In the face of increasing energy costs and concerns over global warming, buildings are receiving increasing scrutiny to reduce their carbon footprint and cut their energy expenses. However, unlike IAQ of the 1970's, modern buildings must provide a healthy and comfortable indoor environment. Add to this the growing interest in making buildings green using the USGBC/CaGBC LEED guidelines and what is a building owner to do?
A big part of the answer to this question revolves around how a building controls outside air, according to Mr. Gordon Sharp, the chairman of Aircuity and our February dinner speaker.
Mr. Sharp's focus is outside air as the largest single driver of both a building's energy efficiency and its indoor environmental quality. In the past, such approaches as economizers and demand control ventilation have attempted to reduce energy expenses by controlling outside air but the actual results over time have been mixed at best.
Mr. Sharp's presentation will discuss a healthier and more energy efficient variation on demand control ventilation as well as how economizers can be operated more reliably with greater energy efficiency. The key to improving the operation of these outside air control approaches is a new, cost effective, and highly accurate sensing technology that will be discussed known as multiplexed sensing.
Additionally, a new approach for demand based control of air change rates in laboratory rooms will also be presented. This control approach can drop air change rates significantly when lab air is clean and increase it to higher, purge level rates when chemical vapors or particles are sensed in the room. This one approach has often been shown to be the single largest energy conservation measure safely applicable for many laboratory buildings.
Case study examples will be presented of how this new technology is being employed in the new Bank of America Tower (world's largest green building), the new ASHRAE HQ, Arizona State University's 2006 Lab of the Year, the world's largest net zero project at Masdar City (UAE), and the first net zero school in the U.S.
Mr. Sharp has over 25 years of wide-ranging entrepreneurial experience and more than 25 U.S. patents in the fields of energy efficiency and laboratory controls. As founder, former president and CEO of Phoenix Controls, he led the development of this world leader in laboratory airflow controls that was acquired by Honeywell in 1998. In 2000, Mr. Sharp founded Aircuity, a venture-capital backed company that was spun out of Honeywell and is focused on building energy and environment information systems for airside energy efficiency.
Mr. Sharp is a graduate of MIT with bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering. He is a member of the ANSI Z9.5 Laboratory Ventilation committee, and a member of the board of directors of the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories, the nonprofit foundation that cosponsors and operates the Labs21 conference.
