In Washington, the Clean Buildings bill (HB 1257/SB 5293) was voted out of the House Finance Committee on Wednesday [reported by KUOW here], and the House Appropriations Committee heard testimony Thursday morning. The Senate Ways and Means Committee is considering a vote this week. NEEC is continuing to voice its strong support for this bill, especially the commercial building standard. It can be easy to underestimate the impact of shifting our mindset about buildings from places we go to, work in, and drive by to community assets that perform either adequately or inadequately depending on how you define your standards. The Clean Buildings bill takes an initial, important step toward changing how we think about the energy efficiency of our buildings by establishing an energy performance standard for commercial buildings over 50,000 square feet. This is the kind of smart, innovative policy that will help us transform our building stock into the dynamic, community assets the future demands.  Now is the right time to reach out to your legislators to urge their support of this important legislation.

The legislature continues to consider SB 5116/HB 1211, the 100% Clean bill. The Senate version is making its way to the floor schedule and already has a hearing scheduled in the House Energy & Environment Committee. As reported a few weeks back, this bill defines distributed energy resource in a manner to include EE and conservation resources, and NEEC believes this is a great way to accelerate the role of buildings and consumer equipment as part of the grid of the future. As the grid relies more heavily on intermittent resources such as wind and solar, leveraging customer-sited solutions such as demand management, energy efficiency, and storage will be critical to grid reliability. We are excited about how this bill paves the way for more sophisticated and complex customer side solutions.

Telensa, a leader in smart street lighting and smart city applications, announced the Urban Data Project – a combination of new technology and transparent policies for cities; collecting, protecting and applying data to improve city living.  Telensa is partnering with Microsoft Azure cloud platform to create a trust infrastructure for urban data.

From Business Wire:

Urban data is the mosaic of street-by-street, minute-by-minute information that makes up a city’s digital twin. It includes mapping how people use the city, the mix of traffic on the roads, the hyper-local air quality and noise levels. This data is incredibly valuable for designing better city infrastructure, delivering more efficient city services, and making everything more transparent to empower citizens. It is also potentially valuable to industries such as retail, real estate and insurance.

The use of urban data has been limited by two barriers. The first is the cost of single-purpose sensors, and the related cost of moving video data to the cloud. The second has been one of trust – how can a city’s Chief Data Officer apply best-practice policies to the data, and provide transparency to citizens on how that data is protected and used.

There are two key technology elements to the Urban Data Project:

• Data is collected by Telensa Multi-Sensor Pods installed on streetlight poles, with sensors including video and radar feeding into a powerful edge compute platform. The pods run on Microsoft Azure IoT Edge and feature real-time AI and machine learning to extract insights from the raw data.
• Data from the pods is combined with other city data in the City Data Guardian. This is the trust platform, built on Microsoft Azure, that enables cities to apply privacy policies, comply with data regulations, and make data available to improve services and drive future city revenues.

Following intensive product development during 2018, the first deployment is scheduled to take place in Cambridge in March.

Claire Ruskin, Executive Board Member for the Greater Cambridge Partnership and CEO of Cambridge Network, said: “Cambridge has pioneered a number of smart technologies, collaborating between the city’s world class academic and commercial R&D organisations and the local authorities. The Greater Cambridge Partnership has funded ‘Smart Cambridge’ to see how data supports activities that help to make Greater Cambridge even better to live and work in. The Urban Data Project is part of this innovative approach, helping to create a comprehensive ‘digital twin’, and providing the tools to use the data responsibly with policies that are transparent to our residents. Telensa is a world-class company based in Cambridge and we are very pleased to be able to assess the real use of IoT technology.”

Will Franks, CEO of Telensa, said: “We’ve been busy working with cities for the past ten years, making millions of streetlights smart and turning light poles into sensor hubs. But for us it was always about data, and finding an economic way for cities to take control of their urban data assets. We’re delighted to be working with the vision of Smart Cambridge, the innovation of Microsoft IoT and the power and reach of the Microsoft Azure family to make it happen.”

Bert Van Hoof, Partner Group Program Manager, Azure IoT, Microsoft, said: “Microsoft is committed to supporting cities achieve their goals of sustainability, resiliency, and inclusivity through digital transformation – powered by IoT, cloud, AI and Edge technologies. With a shared value of providing infrastructure built on trust, that enables cities to take control of their data strategy, working with Telensa on the Urban Data Project was a natural fit.”

About Telensa

Telensa makes wireless smart city applications, helping cities around the world save energy, work smarter and deliver more joined-up services for their citizens. Telensa PLANet is the world’s most deployed smart streetlight solution, with a footprint of 1.7 million lights. Building on the compelling business case for its smart streetlighting, the company provides cities and utilities with an open, low-cost platform to add multiple sensor applications. By leading the Urban Data Project, Telensa is helping cities to build future-proof operations driven by data intelligence, trust and transparency. Telensa is based in Cambridge in the UK, with regional operations in the USA and Australia.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced up to $42 million in project selections to support early-stage research and development (R&D) of innovative residential and commercial building technologies for energy efficiency.

Buildings use 75% of U.S. electricity and account for 40% of U.S. overall energy use. Energy efficiency is a key driver of overall economic efficiency and part of DOE’s mission to increase energy affordability and energy security. The technology developed from these early-stage R&D projects is designed to help consumers and businesses save energy costs and drive domestic economic competitiveness.

A total of 46 research teams were selected as a result of three fiscal year 2018 funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) issued by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Building Technologies Office.

Major focus areas under each FOA include:

• Buildings Energy Efficiency Frontiers & Innovation Technologies – 19 selections for $19.5 million dollars
  • Advanced separation technologies for dehumidification
  • Innovative materials for thermal insulation
  • High performance windows
  • Advanced controls and automation in building energy management
  • Innovative technologies using natural gas
• Solid State Lighting – 11 selections for $11 million
  • Core technology research for LEDs and organic LEDs (OLEDs)
  • Proof-of-concept and prototype development for LEDs and OLEDs
  • Advanced manufacturing R&D focuses on chemistry and physics of LED/OLED panel fabrication
• Building America – 16 selections for $11.5 million
  • Development and validation of high performance residential envelope systems that provide moisture management and validation of high performance envelope specifications for performance and durability
  • Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) installation and performance
  • Gap analysis of building industry standard practices

For more information on the selections visit the Energy Department’s Building Technologies Office web site.