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No doubt there are plenty of antediluvian greenbashers frumphing about how the figure is overblown and vaguely European. These folks remind me of the "economist" who is walking with his granddaughter who gleefully proclaims, "Look, Granpa! A $20 bill on the ground!" The "economist" sniffs, "Ignore it, dear. If it were real, someone would have picked it up already."
One hundred and thirty billion is a big number but, as real energy efficiency pros know, $130 billion is all the waste you can eliminate without engaging your brain. Heck, Art Rosenfeld, now a California Energy commissioner and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory when I knew him, said we were wasting $100 billion a year, almost 30 years ago when a buck was still worth something. Anyway, I'm always nervous that people will continue with their brain stuck in neutral, cream-skim the $130 billion and effectively render the next $150 billion of cost-effective savings un-economic because they need to be packaged with the cheap stuff to get over most folks' hurdle rates.
On a less piss-ant note, I'm really digging the SunEdison work with large retailers Walmart and JCPenney to put solar panels on their big box. The same greenbashing troglodytes from the earlier paragraph are no doubt grousing about the lack of cost-effectiveness of these investments. However, if one gets out of the 1980s energy commodity mentality and looks at the cost of providing energy services -- as are these august retailers -- you realize that an energy efficiency/solar combination package is not terribly more (if at all more) expensive to light, heat, cool, etc. the stores than a conventional package of leaky-bucket store/underpriced grid electricity. After all, Walmart has improved the energy efficiency of its stores by 21 percent in just a few years, so the 25 percent to 30 percent being provided by the solar panels is unlikely to make a noticeable increase in the overall cost of energy services.
I'm hoping that the ongoing thermostat wars reported by the IFMA survey, which are relics of poorly designed and/or maintained buildings, will increasingly be things of the past as growth in LEED EBOM (Existing Buildings Operations & Maintenance) continues and the retro-green commissioning industry begins to hit its stride.
Long gone are the days when energy efficiency was equated with freezing in the dark (actually, that sounds like one of those black-glass "energy-savers" from the 80s) and today's combo of better design, better equipment and better monitoring and control begins to demonstrate that green buildings are better indoors and out.
Rob Watson is the executive editor of GreenerBuildings.com. You can reach Rob at rob.watson@greenerworldmedia.com or follow him on Twitter @KilrWat.
"Global Warming II" — Image by spekulator.
Preach On Brother, Preach On...
People are very quick to bad talk anything new. They have no real thought process. I hear so many people say solar is pointless, claiming that by the time a residential system is paid off they would have spent the same or more to have electric in their house, or they say what is the point because it takes "x" amount of petroleum products to make the solar cells. They don't see how much of our planet they would save, they don't see how much oil we did not have to buy from another country, they don't see how much greenhouse gas was not released into our atmosphere. They don't see that in time we could run all of our factories on renewable energy. If it cost the same or even a little more to use renewable energy, it would be money well spent to improve the world we live in. I actually built and installed a solar panel array on my own home. I saved a ton of money and cut my electric bill by 50%.