July 2010 Newsletter

By Gordy Slack

The formidable, fifty-year-old Cory Hall, home of Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering Division, is a vortex of energy consumption. The fifth-most energy consumptive building on the entire campus, it houses, in addition to standard classrooms and offices, numerous instrumented instructional labs, a micro-fab facility filled with high-load semiconductor processing equipment, labs with fume hood installations, a machine shop, an energy-intensive data center, overused elevators servicing six stories and mezzanines, and notoriously inefficient ventilation equipment.

The whole building draws an average one megawatt of electric power—between 3–5% of the campus total. Where is all that electricity going? Ten months ago, David Culler and Paul Wright of i4Energy received a grant from the California Energy Commission to rig the building with sensors and find out. The project, known as Cory Hall Sub-metering Energy Efficiency and Dynamic Control Testbed, or the Cory Hall Testbed for short, installed a network of monitoring equipment to track the flow and use of electricity. Most of the meters are off the shelf, but the researchers brought in a lot of new IT to the project. Once the group could track where the electricity was going when, it would be able both to better manage it and, even more importantly, to use the building as a testbed for further research.

“The Testbed will be an i4Energy "user facility" providing a well-instrumented setting for several different kinds of researchers to work together to develop and test new methods for monitoring and control,” says Carl Blumstein, Director of the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE).

In the Cory Hall Testbed’s nine-month-long first phase, the building was successfully wired with sensors that use an open standards-based system for communications and networking, even in this deployment phase, the research team, led by Professor Culler, learned a lot, says Scott McNally, Director of Space Planning and Facilities at Cory.

McNally, remembering one day in the spring when the sensors had not long been in place, points to a photo of a huge air conditioning unit on the roof of Cory and shakes his head. “It was going on and off all day. At some point I said, ‘Hey, it is 50 degrees outside, why are we using the air conditioner?’ Obviously, something was wrong. I made a phone call and luckily, through our digital control systems, we could call it up and see what was going on.”

It sounds ridiculous, he says, but they were both heating and cooling one large room at the same time. “The sad thing is, this happens in buildings all the time. It is just not known. Facilities tend to be under-funded, understaffed, and very reaction-oriented. If it is too hot, staff members run up on the roof and turn on the chiller. They do not have time to analyze the system. But these monitors are giving us tools to identify where we are wasting energy.”

“I can look at the piece of equipment, or at the panel, or at a breaker in the basement, or the whole building usage,” McNally says, “and I can see what is going on.” Even after bringing in the team to fix the simultaneous heating and cooling problem, the chiller was going a lot of the time.  This was due to the manual over-ride switch, which was still on. The system allowed us to discover that.   

The system is, in places, already quite specific, measuring not only how much energy is being consumed, but the service that that electricity is delivering. In the future, that will allow for constant demand-response-type regulation, where less time-bound tasks are conducted when there is less demand on the grid and electricity is more plentiful and affordable.

One planned use of the testbed is the installation and testing of novel prototype MEMS devices for lower cost networks of voltage and current sensors. These miniature, wireless, passive proximity sensors (WPPS) will also facilitate the development and study of new wireless communication techniques, advanced methods for affordable monitoring of building energy use, and conservation strategies. Data gathered from the tried-and-true but larger and more expensive commercially available sensors already installed will serve as an all-important baseline.

“Before you can do good control,” says Blumstein, “you need to do good monitoring. These new inexpensive sensors would allow easily installable, self-powering, and accurate monitoring. There is a huge payoff for improved controls, particularly in big complicated commercial buildings. If you understand where energy is going, and if you have competent operators to respond to that information, you can reduce consumption by 20 percent or more. But, the first step is to get your arms around what is really going on.”

“The infrastructure we have put in place can also guide us as we extend beyond Cory Hall to other buildings,” says Paul Wright, the PI on the project. “Soda Hall and Sutardja-Dai Hall, the new CITRIS Headquarters, would be good next candidates; both pose interesting challenges. Eventually, we could potentially extend to the rest of campus,” he says.

“Just being aware of their behavior’s impact on energy use will motivate the buildings occupants to adopt more energy efficient behaviors,” says McNally. The awareness of others might not hurt either; eventually, all the data will be made accessible, in real time, on the web. Already, some students working on the project have programmed and installed small icons on their computers, displaying the energy use in their specific work area or part of the building.

The Berkeley team is also working with the Smart Grid Center at California State University at Sacramento to allow it to take the knowledge gained from the Cory Testbed’s efforts and transfer them to a place where they can make an impression on state legislators and on the smart-grid community at large, says Wright.

The building has been evolving toward higher complexity and energy opacity since it was erected half a century ago. “It will continue to evolve,” says Wright, “but I see it evolving in a much cooler direction in the next fifty years. Cory was designed with the same consumption-blind ethic as other big buildings of its day: build it and pump as much electricity into it as it draws. Electric power went in, but no information came out. That has got to change. We cannot afford that approach any more.”

By Gordy Slack

Taking great ideas and turning them into technologies that help solve serious problems has been the CITRIS mission for all of its ten years. The need to do that is nowhere more clear or more urgent than in the energy field. Carl Blumstein, Director of the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE), puts it bluntly: “Our survival as a species depends on our learning to manage energy problems in new ways.”

