[00:00] Zhi Wei Li, Director of Innovation and Engineering, ICONICS
Hello everyone, thanks for joining me today. My name is Zhi Wei Li. I'm the Director of Innovation and Engineering for the US. Today I'm going to talk about streamlining operations for a sustainable future. And with me here today is Dean Tallman, the CIO of the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE). And he'll talk to us about how IUOE utilizes ICONICS as part of their building and also as part of their training program.
[00:42]
So, this is the agenda for the topics I'm going to go through today. I'll start by talking about why sustainability is important. And then some strategies around achieving that sustainability and how ICONICS is part of that strategy. And then Dean will come on and talk about how IUOE approaches sustainability and how to utilize the ICONICS technologies to achieve that. And then I'll do a little bit of demo around our product, Energy AnalytiX, that is the flagship product around sustainability itself. And end with some topics around how Mitsubishi Electric approaches sustainability and the efforts that our parent company, Mitsubishi Electric, has around sustainability.
[1:29]
So, to kick it off, why is sustainability important? A lot of people are talking about it now. And these images are why, right? We are all familiar with some or more of these images, we may have been impacted by it directly, or indirectly, one way or another. So this planet that we live in, the only planet that we've ever lived in, needs our help.
[1:56]
Like it or not, our climate is changing, we're feeling the effects of that, right? And these are some of the statistics that NASA has compiled, to show how we are impacting this world that we live in. The world is measurably warmer than before. The polar ice sheets are melting, causing sea levels to rise, causing climates to change. Ocean heat is increasing, causing ocean ecologies, like coral reefs to collapse, and there are environments that we see today that our children and our grandchildren may not be able to see.
[2:37]
So why is the climate changing? Scientists have studied our climate for a very long time. And what they've observed is that the accumulation of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, in our atmosphere is the primary reason our climate is changing. The greenhouse effect caused by higher levels of greenhouse gases act as a blanket that traps heat that we generate, thereby increasing the overall temperature. So the climate changes as a reaction to this increase in the overall temperature of the environment.
[3:17]
So what we need to do now that we've experienced the effects of climate change, and I don't think we want more of these, is to understand the causes of it. And knowing that this path that we're on is not sustainable, we should ask the smartest creatures on the planet to do something about it. Right? So what do we need to do? In general, we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. And the major part of how these emissions come about is due to our energy consumption. So energy consumption itself is not all bad. We have to consume energy to live our lives. However, we should commit to a path that lets us be a more sustainable species on this good earth. Key to that is to use energy efficiently and not waste it. So being sustainable means being energy efficient, and our corporations and businesses play a very big role in this, because these organizations consume a lot of energy in the manufacturing of goods, in the transport of goods, in computing, etc.
[4:29]
So how do we achieve sustainability? I lay out three key steps. There are three key steps to the journey to sustainability. And as with most things, knowing is half the battle. So the ability to accurately measure our current energy consumption is the key first step. Now once we know, what we then want to do is to track that knowledge. And finally, aggregate all that data that we've tracked into digestible reports that a wide audience can understand and act upon. And I will go into detail of each of these steps.
[5:16]
So first, we have to measure where to start, we must measure the overall consumption of each energy resource that we consume, like electricity, like gas, water, steam. This gives us an overall understanding of how much of each type of energy we are consuming.
[5:40]
Then we should measure and understand how these different energy sources that we're consuming are generated. For example, in the case of electricity, there are sources that are “dirtier” from the perspective of greenhouse gas emissions like coal, oil and gas. And there are “cleaner” types of generation, like wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear. Now, the clean sources are not entirely clean throughout their process because some of the equipment that is necessary to generate electricity using these clean sources themselves do produce some greenhouse gas emissions. But overall, they are cleaner than the dirty sources. So, we should do what we can to increase energy consumption from those cleaner sources and reduce our reliance on the dirtier ones.
[6:44]
Next, it's also very useful to measure who or what is consuming all that energy? We're paying for all that energy in some way, shape or form, so we should know where it's going to. So is it mostly consumed by people for things like, you know, computers that are plugged into the wall appliances, they're plugged to the wall and so on? Or is it consumed by maintaining a livable environment, like lighting, or heating or cooling ventilation of a space or a building? Or is it consumed in the case of manufacturing machinery that's used to produce those goods? And when you start measuring that, we start seeing patterns that may or may not match our expectations. So that is useful.
[7:43]
And lastly, it would be also interesting to measure where all this energy consumption is going to. Are the office buildings that we use consuming the most energy? Can we tell if the energy consumption is concentrated in certain floors, or certain sections of floors? Are factories that are producing our goods consuming the most energy? And similarly, are certain zones or production lines, consuming more energy than other like production zones or lines? Knowing as much of these through as accurate a measurement as possible, sets the foundation for all the other steps that we're going to take in our journey to sustainability.
[8:38]
So once we have measurements, the next thing we want to know is to start keeping a history of that, so we can track those changes. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So it's important that all these measurements that we collect can be visualized with visual tools like graphs, or heatmaps. And tracking and visualizing all these various measurements allows us to discover trends, as we are all visual beings, right? Seeing the measurements graphically allows us to compare consumption changes more intuitively, and better understand the effects of any of these sustainability initiatives that we may kick off and know that they are producing the kind of impact that we expect out of those initiatives.
[9:26]
The third step is in producing reports with all these measurements and history that we're collecting. Now, the purpose of these reports is to allow an organization to have a common understanding of the information so that everybody knows where we are in terms of pursuing that goal of sustainability, and how much more do we need to do to get there? Reports facilitate the accountability, and target tracking of sustainability initiatives. Reports are also necessary if the organization is benefiting from monetary incentives, like rebates from utility companies, as they often require these reports to keep themselves accountable. So the usefulness of reports is magnified, if the process of generating them is automated, such that up-to-date reports with up-to-date data can easily be generated either ad hoc or on a scheduled basis.
