexorable

conflicts” (Nature 433, 557; 2005) understates the extent of the embarrassing failure by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), during the past year, to disclose information about NIH scientists serving as paid consultants to private companies. Having been a scientist at the NIH since 1967, as a physician, a cell biologist and now a science administrator, I must add that the habit of non-disclosure continues, making further embarrassments likely. In November 1995, the then-director, Harold Varmus, made an unpublicized change to the rules on paid consulting by NIH scientists. The permissiveness of the 1995 rules opened the way for a spree of consulting that ended on 1 February 2005, when a stricter policy was announced. The previous decade left a legacy of harm, only part of which has come to light. In articles published since December 2003, the Los Angeles Times has given ten specific examples of NIH scientists with financial conflicts of interest. However, details of hundreds of others remain hidden, and the extent of the damage caused since 1995 is unknown. NIH director Elias Zerhouni told a Senate subcommittee last year that he had found no harm to patients as a result of NIH scientists’ outside financial arrangements. However, he provided no evidence to support this claim and did not explain how he arrived at his conclusion. On 2 February 2005, I attended a large meeting of NIH scientists at which Zerhouni spoke of “very disturbing” product endorsements by NIH scientists “speaking for a company on behalf of a product to entice physicians to prescribe a product at greater levels”. He provided no correspondence

Warming to the idea

Steve Schneider has long been a prophet of man-made global warming. With all the current interest his latest book must command attention. However it is an unfair twist of fate that Global warming should hit the stacks at the same time as a whole range of new reviews of climate change accessible to the lay reader. It is also ironic that, given the story of inaction and incredulity that Schneider relates, the books final section on international Responses should have been outdated before it left the press. Many of the bookstall competitors are scientific journalists of some standing. However, Steve Schneider has not only made his own substantial contribution to the art of climate change prediction, but is also no stranger to explaining science to the public. Perhaps the most important theme threaded throughout the text is the relationship between science and the media.

The Urban Challenge

Cities race to reconfigure, to extract the most from waste matter and energy, and minimize the overhead of transport. Cities race to reconfigure, to extract the most from waste matter and energy, and minimize the overhead of transport.

Wood pellet heating systems (Earthscan expert series), by Dilwyn Jenkins

that with the use of indices, tools can evolve that flag up key issues in time. In one sense that is as far as the authors seem to intend to go and readers perhaps should not be greedy and want the material expanded to the political and economic landscape that needs to be meshed in to make this assertion totally credible. So they point out that the sustainability of countries like Saudi Arabia and China seem at this moment to be based on annexing, through commercial contracts, the resource of others. So presumably in one scenario the rich have a sustainable future and the less well off do not. That kind of uncomfortable conclusion is not developed. For authors with some credible academic track record it is disappointing that there is no discussion of what lies behind the indices used. The HDI is an index used in international development and is ‘designed’ to exhibit rapid marginal gains for changes at low values and low marginal gains at high values. That is fine when allocating development funds but a less convincing vehicle for comparing two developed countries. It is not a fatal flaw in the argument but slightly unconvincing that the richness of different nations and cultures can be wrapped up in indices not specifically designed to measure ‘sustainability’. Several times the text gets near this goal, for example in the discussion of solar budgets but then shrinks from making a firm proposal. That may be the authors’ intended style. Chapters never end with the normally obligatory ‘conclusions’ paragraph or open with a summary of ‘the argument this far’. It makes the book feel less didactic than some, but also less focussed. A book of this kind is inevitably faced with describing the state of a nation of several million people through a summary one-liner. But once or twice the authors might have been a little more circumspect about the geopolitics. Did Cuba really cut itself off from the rest of the world? Unusually for an Earthscan publication this reviewer has some editorial carps. Several important graphs – especially those showing global distributions – are squeezed into the body of the text so as to be unreadable when their scholarship merits a full page. The text is littered with ‘cartoons’ which really add little and risk giving the false impression to the casual reader that the argument is a little frivolous. What this book sets out to do is both necessary and ambitious. It does not fail so much as only get part of the way. But it must be a welcome contribution to the growing ‘Rioþ 20’ literature that is there to guide humanity through a century that looks much more perilous than it did at ‘Rioþ 0’. David Fisk Imperial College London Email: d.fisk@imperial.ac.uk 2012, David Fisk