Reference

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:

  • Building professionals tend to underestimate the contribution of buildings’ energy to climate change and to overestimate the cost of saving energy. 
  • Know-how and experience are lacking in these professions. 
  • Our research found four key deficiencies: personal know-how, business community acceptance, corporate conviction and personal commitment. 
  • There is a lack of leadership on building sustainability. 
We need "Know How"

Generally, "know-how" is a short hand for "pay a consultant", but on average the available savings are spread over some 1.5 billion buildings and one thousand dollars potential per building (to include travel costs) means that only the biggest buildings can viably afford consultancy (even if we had the consultants to serve hundreds of millions of buildings).


The only viable solution is that we provide support using technology. This may be why kWIQly were called out again this week in the
 Silicon Angle Newsletter weekly round-up matching Amazon, Google, Hulu and Hewlett-Packard paragraph for paragraph :)



Naturally George was delighted to pick up the award to the full 2000 conference attendees

(1 min)


and afterwards I put in an effort to spread the word during a slightly longer (10min)  TV interview with theCube


And we need to deliver it 

As we are at pains to point out - we (our industry) need to deliver advice, but the industry hardly exists to reach 1.5 billion buildings (with expertise).

There are great companies making in-roads into these markets Honeywell, and Schofield Lothian are two consultancies we are talking to in the UK, and many of the utility companies are waking up to the need (four major europeans are currently neck and neck to sign us up).

Particularly slow however are the facilities management sector who stand to watch this huge market be drawn from under their feet.

What do we need to deliver?

As we mentioned above it is about delivery of know-how, and this ranges from very simple advice (changing thermostats and time-clocks) through to sophisticated re-configuration of control systems where a consultant must be available as support. The thing that grabbed the attention of the judges and the public in awarding us our title at fluent conference was according to the conference chairman Peter Cooper who is also editor for javascriptweeky that we use fresh technologies to serve a real business need as you can see in the demo we showed them
So if you need technology to make your consultants more productive or really state of the art support for your energy managers please get in touch