Peter Fairley | Vox

From air conditioning to urban planning, defaults and standards create dysfunction by design

2017-12-14T18:22:56-05:00

Originally published on Ensia.

Personal heaters are a summer survival tool for many office workers chilled to the bone by hyperactive ventilation systems — an act of self-defense against an epidemic of overcooling that is wasting energy and confounding comfort in not only offices but also large shops, schools, and other buildings. An audit of US government buildings found that over three-fifths of their occupants felt too cold in the summer. The most likely culprit behind this big chill? Engineering conventions. Slavish adherence to unfounded and outdated rules of thumb that cause mis-programming of air conditioning systems.

Frozen spaces are but one chilling case of an iceberg of waste. Many of the technologies, practices, and systems that we interact with every day are shaped by default settings in the form of “established practice,” professional standards, and design codes. Many deliver dysfunction and overconsumption by design. Zoning rules preclude the construction of affordable microhomes. An outmoded presumption of universal automobile ownership begets wide streets and “gargantuan” gaps between intersections that hog-tie urban planners working to increase density. Default settings dial in waste in all manner of electronic devices, keeping video game boxes on perpetual standby and pre-programming irrigation controllers to drown gardens in wasted water. And many such controllers revert to their wasteful factory defaults every time there is a power outage, undermining any conservation impulses consumers might have had.

The flip side, however, is that confronting problematic design defaults can open some surprising opportunities to improve living, save money, reduce pollution, and conserve precious resources from energy to water to open space — sometimes all at the same time.

Breaking through decades of inertia to overcome embedded defaults will require that engineers, design professionals, and policy-makers admit they may have been wrong or even irrational in the past and become activists for reexamining our assumptions about the way things need to be. And it will require patience: As reformers such as Jeff Speck, a Boston-based city planner and architect and author of Walkable City, have documented, dysfunctional default settings can take decades to set right.

A/C overdrive

Just finding the defaults can take many years. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, for example, identified the problem of overcooling in the 1990s as “consistent and systematic.” Yet two decades later, a senior ASHRAE expert, Richard de Dear at Australia’s University of Sydney, reported that the society’s interior comfort specialists remained “puzzled” by it.

This chilling mystery has inspired an array of often-contradictory theories. In his 2012 essay “Did someone set the air on Arctic?“, de Dear cites boilerplate leases in which building owners guarantee their tenants spaces far cooler than ASHRAE’s thermal comfort standards recommend. Last year researchers in the Netherlands made headlines with a report that blames those ASHRAE standards for driving thermostats down in favor of men’s higher metabolisms — an alleged gender bias that was quickly refuted by ASHRAE.

Hui Zhang, a thermal comfort expert at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment, says recent research supports a disarmingly simple explanation: default settings that cause ventilation systems to blow too much air. “The cause of overcooling is over-ventilation,” she says.

The root of the problem is a technological artifact left over from the pneumatic controls that were once the go-to method to modulate airflow to each zone in a building. Pneumatic control boxes offered just one setting for each zone’s minimum airflow, whether the system was heating, cooling, or just delivering fresh air. Since heating required at least 30 percent of a system’s maximum flow (or more), engineers came to view this as a natural minimum.

Pneumatics were standard equipment by the 1970s. But by the 1990s they were being edged towards the technology scrap heap by electronic controls capable of specifying different airflows for heating, cooling, and ventilation.

Nevertheless, the rule of thumb endures — airflow equipment is still sold with labels advising against lower flows — keeping flows whistling in most buildings above 30 percent at all times.

Zhang and her colleagues at Berkeley and at nearby mechanical engineering firm Taylor Engineering suspected that the old pneumatic rule of thumb and other accepted wisdom on ventilation was causing the indoor equivalent of wind chill. Telecommuting and the installation of energy efficient devices and lighting was reducing the heat inside buildings. Yet ventilation systems could not be turned down below an increasingly excessive 30 percent of capacity.

In 2006 Taylor Engineering scored a first victory against the 30-percent default by demonstrating that most digital controls could reliably regulate flows below 10 percent of system capacity. Cutting flows could cut energy use, and California legislators acted fast to lock in the benefits. Their 2008 amendments to the state’s building code effectively forced builders to let flows drop to at least 20 percent of system capacity.

Skeptics within ASHRAE, whose standards guide other states’ (and countries’) building codes, still questioned whether occupant comfort would be assured under low air flows. “There was a lot of skepticism and controversy,” recalls Taylor Engineering principal Jeff Stein.

