Transcript: Crowdsourcing Engineering for Energy Solutions

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, session number eight. Hello and welcome to this episode of Constructor. I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. I want to help property owners foster trusting relationships with your project teams, help you understand how to lower risk, be on the budget and on scheduling of construction projects and exceed your end user's desires. Hello everyone, thank you for joining me today.

If you are any size business and have sustainability concerns or solutions to be solved for, this interview will be particularly interesting for you. Also, if you are an engineer by hobby, by craft, trade or education and wanting to eliminate the energy waste dilemma, you are really going to be excited about this interview I had with Dr. Ralph Muehlheisen. Dr. Ralph is the principal building scientist of the Building Energy Decision and Technology Research Program in the Energy Systems Division of the Argonne National Laboratory.

At Argonne, Dr. Muehlheisen leads research to increase the energy efficiency of the built environment. In the name of few, some of his projects include tech to market activities, reduced order building energy modeling, risk analysis of building energy retrofits and smart building smart grid integrations. Dr. Ralph just so happens to have been one of my advisors when I was attending IIT.

In my undergrad, I studied thermal comfort design. If you have any questions about that, let me know. At IIT, he is currently an adjunct associate professor there. In past years, he was the director of the architectural engineering programs and a full-time faculty member in the Department of Civil Architectural and Environmental Engineering. Dr.

Muehlheisen also has a joint staff appointment at the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago. He is the author of over 150 publications and is a frequent invited speaker in the areas of urban scale modeling, building energy modeling, and architectural acoustics and noise controls. Without further ado, here's my interview with Dr. Ralph Muehlheisen specifically about the JUMP program. Go ahead and please tell me a little bit more about the JUMP program.

Well, actually, I'll talk a little bit about where this kind of had come from as you had put out on your blog or your LinkedIn posting of the – do you know who the smartest person in the room is? They probably aren't actually there. That was one of the things that has been – has come up and it was actually the assistant Secretary of Energy, Dave Danielson, who in trying to spur technology to market activities – and a lot of this came about from the national labs themselves developing so much technology that seems to get stuck in a stage after we do great discovery science and we do a bunch of applied engineering, things don't always get to the market like you would expect.

And it's a question of why is this and what can we do to change that? And at the same time, he was thinking about, okay, this great work and all the taxpayer money that's going out that isn't necessarily getting out to the marketplace to not only help save energy but to provide companies and help generate companies and help generate business in the US is a thought of – there's actually lots of solutions that industry needs that we are trying to think, do we want to invest research here that is probably best done by industry themselves?

But industry is doing a poor job of internal R&D, whether it's because of short-sightedness in companies or with having shareholders who are really always looking at what's happening next quarter, what's happening next quarter as opposed to a longer-term effort, or just not having the resources. Is there too small a company to be able to look outside of their little sphere of whatever it is that they're trying to bring to market? He said we need – Well, it's a good question. It's a good question as to whether these investment dollars into R&D is going to pay off in the long run.

So everybody's looking at that bottom line in the industry. So it's a matter of, okay, will it pay off? And you really can't justify it all the time. You really have to either have a specific department dedicated to that and dedicated to making sure that it pays off in the long run, or it may not be worth it for that particular company. So that makes a lot of sense.

So actually, he then took a cue from some of the companies, whether it's small companies or big companies, who actually started looking at crowdsourcing as a way to fill in some of that R&D gap. And one of the companies who has worked closely with the Department of Energy in various forms is General Electric. GE works with Department of Energy primarily on their generation side, a lot of wind power generation that they've been involved with. They are teams on research efforts that are going through labs or companies that are winning small business innovative research grants or just larger term efforts that are linked in with cities and regions that are trying to put together large scale wind farms.

And when he talked to GE officials, I mean, they have a huge research group, they have a huge research budget that they said they have within their own, they run their own crowdsourcing program, specifically because there are ideas outside your group, outside your company that are different and having a different mindset and having smart people from all over contribute is a way for them to bring in new life, new blood without having to have dedicated resources that are there just for discovery. The Bell Labs are gone.

