Building Energy Resilience

As Eveline discussed in her last blog post on green banks, there are significant hurdles to gaining the trust and investment dollars of building owners to support energy efficiency investments. Because as efficiency providers we see these investments as certain, we expect owners to share our view and jump at the opportunity to invest in their property and get a great return. As Eveline mentioned, energy efficiency providers have a significant role in getting owners to adopt efficient practices. Here are five rules that can increase the success of energy efficiency programs and providers:

As an engineer myself, I was struck recently by fresh evidence of the pervasive challenge of communicating technical information effectively. I attended a building conference where the focus is designing better buildings and one common thread emerged. “Death by PowerPoint” is alive and well in the building and design industry.

While performing a recent functional performance test for a school HVAC system, I discovered something that had gone unnoticed by the contractors and building owner: a motorized damper actuator installed backwards. This damper, one of more than a dozen installed in the building, controls the outdoor air intake for one of the ventilation air handlers. When a discovery like this occurs (and discoveries like this are common in building commissioning), it begs the question: what would the cost impact be if the condition went unnoticed?

This engineer recently attended a seminar on “Innovation Implementation: Developing Sales Strategies and Tactics for Growth,” which spent most of its eight hours discussing sales. I found it interesting that this word – sales – caused such a visceral negative reaction in me as well as in some of the other attendees. We did not want to talk about sales and we certainly didn't want to be categorized as “salespeople.” By the middle of the seminar, however, I had a totally different opinion of this word and now realize I am a salesperson! So I better get over my stigmatizing and figure out how I can change this involuntary negative reaction to the idea of “sales.”

One of the first things I became aware of when I joined Cx Associates is that sustainability is a way of thinking. I learned efficiency and judicious use of resources can be approached on many different levels, from choosing a more efficient clothes dryer, to finding alternatives for drying clothes, such as line or rack drying. All efforts toward sustainability are important, and a large impact can often be had for little effort and inconvenience. Multiplied by dozens or even hundreds and thousands of people, a seemingly small change can go a long way.

This is the third and final post in a series focused on the connection between energy efficiency and sound control. Actually, the choice of sound control is somewhat arbitrary, and the topic could easily have been energy efficiency and temperature control, energy efficiency and lighting design, or energy efficiency and industrial process.

Saving energy and promoting sustainability are the core philosophies underlying all of our client project work at Cx Associates. This strong shared belief in sustainability is part of our company’s culture. So about 18 months ago, we began brainstorming about other areas where we could extend this philosophy in our company beyond actual project work. One of the first things that came to mind was commuting, and we began to consider how we could encourage our employees to use the most environmentally-friendly means available for their commute back and forth to our office in downtown Burlington, Vermont.

When I was managing business energy efficiency programs at Efficiency Vermont (EVT), I diagrammed the web of market forces that affect decisions around energy efficiency in buildings. I’ve recently been encountering those market forces and new vectors that I hadn’t even considered back in the nascent days of EVT. As a result of these encounters, I’ve realized how fundamental people are to a successful transformation of our building stock into efficient and sustainable structures. People tend to fall between the following camps:

Sustainability – defined here as the responsible management of natural resources to create a more robust, independent and environmentally conscious organization – is a pursuit being explored by more and more companies. The challenge for many corporate leaders and managers is how to initiate change in their company’s culture. How do you create such a sea change authentically: something that won’t sound like a gimmick or start with a bang and fizzle out within a brief period of time? Over the years I have seen a pattern to the steps taken by clients who have been successful in creating a corporate culture of sustainability.

A coworker recently forwarded a link to a posting in the Environmental Leader by Kathy Miller, mentioning that it related to some of my blog posts. In How to Engage in Sustainability with Higher Purpose, Dr. Miller points out the importance of corporate vision to sustainability, and recognizes that engaging people increases their commitment to the business and its goals. These are recurring themes in my thinking.