[10:28]
So how does ICONICS help with those three key steps? ICONICS has products that help with the data collection, through our use of open standards, like Modbus, BACnet, OPC, we can connect to all the various kinds of meters that you may have either existing or will install in your facilities. And that data is brought into our product platforms like GENESIS64 or using IoTWorX published to the cloud. And that data can be visualized in real time and can be stored in history with Hyper Historian. And once you have history, you can report on it, you can visualize the trends, you can do all those track-and-compares that I talked about.
[11:22]
Now, we also have analysis solutions built on these products. And one of them, specifically around energy, is Energy AnalytiX. So that can consume data from various kinds of meters, either they’re accumulated meters or instantaneous meters. And it can calculate the consumption based on these raw meter readings, into actionable insights and information. Energy AnalytiX is built on the same product platform that you're used to. It's built on AssetWorX, Hyper Historian, AnalytiX-BI, but it streamlines the process of all those into a single coherent step of configuration. And all that data is made available to our visualization platforms, be it KPIWorX, GraphWorX, WebHMI, or ReportWorX. And here are some samples of screens for Energy AnalytiX. But I will go into more detail on them in the demo later.
[12:29]
Now I'd like to introduce Dean Tallman, and we're very lucky to have him here with us today from the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE). Dean leads the organization from a technology standpoint, and the organization is training their union members to get ready for industry 4.0, for the coming wave of information-based workers. Dean? [Thank you.]
[13:00]
Good afternoon, everyone. It's been a while since I've been out in public, so bear with me. I'm going to leave my notes over there. I am the Chief Information Officer at the International Union of Operating Engineers. My background is I started in the early 80s as a COBOL programmer, assembly programmer, that type of thing. And I kind of rode this wave for 33 years, right? So I've seen a lot and then there's been a lot of transformation, but this one seems to be accelerating things. The IUOE’s current focus centers on the implementation of emerging technologies like Zhi described in the construction and building automation industries. We also provide advanced training to our members. So it's not just the building engineers that we train, it's also the construction guys.
[13:49]
So, we'll talk a little bit about IUOE, what we do, what our mission is, industry 4.0. A lot of these themes have been hit a lot today, so this presentation may be a little shorter than it was and then we'll talk a little bit about what we're doing at our ITEC, which is our International Training Education Center, and what we've done there with ICONICS.
[14:12]
We were founded in 1896. This is 125th year anniversary. We have a big party down at our training facility in November. I don't know, Gary, maybe if you want to come. We're headquartered in Washington, DC. We represent 400,000 members in the United States and Canada. We are the 10th largest labor union and the AFL/CIO. It's interesting about the AFL/CIO, we are part of the building trades organization so we're part of the electricians and the carpenters and the operating engineers and so it's different from some of the other unions. We're skilled with a big emphasis on training. We have 123 locals in the US and Canada. These terms here you'll see “hoisting and portable”, “stationary”, our roots are in the steam world, right? We're 125 years old. So, back then, if you were operating a piece of equipment that had a steam engine in it, if you were operating a boiler in a building, everything was run by steam. So “hoisting and portable” refers to digging and lifting. And “stationary” means that that steam engine didn't go anywhere. It stayed in the basement of that building, and you’d better be trained or else somebody is going to get hurt, right? Those are those are pretty dangerous pieces of equipment. We also specialize in the pipeline industry and the petrochemical industry. Pipeline really fits into the hoisting and portable area and petrochemical is really in the stationary area.
[15:36]
What we do … So whenever you pull up into a city, you'll see tower cranes on the skyline, you'll see construction, you'll see road crews, so anybody who's screwing up your commute because of the paving that they’re doing, that's us. And ruining the skyline with the tower cranes, that's us. But it's all advancement. It's all good stuff. We also work in the mining industry, anywhere you have to dig you'll have an operating engineer. Wells, mines, those types of things, earth moving. These stationary guys are the people that work the generators and the boilers and it all comes off our roots in steam. So those are the stationary engineers. At a construction site, we’re there when the surveying starts, we're there when the foundations are dug, we're there when the construction happens, and we're the ones that are left with the building when it's done. So, the construction phase might last two years, but that operational phase could go on for 100 years. I mean, we operate the Statue of Liberty, we operate Ellis Island, we operate a lot of national parks and monuments and things.
[16:53]
So, this is important. This English is from 1896, but the objects and purposes of this organization are to elevate the trade of the Operating Engineers. And this other piece is important, “by which the trade, the membership thereof earn a livelihood for themselves and their dependents.” We've been talking a lot about technology. In this case, we're talking about human beings. So it's a little bit different take on what we've been talking about. And it's to elevate them to the “proper position in all industry activity and the ranks of organized workers; to encourage a higher standard of skill among its members.” What does that mean? That means they should be trained in the latest and greatest technology. They should know what they're doing. If you're an employer and you hire one of our members, that member should know what they're doing. So we've got a huge focus on training.
