Special Report: 3.12.2009

Posted by TED Magazine on Thursday, March 12, 2009

Energy Efficiency: The Cheapest

By Joe Salimando

March 5 brought a few hundred people to the Dirksen SOB Room G-50 for the sixth annual Great Energy Efficiency Day, sponsored by the Alliance to Save Energy. We listened to a parade of informed speakers. We also heard remarks from politicians.

Dirksen SOB? SOB = Senate Office Building, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (This name is NOT a derogatory comment on the late, great Senator Everett Dirksen!)

Here’s a report on some of what was said:

Ramping Up

A most interesting speaker was Stephen Cowell, chair/CEO of Conservation Services Group (CSG), which is in the business of organizing residential energy-efficient installations. (That does not mean his company DOES the work.)

As Cowell explained, there are “levels” in getting energy efficiency retrofits (and such) in motion. You need, he said:

• Perhaps 10 to 30 employees of an organizing group (such as a state agency like NYSERDA, the New York State Energy Research & Development Agency).
• Another 40 to 100 employees of a company like his, which gets such projects into gear. (To his credit, he named several others.)
• On the execution level (think contractors, including electricals), up to another 1,000 employees.

Yes, it works out 30-100-1,000, or thereabouts, he said. This was explained carefully but quickly (each speaker had 10 minutes). Cowell detailed, to a crowd of EE enthusiasts, exactly what it takes to actually get the work done.

His point: “Ramping up” to ever-higher levels of energy efficiency retrofits and installations will take a lot of people and effort. Fortunately, he said, many folks with needed residential expertise have been sitting around lately, with no work.

While they (impatiently) wait, it will still take time to get them productively engaged, he added. There are nitty-gritty details involved, including the fact (he mentioned) that a lot of this work will be done by small companies. These small companies will need financing to gear up to handle increased workloads.

From where will the organizational skills, loans, and such come? To which I would add: Who will competently manage the projects?

No, Cowell was NOT attempting to slow things down, and he did not appear to be poor-mouthing the stimulus plan. His point, as a practical person, is that it will take a lot of entrepreneurship, planning, logistics, and even some training to put to productive work the federal dollars meant to “stimulate” the economy via energy efficiency retrofits.

Cowell also said the words “electrical” and “contractor.” What a mensch!

Most Important Speaker

Energy Secretary Stephen Chu (a 1997 Nobel Prize winner) was the lead keynote speaker. He also spoke at an energy event on Feb. 23, which was televised (on C-SPAN). That’s him, below (on the left).

 

Chu seems like someone you might like. That’s NOT a contrast with his predecessor, Samuel Bodman, the final Bush II administration energy chief; an earlier Special Report, said he, too, was worth liking.

Chu’s take was simple to understand and entertaining, too:

1. Energy efficiency work is the low-hanging fruit, and we’re going to have plenty of it to do—for decades.
2. There’s more out there that can be done. Chu said that constructing buildings that don’t waste energy wasn’t low-hanging fruit—“it’s fruit lying on the ground.”
3. He spoke about appliance standards. Specifically, state standards in California for more-efficient refrigerators, put into place in the 1970s, are responsible for stupendous national energy savings. Chu thinks there’s opportunity for stiffer federal appliance standards in other areas, and he intends to pursue them.

Actually, Chu said something else very important: He’s planning to ramp up the ENERGY STAR program to designate some products (maybe “the top 5% to 10%,” he said) as “Energy Superstars.” He didn’t provide details; we’ll provide more when we get it.

Best-Known Speaker

Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who unseated Michigan’s John Dingell (also a D) as chair of the House Energy Committee, spoke.

Waxman has set his committee (and himself) one heck of a task. Sure, he’s in the House, and House committee chairs are powerful. With the Democratic edge in the House, he can run roughshod (if he likes) over Republican objections to what he wants to do.

