Monthly Archives: August 2019

Synergy Efficiency Solutions today announced the first complete redesign of their brand identity since the company was founded in 2008. Previously operating under the name Synergy Carbon, the company has created a new brand identity that reflects its standing as Asia Pacific’s foremost energy efficiency expert, offering leading-edge services that promote sustainable design and green building in the region.

Synergy Efficiency Solutions’ new brand identity serves not only to improve its visual presence, but also to highlight its success in offering a variety of sustainable solutions that create energy savings for Asia Pacific businesses. “Few other companies in the region have the technology, expertise, and financial partnerships that synergy efficiency solutions offers its clients,” says synergy efficiency solutions’ Founder and CEO, Steve Piro. “Synergy Efficiency Solutions has grown to become an international leader in Energy Audits and Building Performance Simulations, making it well equipped not only to help companies save money and remain competitive in the face of increasing energy prices, but also to use it’s influence to promote sustainable building funds that help remove financial burdens. The new SES brand was created in response to the evolution of our services, our market, and most importantly our clients’ needs.”

In recent years synergy efficiency solutions has had great success with their range of services and financing models. Their services have evolved to include energy audits, building performance simulations, ESCO financing, and LEED consultations. They’ve become well known as Indonesia’s national market leader, collecting awards for the outstanding energy performance of their buildings. One example is the campus of Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, a structure that was voted most energy efficient building in Indonesia by the Ministry of Energy.

In order to offer its services to a broader market, Synergy Efficiency Solutions has gone beyond reimagining their identity and have announced a broader range of services, an increase in their team of highly specialized, internationally educated energy efficiency experts, and additional partnerships with organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), who aide in the financing of energy efficiency solutions.

The new brand identity, along with its fresh website, logo, and direction, will be launched on June 04th.

ABOUT Synergy Efficiency Solutions

A leader in energy efficiency solutions, SES exists to encourage companies to save energy and money through energy audits and sustainable building designs. The energy efficiency experts at SES use cutting-edge technology and software to design the most effective energy solutions for each client. Through partnerships with international funds, SES is able to remove the financial burden of energy saving solutions, whereby the client pays for the services through the energy savings they achieve. SES specializes in Energy Audits, Building Performance Simulations, LEED Consultations, and ESCO Financing.

In countries like Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia many businesses don’t perceive energy as a tangible good and aren’t aware of the numerous opportunities that exist to decrease energy consumption. Lights are left on during the day, AC is left running in unoccupied rooms, and even vehicle engines are running while no one is using them. This behavior is largely the result of government policies that have maintained artificially low energy prices through subsidies to the energy sector. But those times are changing.

Prices have already started rising rapidly – in Indonesia electricity prices for businesses rose by 15% in 2013 and in 2014 they rose between 28% and 64.7%, depending on the type of building. Currently, the government is relieving its annual energy subsidization in order to emerge from the massive debt it has accrued, thus many businesses are faced with economic losses and even bankruptcy with the sudden need to navigate the first era in which energy is a crucial aspect of financial planning. So what can be done to avoid the rising energy prices?

The possibilities to minimize energy consumption are countless, and some are surprisingly quick and easy to implement. Energy savings could be achieved through various behavioral changes, while energy efficiency could be improved by substituting or repairing various components of a building. Combining energy saving practices and energy efficiency measures helps buildings save up to 49% on their annual energy bills. So how does the reduction in energy consumption work?

Energy savings have often been achieved through behavioral changes – switching off the lights would result in energy savings. Energy efficiency, on the other hand refers to optimizing the equipment that consumes energy so that it can deliver the same service with less energy input. One simple example is LED light bulb, which will reduce the energy spend when compared to conventional light bulbs (LEDs also have a longer life-span).

Saving energy and money is fairly simple. A building is entered for inspection, data is analyzed, and energy saving suggestions are made that range from optimization of old equipment to its replacement with new and more efficient technology. Some of the energy conservation measures are often associated with little or no cost. Others may be more costly, like replacing old equipment, but would have a fast return on investment (usually less than 2 years) and result in significant financial savings after that period.

Some energy efficiency consultancies (those that are supported by ESCO, like SES) will even retrofit a company’s equipment free of charge and then receive payment by sharing some of the company’s energy savings. This eliminates your risk completely and essentially gives you free equipment and energy savings.