[17:42]
It's funny, I thought, these are some of the “iconic” buildings that we're in. These are people that we have agreements with. So CBRE, Blackstone, Port Authority of New York, Brookfield, Able, all of these are people that we have relationships with. Each one of these people, each one of these organizations on this slide puts money into a training fund for the Operating Engineers. They expect training for that money that's going in from a collective bargaining agreement. So it's incumbent on us to satisfy the employers, and it's incumbent on us to train the membership. So anywhere you go, we're there. The pyramid building, the Willis Tower, Statue of Liberty, Pentagon, I think we're both in the Pentagon. So I think there are some things to talk about there. All the stadiums, all the arenas, the Vegas Strip, all the casinos, all the hotels, it's all run by our Operating Engineers, and each one of those buildings has control systems that we are trained in that we understand. Hospitals as well. Museums. It's interesting. We're in the Whitney Museum in New York City. In 2018, they wanted to get the Andy Warhol exhibit into that museum. The amount of data you have to give anybody who owns that type of art, as far as particulate matter, sunlight, CO2, humidity, all of this stuff. The guys in that facility were creating spreadsheets and dragging things down and just try to prove that they could get that exhibit in there, and I think with the advance in systems, you could probably run a report to get the same information. But the chief engineer of the Whitney Museum is the one who's responsible for all those systems and generating that information. Trying to breathe. It's been a long time. One of our bigger implementations is the Javits Center in New York as well. It's a pretty hefty Siemens Desigo implementation. And we talk about green technology and sustainability. The Javits Center, and this is something I didn't really realize until I went up on the roof. It's a green roof. It's acres of sedum up there to control water and absorption. They've got hawks on the roof. They've got bats on the roof. They've got a beehive on the roof. So we've got beekeepers and falconers and all these people, greenskeepers up there on that roof. And it's an aspect of green technology that I don't know how you monitor that. I don't know, I mean, but it was an interesting thing to me. And you probably recognize all these folks and you probably deal with all these folks.
[20:45]
We came on the scene in 1896 during the second industrial revolution, but our roots are over here in the first industrial revolution. We've been adapting to change and adapting to technology since 1896, right? So it's what we do, it's what we have to do. And all along the way we've adapted from steam to diesel, to electric, to computers, and now we're in this fourth industrial revolution of data and intelligence, so we're trying to keep up; we’re trying to stay ahead. But for a labor union to be this focused on technology, it's a bit new, but it's something that we owe our membership.
[21:31]
This is a topic that we hit a lot today IoT, IT and OT. I don't know that have to go into this anymore. But as we did these presentations today, I saw the same themes that we're dealing with day to day in all of our implementations. So, I think we all understand about IT and OT. What's interesting here is that my background is in telecom and the cable TV industry. Telecom and cable TV have had smart networks for a long, long time. They've had telemetry and data collection for a long, long time. During the 90s, and the early 2000s, the cable companies especially found themselves that there was technology that would allow them to deliver internet through a coaxial cable, it changed that whole industry. What used to be broadcast headends became data centers. The field technicians that used to run wires and do box swaps and things like that are now doing WiFi and they're doing smart home stuff. We've seen it in the telecom and the cable TV industry and I think we're living through kind of the same thing here. So from my perspective, when it comes to labor, our guys need to adjust, they need to be trained and follow that.
[22:48]
Some of the things we're looking at, I know the other room’s probably got a lot more about IoT in here, but these are the slides I've been using to kind of bang the drum internally about what is IoT, what does it mean. I try to boil it down to: It’s sensors, it’s data, and it’s actions. We collect the data, we digest the data, we put AI or machine learning on the data. It'll suggest an action and that action could either be a manual action; somebody can go do something based on that, or it could be an automated action. So sensors, data, actuators, and it's all hooked up through the WiFi and through the internet. So I think this audience is well aware of this.
[23:31]
So one of the other areas that we're looking at is digital twins. We see this coming. We've had some conversations here. I've talked to companies like Bentley and Willow and those types of companies. And from what I see, I don't think we're quite there yet. For somebody from my perspective where I'm going to train people on how am I going to use a “digital twin” at the Javits Center? What good does it do me? But we're on it, I'd like to take the journey with you guys to see where we can take that down in our facility in Texas.
[24:04]
Microgrid and sustainability off the grid. Our facility in Crosby, Texas, got hammered last year, by the little bit of snow they got. I didn't understand that. But I'm originally from New York. So it seemed, but I've been down there. And we lost power for I think seven days. Thousands of gallons of diesel went to our generators down there because our facility down in Texas is also an evacuation site so people in the area can come there and stay. So this type of technology kind of got a little more momentum there. But we're looking at this technology as an area where control systems are going to evolve. And we're going to have to start bringing this type of thing into our stationary engineers’ world to understand how we're going to integrate these types of control systems into our existing control systems. So that's what we're trying to stay ahead of. I don't know what ICONICS is thinking in this area, but this is something I'd like to follow up with.
[25:15]
So, kind of my job here is understanding the evolving industry. And it's not just here it's also on the construction side, which is very interesting with autonomous vehicles and GPS technology and things like that. But this is just kind of a list that I use to drive myself. Advancing building automation systems. that's what we're doing. Here looking at Digital twins, we discussed, IoT, big data analytics, real-time data and mobile access. The mobile access and real-time data that ICONICS has given us down in Texas is changing the way we run the building. It's very good. Virtual building automation systems. We heard a little bit about that today going cloud-based. Green technology, sustainability, off the grid, microgrid technology. So this is kind of my roadmap, my to do list of the technology I need to stay on top of and I need to drive for the IUOE.
[26:09]
My recommendation to my organization is do not get caught flat-footed. I believe the coal industry probably saw some things coming in the future that may have changed the way they acted. But we don't want to be stuck in kind of a dying profession. So stay on top of the emerging trends, reach out to vendors, partners, and employers. This is important here. I want vendors and partners to understand that we're willing to take the journey with them. We will be a lab. We’ll be an incubator for you. You can come down to our facility in Texas, try some things out, try to run them, we can fail fast, nobody would even have to know. So, and then we can do it, do it again and do it right. So, we're willing to take this journey, we've got a lot of partnerships in the industry that I think would benefit all of us. My main goal is to outfit the ITEC with the new state of the art technology as much as possible. And that's part of the ICONICS story here is what we're doing. And to develop forward thinking curriculum. So not only are we running our building with the ICONICS platform, but we’re also using the ICONICS platform to train our members in the advanced building automation classes. The people who have seen it, love it. A lot of these engineers come from places where it's not very advanced. So they were kind of blown away by what they were seeing. So that's another area that I think we should advance some of that curriculum. Phil and I have had some conversations about some ideas about what we think would happen. And then just to continually train, train, train, train. That's why the place is there; that's why we train.
