From building owner side, what are the benefits of transaction-based building control?

Transaction Based Energy Consumption (TBEC) can give building owners additional opportunities to reduce their energy costs and increase the reliability of their supply. Building owners can provide valuable comfort and productivity services to tenants, such as automatically and continuously improving building operations and maintenance, while at the same time reducing energy costs.

Owners could benefit from the diagnostics, commissioning and retuning capabilities in several ways. The sensing and metering technology could, for example, provide building-specific advice to owners, outlining return on investments and timescales for efficiency upgrades, such as new equipment or motors, or calculate and point to the amount of energy wasted per year.

Building owner can get benefits from four major types of transactional interactions:

1) End-user services

Building or facility owner passes through energy costs (including dynamic rates), peak demand charges, etc. to tenants of or business divisions occupying the building, or gives them a monthly allowance for energy consumption that is covered in the tenant’s monthly rent. In the case of, if the monthly allowance is exceeded by the tenant/division, the tenant incurs a penalty, or they may receive a rebate to the extent the monthly allowance is not exceeded.

Figure 1.

Through this way,

• (1) Building owner allocates energy costs, peak demand charges, and dynamic prices to individual tenants or business divisions as an engagement mechanism.

• (2) Building owners can manage the monthly operating costs for electricity within a small tolerance of a desired threshold (equivalent to the aggregate allowance of tenants/divisions).

2) Energy market services

Building owner can sign up with retail utility or a retail service provider for a dynamic (time-varying) rate program such as a time-of-use (TOU), a critical-peak-price (CPP), or a real-time price (RTP).They can changes their contract with utility or retail service provider for electricity purchased at a constant, flat rate for a contract with a rate that varies over time.

Figure 2.

Building owner can take advantage of the rate by shifting some of their load from high-price periods to low-price periods, thereby lowering their bill.

3) Grid services

Building owner can sign up with a demand response aggregator or utility to provide ancillary services in the form of regulation, or spinning reserve. They can participate in one of three load control programs: interruptible service, direct load control, or dynamic rate, with additional incentives and rebates. The utility reserves capacity based on the willingness of customers to participate, then loads are dispatched by the utility when necessary based on a 4-second resolution regulation signal.

Figure 3.

4) Societal services

Building owner can sign up with a utility that provides an incentive payment for the efficiency achieved, and uses the resulting savings to meet regulatory obligations or in a secondary market for generation for carbon market and for meeting renewable portfolio standards (RPS).

Figure 4.

Of course, building owner can obtains a lower energy bill.

In general, using a transactional framework to coordinate currently disparate entities has the potential to provide substantial energy savings and new cash flow opportunities to buildings, effectively turning currently disparate and passive assets into coordinated engines of efficiency and productivity. The framework offers the opportunity to extract services out of loads and assets that previously did not exist; delivering building owners targeted benefits while enabling ancillary benefits, such as reduced energy costs, reduced energy use and reduced emissions to society as a whole.