But turning research into action on the ground can be tricky at a university most celebrated for its fundamental research. CIEE has been supporting CITRIS in its effort to do that in the energy efficiency world from the start. It was nine years ago that Blumstein met Ron Hofmann—now a senior advisor at CIEE and in a similar role at CITRIS—at a Berkeley café and discussed how best to best lower the costs and increase the performance of information technologies needed for a real-world Demand-Response system. That meeting, and the funding from the California Energy Commission that stemmed from it, led to much published academic work, but it also led to the creation of practical new devices and algorithms and contributed to the establishment of businesses, such as Dust Networks, Arch Rock, and Adura Technologies, all spinoffs from CIEE-supported research.

Other CITRIS and CIEE-generated research, however, is still ripe on the vine. A new Haas School of Business program, called Cleantech to Market (C2M), is partnering with CITRIS to help select suitable projects and bring them to market. The program brings together Haas business students as well as masters and PhD students in engineering, sciences, law, and the Energy and Resources Group, and Berkeley and LBNL researchers working on clean-energy technology, and exposes them to industry venture capital professionals. Each of ten groups in the class is assigned a new technology—developed by a Berkeley or LBNL researcher—around which they conduct market research and in some cases develop a business plan and investment pitch.

For example, one group built a proposal around work done by engineer Christine Ho on materials and direct-write fabrication methods that can be employed for printing carbon-based electrochemical capacitors and zinc batteries. Basically, Ho’s work enables the fabrication of “solid-state” capacitors and batteries that can be patterned and integrated directly onto devices such as wireless monitors. The type, shape, and capacity of batteries can easily be customized for each application.

Ho, who earned her Berkeley PhD in engineering this June, worked with three MBA students—Brooks Kincaid, Ben Poynter, Hiroki Taniguchi—and one PhD EECS student—Kyle Braam—to develop a business and marketing strategy for the technology. After analyzing the market opportunities and competing technologies, the group developed a business plan for a company selling wireless sensor networks based on the new battery technology. The group also helped Ho navigate the intellectual property issues, which, “because of my unfamiliarity with IP laws, was extremely helpful,” says Ho. “We also met with a series of VCs and industry executives, and their contribution to the meetings was very valuable.”

Ho gave a version of her presentation as a talk to the CITRIS i4Energy symposium, and has received more invitations to talk from companies around the country who may be interested investing.

Another group based their project on work long conducted at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center under EECS Professor Jan Rabaey and CITRIS director Paul Wright. The students—Dave Bend, Ankush Garg, Kurosh Hashemi, Mark Hurwich and Taylor Keep—developed a plan for this work on self-powered, wireless network platform that exploits a novel ultra-low-power radio technology. Because the radio uses far less energy and is much smaller than previous radios, it will allow for much smaller, easier to use, less expensive, and more reliable sensors that could be employed to do environmental monitoring, personal work station energy efficiency lighting controls and, more broadly,  efficient building management.

The technology is a product of many years of investment, both on the parts of the researchers, CITRIS, and CIEE.  Numerous papers, conference presentations, and PhD theses have come from it. But now, says Blumstein, “the work we started a decade ago is coming to the place where it really needs C2M-like attention, where students can team with researchers and make sensible and compelling business plans that will get the attention of industry.”

“C2M is a class,” says Beverly Alexander, the co-director, “but it also functions as an incubator.”

Alexander, a former VP at PG&E and a lecturer at Haas, says the course is providing a link between the “focus on fundamental science that Berkeley researchers are so famous for and the kind of research it takes to get these technologies into the market where they can impact society and solve pressing problems.”

“Most of the people I work with are in this business because they want to make a contribution,” says Blumstein. “To make one, though, you need to start thinking like a business or you will not succeed. As a close friend says: ‘No margin, no mission.’”

Doing that can be tricky in a university setting where publishing papers is traditionally more celebrated, and more likely to be rewarded with tenure, than solving practical problems, says Alexander, whose years at PG&E were devoted to clean energy and business customer solutions, including moving $1.2 billion of clean energy incentives into the California economy. In these urgent times, “understanding the fundamental science is essential, but it is not enough,” says Blumstein. “The people who are supporting this technology do not just want papers; they also want results that can be applied.”

But working in a multi-disciplinary team “can be exhilarating,” says Blumstein, “and clean energy is as multi-disciplinary as it gets. If you get a group of the right people together working on the right problems, you wind up with a very special kind of energy, you want to come to work and make a lot of progress, ideas are flowing, it is very stimulating. We are creating an environment like that in the CITRIS context. We are building a community of researchers with a common agenda who can rely on one another in their research.”

Individually, faculty can focus on their research, but collectively, and with support from the staff, that research can turn into real progress.

That is certainly the aim of i4Energy, the year-old program that coordinates all of the clean energy related projects from CITRIS, LBNL, and CIEE, says Gary Baldwin, CITRIS Director of Special Projects for Energy and the Environment and Managing Director of i4Energy. i4Energy, housed on the fourth floor of SDH, sponsored C2M’s final presentations in the CITRIS auditorium. The event drew approximately 200 people from the university, business, industry, and beyond.

“CITRIS is one of the shining examples on campus where we reach out to industry in a user-friendly way, it is a space people want to come to, where the discussion is a little less academic and more applied. People in industry can relate to it,” says Alexander.

The missions of CITRIS and C2M are “well-tuned for collaboration with each other,” says Alexander. “We are both devoted to promoting clean energy—CITRIS from IT perspective and C2M from a business perspective. We bring the MBA students, and CITRIS brings technologies that are closer to market. Together we can do wonderful things.”