[27:57]
Ahh, so why ICONICS? We needed a platform that can integrate with any building automation system. We've got Honeywell down there, we've got Daiken, we've got Schneider Electric, Niagara, Johnson Controls. We needed something that's going to be able to sit on top of that and aggregate the data. The journey started with Microsoft, a guy named Neil Ross from Microsoft got us all together. The president of the union and I went up to see Russ in here, wherever we are, Foxborough, and it was a great meeting. We didn't do an RFP, we didn't do an RFI. We work with companies to kind of bang a look and see what's out there. And somebody found Ross, Ross found us, we looked at it. We went and saw Russ, and we had a cultural fit. We had kind of hit it off. I think Russ, his brother-in-law was a member of our union actually; Local 14 in New Jersey. But by the end of it, we were taking pictures and shaking hands. So, it was pretty good. But that's a joke. But it fits. And we really didn't see anything else that was going to fit the bill like this did. So, we rolled this thing out in the middle of the pandemic. We had a team in Los Angeles, we had a team in Chicago, New York, Boston, and Houston. None of us ever met. We did it all through Zoom. You want to talk about ease of implementation? It was pretty--I wouldn't say it was easy--but it was easier than you'd think it would be. We had two people on the ground in Houston at Crosby actually at the facility. I don't look for vendors, I look for partners and I think ICONICS is a partner. Right? So, I think this worked out well and I'm glad we're in this relationship.
[29:54]
So, I just called it ITEC 4.0 so I could be cool like the Industry 4.0 and fourth industrial revolution. But this is our training center. We shrunk the picture a little bit, but it's 327 acres. It's got 237dorm rooms in it. It's got a dining facility. It's like a university. It's got a pool. It's got a nice gym, people can come there and train for weeks. The thing about it is our plant, we've got a redundant plant in there that's got in this case, we’ve got three chillers. Two are online at any one time and one is for training. So we're able to swap things out and be able to train that way. We've also just built this state-of-the-art stationary specific training area that's got, we've got a system that's running the building, and then we've got this kind of lab area that we can kind of roll different building automation systems and things in there and we can train on anything and try anything out, but ICONICS sits on top of them. We get data, and it's working well for us.
[31:01]
Here's my oversimplified architecture. I saw some much better architectures today, but this is the same story that data is collected, data is processed, rules are applied, action is taken, right? I mean it's pretty simple if you look at it. In our case now, action is being taken based on dashboards. But we'd like to take action, automated action, based on the results of what we see out of the rules engine. We haven't gotten there yet, but I think that's our next step. Whether something needs a firmware upgrade or whatever it might be some things that are easy. But I know Johnson Controls doesn't like us going in there and pushing their buttons.
[31:46]
Again, these are the same benefits, I see the same theme all day today. And it makes me feel like we've made the right choice that we're in the right direction. But again, I'll just read it off, it provides operational intelligence. And the data that we need to run that operation increases our equipment health and longevity. We think we're able to do better maintenance on our equipment and understand things a little better. Based on the information we're getting out of it, certain behavior that we're seeing on an air handler or things like that. So we get visibility of all the building systems. In our case, it's not just the building operation systems. We've also got other databases and other platforms in there, like occupancy platforms and hospitality platforms and things like that, that we want to bring all of that together so we can predict what we're going to look like, we can understand what the weather's going to be like, we can understand what our capacity is going to be. If it's going to be 90 degrees out for the next two weeks and we've only got 40 students there, we'll shut off two floors, or we'll set the setpoints down or up or whatever it might be in Texas. Our guys are very focused on comfort level. We're integrated right now with the Wellstat. I heard all about the Wellstat integration the other day and how great it was so I had to put it up here. One of the big things here is that the students are learning from a real system with real-time data in a dynamic environment. Previously, it was almost like you had some dummied-up data and you taught some theory, and they kind of got it, maybe they got it, I don't know if they didn't get it. But when we show them these dashboards that we've created, and they can isolate what they're seeing, and what it means it's very big, the feedback we got was very good. The head of stationary education is a 30-year member, but he's also a Senior Chief Engineer for Able. I stole him from Able; now he's in here, he's got real world experience. He's also our senior educator there. So working with him and us and he's been on the ICONICS implementation. His name is Nasser Dollah, you're going to hear Nasser on our demo; he thinks we autotuned his voice, John, but I don’t know.
[34:00]
That’s where we’re at. I know it went fast. It’s been a while for me, but I hope that you kind of get what we’re up to at the IUOE. It’s about the people. It’s about their livelihoods. And it’s about keeping up with technology. So, we've got a demo now from Nasser, where he's going to narrate some of the screens that we've built recently.
[34:25] Nasser Dollah, ITEC Instructor
I'd like to just start off here by talking a little bit about the monthly peak demand chart here. And what's nice about this is we're able to see on a monthly basis, what our peak demand levels are looking like. And if they are high, or they are low, it really takes us back to the equipment, because that's the whole reason for this system is being able to maintain energy and comfort and looking at the different charts here to be able to do that. And this would really show us if a chiller is being turned on too early or being turned on during the day or a large piece of equipment. So, we have a constant view of what our peak demand is doing. The other graph here which is giving us a screenshot of the deviation of setpoint into different areas, which would be the administrative area, the dining areas, and dorms, and so forth in the lobby. And that's a real big help. Because look at that; if we start to see some major deviations, what we'll do then is we'll go over to the comfort screen here. And then we'll first look at the different space temperature--I'm sorry--percentages of space comfort in this area here. And if it's really deviating a lot, then we'll go into the different spaces and look at that. But another nice option to this screen here is the CO2 parts per million. This really helps us out here when we're bringing in the amount of outside air, because that's really where the cost of energy comes in. The amount of outside air, whether it's cold air or warm air, it either has to be heated and either way, it's going to cost BTUs, which, in turn, costs kWs. So, by looking at this here, and looking at it right now, which we're well below, you know, between 800 to 1000 ppm, which is telling us here, we could probably shut down on our outside air dampers quite a bit, to be able to save some of that energy. So these are some big money savers right here for us, and also comfort, being able to see what our comfort levels are.
