Energy & Environment R&D

Enterprise-Scale Energy Management for Real Time Savings

We have addressed the challenge of analyzing disparate sources of information from energy management systems and sensors, leaping past conventional approaches for energy efficiency. Our solution processes and analyzes energy system data in real time, providing enterprise level managers a view of energy consumption so that they may make informed decisions on how to avoid overspending on volatile energy budgets. When energy system performance is suboptimal, Enterprise Energy Dashboard (E2D) provides the analysis and prioritization of actions, focusing efforts on corrective actions which provide the greatest benefit.

Enterprise Energy Dashboard (E2D) provides executive-level energy managers with a tool to quickly identify significant system variances and address them in a timely manner. Unlike a traditional energy management and control system (EMCS), the E2D tracks metrics, sorts them by their scorecard status, and identifies energy inefficiencies. This allows managers to focus time and resources on resolving the issues that provide the greatest cost reduction and operation efficiency.

A traditional EMCS reports the operating status of equipment, as do metering systems and advanced metering initiatives (AMIs). These traditional systems rely on rigorous analysis and cross referencing by experts in order to interpret current conditions and identify what needs to be addressed. This process can take days, weeks, or months. E2D transcends this approach by tracking and reporting equipment status and consumption variances on an hourly basis, providing a real-time tool to help enterprise-level managers mitigate energy risk.

An enterprisewide solution

E2D collects and analyzes data from multiple EMCS and metering systems, providing an analytic and reporting gateway that focuses resources on the most critical energy issues affecting the enterprise on a daily basis. E2D is a thin-client software solution designed to overlay traditional EMCS, AMI and metering systems. This is important, as most enterprises have a multitude of incompatible energy systems in their facilities, requiring multiple computers and skill sets to manage. E2D allows a single point of entry and a common look and feel for energy management across the entire enterprise.

The E2D engine cross-references data from various systems, devices and relational databases in order to calculate energy inefficiencies. This provides senior-level managers with a snapshot of overall energy usage, which allows them to prioritize their actions effectively. E2D also provides the means for management to filter and sort identified assets (such as regions, facilities, buildings, and equipment). Information is arranged to represent the organization so that managers can easily identify energy and carbon footprint variances and make subsequent optimal performance changes.

Simple color codes tell you what you need to know in seconds

SAIC built E2D to process raw data from an organization's operations and compare it to historical data, budgets, and known metrics. Using simple traffic light colors, E2D helps enable senior level energy managers to understand how energy is being spent in real time, eliminating the delays caused by monthly analysis that cost time, money, and resources. This tool, updated hourly, allows managers to visualize energy use, recognize inefficiencies and identify energy savings opportunities.

SAIC knows energy management

SAIC designs, builds, and implements energy management solutions that help reduce costs and streamline operations to help clients address the unprecedented changes and volatility in today's global energy market. Our energy experts have helped federal, state, and private clients reduce costs, streamline operations, and increase effectiveness. SAIC technology and tools are used by clients in a variety of industries to help reduce energy demand, conserve energy, improve energy efficiency, and reduce their carbon footprint. In addition, SAIC analysts and engineers have helped evaluate hundreds of energy efficiency programs for numerous clients.

By understanding the complexity of integrating disparate systems, SAIC provides an array of experience and support services that will help clients manage energy and go green through the use of technology.

Cleaning Yesterday's Contamination with Today's Technology

SAIC's environmental scientists combined several technologies into one powerful tool that is being used to quickly and accurately determine the nature and extent of radiological soil contamination on hundreds of affected sites. Using a radiation detector coupled with a GPS unit, we can survey an entire area precisely. GIS software creates detailed color-coded maps that show radiation levels. This highly visual assessment enables our scientists, as well as customers and regulators, to focus their remediation efforts, thereby delivering great efficiencies. This is but one example of how SAIC helps improve our environment.

Previous governmental, military, and commercial activities have resulted in the presence of leftover radiological material in soils at sites in the U.S. and abroad. The ability to quickly and accurately assess the radiological contamination on such sites is a critical requirement throughout the site cleanup process.

For over a decade, SAIC has developed and refined cutting-edge technology to set the industry standard for the rapid assessment of radiologically impacted sites. By coupling sensitive radiation-detecting equipment with state-of-the-art GPS technology, SAIC scientists can efficiently and accurately assess the extent of radiological contamination across land areas large or small. The resulting site data is then analyzed using geographic information systems (GIS) software. The combination of these technologies provides an extremely powerful tool that SAIC scientists have used to rapidly and precisely assess radiological contamination on hundreds of radiologically impacted sites.