The misconception in Southeast Asia is that energy is an extra cost to businesses, and that it serves only the environment and has no financial incentive. The usual attitude towards energy efficiency investments is: “We want to invest less now, regardless of the future benefits”. Businesses are generally not aware of just how much money they will save over the course of even five years.

It is Synergy Efficiency Solutions’ hope that we can promote energy efficiency as a mutual benefit to all – saving energy, money, and the environment at the same time. SES has already helped various private and business clients take the next step, making them realize the huge monetary benefit of energy efficiency.

Remember that futuristic-looking building I wrote about some months back? The tall grey egg-shaped tower is home to SkyStar, one of Jakarta’s fanciest co-working spaces and startup incubators. This is what it looks like inside:

The building was named the most energy efficient building in Southeast Asia last year. It also resembles a set straight out of Star Wars’ Cloud City. The towers are part of the Universitas Multimedia Nusantara complex, a university associated with Indonesia’s Kompas Gramedia publishing group.

But this story isn’t about the startups in SkyStar’s incubation program (I’ll get to them another time). It’s about the tech company that designed the structure. Its name, Synergy Efficiency Solutions (SES), is a mouthful, but it solves a straight-forward problem. SES helps existing buildings, like hotels, hospitals, or universities save energy, and it designs new buildings with optimal energy efficiency in mind.

An extended surf trip
SES was founded seven years ago by Steve Piro, a Californian who ended up settling in Indonesia after what was intended to be a one-year surf trip.

At home, he studied environmental science and economics. His first job in Indonesia was as a biology teacher, but he soon found his way into the energy sector by doing carbon audits, which means assessing and quantifying a company’s total carbon dioxide emissions.

“One day a client pulled me aside and said ‘we don’t really care about this carbon stuff. Just help us be more energy efficient so we can save money,’” Piro recalls.

That stuck with him. He recognized the way to get companies to commit to energy efficiency is not through a cleaner environmental conscience – it’s through saving money. When this key marketing message materialized, he founded SES. The company now counts 15 employees as it upgrades and designs buildings all over Indonesia, and internationally.

Piro knew saving energy wasn’t as complicated as is sounds. In Indonesia, where buildings don’t tend to be built on principles of energy efficiency, he found a lot of low hanging business fruit.

“Sometimes changes as subtle as placing anti-glare film on windows can lead to noticeable savings,” he explains. Often, it’s old equipment like cooling systems, or pumps, which need replacement.

SES primarily deals with hardware. It enters a building with measuring equipment and identifies and upgrades the big energy wasters. But the company also relies on sophisticated tech solutions, like 3D modelling to study energy flows, and sensors to monitor energy consumption in real time.

SES’s business model is also interesting. Rather than getting paid based on work hours, it’s compensated with a percentage of money saved after the energy bill drops.

Pay me when you start saving
Companies like SES are called energy savings companies (ESCO). The “pay-me-when-you-start-saving” business model has become known as ESCO financing. The concept, says Piro, has actually been part of the energy sector since the seventies. This is something most people probably don’t know. Basically, ESCOs are confident their tech will allow building owners to save significant amounts of money.

A project for SES typically begins with an energy audit. This includes evaluating the building’s lighting and cooling systems, all motors and pumps, as well as possible energy leakages in the building’s envelope – things like materials, wall structure, windows, and entrances. The audit comes at a fixed price.

SES then uses data to make recommendations. Where are simple tweaks enough, and which parts need replacement? The team calculates how much money the building operator will save if it follows through with all or some of the suggested changes.

Often, the operators will shy away from upgrades that require high initial investments. This was the case in one of SES’ projects, the Adi Husada Hospital in Surabaya.

At first, the hospital management only wanted to pursue changes that required no or little additional investment. Those interventions included smart load shifting – which means running equipment that consumes a lot of energy at times when the local electricity provider charges the lowest rate – usually late at night. Another measure was to paint the hospital’s roof white instead of black, and open roof vents to allow for better air flow.

Those simple changes were able to cut the hospital’s energy costs by 15 percent, according to Piro.

More recently, SES added a financing option that allows risk-averse clients to go further. For this, they have created an investment branch called Grinvest. The firm offers to take over investments for more complex upgrades, so the client carries no financial risk. SES knows it will get re-compensated over time, when the monthly cost savings kick in.