[37:06]
Then the next thing we'll do is we'll go into the different floor plans after looking at this here, which is the percentage of space comfort. Sometimes, you know, if we're pretty much all in the green, which we are a lot of times, we might not have to go through all the different floor plans. But if we do have a big percentage of too cold or too hot, then as we go through the floor pans, we'll go through the first floor here and click on our layers and look at the deviation from setpoint here. And as you can see, we're in the lobby area that looks pretty good in the lobby area. But once we go into the administrative areas over on this end here, we can start to say to ourselves, you know, we're deviating quite a bit from what the actual setpoint is. The setpoint is, you know, the zone temp is 66 degrees, so that's a large deviation there. And then from there, we can, if we want, if we have other problems in other floors, we can easily go into the other floor plans and look at the second floor. And look at those deviations, which we have quite a few in the colder zones, and we can go to the third floor also. But from there, we're going to actually go to the VAV summary. And if we are having a problem in one of the areas,we can go to that VAV box and this one here, 130, which is showing us that it’s really warm in the area. And then what we'll do there is that takes us right to the piece of equipment. And that's where I was saying to start off with, this helps us with the operation of the equipment, energy wise, indoor air quality wise and comfort wise. So we might go to this piece of equipment, we might have an issue with the blower, we might have an issue with fan belts. We found through this a couple of times that we actually had an issue with a variable frequency drive. And by going through the sequence I just went through, it took us right to the issue of that drive. Also, you can have, you know, on the list of items, bad filters, dampers might be sticking, or outside air dampers might be sticking. You might have a bad actuator, bad sensors. So, this has been very, very helpful with that part of it.
[39:58]
Another item that we can go to is, you know, after looking at our VAV summary, take us right to the air handling unit because we might not only have a problem at the VAV box itself, but if it's an entire area, we might have a problem at the air handling unit itself. So, this is really showing us that the unit is running at 100%. We've had issues where we're looking at the fan speed and wondering why it's sitting at 20% and the area's not meeting setpoint, and that's where we were able to find an actual VAV box that had a problem. We were able to find an actual variable frequency drive that was a problem on the unit itself. So, in that sense, it really helped us a lot.
[40:53]
Now going down into the summary, digging deeper into the summary itself, and going into an air handling unit here. All these items that I walked through with you already, I actually use in the classroom setting too, as far as peak demand and for them to understand what peak demand is, and how you actually are able to watch your peak demand and how you can alleviate peak demand all together. And then taking them into the different floor plans and so forth and if you have a sensor problem. I use a lot of this in the classroom, but this is one screen that is very helpful in a classroom setting, especially when I'm teaching indoor air quality, air testing and balancing, and controls. I use it in all three classroom settings. With this screenshot here, I'm able to show them the basic ventilation cycle of the exhaust dampers, the return dampers, and the outside air dampers. Showing them how exhaust dampers and outside air dampers might be working proportionally together, or if you're having a pressurization issue in the area, you might be bringing in, sending out a little bit less exhaust, bringing in a little bit more outside air to make that area more positive. So, energy wise, you're not bringing in any cold air or pulling in any hot air because if that area is in a negative, now you're actually bringing in that 90-degree air into that 72 degree air that you're trying to maintain. So with this here, we're able to really troubleshoot the building, and I actually use it in a classroom setting. I'm actually able to show them the frequency drives and how they work in conjunction with each other. The fan, the actual chilled water coils, the hot water coils, and actually showing them where the sensors are in all the different areas. The discharge air sensor, the return air sensor and being able to read temperatures and show them what I'm bringing in and actually what the leaving temperatures are. So that's been very helpful in the classroom settings.
[43:34] Dean Tallman, CIO of IUOE
He really likes that system.
[43:37] Zhi Wei Li
Well thank you, Dean.
[43:38] Dean Tallman, CIO of IUOE
But just quickly, it just shows you, all this analytics and all the data we're talking about today, this is actually people taking action based on it. Maybe you find a bad fan belt, maybe you find a bad filter, things like that. So, it's really, again, it's where the digital world meets the physical world. And thank you very much.
[43:59] Zhi Wei Li
Thank you, Dean, that was very informative and very inspiring. And thanks to Nasser for doing the demo. Continuing with this sustainability theme, we're very proud to announce that we've been recognized by Microsoft as a Sustainability Changemaker, right through the efforts that we have improved providing tools and capabilities for customers to embark on their sustainability journey. Microsoft recognizes that as a key step in helping our customers get on the sustainability journey. And one of the customers that took advantage of that capability is bank Intesa Sanpaolo. So banca Intesa is the leading bank in Italy. So they're very large magnet, Italy, they have a lot of buildings and portfolio. And they needed a way and a system, I guess, to monitor their buildings to give them an idea of how well are they operating their buildings? How efficient are they using the energy in those buildings, they reached out to Microsoft, Microsoft reached out to us, and the result is a solution that allowed them to save almost 500,000 euros annually. And that was, you know, amazing when they when they tallied up the numbers and that was what they were able to achieve. So this was built using Microsoft technologies, using ICONICS technologies, and is being deployed through the joint effort of Microsoft and ICONICS. So our colleague in Italy has gracefully recorded a demo video of their system and I would like to thank Banca Intesa for allowing us to show that here.
