Singer broadens its service to offer energy management

As the Singer Group has consolidated its electrical design and installation, maintenance and automation sectors, it has added to its service mix evolving skills such as risk and safety and most recently, energy management. Kevin Kevany reports.
Jeff Mclaren and his canny management team have been quick to build on their established business model and embrace the technological innovations that are both appropriate to customer needs and the social changes affecting broader society. Things like a greater awareness of the environment and the need for sustainability in all our actions. 
Tony Brown, a seven-year ‘veteran’ in the energy management arena, has joined the Auckland Spaghetti Junction-based company to spearhead the new function. He has alongside him, Phil Wright, one of only a handful of Citect-certified engineers in New Zealand, adding further incentive to his decision to join.
“I’m not precisely sure of the current numbers, but Singer must account for somewhere between a third and half of those with a specialist training in the full suite of energy management products and software from the market leader, Citect,” notes the Singer new recruit.
Brown, who has an Energy Management Diploma and a ‘control fitter’ apprenticeship, obtained during a six-year naval stint, has already had a significant career in energy management in office, retail and warehouse environments. He has been fortunate enough to work with Wayne Inger, one of the top ‘energy designers’ in the country, as well as having gained prior experience in the field – smelters, fishing boats and general commercial.
Prior to joining Singer, Tony was energy manager for Progressive Retail Enterprises; Singer being one of the suppliers he managed.
“There are two sides to the energy management equation: one is the actual energy purchasing and analysis of time-of-use information, the structuring of the purchasing plan etc – and the other is the utilisation of energy-efficient products, to achieve efficiencies in systems, computers, air-conditioning plant, escalators and lifts.
“It’s concerned with energy usage on the site, including the use of standby power to shed load. Any place where electrical power is being used, we are potentially involved in measuring and streamlining its usage to achieve savings on the bottom-line.”
Energy management experts consulted
Brown says that well-run, truly excellent companies and organisations will even consult energy management experts on the impact of one computer system versus another, so important has this relatively new skill become in informing decisions across the board. 
“There might be little in a choice of a computer system, meaning that in the past it would have come down to the ICT manager’s preference for a particular brand. Today, the relative power usage analysis and the heat given off are more likely to be the deciding factors.
‘Demand control’ is another aspect of energy management which sees measures like the reduction of peaks, through to restrictions on cable size, being applied to achieve a better balance. Under the cloak of better energy management, the professionals might go into the broader management of an enterprise, looking at different opening hours, or say the better utilisation of north-facing offices: every action is reduced to the demand it places on the energy usage of an organisation.
An amount of energy is bought on the electricity spot-market in a so-called ‘contract for difference’.  To ensure that their clients are hedged to the desired percentage, the professionals look at the state of the market, the prices on offer and the capacity of the lines, before making an astute call to purchase.
How does this all translate to the bottom-line for the owner or manager of six or seven CBD tower blocks?
“Realistically, we should be able to cut 15 percent off their total energy bill, and mostly do, unless the buildings are all built or renovated to the latest specs. Obviously, there are lots of variables in the open-ended example we are using, but that could be as much as a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year across the six or seven buildings in the Auckland CBD.”  
Achieving instant savings
The replacement of wire-wound ballast
(key in removing heat from a building and saving on air-conditioning) with modern electronics, achieves an instant 18 percent saving. The removal of outdated light bulbs with fluorescents; automated touch-screens; the installation of variable speed drives on HVAC fans (“payback within a year”); power factor correction – to improve line charges and power quality reducing “dirty power” from say, switch-mode power supplies (where 230 volts drop to 200 volts) – are all high-tech arrows in the smart energy manager’s quiver.
Brown emphasises that despite the high percentage savings he is claiming, these are all on existing buildings and that not enough clients in New Zealand have yet understood the need to consult experts before they finalise their designs of new buildings with architects.
“We can achieve so much more in new buildings, where our total focus on maximising energy efficiency can be a valuable reminder to architects and engineers to constantly bear in mind the different energy-usage profile of office workers today, with their high-tech needs for telecommunication, computer,   printing and management aids, and try and achieve natural venting, for example.”
Lighting design formats and the utility of individual lamps also come under scrutiny. Here the trend is to utilise better technology to achieve greater energy efficiency.
An important aspect of effective energy management is the mental changes that organisations and individuals working there have to undergo. These apply equally to factories, hospitals, office blocks, museums and schools and universities – all big energy users, needing more and more energy to drive their increasingly high-tech equipment.
“At the heart of it, we are dealing with ‘need versus habit’; needing more power to improve the quality of each individual life, but failing to cut out the old wasteful thinking and attitudes.”
Social and philosophical changes
So into the mix need to come a great flexibility to avoid wasteful peaks, fine tuning to gain greater energy efficiency and getting everyone’s head right – all part of the social and philosophical changes that an organisation can be guided to examine and adjust.
For example, lecture theatres, operating theatres and exhibition areas can all have their air-conditioning set to switch on 15-minutes before use.
Office lights can be sensor-powered to only light areas in use and allow a lit path to the exit; instead of a whole floor blazing away late into the night, or be set to allow cleaners to follow them down a building.
These are all part of pushing the frontiers on outdated habits, Brown believes.
The bottom-line is often a case of removing the human input and mechanising.
Nexa used in Kremlin
Citect’s Nexa facilities monitoring software and its Meta energy-usage bench-marking programmes are deployed inside the fabled Kremlin , which has a large outdoor thermometer displaying temperatures from -40 to +40 degrees C. These programmes help preserve such historical Russian monuments as the 16th century Ivan the Great Church, the Uspenskaya bell tower and the museum. At the other extreme, its software is a key component of an integrated building automation solution in two buildings, one in Germany, the other in Japan.
The programmes installed in the Einstein 111 (said to be “as intelligent as its namesake”) in Munich and the Mori Tower in central Tokyo – the “Artelligent City”, where art and intelligence combine – are improving tenant services, reducing operating costs and optimising energy utilisation.
Citect combines with market leaders like Fuji
Electric Systems in Japan, Amann GmbH in Germany and RTSoft in Russia to implement solutions appropriate to each market.
In New Zealand, the Singer Group has been selected to link up and develop the local market.
“Singer has a long history in electrical design, installation and maintenance in the New Zealand market, and Jeff Mclaren, the CEO, has been a known quantity in this business and a friend for 20-odd years, so they were a logical choice as ‘gold’ associates,” notes Grey, himself a sea soned campaigner in the business.