What he wants to do is move out of his committee by Memorial Day (that’s just a few weeks away, really) a single piece of legislation that

• takes care of energy efficiency and green on into future
• plows new ground on the greenhouse gas/global warming front (via “cap-and-trade” rules, one surmises), and
• gives private industry new incentives “to do more with energy efficiency and alternative energy”

Most Disappointing Speaker

Sally Wilson of CB Richard Ellis spoke on an afternoon panel. She had credentials galore following her name—AIA, LEED AP, global director of environmental strategy, senior vice president. That’s one heck of a superfecta!

Wilson’s company, CBRE, wants to be the greenest in real estate. She didn’t tout her company’s many stupendous numbers, instead just noting that it manages about 2% of U.S. office space (at least double that of the nearest competitor).

Wilson is a good speaker. What disappointed me is the info she imparted about office buildings. There are 70 billion square feet of office space under roof in the United States. I would bet all these existing buildings have electricity and even lighting.

Essentially, many need to undergo energy-smart retrofits.

Why haven’t they? Wilson did not answer this question. But she did dance (beautifully, it might be noted) around the answer:

1. Before the commercial real estate market collapsed (last year), it was very hard for a company like CBRE to manage a retrofit of an office building. CBRE doesn’t own these buildings; someone else does. With the hot-hot-hot commercial market, by the time CBRE had planned out an energy-efficient retrofit, the owner had flipped the building.
2. From that perspective, she said, maybe the collapse in the market was a good thing. Efficiency plans made now can be followed through.
3. However, 60% of such a building’s energy use is in the hands of tenants. Thus, office building owners often don’t have the motivation to do the right thing. There’s also the financing angle, which is awful.
4. She noted that the number of existing commercial buildings certified in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED-EB program more than doubled recently, from 59 to 120. And there were 2,200 commercial buildings “registered” for future LEED-EB certification. Sounds great? Well, there are like 4 million such buildings in the United States [translation: It really, really, REALLY sucks!]
5. Further, CBRE has 11,000 buildings under management, but thus far has just 300 registered for LEED-EB. Unfortunately, Wilson did not explain the “why” here.

Most Impressive

The most impressive person to come to the microphone at this event was Alexandra Teitz. She was one of two “Unsung Heroes of Energy Efficiency” honored by ASE. Her award was presented by Rep. Waxman; she serves on Waxman’s staff.

What impressed me about this person was not that she works for (or, as he said, “with”) Waxman. It was what she did a number of years ago, when she worked at the EPA.

According to Waxman, as an EPA staffer, Teitz co-wrote (with one colleague) the original EPA determination that carbon dioxide emissions needed to be regulated.

That was a staff determination; EPA staffers do not get the final say. In this case, the George W. Bush administration got to weigh in. It did not like the idea of regulating CO2, so it piled huge heaps of dung upon the idea.

Unfortunately for the Bushites, this action (or inaction) was taken to court by the state of Massachusetts. It ended up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. And in an amazing Court ruling, the executive branch (now presided over by Barack Obama) was told to get off its butt and follow through on the EPA staff determination.

It is believed that the Obama folks are going to run with this! Here’s the 66-page Supreme Court decision. This link (if it works for you) takes you to a Feb. 19 New York Times report that the Obama Administration “is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet.”

[Note: For six years, 1984-1989, the editor of Waste Age was one Joe Salimando. He got a chance to get to know, and actually came to admire, “bureaucrats” at the EPA (people somewhat like Teitz). In the process, he developed an instinctive dislike for people who use the word “bureaucrat” as a generic insult.]

In the educated opinion of your humble reporter, Alexandra Teitz should not be “an unsung hero” of the energy efficiency and environmental movement (and the planet). She should be widely praised, feted, and sung…maybe, even, danced!

	Joe Salimando of EFJ Enterprises is a consultant, web content provider, and wordsmith based in Oakton, Va. To contact him, call 703-255-1428. See also The EleBlog.
Personal Disclaimer: The appearance of the ambling pachyderm is indicative of the writer’s obsession with elephants, not his political leanings.
IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS COLUMN REFLECTS ONLY THE OPINIONS OF ITS AUTHOR AND DOES NOT REFLECT THE OPINIONS OR POLICIES OF NAED, TED MAGAZINE, OR THE ADVERTISERS ON THE TEDMAG WEB SITE.