Radiological Assessment Methodology

After the history of a site is thoroughly researched, SAIC scientists perform “walk-over” or "drive-over" radiation surveys to investigate the radiation levels across the area of concern. This process involves scanning the ground surface with radiation detectors linked directly to GPS units. As the scientists conduct the survey, data-loggers electronically record radiation levels while simultaneously recording their associated geographic locations. Our scientists have optimized this technology combination resulting in the ability to record a radiation level (and corresponding geographic position) once per second throughout the survey. GIS software is then utilized by our scientists to create color-coded maps of radiation levels across the site.

Decision-Making and Cleanup

The color-coded maps allow SAIC scientists and other decision-makers to visualize areas of elevated radioactivity in order to focus subsequent efforts on the specific zones needing additional investigation. For example, scientists can use the survey data to return to the exact locations of elevated radioactivity to obtain soil samples to detail the nature and extent of contamination. Conversely, our scientists also use the data to eliminate from further investigation those areas without elevated radioactivity, thereby saving the time and costs associated with unnecessary additional assessment of these areas. After our scientists have performed the radiation surveys and associated soil sampling, SAIC GIS specialists use a suite of software tools to visualize, analyze, and interpolate the soil data. For example, three-dimensional soil contamination modeling is used to aid scientists and engineers in determining soil area and volume requiring excavation.

Verification of Successful Remediation

Finally, after the known contaminated soil has been excavated from a site, our scientists again use the powerful combination of GPS-assisted radiation surveys and GIS data analysis to verify and demonstrate successful cleanup. The excavated areas are re-surveyed and the data is again managed within the GIS to allow SAIC scientists and other decision-makers to examine and document post-cleanup conditions.

Advantages

• Quickly and accurately records radiation readings across a land area.
• Resulting data is immediately mapped and color-coded for effective data visualization.
• Interactive maps are used as decision-making tools by planners and other stakeholders.
• Large "clean" areas can be quickly eliminated from unnecessary additional investigation.
• Data/maps are easily shared/evaluated using web-based GIS tools.
• Accurately documents post-remedial conditions.

Heating Homes with Stored Solar Energy

SAIC played a big part in enabling a small Canadian community to use summer's solar heat to keep warm during the winter, when temperatures dip as low as 40 degrees below. SAIC Canada's Renewable Energy and Climate Change Program was instrumental in the development and successful completion of the Drake Landing Solar Community, a 52-home suburban community that uses a solar-thermal design concept to store the summer's heat underground for reuse in the winter. Not only does our solution reduce the carbon footprint, it helps insulate homeowners from volatile and escalating energy prices.

The Technology: Solar Seasonal Thermal Energy Storage

For the northern United States and Canada, a significant quantity of fossil fuel is required to meet heating demand. Approximately 80 percent of residential greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions comes from space heating and domestic hot water. Approximately 75 percent of this annual thermal energy demand is for space heating. The use of underground thermal energy storage (UTES) in residential and commercial buildings can significantly reduce the amount of fossil fuel we consume while simultaneously reducing 60 to 90 percent of GHG emissions from conventional building energy systems.

Most population centres in the northern United States and Canada receive a significant amount of solar radiation. However, the bulk of this solar radiation is received in the summer months; solar radiation is relatively low during the winter months, when the demand for space heating reaches a peak. The ability to effectively store thermal energy for a period of months provides an opportunity to substantially increase the use of solar energy. Figure 1 shows an example of the seasonal mismatch between the availability of solar energy and the need for space heating.

The Project

This large-scale solar seasonal storage project, located 10 miles south of Calgary, is in its second year of operation. The Drake Landing Solar Community is a community of 52 modern, detached homes that derive most of their heat requirements from solar energy, using borehole thermal energy storage(BTES) to store heat collected in the summer for usein the winter. Drake Landing is designed to have the highest annual solar fraction (90 percent) of any solar-based seasonal storage system in the world.

How it Works

Thermal energy (heat) is collected using 798 conventional, flat-plate solar thermal collectors mounted on four rows of interconnected garages and carports located behind the homes. An energy centre building that is located in the southwest corner of the neighborhood park serves as the heart and brains of the system. The energy centre decides how best to collect, store, and distribute the heat throughout the neighborhood.