I mean, we have some place like GE, Ford Motor Company, they do have big research arms, but the plane just pure discovery other than I think IBM right now has a huge group and they're doing it mostly to generate patents. I mean, I shouldn't say that's mostly what they're doing, but that's a lot of what they do. The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, that brought us most of the development of the mouse, the windows, the windowing operating system, those groups are gone. So the idea of outsourcing has been happening in corporate America and so he said, why don't we try to look at this to solve some of the problems that we know we have within the Department of Energy.

So he put forth a program, a pilot of this program that when he discussed it, it was actually the Building Technologies Office that kind of took this up and said, we're going to be the first group within DOE to do this. So Dave Danielson, he recently stepped down, was the Director of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, EERE division within Department of Energy. I think the yearly budget is about $2.8 billion. Of that, about $200 million a year goes to the Building Technologies Office and that goes out for research, development, deployment and market transformation in various forms to labs, to industry, to universities, to small businesses.

And so it was within that group, the Building Technologies Office, that they decided, let us, they worked with one of the labs, which was Oak Ridge National Lab, to do a pilot to say, let's just see if we can put up something that's going to, that we can try to capture some ideas from the people, entrepreneurs in the building industry. And the idea was we will pick a topic, a challenge that is either brought to us by industry saying they have a particular need for a technology or it doesn't actually, wouldn't even have to be a technology.

It could be a business model. It could be thinking about things. And when I say that is you could be thinking about things like we have the technology we want but we're having a hard time having it get in the marketplace. One of the ways that a lot of energy efficiency in buildings goes is through programs at utilities. Utilities go and they give rebates, they help do financing and there are barriers a lot of times to companies doing retrofits, whether it's financing barriers, whether it is capital cost barriers, whether it is the inability to actually have expertise in the house.

So well, and I'm actually working to do one of those, working with ComEd, actually electrical power distribution utility to get a rebate from one of my clients right now. It is a challenge to understand like, okay, what do you need to provide to them and how much money is that going to take to pay your engineers to actually delve into it and your contractor to delve into it in order to get all the information to them to actually give you that payback. It's an RUS process and you have to pay for the time in order to do it and is it worth it?

Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. So I completely understand the perspective. Okay. So we have here companies that are trying to bring new technologies to market and maybe need some R&D help or we have places like utilities who are saying, I need new ideas of how we can get our rebate money, our money that we are supposed to invest in energy efficiency and actually get people to make use of this. And so they're looking for innovation in those directions.

So the Building Technologies Office says, let us take up the mantle and try to see if this program is going to work. And what came out is the JUMP program and unfortunately I still don't, it was the name of it, actually JUMP isn't too bad, but it came out of join the, one of these people who took a phrase and then took letters out. So JUMP itself isn't, but what it stands for is like, oh God, this wasn't a marketing person who worked this out, this was an engineer.

It's catchy enough, it works. Well, yeah, JUMP is okay. Actually when we were talking about trying to put a website together, an actual name, because when we first started it out, it was posted at Oak Ridge or there was a URL through Oak Ridge National Lamp, like no, we want it to be vendor, you know, lab independent because all the labs are going to join in and we wanted something that was easy and it ended up being JUMP at Ideascale.com because we're using the Ideascale platform, crowdsourcing platform to do this.