In 2012 collaborative work by researchers at Taylor and Berkeley (and partly funded by ASHRAE) satisfied even the skeptics. They tested six buildings at the Sunnyvale, California, campus of Internet giant Yahoo. When they reprogrammed the ventilation system, allowing ventilation air flows to drop from 30 percent to 10 percent, Yahoo staff reported 47 percent lower dissatisfaction with air quality.

And energy savings were substantial. Electricity use dropped by 13.5 percent. The buildings also burned 12.2 percent less natural gas because less overchilling reduced the amount of air that had to be reheated in the buildings’ most arctic zones.

Dan Int-Hout, chief engineer at Texas–based Krueger-HVAC and an ASHRAE director, says this “incredible news” from the Yahoo project has begun to convince engineers to allow lower flow rates. Still, he predicts that fully overcoming the inertia in practice “could easily take 20 years.”

The hang-up is engineers’ aversion to risk. Better to overcool buildings in the summer and let individual occupants sort out their own needs rather than get sued for under-delivering. “It’s easier for people to bring in a personal heater if they’re cold than to bring in a personal air conditioner,” says Stein.

Off-street autopilot

Default practices inspire waste and resist change in transportation, too. And transportation planning exhibits a similar pattern of breakthrough research and slow-motion response.

Consider off-street parking requirements.

University of California, Los Angeles planning professor Donald Shoup has been driving the research on parking for the past four decades, and he jokes that he chose the least illustrious field an academic could tackle. Yet his results are profound. Shoup has documented devastating impacts of minimum parking requirements on everything from delayed redevelopment and festering inequality to transportation inefficiencies and greenhouse-gas emissions.

Still the response from the planning profession has largely been silence. “There isn’t a single urban planner who has denied these impacts. Nobody has said ‘this guy is wrong.’ They just carry on because it’s so much easier to change nothing,” Shoup says. “Parking is on automatic pilot.”

Parking rules have been wildly successful at assuring a place for cars, as Shoup points out: “Parking is now the single biggest land use in almost every city.”

But research by Shoup and others show that life gets better without the mandates. In 2010, Michael Manville, then a UCLA postdoctoral researcher (now an urban planning professor at Cornell University), documented rapid redevelopment in Los Angeles after the city waived its two-car-per-unit parking requirements for developers converting historic office buildings into housing. Between 1999 and 2008 the exemption fostered at least 7,300 new housing units in downtown LA, where only 4,300 had been added in the three prior decades.

Despite research by UCLA and others, parking requirements remain nearly universal, sustained by a planning profession that remains wedded to outdated car-centric standards, according to Shoup, Speck, and other urban reformers. Speck’s book backs up the intransigence of planning engineers by quoting one: Charles Marohn. As Marohn puts it in his apologetic 2010 essay — “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer“: “[W]e can’t recommend standards that are not in the manual.”

Often, says Speck, the inertia is most powerful at the county or state level. “Almost every community I have served in the past two decades has had its best efforts at making safer streets at least partially thwarted by a state or county department of transportation who literally owns the roads,” he says.

As with overcooling, there are signs of change in urban planning. Some cities are realizing that mandating parking is a bad idea. Shoup points to Buffalo, which is poised to approve a planning overhaul that would make it the first US city with no requirements for off-street parking whatsoever.

Other cities, such as San Francisco, are replacing some of their minimum parking requirements with maximums. “As a minimum, LA requires 50 times more parking space downtown than San Francisco requires as a maximum,” says Shoup.

Gaming design

Flipping defaults 180 degrees from minimums to maximums may be more than just a step in the right direction. It could point the way toward a broad strategy for ditching dysfunctional defaults. Imagine if ventilation engineers started designing a building’s AC systems by assuming 5 to 10 percent minimum air flows — rather than the highest level allowed by code — or if city planners added parking requirements only where research supported them.

Civil engineering professors Tripp Shealy at Virginia Tech and Leidy Klotz at Clemson University say flipping the defaults in design software for everything from buildings to roadways is a good place to start. Many such tools start each project with default parameters that tend to reinforce the status quo.

For the past three years Shealy and Klotz have been experimenting with another default flip to make “greener” choices the default option in project rating systems such as LEED, which scores building projects using various measure of sustainability (such as water consumption, support for bicycling, and use of recycled materials). Shealy and Klotz tested a sustainability-by-default approach by reprogramming a software package called Envision that was created at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design as a civil engineering analog to LEED. Envision rates the sustainability of infrastructure projects such as civic transport redesigns and land-use plans.

