We hear a lot about ZigBee, Z-Wave and even Wi-Fi when it comes to standards for smart-grid appliances. But a dark horse in this race could be trusty old FM radio, which Toronto-based e-Radio Inc. is strongly pushing. The company has developed an FM receiver smaller than a postage stamp that would be embedded into appliances such as dishwashers, washing machines and dryers, electric water heaters and thermostats. On Friday, it announced a deal with Canada’s national radio broadcaster, CBC Radio/Radio-Canada, which would allow the use of its cross-country frequencies for smart grid control applications. (See my Toronto Star article here)

The CBC reaches 99 per cent of the Canadian population, so the bonus is that no new infrastructure need be developed. The idea of using FM signals for smart grid applications was promoted in October by the U.S. National Association of Broadcasters in a submission to the Federal Communications Commission. As Greentech Media’s Michael Kanellos wrote back in May, FM broadcasters could become giants of energy management. Apparently General Electric is working with FM frequencies and is a partner with e-Radio on at least one pilot project. It will be interesting to see how much traction the FM promoters get. It makes sense to use an existing and reliable low-power frequency as a standard — these are, after all, basic telemetry applications we’re talking about.

The question is whether down the line we’ll need to send more than just price signals, on/off commands and other basic information as part of home and business energy-management applications. In other words, should we be planning for two-way broadband? Also, this narrowband approach causes problems for large-scale deployment of demand-response, since FM signals are a one-way thing — the utility doesn’t get a message back that a dishwasher at someone’s house was actually turned off. It must assume that it was. If, for some reason, a demand-response call is ordered but it fails to deliver, then a system operator relying on that command being carried out could be blindly taking actions that put grid reliability at risk. These are issues to be sorted out.

Cremation is popular these days for those who have kicked the bucket. In Canada, only 3 per cent of the population got cremated 50 years ago, while today that number has ballooned to more than 55 per cent. But here’s a shocker for the conservation-minded: The amount of natural gas and electricity used to cremate one body is the equivalent of driving a car from coast to coast. When your body goes up in flames, it also emits a lot of nasty stuff: greenhouse gases, smog-causing gases, particulates, and mercury vapour if you’ve got a few of those old tooth fillings.

Given this post-humus environmental footprint — and given our concern about climate change — innovation in this area is on the rise. In Denmark and Sweden, some municipalities are taking the waste heat from their local crematoriums and using it as part of their district heating systems. In North America, there’s a new technology called Resomation — generically, biocremation — that avoids incineration by chemically breaking down the body. A Toronto-based company called Transition Science Inc. has licensed the technology and recently signed up its first customer, cemetery and crematorium operator Park Lawn Trust, which plans to have its first Resomation system up and running in Toronto next spring. I’ve got an article on this company and the technology in today’s Toronto Star. You can read the article for a detailed description of how it works. It’s kind of yucky — basically the body is loaded into a metal chamber that’s filled with an alkali-based solution that, under heat and pressure, turns the non-skeleton portion of the body into a soapy soup that’s simply flushed down the drain (apparently it’s benign and gets treated in our wastewater treatment system just like what we flush down the toilet). The process uses a fraction of the energy required for cremation.

Sure, sounds gross, but since we’re always talking about the need for cradle-to-grave energy analyses, it makes sense that we leave the world in the most energy-efficient way possible. The interesting thing about biocremation is that plastic and metal devices left in the body — knee and hip replacements, pacemakers, stents, etc. — are retrieved in perfect condition and can be recycled. Alternatively, if you’ve got land to spare, you could always have a good old-fashioned burial.

Smart meters and time-of-use pricing are always well-read stories because there’s true division within the general public on whether smart meters are consumer-friendly gadgets that encourage conservation or utility-friendly devices that make it easier to gouge consumers. See my story in the Toronto Star from Friday. My take is that electricity prices are going up whether we get smart meters or not, and that smart meters — and the applications they enable — offer households a way to shift and even lower their electricity use to buffer the impact of rising prices. The mistake — and again, just my view — is that smart meters have been improperly marketed to consumers as some kind of sexy wonder tool that will help them lower their bills. Instead, utilities should have downplayed the introduction and simply moved ahead with their installation as part of a less exciting grid modernization play — equivalent to a telecom company upgrading from analog to digital networks so that, down the road, new services can be offered to customers. Customers don’t care about the bandwidth, they just care about the handsets and what they can do.

By positioning smart meters as more of an infrastructure play the cost of deployment can be simply incorporated into annual capital budgets and households are more resigned to the fact that getting the new device is mandatory. Let’s face it, initially smart meters are about helping utilities manage their networks better — i.e. they can pinpoint problems and do more detailed analysis of individual household, neighbourhood, and community power consumption, improving system planning and maintenance operations and preparing utilities for increased distributed generation in their service territories.

By making this seem like some gift to consumers, as has been done, utilities open themselves up to consumers expecting certain results and wanting the option of getting or not getting the smart meter. (more…)

The Real Property Association of Canada, whose members are property investors representing more than $150 billion in real-estate assets, has formally adopted an energy-consumption target for office buildings equal to 20 kilowatt-hours of energy use per square foot of rentable area per year, and they’ve pledged to reach that target by 2015. “The target represents a reduction of up to one half of today’s energy use in Canadian office buildings,” according to a just-released report. “Achieving the target will lead to an estimated energy cost savings in the order of $18.5 billion a year, and greenhouse gas emissions savings of 7.5 megatonnes per year contributing to 5 per cent of Canada’s national 2020 goal.”

The target was derived from large pilot projects conducted last year by the Canada Green Building Council, which created a large, detailed database of office building energy use performance. ” Audits were conducted of top-performing buildings to document their building system characteristics, leading to identification of best practice design standards,” according to the report. The audits found that there was a large range of energy use per square foot, with some buildings using more than twice as much energy. Surprisingly, results showed no co-relation to building age. In fact, some of the oldest buildings — as much as 40 years old — were among the most energy efficient. Getting to the efficiency target by 2015 will be a challenge, the association concedes. “The good news is that operating cost savings should generally be greater and Capex less than had previously been expected, with higher rates of return on investments,” it states. “The more challenging conclusion is that high levels of performance cannot be achieved and sustained without significant organizational change to align policy, management, leasing, procurement, and HR programs with the demands of consistent energy efficient practice.”

Kudos to RealPAC for doing more than our government is prepared to do by tightening building-code rules.

Toronto-based Ecobee Inc., which has developed a cool-looking smart thermostat that connects to your home Wi-Fi network, will soon be launching a new application that lets a person control the thermostat from their iPhone wherever they happen to be. “Basically we have created an iPhone application that turns the iPhone into a thermostat replica,” a spokesperson told me. “So, it’s displayed horizontally on the screen and gives you some of the functionality of the thermostat. You can adjust the temperature and humidity, receive and set up alerts… and control multiple thermostats.”

Ecobee already offered the ability to control its user-friendly smart thermostat through a Web portal, but the new iPhone app allows for remote mobile control of your household energy use. I should add that Ecobee’s thermostat can also be used for demand-response programs. Neat little tool.