So there was a pilot that was done over at Oak Ridge and what they decided to do was as their model was they were going to go find companies, technology companies that they had worked with in the past on various projects to suggest a problem that they wanted solved within their R&D that they were either not having, again, not having the funds to do or they had been thinking internally and they weren't getting the solutions that they wanted and put up a prize. And the whole model of the way that JUMP is going to work and the reason why the labs are involved is we are supposed to then go find problems that we know that if industry has them and they get solved, they are going to help solve the energy efficiency and carbon reduction challenge that we have within the Department of Energy to reduce energy use

and carbon emissions from buildings. And part of the idea here is crowdsourcing in itself is done a lot of places but one of the problems is just putting up a crowdsourcing site and getting ideas doesn't necessarily solve the problem because there's an awful lot of solutions that are not what you would be hoping to get. I'm going to put this a little bit more clearly. So one of the jobs of the lab is to work first with the company who's got this idea, the problem they want solved, to really articulate that challenge well in a way that they have an idea of what they want solved.

But we're now trying to talk to a completely different group and it could be people who are material scientists and not building engineers. It could be just business people. It could be people who work out of their garage and have a high school education and read a lot of books by Nikola Tesla and so they've got a lot of weird ideas but maybe they can solve the problem. So it's first articulating the problem in a way that a lot of different people will be able to understand.

The next part is when this gets posted and you is using the Department of Energy network, both of people who subscribe to Department of Energy postings and the outreach that we have connection to a lot of different outlets of information to actually get the word out that there is a challenge. So the Department of Energy acts as a good conduit to advertise the fact that there is a challenge out. We would work then with the company to put together an appropriate award. Most of the time the company wants to give a cash award of that that's related to this, whatever the best idea or two ideas will get a cash award.

And then the labs acts as a team to help do judging, help set up judging, help set up the rules for judging that would go on and give a recommendation to the company of who they think after this crowdsourcing is done really ought to get the award if anyone. And one of the things that we think is unique is the Department of Energy can act actually as a middle person as an independent neutral evaluator. They say, no, we don't think anything was worthy of an award.

We're not going to recommend anybody. One of the reasons why this then becomes a little more attractive to industry is because they are kind of off the hook from the standpoint of, well, if they did this themselves, people say, you never gave an award. We had it. We had ours up there. We should have won.

Now, I mean, even if we give a record, the idea here of the judging panel that would involve people from the company, involve people from the labs, involve people from industry that's set up by the lab, the lab become this person who is a little bit third party independent who can go ahead and say nothing was good enough. So the company hasn't had to put out the money and DOE can act as a buffer to make sure that they're sort of shielded from the criticism that may come up from not getting an award.

OK, that makes sense. But one of the other things in between is as this process is going on, and I think one of the most important things that the labs bring is we actually then act as a filter for and as a support basis for people who are proposing solutions. The first level thing is when somebody would be posting to the crowdsourcing initiative, they get an idea they want to post. Actually, kind of a two things. There's a public facing page where other people can see and view and vote on this, which becomes a part of the judging process.

But if somebody has an idea and they're worried about IP, right, they're sitting and saying, I don't want the world to see, I do want this company to know about it. They can go ahead and submit an idea and say, don't post it to the world. So then it becomes part of the lab to go ahead and say, yes, we will still go through our evaluation process, make sure it gets judged. But it doesn't have to be out for the world to see. So that's a good part of having an in-between.

The second thing is, is actually we can, as I said, we can become a filter and we can be a support basis. And the first thing is when some people start posting things up, we can be a first level filter of things that people post that violate the laws of thermodynamics. Well, we can just throw them out. I mean, you can reduce the amount of traffic and the amount of information that has to go through these judging budgets saying, no, this is something actually now Department of Energy seriously has to put it in their calls when they do calls for put out funding opportunities and they go outside of the labs.

They have wording in here that says, we will not consider any solutions that appear to violate the laws of thermodynamics. You can't put it, you can't suggest a perpetual motion machine. We know it won't work. So we can do that. One of the other things actually that comes out that is a problem if you look at some of the public crowdsourcing and there isn't a good mediator are you will get racist, sexist.

And so we can act as an if filter, all those big nasty things that will come up. And when somebody posts a solution and somebody else will go ahead and start doing comments, we act as a filter. And it's something that shields the company as well. So the company, these things never get put publicly and they don't have to have had the responsibility of being that shield. That's something else that the Department of Energy is willing to take on as that buffer to make sure that we avoid flaming lots.

