Eco-Warrier or 1 in 10,000 ?

The Flower portrait (known to be a 19th century forgery) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Are you an eco-leader marching to save the planet?

Will you be remembered by a latter day Shakespeare as one leading a "band of brothers"?

    But we in it shall be remembered -
    We few, we happy few,

         we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me... 

No - for we are energy managers !

Perhaps our words betray us...

They fired me for saving energy

First a bit of background -

I was completely innocent -  as we all were once - right ? ; )

Semi-Digital Control #Rant !

It's been a while since I had a good rant...

So here we go.

We've all heard of digital control (ON/OFF), but semi-digital control is simpler  - (ON) !
Practitioners of semi-digital control fit that bill - simple (as in simpleton) and are the bane of many an energy manager.

1925 Pelapone PD6, 17 litre 6 cylinder, petrol engine-generator set, ex a standby generator at Shrewsbury Hospital Now on display at the Internal Fire museum. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Their arguments go something like this;

1. Our controls company said we should keep the lead boiler enabled at all times
2. Our chiller manufacturer says the chiller is designed to manage load efficiently and there is no need to switch off.
3. Switching fluorescent lights off reduces their life and consumes more energy on start.

And the biggest BS:

How to save 1.5 Trillion Dollars - that's the question !

Is 1.5 Trillion Dollars really available as energy savings in buildings each year ?

Global energy production is known by the IEA to be around  12,717 Mtoe

(million tonnes of oil equivalent) and one single tonne of oil equivalent is 11,630 kWh so simple multiplication gives us 147 Trillion kWh.

However we must convert production to end use where a factor of 65% is close.
The World Council for Sustainable Business Development tells us 40% of this is used in buildings - so we get to a building consumption figure of 38 trillion kWh.

If we take a delivered price of 10 cents for energy end-use in buildings (which could be debated) we end up with 3,800,000,000,000 dollars each year.

But it may be that only 40% of this is waste according to WCSBD so energy managers in buildings can only save us from potentially 1.52 Trillion Dollars waste per year.

So what's the problem ?

According to WCSBD the problem is very clear - this is their summary: