We heard a lot last year about how improving energy efficiency was cheap, low-hanging fruit and how it was the best way to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. Break out your caulk guns!
- Brian Zak/Sipa Press
- Morgan Stanley HQ, now with less energy usage
Frankly, it all sounded a little too good to be true. Without any big sacrifice or a change in lifestyle, less energy would be needed. Just keep your tires properly inflated. Oh yeah, targeting energy efficiency would create jobs also. A double shot in the arm for the ole economy!
Is there really that much waste? Consider the lesson of Morgan Stanleys trading floors. At its global headquarters in Times Square, Morgan Stanley kept its trading floors at a nice temperature 24 hours a day, five days a week. Even at 3 a.m. Why push so much heat in during the winter or cool air in the summer in the middle of the night?
That was one of the questions posed by EnerNOC Inc., a Boston-based darling of the energy efficiency industry, after it began monitoring the 42-story building. Another finding: Morgan Stanley, which owns the building and occupies somewhat more than half of it, was keeping the elevator machinery rooms and other mechanical spaces as cool as the corporate suite. And the bathroom fans were running 24/7.
In all, EnerNOC said it found about $100,000 in savings for Morgan Stanley last year. (The Wall Street firm posted a $729 million profit in the first three quarters of 2009, so the energy savings are not a make or break figure.)
Morgan Stanley has definitely recouped all of their investment, says Tim Healy, EnerNOCs chief executive. They were ahead of the game within months. Since hes selling monitoring not expensive new lighting or higher-efficiency furnaces it was a relatively low upfront cost. (Morgan Stanley confirmed EnerNOCs account of EnerNOCs work and the savings uncovered.)
EnerNOCs business is all about using information technology to monitor buildings and ferret out inefficiencies. Mr. Healy calls is data-driven energy efficiency.
Lets put a super computer inside that building that processes all the ways energy is being used, the way air is being used, the way lights are being turned on or off and try to optimize that, he says. (No people wandering around the building with notepads are needed. The company can monitor carbon monoxide levels to figure out how many people are working in a certain space.)
He figures active monitoring of buildings to save energy will be a $30 billion to $40 billion market in the U.S. in a few years. That seems pretty bullish, but there are a lot of people who see a big potential in efficiency right now. In 2009, energy efficiency got $1.6 billion in venture capital and private equity investments, according to New Energy Finance, not far behind leading sectors wind ($1.75 billion) and solar ($1.74 billion.)
By now, there’s probably not even a single avid Internet user who is not familiar with the way 2009 has wiped the floor with most carmakers and pretty much everything related to the auto industry. The on-going economic crisis, coupled with a massive change in car buyers’ habits and bad management have taken their toll on two giant US car-companies, crippled a bunch of other foreign ones and in the end left a lot of people bitter and/or out of work. Quite a bummer, actually.
In my latest podcast, I speak to 
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