Archive Dog Blog
Delivering Responsible Energy Solutions
Today at GreenNet ‘09, Fat Spaniel and REGEN Energy are joining together to deliver an integrated renewable energy monitoring and control solution. Fat Spaniel and REGEN Energy share a vision of a world where efficient energy solutions and renewable energy systems enable responsible energy production and usage.
At the highest possible level, the benefit of a combined Fat Spaniel and REGEN Energy solution can be summarized as follows:
• Reduced fossil-based energy consumption within the building
• Increased renewable energy production
• Accelerated ROI for renewable energy projects
• Proof that simple solutions + Internet technology = a network effect that has high impact and direct relevance in today’s economy
REGEN Energy has joined Fat Spaniel’s Insight PlatformTM Developer Program to deliver integrated renewable energy monitoring and control solutions. Fat Spaniel and REGEN Energy share a vision of a world where efficient energy solutions and renewable energy systems enable responsible energy production and usage.
“The combination of Insight Platform and EnviroGrid will provide customers with the ability to both closely monitor their renewable energy generation and flexibly manage key electric loads including HVAC, lighting and cold storage to reduce peak demand during periods of reduced renewable energy production. In addition, EnviroGrid also allows customers to maximize energy efficiency and to participate in Demand Response programs,” said Mark Kerbel, President and CEO of REGEN Energy. “Together we will help customers be both responsible and responsive in their energy generation and usage.”
“Industry partnerships are vital to achieving what we call ‘Responsible Energy,’” said Tom Tansy, acting Vice President of Marketing, Fat Spaniel Technologies. “REGEN Energy is widely recognized as one of the leading innovators of electric demand management technology, and we believe that this technology has the potential to reduce peak electrical demand in commercial, industrial, and institutional settings by up to 25%. Fat Spaniel customers will be able to generate a much greater portion of their total energy demands from renewable energy and take full credit for the environmental impact of the solution. We are excited to bring together our mutual industry experience and solution design expertise to introduce high-return energy management solutions that help solve these global challenges.”
Write back to us at dogblog at fatspaniel.com to share your views.
Tags: Energy Efficiency, energy management, Responsible Energy
Supporting Social Energy Applications
Picture if you will a community of schools that wants to start a fun and honest competition around their relative responsible energy production and use, but the schools don’t have the resources to create the infrastructure necessary to share the pertinent information.
This community has a webmaster with the skills of creating Web 2.0 mashup applications who has already created a community website collecting an assortment of related local news and various clean tech topics for discussion and community education. To support the community’s desires for a competition the webmaster extends the website to securely accept an energy intelligence user ID of each participant.
The webmaster then accesses the community of schools’ common energy intelligence solution, acquires each participant’s most recent energy information and places that information onto a Web-based map of the neighborhood. Each school’s spirit around energy use is then demonstrated to the community.
The creation of this unique social energy application might not have occurred if the entire creation had to fall on the web master’s plate. It would have been simultaneously too complex and expensive to accomplish and not dollar rich enough to get the attention of most companies in the industry. But when an energy intelligence solution monitoring each schools’ generation and usage can be easily leveraged by a resource already within a community, this unique need is addressed, the social energy application exists and the application benefits the renewable energy industry as a whole.
Now that’s a nice picture.
Write back to us at dogblog at fatspaniel dot com to share your views.
Posted by Brett Francis
Tags: energy intelligence, platform, Responsible Energy, social energy application
Why Being “Green” Is Not Enough
As an Operations guy, I’m a big believer in: “You can’t fix it if you don’t measure it”. This is a tried and true formula for getting your arms around a quantifiable problem, and then working it over and over to a point of economic optimization. A great example of that is something known as The Prius Effect. The Toyota Prius came out with a new information display about energy consumption and generation – that had never before been seen in automobiles. Consequently, Prius owners (of which I’m a proud member) started driving with one eye on the meter to see how they could maximize their fuel economy. I saw reports from Prius chat rooms that went over 70mpg.
How does this apply to Responsible Energy? In the U.S. alone, over $300 billion a year is spent on electricity by residential, commercial, and industrial consumers. Electricity makes up over 40% of the use of primary energy sources. Some have estimated that saving even 5% of that electric energy would result in avoiding $50 billion in energy plant investments, and provide the equivalent CO2 benefit of removing 50 million cars from U.S. roads. However, that will not be achieved if we don’t measure where the energy is being consumed, and find a myriad of innovative ways to manage it or avoid needing it.
These sorts of measurement systems are already well understood at the utility and large industrial level. However, as you move further down the food chain there is a nascent (and burgeoning) industry of meter and monitoring suppliers who are just now getting traction to help the commercial and residential consumer. These solutions get beyond the utility meter, and get into sub-metering: How much energy is the HVAC system consuming? The data center? The refrigerator? These meters are only useful to the consumer if they are connected to monitoring systems that can intelligently display the energy information to allow the user to make decisions.
Some people believe this is simply a “Green” perspective aimed at minimizing our carbon footprint, and that it doesn’t really affect the corporate bottom-line. However, consider that the 5% savings above represents $15 billion per year in expense savings, and the avoidance of $50 billion in capital expenditures. Those are numbers that are difficult for anyone to ignore. And, in this economy, smart consumers are looking everywhere they can to reduce costs.
Write back to us at dogblog at fatspaniel dot com to share your views.
Sincerely,
Ron Lloyd, COO
Tags: carbon footprint, energy consumption, Prius, Responsible Energy, sub metering
Welcome to Fat Spaniel
Welcome to our very first Fat Spaniel Technologies blog. This post is being written as I travel by train through Southern Germany. As nice as that sounds, I’m not on vacation; I’ll explain in a moment.
Six years ago, on January 30, 2003, I founded Fat Spaniel. The original idea was to help increase awareness of Renewable Energy and enable customers of solar electric systems to track and improve their performance. It was about showing a skeptical world that Renewable Energy is a viable source of energy and providing tools to help ensure these systems worked as promised. Our very first tagline was: “Visualize Renewable Energy”. This was both to describe the function of our product as well as indicate our desire to actively participate in helping the industry grow and succeed.
Today, through technological improvements, cost savings, public investment and innovative business models, the Renewable Energy industry has been transformed into a global, multi-billion dollar powerhouse. As one of the few bright spots in difficult economic times, our industry has landed at the intersection of some of the key issues of our time: climate change, energy independence and economic recovery.
In September of last year, I relocated to Munich, Germany, to personally launch the European Business Unit of Fat Spaniel. As I write this, travelling from our new European office, solar energy systems are visible everywhere. Farms, factories, and homes are sporting large arrays almost everywhere you look. Some estimated 14% of Germany’s grid power now comes from Renewable Energy which inspires my optimism about the future of our industry in the USA and beyond. It’s a great start, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of a massive potential market.
In early 2009, the Fat Spaniel team decided to formalize the passion and purpose that has been driving us since the beginning; to create a mission that would motivate and challenge us for many years into the future. Our vision is to enable and promote *Responsible Energy*, by making energy information easily available and ubiquitous.
An important way to move our mission forward is to share it and discuss it widely; hence the creation of this blog. Several members of the Fat Spaniel team will be posting here to share their perspective and expertise. We invite you to participate in the conversation and join our quest to accelerate the adoption of Responsible Energy.
I hope to talk with you again soon.
Sincerely,
Christiaan Beekhuis, President & Chief Technical Officer
Fat Spaniel Technologies, Inc.
Tags: Energy Education, green jobs, Responsible Energy, stimulus plan