Power Economics

An Executive's Guide to Energy Efficiency, Conservation, and Generation Strategies

Elena Cahill

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119708070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Business
• Index: Business

Energy efficiency is more of a journey than a battle. It starts with small steps, taken at the local and state levels. It is a matter of identifying and then practicing good habits in our daily lives, at home and at work.

Every idea and process described in this book, if performed reasonably well, will put money in your pocket.You will not only save money; you will probably make money—and you will take important steps toward saving the planet.

Power Economics is a book for thoughtful people who want to cut their energy costs and diminish the harmful effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change and global warming are not speculative fantasies. They are real. They threaten communities, towns, cities, regions, nations, and continents. Even if you don't care about polar bears and penguins, the effects of melting icecaps and shifting ocean currents will transform your life and the lives of the people around you.

Power Economics offers practical steps and achievable strategies for reducing the destructive impact of climate change and global warming.

Yes, we need energy to live and to sustain our economies. But we don't need to burn fossil fuels and release CO2 gas at levels that will result in a global catastrophe. There are reasonable alternatives to our current practices. None of the ideas that described in this book are entirely new or totally unfamiliar. They aren't extreme or bizarre. They won't require harsh or draconian measures to work. All of them follow basic rules of common sense and can be achieved at reasonable cost.

"I have done my best to convey the complexity and urgency of the matter. I hope that you find this book informative and useful. Working together, we can shed many of our wasteful energy habits and begin the task of building a world that is safe, sustainable and healthy, " writes author and energy expert Elena Cahill.

Chapter 1
Good Building, Bad Building

Sometimes, the answer to a problem is right in front of your eyes. Conversations about energy often dwell on industries such as transportation, manufacturing, and power generation. Those are worthy targets of our scrutiny. Yet there is a culprit we tend to overlook, perhaps because it is all around us.

Our homes and buildings—referred to as the “built environment”—account for roughly 40 percent of the energy consumed annually in the United States.¹ Residential and commercial structures account for about 70 percent of the electricity we use in a typical year, and are responsible for more than a third of the world's energy-related carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.² Yet more than two-thirds of the total energy consumed in the United States is wasted, according to data compiled by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.³

“Most buildings waste energy needlessly, making power plants work harder and putting stress on the electric grid, making energy efficiency in buildings incredibly important,” according to the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit, bipartisan alliance of business, government, environmental, and consumer leaders.⁴

I've researched this topic thoroughly and almost every study supports the conclusion that buildings are a vast source of wasted energy. That's why I am adamant about making our buildings more energy efficient. If our buildings and their systems were optimized to save energy, instead of wasting it, many of our environmental problems would become manageable and ultimately solvable.

A growing number of architects and builders are aware of this. Slowly, a consensus is emerging around the need for design and construction strategies that prioritize energy efficiency and reduce waste. The built environment has a permanence that makes it unlike any other human artifact. For better and for worse, the built environment surrounds us. Except for brief periods of time when we're hiking through the woods or sunbathing on a beach, we cannot escape it. Therefore, we need to make it better.

Living Buildings

Jason F. McLennan wishes that buildings were more like flowers. Jason is known as “the Steve Jobs of the green building industry,” and he's received the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Prize, the world's top prize for socially responsible design. Jason created the Living Building Challenge,⁵ which has been hailed as the most stringent and forward-looking green building program ever developed.

Jason and his firm, McLennan Design,⁶ strive to create buildings that are beyond efficient and green. Their goal is designing sturdy, durable buildings that are living parts of their environment, buildings that are more like trees and flowers, drawing energy from natural sources and adding value to the neighborhoods around them.

Living buildings also offer the best long-term economic benefits, according to Jason. “You don't pay energy bills or water bills because the building is producing its own energy and water,” he says. Living buildings such as the Bullitt Center, a six-story Class A office building in Seattle, also compost and recycle their own waste materials, eliminating sewer bills and greatly reducing the costs of waste removal. “The goal is creating habitats instead of destroying them,” Jason says. “We're not just trying to be ‘less bad'—we're pursuing a holistic model that is regenerative for the planet.”