[46:00]
Let's start by selecting the Montebello building from the navigation tree. This loads the meter map overview of that building, showing the active power consumption of each meter in the building and its relationships with so many meters It's useful to be able to zoom in and pan around to see the values of each meter in detail. We can also change the aggregate timeframe to one hour to view each meter’s measured consumption per hour, or even one month. Additionally, I can easily see the top 10 highest reporting meters with a click of a button with a varying gradient with a red highlight indicating the meters ranking meters is with a higher reported consumption is darker, with the highlight fading as the reporting values decrease. If looking at so many meters is overwhelming, I can filter to just meters by their category with the filter menu. I've now filtered the view to show only meters that measure HVAC equipment’s energy consumption.
[47:31]
If I’m trying to do some data analysis, a tabular view of the meters is always helpful, and I can get that by going to the second tab. This lets me perform sorting by my desired column easily at a define the highest measured meter. I can also filter by the category of meters if I'm only interested in a particular category, for example, meters associated to HVAC equipment. In addition to electric meters, water meter information is also available.
[48:11]
While keeping on top of energy consumption is important, ultimately, the building is there to serve its occupants. So, ensuring occupant comfort is a key function of the solution. The comfort page lets us monitor the status of HVAC equipment like variable air volume and fan coils in a single tabular like view. In this fan coils view, we can easily pick out individually equipment that is misbehaving like this unit here that is in heating mode. We can also choose to sort by any column here by clicking on the column header, toggling between ascending and descending. The sorted list lets us quickly identify any other misbehaving equipment. Here's a unit whose heating and cooling valves are both open, and its dampers are also fully open. This means this unit is wasting a lot of energy trying to simultaneously heat and cool. With a single click, we can open that equipment’s details to investigate what could be causing the issue. This opens a trend view showing the history trends of key measurements of the equipment. We can also easily add any other desired measurement from the panel on the right. Understanding that the fan coils are linked to the heat pumps, let's see how the heat pumps are doing. Here we're looking at a table of all the real time measurements across all six heat pumps of the building in a single tabular view. This lets us easily compare any measurement across all of the heat pumps.
[50:00]
We can also switch to a chart view that shows us the aggregated active status of the heat pumps. letting us easily understand how many heat pumps were running at any point in time. We can look at the trend for a week, or even two weeks. This helps us ensure that only the right number of heat pumps were running and investigate if anomalous patterns start to show up, for example, if any pumps are running during the weekend, when no one is occupying the building.
[50:31]
Lastly, the system has an automated fault monitoring feature that continuously monitors the equipment in the building for efficiency or comfort related faults. These series of views lets us understand the frequency of any fault condition and lets us easily drill down to the details of a fault for further investigation. The analysis view here tells us the description of the fault. its corresponding fault rule and equipment condition before and after the fault incident. Collectively, this solution ensures the efficient operation of the building.
[51:15]
I hope you enjoyed that. So, now I'm going to do a bit of a live demo. Let's see how this goes. So, what we have here is an Energy AnalytiX solution. That's collecting data from IoT sensors, using IoTWorX. And all this is brought in and aggregated in the cloud. So this is a dashboard that is able to allow me to easily know the energy consumption patterns and history of a portfolio of buildings. What we're looking at right now is a building called Science Center. And what we can do here is look at not just the total kBTU of that building, but I can switch to various meter types that I have set up to be collected from that building as well. I can switch over to say if I'm really interested in the electric consumption, I can change that to look at electric consumption. And what we have here in the view is it totalizes the consumption for that chosen utility source, it calculates the average consumption and tells you which day is the minimum and maximum. And you can see on the right as well, a heatmap that shows you for each hour of each day for that selected time period, which hour was the one that consumed the most electricity. And this gives you an idea and a pattern that you can easily recognize that says, okay, you know, I don't think anybody should be there at midnight. If that has a higher consumption, we should take a look into that. Maybe somebody turned things on and forgot to shut them off before they left.
And then some other statistics on the far right there is it calculates the minimum and maximum hours, so you can know which points are the minimum and maximum, and the average for the hour for that given time period. At the bottom, we have a consumption trend per day. But I can also switch to a different kind of chart, which is the consumption per time and day. What this gives me, as you can see from the legend in the top is not only the total consumption for each day, but also broken up by the time of the day. So early morning, morning, afternoon, and evening. So again, this allows you to key in on times of the day when energy consumption should have happened, versus times of day where energy consumption shouldn't have happened. You want the evening sections to be small, but the morning and afternoon ones to be bigger, perhaps.
[54:01]
So, switching back to the total consumption, in addition to looking at consumption, as a day, I can look at it as hour by hour as well, by changing it into this line chart. So that gives me hour-by-hour consumption for this given building for this given energy type. Now I'm looking at a small timeframe here, the 16th to the 29th of April. But at the bottom, you see this timeline picker. What that allows me to do is I can scroll that blue section to change to a different timeline, but I can also expand that. Let's say I want to look at all the way from January, or, you know, the last day of December. And what that lets the system do is it changes the query that is sent to the back end, which is AnalytiX-BI, to get the data back for that given timeframe, do all the aggregation that the front end is requesting, and present that as you see here, almost instantly. Now because we're looking at now multiple months, the dashboard is programmed to sort of understand that context and change the calculation, the time bucket periods from daily to monthly. So now I'm looking at monthly consumption trends, both from the heatmap standpoint, and also from the aggregated standpoint.
[55:32]
Now this is a good overview. But what if I want to compare energy consumption between a couple of buildings that I have? So here we have a different view, which is the comparison view. When you go to that view, it gives me a listing of all the buildings that I have in the portfolio and to the right to start with is a blank chart, so I have to start adding buildings that I want to compare here. So let's say I want to compare the Administration building, the Science Center that we looked at, and also this dorm room, Taylor Hall, for example. By clicking on those plus icons in the navigation tree, it adds those buildings to the chart on the right and shows me two contexts of charts. One is the totalized consumption for each of those buildings, so you can easily tell, hey, Science Center is using the most energy among those three, and Taylor Hall is using the least. And at the bottom, there's a stack chart that tells me for every single day, for each of those buildings, how much do they contribute to the totalized consumption for that given day. So, the orange one here is Taylor Hall, the blue one is Science Center, and the green one is Administration. You see a bit of the pattern of consumption and how each of those halls contribute to the totalized amount for that given day.