Like architects using LEED, Envision users start with zero points and work their way up as they add merit-worthy features to their projects. Shealy and Klotz reprogrammed Envision’s scoring process, starting users with a perfect score and then docking points as the users removed or scaled back desirable features. Their hunch was that users presented with a case study (redeveloping a rural Alabama town devastated by tornados) would produce higher-scoring (i.e., more sustainable) plans with the new defaults. The idea was based on pioneering decision science research by Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman (author of the best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow) showing that loss aversion is a more potent motivator than reward seeking.

A trial run with civil engineering students and practicing civil engineers bore that out. Participants who started with full points for sustainability delivered projects that scored about 20 percent better, on average, than members of a control group who worked up from zero.

Flipping the initial default score from zero to full points, “drastically increased what engineers thought was possible, and their motivation to try to achieve those points,” says Shealy.

“We’re helping people make decisions that are in their best interest,” observes Klotz, since designers use decision tools such as LEED and Envision as a means of achieving the most sustainable project.

Shealy and Klotz say their sustainability-by-default approach may become the standard setting for the next version of Envision, which is due out in 2018. It is one of several signs that defaults are breaking down, along with Buffalo’s abandonment of off-street parking rules (which appears to be headed for a city council vote this year) and a trend towards greener factory settings for video games and other consumer electronics.

Designing by default may never be stoppable, but it looks as though it can be a lot more sustainable.

Are energy-saving settings bad for the environment?

2019-03-05T17:41:44-05:00

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Originally published on Ensia.

Volkswagen’s deceptive engine controls, uncovered a few months ago, gave its cars a dual personality: one for everyday operation and a secret greener one used to rank higher than warranted on vehicle emissions tests. Regulators in the US and Europe are now examining whether some television manufacturers similarly misbehaved, programming their screens to detect a standard video test clip, dial down their brightness, and thus cheat on energy consumption tests.

While action deliberately aimed at providing deceptively favorable information about environmental impacts could obviously make a person cynical about a company’s claims, efficiency advocates see similar risk hiding in the open in the “eco” buttons popping up on a wide array of products, from automobiles and TVs to dishwashers and water heaters.

The multiple energy personalities in today’s devices present complex, ill-defined, and often confusing options for consumers and regulators to consider. “It’s not simply on and off anymore,” says Noah Horowitz, who runs the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Center for Energy Efficiency.

While eco buttons and modes allow consumers to set their devices for lower power consumption, in many cases they also degrade the quality of service the products provide. As a result, eco buttons, which can promise savings of 10 percent or more when they’re deployed, may have little real impact on energy consumption. “It’s good for selling a product to offer an eco mode,” says Rainer Stamminger, an energy expert at the University of Bonn in Germany. “But in reality I fear they’re not often used.”

And much as the cheat devices made VW car buyers think the product they were purchasing was more environmentally friendly than it really was in actual use, consumers may be misled when eco buttons and modes enable manufacturers to score top marks in government-mandated energy labeling programs. “You may not see the energy savings you were expecting to see, because the tests are done in conditions that don’t reflect reality,” says Christoforos Spiliotopoulos, an energy policy officer with the Brussels-based product standards advocacy group ECOS.

Eco-button loophole

I got my first glimpse of what Spiliotopoulous and his colleagues call the “eco-button loophole” two years ago when I set up a new TV emblazoned with the logo for Energy Star, a mark of excellence maintained by the US Environmental Protection Agency. In fact, the preset energy-saving mode that had earned my TV its Energy Star credential delivered a drearily dim picture. Its efficiency promise went out the window as I set the TV to another preset mode called “movie” that uses about 10 percent more power.

It turns out that my experience is widely shared. Consumer Reports noted in 2014 that many TVs qualify for Energy Star by employing a power-saving mode that “can result in a dim or washed-out picture.” The magazine endorsed my solution, suggesting the switch to “movie” mode for “a natural-looking picture.” HomeTheaterReview.com concurred last September, advising readers to dump the “ridiculously dim Standard mode” created for Energy Star.