We can avoid the flames. We can avoid having the various ists getting a chance to voice their opinions on the site. So that's really interesting. Somebody comes in and they have a nugget of an idea that is really, maybe they weren't educated as an engineer. So they didn't know how to articulate it.

One of the things we can also do is iterate with it. So they have this idea comes in and we read and said, this is really good, but we don't want to post this. So we can send emails back and forth and say, all right, and help clarify, is this what you were really trying to say? Maybe this is the way and this is how you might word this a little bit more clearly. So we can go through an iteration process to help them actually improve their process, help them articulate the posting better.

And to the point of we have funding to give them technical assistance during this change. They have something here and they've got this great idea, but they, you know, basically we may ask them say, oh, do you have any idea? There may be a posting of that comes out from a comment from somebody when this goes public of how much energy is this really going to save? And they might say, I don't have any idea. We can help them with some of the money that comes from DOE in this stage where we're still evaluating the idea, help them to figure out how much energy you would save.

This is one of those things that we do. Every project that we have to do, we go through and say, okay, you got 17 different climate zones, you got 20 different types of buildings and in this building it will save this much energy and that's a building will save that much energy and it saves more in Kentucky than it saves in Washington state. And we have the process and the tools and the techniques to figure out what is the nationwide impact or energy savings for new technologies because that's what we do every day.

So we can help them, help them to work out some of those, those details, at least sort of our back of the envelope calculations. So that's something else we can help while the competition's going on. When this is done and an award is made, one of the things that we can also then do is that somebody already had, suppose when they go through and say, oh, we have a technology, we have something that we think is already a solution, not just an idea. You know, we're a small business, we already have this going on and there was just not a connection.

So we made a connection now to a company that has a problem and a small business or a university or a student who has an idea that maybe they've already tested. It was part of their master's thesis, they built this little thing. We can actually then, with some of the money that we have, provide some testing. We can provide technical assistance in the order of 10 or 20K that maybe it's like, oh, we can actually throw it into the lab, run it through one of the building simulator programs or put it onto one of the test facilities that's out at one of the labs.

That's something else that we can end up doing to help out the company. And then we also connect them up with other opportunities or help connect them up. One of them being, one of the other things that came out of this tech market, the small business voucher program, which is a program where small businesses can get a voucher for 50 to about $300,000 to engage the labs, to work with them for doing things like testing, for doing third-party evaluations, for doing extra R&D that they might need to have done.

We can help them identify funding opportunities through small business innovative research, whether it's with DOE or with other groups. And we can even then look to help them write the proposal to partner with them. It could even be that it's a matter of within the funding that comes to the labs every year to be doing, excuse me, R&D, we can look and say, this is a great idea. Even if this technology isn't what we want to do, you look like you have great ideas. Maybe you want to become a partner with us as we get our R&D funds.

And then we start engaging with partners who are small businesses and other industries, more than we would have had just keeping stuff in-house. So there's a whole layer of things that come out of being in the competition besides just a cash award of $3,000 or $5,000 to that small business. And we actually think it's all the other things that go along with it because it's the Department of Energy who's putting up the funds for us to work and spend the time to work with a company that are the biggest benefits.

Absolutely. It sounds like a great opportunity. No, absolutely. Thank you so much for that kind of download. I mean, number one, the fact that you guys are there to not only filter, buffer, and support whoever is submitting their ideas.

Well, not only the small businesses who've encountered an issue or want something solved or even just have a great idea, you're supporting them by even establishing this jump program. But not only that, but whoever is contributing to whatever solution, you have that sort of moderator role plus you're highly supportive in many different scenarios. But I must say it's a great opportunity for large businesses like GE, like you mentioned, who's already doing R&D, as well as small businesses. I think it's a great opportunity. Actually one of the ones that came out that is being done by Berkeley Lab is a small startup company called Building Robotics.