One of Jakarta’s major five star hotels is in the process of being upgraded by SES with full ESCO financing. Piro has some neat figures to describe how much a hotel of that size can save after the upgrade is complete. He puts it this way: Over the course of ten years, the hotel’s carbon dioxide emissions will be reduced by the same amount as removing 226,000 cars from the streets of Indonesia for one year. It will save enough electricity to power 11,500 houses for one year. And it will save enough water to supply 680,000 people for one year.

Technology agnostic
SES is a tech company, yet it prefers to work with off-the-shelf and open source solutions rather than developing its own proprietary tech.

“We like to stay technologically agnostic,” Piro explains. “We do not want to become exclusive with any one technology provider […] because we don’t want to be viewed as an equipment supplier.”

When SES makes upgrades to a building, it hooks up relevant parts to a monitoring system which is from then on accessible to both the client and SES. Through this dashboard, both parties can observe the building’s energy consumption in real time. It takes this type of software from companies like Siemens or Schneider, both of whom have strong presences in Indonesia. This means they are nearby in case the clients need technical support in the future.

When it designs new buildings, SES relies on software called EnergyPlus developed by the US Department of Energy. It’s open source, and Piro says it’s ideal for their needs, though it takes years to master.

“Ery Djunaedy, our chief scientist, has a PhD in energy simulation from [the Eindhoven University of Technology] and therefore is the man when it comes to this software. He is definitely the best in Indonesia,” Piro says.

With EnergyPLus, SES creates precise 3D-models of the buildings its planning, simulating energy flows and testing reactions to all kinds of parameter changes.

Crowdfunding in the future
In Indonesia, ESCOs are still rare. Piro points to a state-owned company called Energy Management Indonesia, though the company targets large industrial clients. Then there’s Adhmora, a startup run by fresh graduates from Bandung’s Institute of Technology. Though they aim to offer ESCO financing, their main focus at this stage is to educate households on simple energy-saving measures and energy-monitoring solutions for private homes.

Piro believes the market still has many opportunities. One thing he’d like to explore in the future is a crowdfunding concept. Anyone can invest into the upgrade of outdated buildings and get recompensated through a cut from the future savings.”

Editing by Leighton Cosseboom and Michael Tegos

Synergy Efficiency Solutions’s sustainable design for the ICE building was recently featured in Asia Green Buildings. The full story can be accessed by clicking ‘Read More’ below or you can go to the original article here.

Sinar Mas Land and Kompas Gramedia have collaborated with Synergy Efficiency Solutions (SES), in designing the Indonesian Convention Exhibition (ICE). The ICE building, which is the largest convention center in South East Asia, is located in the heart of BSD City and aims to define the future of Indonesia’s sustainable architecture.

Energy efficiency has been at the forefront of this building with construction based on green practices. The green goal is to meet and far exceed all energy and water code requirements. As part of the new emerging destination of the MICE industry (Meeting, Incentive, Convention, and Exhibition) in Indonesia, ICE comprises of 10 exhibition halls of 50,000 sqm and an additional 50,000 sqm outdoor exhibition space, a 4,000 sqm Convention Hall divisible into 4 rooms; 29 meeting rooms; and a 12,000 sqm lobby.

The ICE building incorporated sustainable design concepts from day 1, which, in contrast to common belief, did not result in a significant increase in investment costs. According to Steve Piro, the Founder and CEO of SES, by keeping sustainability as a key design driver, the immediate investment costs of the building were actually reduced. This came as a result of employing a high performance-building envelope (e.g. double low e-glass and optimized shading eves) and a high performance cooling system amongst other strategies. By focusing the budget on helping the building stay cool, they could actually reduce the size of the cooling system by more than 30% compared to a conventional design. This is where the savings were achieved. This high performance design will result in the ICE building saving around 305 million kWhs of energy over a 20-year period and resulting in 240,000 tons of CO2e eliminated. This has both a positive impact on the environment and the operator’s bank books.

Some of the key features explored during the design and construction process consist of photovoltaic solar panels placed on roofs of the exhibition halls, low energy LED lighting across the complex, optimizing natural day lighting, implementing passive ventilation strategies, rain water harvesting and water recycling facilities.

The concepts of Green Buildings and Energy Efficiency are relatively new in Southeast Asia, however they are gaining more popularity with constantly rising energy prices creating pressure for businesses to operate more efficiently at a lower cost. Sinar Mas Land and Kompas Gramedia hope that this building raises the bar for green buildings in the region and proves that such a building makes sense from both an environmental and financial standpoint.