Katharine Kaplan, who leads the EPA team that develops Energy Star’s specifications, says that is worrying feedback, since one of her program’s founding tenets is that certified products should deliver as good or better all-around performance than the competition. Kaplan says EPA has responded, adjusting its TV specifications twice in the past three years to protect against manufacturers using dim settings to win efficiency ratings. The EPA’s October 2015 update defines, for the first time, an absolute minimum brightness for standard home viewing.

Drivers and dryers

Eco-mode performance degradation is a turnoff in other products as well. Consider automobiles, where an increasing array of models come equipped with a console button promising fuel savings by dampening vehicle acceleration.

Jack Barkenbus, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University’s Climate Change Research Network, admits to seldom pressing the eco button in his Nissan Leaf: Motoring with the button pressed, he says, is akin to “trying to drive through molasses.” He suspects that, as with my TV experience, he is not the only one forgoing an eco option’s promised energy savings.

“If the eco label comes with a trade-off in performance, the public isn’t buying,” Barkenbus says.

The good news with eco buttons in cars is that no one is being misled. EPA rules require buttons-off operation when testing cars’ fuel economy. And if people do press cars’ eco buttons, they really can save fuel.

That wasn’t the case with clothes dryers, according to 2011 tests by the NRDC: They discovered two dryers’ eco modes left clothes damp, requiring a second run-through, which negated any energy savings.

Consumer distrust

Such disappointing experiences breed consumer distrust, with sometimes ironic outcomes. Consider Europe’s efforts to make dishwashers more efficient. The European Commission’s Ecodesign program mandates that each dishwasher offer a “reference” cycle that cleans an average load of dishes with minimum energy and water use. But a sudsy debate has erupted since 2011, when European standards body CENELEC instructed manufacturers to name that official reference cycle “Eco” on their dishwasher control panels.

Defending dishwashers’ regulated eco button is Milena Presutto, the senior researcher at the Italian energy research agency ENEA who drafted Europe’s legislation covering dishwashers. She says that while eco modes of the past could not always handle normally soiled dishes, today’s standards assure consumers that pressing the eco button will clean everyday dishes with the efficiency promised on the machines’ energy labels. “That’s the issue we wanted to solve,” says Presutto.

The problem, say consumer groups, is that users may distrust the label and choose another cycle. Their concern is supported by a large market study by Stamminger and his colleagues published this year — one of the few to date examining how consumers relate to eco modes. The survey of dishwasher use in several thousand German households found that most shy away from eco cycles. “They are used for less than 20 percent of dishwashing cycles,” says Stamminger.

The net result could be that European dishwashers are using more energy than necessary, since manufacturers focus their engineering efforts on perfecting the legally mandated reference cycle.

Topten International Group, a Zurich-based consumer product rating and advocacy organization, proposed a solution: Test and regulate dishwashers based on a cycle labeled “normal” or “standard,” rather than what Topten calls “the rather exotic eco cycle.”

Stamminger suggests another solution: better education. He is calling on European governments to back up the Ecodesign program with advertising that encourages consumers to press the eco button. “Eco mode is not sufficient if it’s not used,” he says. “What is needed is to standardize the eco mode and have a big public campaign as well.”

Worth saving

NRDC’s Horowitz says eco modes that actually reduce energy use are worth saving, even when they trade a bit of convenience for enhanced energy efficiency. The same eco button that takes the fun out of driving for some, or renders a TV lifeless for me, may be just fine to others. Sometimes, he says, it’s simply a matter of context. An eco cycle on a clothes dryer that runs for two hours at low temperature to save kilowatts may be a nonstarter if one is running multiple laundry loads to keep a family clean, but it could work great for a single load. “If you’re going out to a movie, you don’t care [if the laundry’s done quickly] and you should have the option to save energy,” Horowitz says.

Household energy consumption already is beginning to decline in many countries, thanks to better insulation and more efficient appliances. Eco modes, says Horowitz, can help accelerate that. “We can drive that trend even further if we take proper advantage of these settings and capabilities,” says Horowitz.

For the responsible consumer, this means giving those eco buttons a fair try, when they are available, to see if the results fit your expectations. You can even do a few measurements to see how much energy is at stake. (I checked the impact of mode switching on my TV by plugging it into an easy-to-use device called the Kill A Watt meter.)

And what if the eco buttons come up short? Think about letting the world know about it. One of the biggest challenges facing rating programs such as EPA’s Energy Star, academic researchers, and consumer advocates alike, is a dearth of feedback on how consumers actually use products. Those efficiency wonks are dying to hear from you.