[56:56]
The other interesting type of chart in addition to the stack one is if I just want to look at consumption of each of those buildings, clustered next to each other, I can do that. And while that's a little difficult to see, let's look at it from the perspective of the month; I can change it to the month. So now I can know for each type of building, how was their consumption trending, month to month, among those three buildings. This gives me a way to analyze if I want to compare like buildings, for example. And on the very right side, you have some metrics that get calculated dynamically as you select buildings, like what is the total consumption of all three buildings added together for that given timeframe? What is the average consumption per day for all these given buildings, and which building had the minimum amount of consumption at what month, in this case, and which building had the maximum amount of consumption, in what month as well? So, this gives me a good way of comparing buildings.
[58:01]
Now let's take a look at a report. I mentioned in the presentation earlier, dashboards are great and more often than not, that may be the preferred way to view data. But sometimes when you want to share information, reports are what people kind of expect, right? You know, “Send me a report or get it to me in an email,” for example. So reports are an important part of any kind of sustainability solution. So here I have a report that looks at the carbon impact of the energy consumed by the building. The carbon impact for the most part is a conversion factor from the type of utility. However, as I mentioned before, depending on the types of sources that are used to generate that energy, some energy sources have a higher carbon impact, and some energy sources have a lower one. So, it's not necessarily just a straight conversion, if you will, from energy consumption to carbon. So here I have a carbon impact report that I’ve executed before. Let's take a look. Going to open a PDF version of this.
[59:21]
Alright, so here we have some aggregated charts that show us the carbon impact of the chilled water, year by year for given building, comparing every month for the three years, 2019, 2020, and 2021, in a chart form and also in a table form. We also have the carbon impact of the electric consumption, same thing, for the three years, in chart and table form. And we also have a pie chart that breaks down the CO2 impact for the three different kinds of utility sources and energy sources that we have for heating, hot water, electricity, and chilled water. So you can see that, you know, chilled water has the highest carbon impact, in this case, in 2019. But in 2021, that pie looks quite different now. Heating became the bigger contributor to carbon impact. Maybe they switched over from the chilling chiller to more electrical-based or cleaner ways of doing that chiller. This gives you a way ofgetting accountability, keeping track of how you're performing, and using tools like ReportWorX mining data from Hyper Historian or Energy AnalytiX, these reports can be generated ad hoc, automatically, or scheduled so that, you know, once a month it automatically generates it, emails it out to the people that need to have a look at this. And so, it reduces a lot of administrative tasks that traditionally may be something that has to be manually done, somebody has to scramble at the end of the month to go get the data. So, if you have a system like Energy AnalytiX, that continuously collects the data, continuously contextualizes it, and with a system like ReportWorX, that automates the whole process of getting these reports out, it simplifies the whole thing and makes the process of getting to a more sustainable footprint easier. And you know, more enjoyable. So, I hope you’ve enjoyed this demo. I’m going to switch back to the presentation.
[1:01:41] Zhi Wei Li
So, ICONICS is now a group company of Mitsubishi Electric. And we're very proud of that. And what I'd like to also go through today is some of the efforts that Mitsubishi Electric has around sustainability. In Ted's talk this this morning, he showed this the same chart. There are 17 goals that Mitsubishi Electric has laid out, to get to a more sustainable type of company. So here I'm going to talk about a few of them that, to me, felt a bit more interesting.
[1:02:22]
So first off, this is one that we are involved in, and we had a very in-depth view of it. SUSTIE is a zero-energy building that Mitsubishi owns and operates in Japan. It's a building that is also sort of a test lab, if you will, for their zero energy technologies. The ability for them to achieve the zero-energy building is through not only the deployment of technology, as you can see on the left there, but also in the design of the building. So basically, the building was designed to consume very little energy to heat and cool to keep the occupants comfortable. And ICONICS’ contribution to this effort is to be a layer over all these complex systems to control, to monitor, and to provide analytics on the data that we collect from all these complex systems that are necessary to keep the building's energy consumption very low. We have visualizations around where energy is consumed and what time it's consumed. We have charts that show the energy consumption by time, by area, by occupancy. And we have charts that provide accountability as far as what type of equipment is consuming more or less of the energy, and you have that photovoltaic generation to give you a perspective if the photovoltaic generation is enough to cover all the energy usage that the building itself needs. And that would mean that it wouldn't need to get energy from the grid.
[1:04:11]
So that's one interesting use case. The other interesting use case here is in closed loop recycling of plastic. All the appliances that we use, the appliances that Mitsubishi Electric produces and sells contain a lot of plastic. So traditionally, those plastics, when the life of the equipment has ended, they end up in landfills, and this is definitely not a good thing for the environment. So, what Mitsubishi Electric did here was to create a recycling process that takes all these old appliances breaks down to plastic back into the purity plastic pellets that can then be used in the next cycle of appliance manufacturing, to create new appliances. Basically, creating a loop where the plastic is reused and never ends up in landfills or the ocean and whatnot. And also, this reduces the need for new plastic to be created and manufactured, which is also a good thing in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions.
[1:05:23]
The other thing around sustainability is water. Water is a very important resource, a critical resource for us. And so having clean water and having the ability to recycle water as best we can, is very important. Alright, so Mitsubishi Electric's contribution to that is they have this machine that you see there which is called the Mitsubishi Ozonizer. What it does is it cleans water through an ozonization process. And that is an efficient way of recycling water so that it can be reused. And it's been deployed around the world. There are over 1700 Ozonizers deployed around the world. And it's so efficient and so good that it's been used in the Toba Aquarium in Japan for the manatee tank. These creatures are very sensitive to the quality of water and the fact that this can be used to recycle the water from tanks so they don't have to continuously get fresh water in means that there is a lot less wasting of the water and more efficient process and a whole.