Author: Devina Mahendriyani

Tested and Approved: Synergy Efficiency Solutions had the opportunity to assess the performance of a combined Hot Water/Cooling System during an Energy Audit. The full story can be accessed by clicking “Read more” below

Audit Tale #1 How detailed: Chiller & Heat Pump Combination

As an energy efficiency specialist in a tropical country, and more particularly in Indonesia, most of my work focuses on cooling systems. This is logical because when it is 30C degrees plus outside, you do not want it to be 30 degrees plus inside. Big, small, split, centralized, air-cooled, water-cooled, ducted, duct-free, there are as many systems and configurations as there are islands in the archipelago. In June I had the opportunity to carry out a Level 1 Energy Audit at a famous hotel in Yogyakarta. The 50 year old hotel, which went under renovation 5 years ago, completely refurbished and replaced its cooling and hot water system. The purpose of this audit, among other things, was to look for energy savings opportunities, but also to observe the new systems installed with the renovation and analyze their operations and performance.

When auditing cooling and hot water systems I typically expect to find corroded pipes, old and tattered pieces of insulation and its common for me to even find the engineering staff drying their hand washed clothing on the condensing units blowing off heat. So you can imagine my good surprise when I stepped into the utility room and was tasked to assess a brand new installation.

The Figure below describes the system installed at the Hotel (pumps and valves not represented)

The system installed uses a centrifugal chiller for the cooling system and a screw chiller heat pump for the hot water system. All the machines installed were less than 5 years old and in good condition. The interconnection between the two systems (hot water and cooling) was the inventive feature that really caught my Attention.

Cooling System

The cooling system runs with one centrifugal chiller to produce the cooling required by the guest rooms and other areas in the hotel;
The second chiller kicks in only in the case of high occupancy or use of exhibitions and ballrooms;
On the evaporator side, the chilled water is being supplied to the different Air Handling Units in the hotel, and flows back to the chiller at a high temperature;
On the condenser side, the water is being supplied to the Cooling Towers and flows back to the chiller at a low temperature.

Hot Water System

1. The hot water system runs with one heat pump to produce the hot water required by the guest rooms, restaurants and other areas of the hotel;
2. On the evatorator side, the chilled water is being supplied to the water tank before being distributed to the different hotel water fixtures through a ring main. Water flowing back from the hotel goes thorugh the hot water tank before passing back through the heat jump to be heated.

Both chillers and heat pumps work based on the vapor-compression cycle. The heat absorbed on one side (evaporator) is rejected on the other (condenser).

The difficult part of an efficient heating or cooling system is how to manage the “undesired” energy. For the chiller, it corresponds to the heat on the condenser side, while for the heat pump, it corresponds to the heat absorbed on the evaporator side.

A chiller/heat pump does not “produce” or “create” heat, but displace it. With the heat pump, the amount of heat added to the water to increase its temperature (hot water production) has to be absorbed somewhere else. If the both sides are not well balanced, then the unit will work harder to compensate and consume more energy.

To put it simply:

– The more heat is rejected on the condenser side, the more efficient the chiller will be in order to produce cooling;

– The more heat is absorbed on the evaporator side, the more efficient the heat pump will be in order to produce hot water

The smart idea behind the combined system installed here resides in the decision to absorb the undesired energy of the hot water system out of the cooling system undesired energy. With this configuration, the hot water system evaporator side cools down the condenser side of the cooling system, killing two birds with one stone. As a consequence, the condensed water flowing through the cooling towers and back to the chiller has a lower temperature without additional energy consumption! This configuration increases the efficiency of the chiller and allows reducing the energy consumption of the cooling Towers.

There are a few good points to this configuration from what I observed:

– The inter connection between the hot water and the cooling system allows for the normally wasted energy from one side (hot water system) to be reused on the other side (cooling system);

– This configuration is working even better due to the proximity of the two systems, located in the same room, a few meters from each other.

Similar configurations and other alternatives to combine both the cooling and hot water systems have been in practice for many years, but seeing it installed and performing well proves the feasibility of this solution. This configuration does not require particular additional investment or design while offering interesting energy savings opportunities.

There are always ways to improve a system performance further, since no system is ever going to be perfect. Nevertheless, this configuration showed an interesting and well thought through alternative to efficiently produce both the cooling and heating required by the building, with the two systems operating hand in hand.

Author: Matthieu Caille, Energy Efficient Specialist at SES