Living buildings are constructed from nontoxic materials, making them healthier workspaces. Use of cement, which accounts for 8 percent of the world's CO₂ emissions⁷ and is a prime component of concrete, is limited to the building's foundational elements.

“Above the second floor, the Bullitt Center is constructed with heavy timber framing, recalling Seattle's history of heavy timber warehouses. One hundred percent of the wood used is Forest Stewardship Council certified, ensuring it came from a responsibly managed forest, according to the Bullitt Center website. “Using wood sequesters carbon for the life of the building, with 545 metric tons of carbon locked away in the Bullitt Center for the next 250 years.”⁸

Jason says he feels energized and optimistic about a future in which buildings are green, healthy, and efficient. “The technology has matured and it's just becoming easier every year. There are more examples out there … people can look around and kick the tires … they can see for themselves what's happening. There are many shades of green and there are many opportunities, regardless of whether it's a very modest project or a larger project. People should feel good about that.”

Systems Thinking

Jason wants buildings to be more like flowers. Amy Thompson yearns for buildings that are more like complex modern aircraft. Amy is an associate professor-in-residence of systems engineering and the associate director of academic programs with the United Technologies Corporation Institute of Advanced Systems Engineering (UTC-IASE) at the University of Connecticut. She currently teaches model-based systems engineering and coordinates the online graduate programs in advanced systems engineering for the UTC-IASE.⁹

“We need to look at energy efficiency in buildings from a systems perspective,” Amy says, “using practices and methods that we've practiced for years in the aerospace industry and other industries with complex systems. We can apply those methods to design and operate buildings. We can reduce operating costs and reduce energy consumption. We can also improve the overall satisfaction and comfort levels of the people who live and work in buildings.”

Most important, she says, “when we apply systems engineering, we can design reliability and resilience into more of our buildings.” In a world of increasingly extreme weather events, those qualities will be essential for ensuring our safety and economic survival.

Thinking about buildings as individual, stand-alone structures reflects an outmoded and unrealistic view of the world. Ideally, the built environment should be viewed as a “system of systems,” a vast network of interrelated and interconnected buildings, each interacting with its environment, responding to changes in weather, and pooling information in real time with neighboring buildings.

“We need to design and optimize at a macro level,” Amy says. In other words, it's not enough for a single individual building to be smart, efficient, economical, and eco-friendly. All buildings should share these characteristics—and they should be interconnected within their corporations or communities, and with external sources of information such as power grids and weather data providers.

For example, imagine the financial and environmental benefits if every building shared information with a regional power grid and could buy or sell energy automatically based on real-time demand and pricing, both of which can vary widely over the course of a typical day.

All of this, of course, would create levels of complexity and uncertainty that would be unthinkable for many architects, developers, investors, and government regulators. Yet I see hope for a systems engineering approach taking hold in our building industry. The aerospace industry deals routinely with high levels of complexity and uncertainty, and that hasn't stopped it from designing and building amazing machines that are safe, reliable, and efficient.

Some large corporations and universities already view their campuses as portfolios of interconnected structures and have developed programs to optimize operational efficiencies across multiple buildings. My hunch is that the systems approach will become more common as the benefits of systems thinking become more widely known and organizations generally grow more accustomed to managing higher levels of uncertainty.

What Makes a Good Building?

As always, the devil is in the details. A “good” building is more than just energy efficient, eco-friendly, and equipped with sensors. Location matters, too. From my perspective, a good building is within easy walking or wheeling distance of a public transportation hub. You shouldn't be forced to drive to a building; that runs counter to the idea of using energy wisely.

Good buildings collect rainwater, recycle their trash, compost waste from toilets, and convert excess heat into usable forms of energy. In addition to charging stations for EVs, good buildings have bike racks. They also hav...