[1:06:38]
And lastly, the last one we want to highlight is in the context of renewable energy sources. We understand that we want to shift from gas or coal-based power generation to solar and wind. But the thing about solar and wind generation is, you can only generate that when the sun's shining and the winds blowing, right, and that doesn't happen 24 hours a day. So, we need to generate as much power as possible when those conditions are ideal and store any excess power that is not immediately consumed in batteries. But interestingly, those two types of power generation require slightly different profiles for the battery. Wind power generation needs small capacity, high output lithium, whereas solar power requires large capacity, NAS batteries. So traditionally, you would have to pick one, or you have to deploy two kinds of battery systems. Mitsubishi Electric's innovation here is to combine these two characteristics into a single hybrid battery storage system. So that means that you can have a power generation farm that is both solar and wind with a single battery system. That reduces the footprint, if you will, for the farm and the battery system. And also, you wouldn't need to have two types of battery systems to maintain. So that increases the likelihood of adoption for renewable generation and reduces the cost of that as well. So that, hopefully, will catch on. And we'll have more cleaner sources of energy.
I’d like to thank our sponsors for today, especially to MacDonald-Miller for sponsoring this specific session. And let’s hear a message from MacDonald-Miller.
[1:08:49] Perry England, Vice President of Building Performance, MacDonald-Miller
Facility Performance Group consists of six areas. With electrical install, the controls, the test and balance, the equipment start-up, the engineering that overlays on all of that as well as, more importantly, the project management, is really what makes buildings work. To deliver comfort, to lower costs, and to eliminate surprises.
[1:09:14] Dave Schaut, Building Operations Specialist, Bellevue City Hall
They have a lot of innovative ideas. You know, they see a lot of other things in other buildings that work.
[1:09:20] Emma Johnson, Manager of Resource Conservation, Bellevue City Hall
We’ve really cut out a lot of our energy use and it drove the performance of this building from a 91, which is pretty excellent in terms of Energy Star score, to a 98.
[1:09:35] Gregory Smith, Director of Facilities, King County Library System
MacDonald-Miller came up with a plan for how we’re going to do our HVAC control system. The buildings are much more comfortable, we have much more control. I can sit at my desk and operate, you know, open and close dampers, see what the temperature is in the building.
[1:09:49] Mark Plunkett, Conservation Engineer, Seattle Aquarium
The MacDonald-Miller energy projects are going to probably save us a hundred thousand dollars a year in utility expenses ad we’re looking at cutting our carbon footprint by about 20 percent as a result.
[1:09:58] Greg Noel, Energy Engineer, MacDonald-Miller
The goal on this project was to save about 15 percent or more of their energy and water bills, and currently we’re looking at saving over a quarter of their bill.
[1:10:09] John Van Hersett, Project Manager, MacDonald-Miller
We guarantee the bottom line, so if we tell you you’re going to save ‘X’ amount, you save ‘X’ amount.
[1:10:23] Zhi Wei Li
Thank you everyone. So, I guess we have some questions, Melissa?
[1:10:35] Melissa Topp, Senior Director of Global Marketing
Alright, let me queue these up for you. And Dean, if you could join us back on stage, we’ve definitely got some questions for you as well. Alright, first one is for Zhi: Can Energy AnalytiX be added to an existing ICONICS system?
[1:10:55] Zhi Wei Li
Absolutely. Absolutely. We designed the product, knowing that it's an additive process where people would want to connect to data, see some of that, and then add the Energy AnalytiX part later, so it's designed exactly to be able to add on to an existing GENESIS64 system.
[1:11:15] Melissa Topp
Awesome. This one's for Dean: As you introduce some of this new technology to your members. Are you getting any pushback from tenured engineers who are resistant to change? [A little bit.] A little bit? Tell us more?
[1:11:32] Dean Tallman
Well, it's disruptive to them, right? They've been doing things the same way for years and years. But for the most part, the prospect of keeping up with things and keeping your career going is a high motivator.
[1:11:50] Melissa Topp
Very cool. Back to Zhi here: Are there any limitations to the kinds of energy sources Energy AnalytiX can consume and analyze?
[1:12:02] Zhi Wei Li
No, no. The product is designed very flexibly. The common types of energy sources we're familiar with, but if you have something that's custom or something that is outside of the normal stuff, you can still configure it. It's very flexible, it’s very configurable. So there are no built-in limitations that we expect to only have certain types of energy sources. You can monitor and aggregate and calculate anything you want.
[1:12:35] Melissa Topp
Nice. One more for you, Zhi, then. A follow-up there. Can Energy AnalytiX data, can it be cross correlated with other non-energy data like occupancy, time of day, etc.?
[1:12:51] Zhi Wei Li
Yeah, and we understand that that's where the insight comes from. A key part of the Energy AnalytiX product is to be able to cross correlate to normalize the energy based on weather, based on square footage, based on occupancy. So that's a core function of the product itself.
[1:13:12] Melissa Topp
Thanks Zhi. And one more for Dean. You said that you started using ICONICS dashboards as part of your advanced classes. How are they being received?
[1:13:24] Dean Tallman
It's funny, I just got an email from the control engineer for Citi Field where the Mets play. It was a very good one, and he was very happy with it. He said it’s one of the best classes he had; very informative, and oddly enough, Nasser was the instructor. So, it all seems to be working.
[1:13:43] Melissa Topp
That's great stuff. I think that's it for the questions that we got. So, thank you, to those of you who submitted questions out there in the audience. Zhi, any closing words to wrap things up?
[1:13:56] Zhi Wei Li
Let's get sustainable!
[1:13:58] Melissa Topp
Thank you, everybody.