One of the most widely used axioms in modern business management is “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”. Proper measurement of a building’s current energy performance is a fundamental of energy management. Sometimes this measurement is done through the provision of an energy “audit” by a qualified engineering firm. Many public energy efficiency agencies insist on an energy audit prior to providing any financial support for subsequent energy efficiency improvements. Unfortunately, there are a lot of commercial and industrial buildings that have never gone through an energy audit.
In the absence of doing a full energy audit, another approach is to at least benchmark the energy performance of a commercial or industrial building through an analysis of its energy bills. Even this simple undertaking has not been widely done, and is just starting to become a trend among larger North American cities. The following article provides a good overview of the situation in the United States.
As this article highlights, most of the benchmarking being done is a simple snapshot of utility bills compared against the square footage of the building. This provides a starting point…but it is not enough.
The future? I feel it is going to be real-time measurement of energy usage in a building as part of an energy audit. This “dynamic benchmarking” provides an objective and accurate measurement of energy usage prior to any retrofit work and then a verification of actual savings following the energy retrofit.
Last November I was privileged to attend the CIPEC Energy 2011 conference in Toronto. One of the keynote speakers was Tom Rand, Founder and Director of VCi Green Funds, Lead Cleantech Advisor at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto. I found Tom’s keynote speech to be one of the most enlightened and practical summaries of the role of energy efficiency in helping address our global carbon challenge.
I would highly recommend reading this summary of Tom’s comments at the Energy 2011 conference. Please see this link.
Here are a few of the key takeaways I got from Tom’s keynote speech:
Think of clean energy as a tree with various fruits that are harder and easier to reach.
Energy efficiency and peak demand reduction are the two lowest hanging, easy-to-reach fruit. We shouldn’t need policy incentives to do this – CEO’s should be doing them now because they have ROI’s that are attractive.
Need to unlock energy efficiency and demand management NOW if we ever expect to get to the more difficult systems such as shutting coal plants, etc.
First step: Efficiency – more GDP, less energy
Second step: Clean energy – more energy, less carbon
BUT – we need to focus on the easy things first: energy efficiency.
Objective feedback on performance and progress is key to just about any change.
Losing weight while on a diet (the scales don’t lie). Paying down your credit card balance (the monthly statement doesn’t lie). Improving your golf handicap (the math doesn’t lie, assuming you accurately record your score!). Measuring energy consumption reductions after you make changes to equipment, processes, or your lifestyle – well, actually this isn’t as easy as it sounds. But technology is helping us improve our ability to do this.
Yes, feedback based on objectively measured data is king. And the more immediate the feedback , the better. A recent article by Carl Duivenvoorden provides some neat examples of how immediate feedback on personal energy consumption in our homes and our vehicles can drive highly positive behaviour to reduce consumption.
The same principle is true for the commercial and industrial sector. A large part of the challenge in these two market segments, though, is translating a large stream of raw data into useful information that can then be used to drive performance. The term “energy visualization” is an emerging field of academic study and usually requires a unique blend of engineering, information technology, and graphic design to come up with a solution that has impact with users of commercial and industrial facilities.
This is a challenge that we have been working on for the past couple of years at SHIFT Energy, and based on feedback from our customers, we are making progress. But there is still a lot of work to do in order to provide feedback to different stakeholders who use commercial and industrial facilities – employees, tenants, the general public – to help them understand how their activities inside a building impact its energy consumption. Visualizing energy consumption in real-time is a foundation. The next step is using this information to drive immediate behavioural change and to objectively measure the results.
Sometimes we as individuals can feel very insignificant in terms of contributing to the solving of large, complex problems. I have made the case in past blogs that solving our global energy challenge, and thereby getting our greenhouse gas emissions under control, is the greatest challenge facing humans today. There have been many proposals made on how to tackle this global challenge; most of them involve a combination of international treaties, national carbon taxation and trading, government involvement in regulating energy usage or prices, and heavy public and private sector investment in technology.
I believe the most effective thing we can do right now is this: use available existing technology to focus on improving energy efficiency at the end user level. To enable this approach, we need to objectively measure the improvement in energy performance when an individual or organization makes a change that saves energy, in order to demonstrate a positive Return on Investment. And once we have provided objective measurement of success, make sure we keep this positive energy performance going by continuing to measure our success and use the savings to invest in more energy savings opportunities. It is a virtuous circle of measure, change, save, invest.
But – based on our experience in the past couple of years with SHIFT Energy Inc., it won’t be Return on Investment alone that drives organizations to save. Even with extremely attractive ROI proposals (less than 12 months to recoup an investment), organizations just aren’t that interested in spending capital or expense money to help curb energy use and carbon emissions. There are always other more immediately pressing spending opportunities inside most organizations, and the effects of not spending on energy reduction won’t be noticed for years. Basically it is easy to ignore spending money to reduce energy and carbon emissions, no matter how attractive the ROI. There needs to be an additional “carrot and stick” mechanism – and this mechanism is carbon.
See the attached article for recent news from China about its approach to managing carbon emissions.
The past couple of weeks I’ve focused on some key themes about global energy demand, and also how energy efficiency efforts are most effective when focused on the final end user. I’d like to introduce another often quoted concept that today is applied to sustainability of our planet’s resources.
In 1968 Garrett Hardin published an article in the journal Science titled “The Tragedy of the Commons”. Although Hardin’s work was focused on human overpopulation of planet earth, his article and its concepts have been widely applied to the issue of global warming. Here is a summary of the concepts put forward by Hardin as summarized in Wikipedia:
The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen. This dilemma was first described in an influential article titled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” written by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968. Here is a PDF version of the original article.
Hardin’s Commons Theory is frequently cited to support the notion of sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, and has had an effect on numerous current issues, including the debate over global warming. An asserted impending “tragedy of the commons” is frequently warned of as a consequence for adopting policies which restrict private property.
Central to Hardin’s article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd) of a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin’s example, it is in each herder’s interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the quality of the common is damaged for all as a result, through overgrazing.. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all.
You can read more about the arguments both for and against Hardin’s article in this Wikipedia link. Also below is a video of Hardin talking about “Human Nature and the Tragedy of the Commons” in an interview with Nancy Pearlman.
I want to make a link between “The Tragedy of the Commons” and my recent blogs using the excellent book by Peter Tertzakian ”The End of Energy Obesity”. Mr. Tertzakian makes the point that if the 6 billion or so people not currently living in the richest economies of the world continue their aspirations to live a lifestyle that the 1 billion people in the richest economies enjoy, our global energy use will grow enormously. The increase in CO2 emissions will follow the same trajectory, and with it the detrimental effects of climate change. Each of us as individuals, though, does not directly pay for the effects of climate change – it takes the effects of billions of individuals using more energy and producing CO2 to create the consequences of global warming. Our own self-interest in not doing anything about saving energy as an end-user because it costs us something , yet which in the end could cost all of us the depletion of the earth’s resources, is our modern day “Tragedy of the Commons”.
One of the most widely used axioms in modern business management is “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”. Proper measurement of a building’s current energy performance is a fundamental of energy management. Sometimes this measurement is done through the provision of an energy “audit” by a qualified engineering firm. Many public energy efficiency agencies insist on an energy audit prior to providing any financial support for subsequent energy efficiency improvements. Unfortunately, there are a lot of commercial and industrial buildings that have never gone through an energy audit.
