Extreme Engineer of the Month

Profile: Nicholas Long, Research Engineer, HVAC
National Renewable Energy Lab, Golden, Colorado

Nick is currently working on a multivariate optimization methodology to maximize the energy efficiency for buildings. Put simply, he's writing a tool that selects combinations of substitute technologies — skylights, insulation, building shape, building orientation to the sun, walls, windows, heating and AC systems, among others — to optimize a building's energy efficiency taking its geographic location into account. For example, adding windows incorporates more daylight and reduces energy consumed in lighting; however, walls still provide better insulation against heat loss or gain. There's a balance between how much should be windows vs. walls, and it differs for every building and its surrounding weather pattern — including such factors as number of days of sunlight, wind, and temperature.

Nick says that project teams need to consider energy efficiency from the outset. It's no longer sufficient to design a building then figure out how to heat and cool it. You build in energy efficiency beginning with the initial design. You must also look for ways to reduce the heating load, the lighting load, the cooling load, and the plug loads (equipment that's plugged into outlets). Once you've minimized those areas you can start to find ways for a building to provide for its own energy needs through solar panels, wind turbines, and other sources, but you start with keeping the load low.

Taking it one step further, the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) is also looking at water efficiency, a critical issue in many regions. It takes a lot of water to run power plants, and reducing power usage reduces water usage. Nick won the Willis Carrier Award in 2004 for his paper titled "Consumptive Water Use for U.S. Power Production." This national award is given to an ASHRAE member 32 years of age or younger each year for presenting an outstanding paper at the society's meeting (www.ashrae.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/44812). His paper looks at power plants and their water consumption to compare the benefits of evaporative cooling systems or "swamp" coolers. His research will help engineers and builders evaluate different types of cooling systems by relative water consumption.

Another project Nick worked on was developing a weather database for use with energy simulation programs. He developed a web-based tool that collected weather data from 4,000 stations worldwide from 1998 to present — including temperature and cloud cover — and put them in a database format that easily downloads and plugs into energy simulation programs.

Nick’s big picture: We live in buildings. We don’t often think of them as exciting, but most of us spend our lives essentially going from one building to another. Buildings use 39 percent of our nation’s energy, of which commercial buildings use 18 percent and residential buildings use 21 percent. HVAC engineering and building science engineers are responsible for making our buildings energy efficiency and comfortable. The new generation of engineers are not just designing systems with heat pumps, gas furnaces, or air conditioning; they need to look at the whole building — what type of walls to use, what type of windows, and how to integrate the design. There’s lots of science to be done on that.

A graduate of the Colorado School of Mines, Nick received a B.S. in engineering with a specialty in electrical engineering. So how did he wind up as a research engineer finding new way to reduce energy usage in buildings? One of his thermodynamics professors asked him to interview for an internship at NREL during his junior year. He liked the research environment, and when he graduated, NREL offered him a full-time job. What keeps him there? Nick likes the challenge of the research environment and having lots of new things to work on.