And they actually want somebody, if you had looked over at the jump site, they want to do a mean radiant temperature sensor, which is really important for indoor environmental quality when you're trying to actually do thermal comfort. You need to know the regular air temperature, you need to know humidity, and you actually need to know the mean radiant temperature. The thermodynamic coupling that you have through radiative heat transfer between people and walls and objects and windows and things like that. So this is a startup company.

They are a startup themselves. And the fact that they caught connected up and said, you know, we've got a product that we're doing here, we really are interested in having a solution, but we just don't have the resources in-house. We'll come up with 3K for an award, but we really want to take advantage of all the help that DOE can do in between. So I think that's a perfect example of a small business, a really small business, because they're just barely out of startup phase to be making use of the program.

Yep. I see Building Robotics here on the website. There are a number of other people here, state industry partners, A.L. Smith, Building Robotics, Clean Energy Trust. Yeah.

So actually, we have a very unique one right now, the one that Argonne's doing. Clean Energy Trust is putting up an award. It's not cash. They're doing a mini accelerator program. So this idea is we're particularly looking for startups or people who want to be a startup.

And so it's not a cash award. What you're going to do is get, you are going to get a mini startup accelerator program. So what you're going to end up getting out of this is help in developing a business plan, help in understanding customer discovery, help in how to put together marketing, help in how you're going to find other investment angel or venture capitalists. And the idea is actually get you set up so that you could go into one of these clean tech competitions like the Clean Energy Trust Challenge or the Clean Tech Open or sit down and actually start making a pitch to venture capital firms.

So it's not just getting cash, but you get something that's worth quite a bit more. Oh yeah, absolutely. I would completely agree with that. I mean, the cash prize is minimal in comparison to what that could possibly do for you. I mean, an angel investor, a capital investor sees this opportunity, it could turn into so much more.

That's awesome. This is great. I'm happy to have the opportunity to hear about what this is and in depth what type of support you guys would be providing for the Dump program. In addition to that, I'm happy to share, you know, I'm part of a couple entrepreneurship communities who are doing just that. They're starting up companies and have brand ideas and are involved in crowdsourcing.

And it's, I think that it'll be good for me to share this information with them and hopefully you get some traction, a little bit more traction just by me posting this. So, I'm excited about that. So we are always, I should say always, but we are looking. This program is continuing, hopefully going to continue on fully next year. But there are, I think Oak Ridge is done with their challenges for the year, but we did our one with Clean Energy Trust and we are thinking we have the funding if we can find the right partner, a partner to do a second one this year.

Okay. In this fiscal year. I mean, because it will be starting this fiscal year. So now that you know more about it and you're interested, if you see an opportunity and have an interest in making use of this within the group that you're talking about, that oh there are people there who are, who would love to get involved as the sponsor, someone who's putting together the challenge and having some kind of award out of this. Please contact me.

Definitely will. I'm building related and well, and it's related to saving energy somehow. Actually it doesn't necessarily have to save energy directly. In the case of humidity sensors, they don't save energy directly. It lets us do far more advanced controls.

I mean, it's a really key part of every HVAC system, but better sensors just means I can put more of them everywhere that lets me do more advanced control and improve thermal comfort at the same time. So I don't know that DOE would be interested in something that's going to speed up the construction process or just make the building more durable. There'd have to be some energy related connection or comfort related connection. But if there was something else along that way, please let me know. Absolutely.

Definitely will do that. To learn more about the JUMP program, you can go to jump.ideascale.com. You can also find them on Twitter at jumpchallenge and hashtag jump the number four innovation. If you'd like to contact Dr. Ralph Muehlheisen directly, you can contact them via email at rmuehlheisen at a n l dot gov.

You can also find his contact information and more about how to get involved in the JUMP program in the show notes found at constructor dot com slash zero eight.