When the community does not need any heat, collected solar energy is transferred to the earth by pumping hot water (heated by the sun) through U-tubes in 144 boreholes, each 35 meters (115 ft) deep. Thermal energy is stored in approximately 35,000 m³ (322,930 ft³) of soil and rock under a corner of the neighborhood park. When the homes need heat, water is pumped through the 144 boreholes in the reverse direction to extract the stored thermal energy from the earth. The hot water (heated by the warm BTES field) is then pumped to the homes in the subdivision and heat is transferred to the homes through a forced air fan coil unit to keep the homes warm.

The Other Benefit: Reducing Greenhouse Gases

The target for GHG emissions reduction for this project is in the residential space heating segment. When the boreholes field is fully charged, an estimated 5 tonnes of greenhouse gases are avoided annually by each home. This translates to more than 286 tonnes annually for the new community.

Cost Savings for Residents

The natural gas price in Alberta is still relatively low. For the next few years, the residents in Drake Landing will be charged a flat fee to cover the operation and maintenance of the energy system. This initial flat fee is based on the amount of money the home owners would have to pay if they had used natural gas for heat in an equivalent home. In the longer term, the residents of the Drake Landing Solar Community will be protected from natural gas price volatility and potentially very high heating cost due to rising fossil fuel prices in the future.

The system is designed so that, in a typical year, more than 90 percent of the energy used to heat the homes will come from solar energy.

Even in an unusually cold winter, more than 80 percent of the required heat is expected to come from the sun. As BTES is charged up after the first few years, a significant reduction in annual natural gas consumption can be realized through the solar BTES seasonal storage system. The finished BTES field is part of the community green space, where play structures and a walking path are located.

Future Markets for BTES

Work is currently underway to implement aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) technology, where the cold from the winter could be stored for summer cooling and the heat from the summer could be stored for winter heating. ATES and BTES fall into the category of energy management tools known as interseasonal energy storage. There is growing interest in North America in both BTES and ATES technologies.

Planning and early work in developing applications using advanced and compact thermal energy storage materials are also underway to find solutions for interseasonal energy storage to work in existing buildings in our urban centres where large-scale district heating retrofit is not practical and space is at a premium.

As the cost of fossil fuel increases over time, building owners and consumers will demand alternative energy management solutions at lower costs. Commercial buildings, office towers, new residential subdivisions, and process industries are future markets for interseasonal energy storage technologies.

The recent peak in fossil fuel price and the growing attention to global warming have caused key stakeholders to be more open-minded in considering nontraditional approaches for energy management. SAIC is working with developers and government representatives on a number of pilot project studies to increase stakeholders’ familiarity and understanding of these new technologies, with the aim to create more demonstration and showcase projects for the market.

SAIC has the full range of special skills and knowledge to implement the new interseasonal energy storage technologies. In projects of this type, multiple infrastructural systems need to be well integrated to reach optimal performance. Our combined experience in energy technologies, systems integration, design and build, and project management can help our society embrace and take advantage of technological innovation.

A Growing List of Customers

Currently, we are working with a number of Canadian municipalities (including the Town of Okotoks, the Town of Markham, the City of Regina, and the City of London) on interseasonal energy storage projects.

Early Warning For Natural Disasters

Spurred by the devastation of the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people, SAIC leveraged extensive experience in underwater surveillance and oceanographic sensing to produce an enhanced, reliable deep water sensor to meet emerging international requirements. The SAIC Tsunami Buoy (STB) System provides a reliable tsunami detection system for the international marketplace. The SAIC buoy is the first commercial system built and independently tested to meet stringent government standards. It can be easily integrated into the world-wide tsunami network.

How It Was Developed

Spurred by the devastation of the Dec. 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people, SAIC leveraged extensive experience in underwater surveillance and oceanographic sensing to produce an enhanced, reliable, deep water tsunami sensor to meet emerging international requirements. SAIC invested significant research and development funds to create and fully test the SAIC Tsunami Buoy (STB) system. The system was evaluated at sea for more than 12 months off the coast of California. During that period, the STB detected the Kuril Islands tsunamigenic event on Nov. 15, 2006, after just 3 weeks at sea. The STB was independently tested by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in a side-by-side at-sea test with a Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART®) system for 120 days and was found to meet or exceed DART performance criteria. As a result of the STB’s exceptional performance, SAIC is licensed by NOAA to produce tsunami assessment systems.

How It Works

The system was designed with three subsystems:

• Surface communications buoy subsystem
• Buoy mooring subsystem,
• Bottom pressure recorder (BPR) subsystem.

The surface communications buoy subsystem integrates a closed-cell foam hull with an electronics well and acoustic modems. The electronics well houses and protects the Global Positioning System, satellite communications, processing, batteries and other electronics.

The mooring subsystem includes swivels, shackles, mooring line, chain and anchors.

The BPR subsystem is made up of a bottom anchor table, several pressure vessels, an acoustic release, acoustic transducers, glass floats, a processing unit, batteries, and an extremely sensitive bottom pressure sensor/recorder. The STB also provides for two-way back-channel communications for troubleshooting, changing operational modes and downloading high-resolution data sets. The BPR has three modes of operation: deployment mode, low power or normal mode, and tsunami mode.

When deployed, the buoy is anchored to the bottom at the selected site and the BPR is deployed in tandem as its pair, close enough to allow for uninhibited real-time acoustic communications. The BPR may be deployed in water up to 6,000 meters in depth. It measures pressure every 15 seconds to an extremely high level of sensitivity. Temperature is measured concurrently and used to correct the pressure values. Water column heights or depths can be inferred from these pressure-level measurements.

The tsunami detection algorithm running on the BPR processor is designed to recognize the characteristics of a tsunami and trigger a response to a preset threshold value. The algorithm calculates the magnitude of pressure fluctuations and compares them against predicted values that include tides and other low-frequency components. The difference is then compared against a threshold value, and if exceeded, the tsunami detection system alerts and goes into tsunami mode.

SAIC deployed its tsunami buoy systems in the Tasman Sea just west of New Zealand last March and, recently, south of the Java Trench in the eastern Indian Ocean. Currently, we are building four additional STB systems for Australia, and we submitted buoy system proposals to China and Thailand. SAIC also is in active discussions with Chile, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Portugal for tsunami buoy detection systems. Additionally, we have recently signed an agreement with NOAA to produce a third-generation buoy system that will decrease deployment costs, increase reliability and extend service life.

High Resolution Weather Forecasting

For 50 years, predicting the weather has been one of the grand challenges of numerical simulation. This problem is incredibly difficult for many reasons: it involves scales of motion that vary by many orders of magnitude in space and time, it involves complex physical processes only some of which we completely understand, we lack basic data on the surface of the Earth that affects the interaction of the atmosphere with the surface, and we lack data on the atmosphere itself. In spite of all of these issues, weather forecasting has steadily advanced for five decades.

For over 15 years SAIC has been developing an advanced numerical weather prediction system. The Operational Multiscale Environment model with Grid Adaptivity (OMEGA) is based upon an adaptive unstructured triangular mesh that facilitates the placement of additional spatial resolution anywhere required. The basic philosophy behind OMEGA development has been the creation of an operational tool that can support both weather forecasting and predicting the dispersion of hazardous materials such as from a nuclear reactor accident like the Chernobyl disaster, widely known as the worst nuclear power plant accident in history.

The flexibility of the OMEGA grid structure allows the creation of grids that have high resolution at diverse specific locations (see below). This allows an improvement in forecast accuracy by resolving both the physical processes in the region of interest at higher resolution and the surface properties that impact the weather (e.g., elevation, land use, land/water fraction, vegetation, albedo, soil type) at higher resolution. It also allows OMEGA to put the computational power where it is needed – for example forecasting specific areas such as airports or tracking a storm such as a hurricane.

OMEGA grid placing high resolution around the 25 busiest airports in the US.

Hurricanes represent one of the most severe forms of weather. Their tremendous impact derives from the intensity of the wind speed, the magnitude of the precipitation, and the duration of the storm. In spite of the tremendous affect of these storms, however, the current operational accuracy of forecast systems has been considerably less than that desired. In 1998, the city of New Orleans was evacuated because of a forecast for Hurricane George that turned out to be in error due to a last minute shift in the storm track to the east.

Had information from SAIC's OMEGA been available at the time, different steps might have been taken. A historical forecast produced by OMEGA for Hurricane George shows the OMEGA surface pressure field (color and contours) along with the observed storm location. The 24 hour and 72 hour forecasted positions are shown below.

OMEGA forecasted pressure for Hurricane George (1998) valid on Sept. 26 (left) and Sept. 28 (right). The actual storm track is shown as dark blue dots.

SAIC continues to improve and develop OMEGA for a host of government and commercial applications. We believe that it can significantly improve operations in the transportation, energy, oil and gas, and emergency response sectors of the marketplace.