Lynne Kiesling
Johnson Controls and the International Facilities Management Association have released their third annual Energy Efficiency Indicator survey. As summarized in this GreenBiz article,
- More than 70 percent of respondents are paying more attention to energy efficiency now than they were in 2008.
- Eighty-five percent of executives believe significant legislation mandating energy efficiency and/or carbon reduction is likely within two years.
- Forty-five percent of business leaders say improving energy efficiency in their buildings is their top strategy to meet carbon reduction commitments.
Many materials related to the survey are available in the news section of the Johnson Controls web site. I particularly found the details in the presentation notes interesting, and I encourage you to look through the notes. One of the sets of details provided is the energy efficiency retrofit activities going on with the Empire State Building.
Johnson Controls also has an Energy Efficiency Now web site with more information and links.
Jeff St. John at GreenLight (a Greentech Media blog) also has a good article that discusses the various companies that have different interests in the business of energy efficiency, in the context of the results of this survey:
Johnson Controls has a dog in this fight. It and companies like Honeywell, Siemens, Echelon Corp. and, most recently, Cisco Systems, are making a big push to increase their presence in the building automation market, with an eye on energy efficiency primarily for commercial buildings (see Cisco Jumps Into Energy Management for Computers, Buildings and Echelon Beefs up LonWorks).
Then there are the demand response aggregators like EnerNoc, Comverge and CPower, which link utilities and their customers in programs to turn down power use during times of peak demand. That’s one way utilities are giving incentives for reduced energy use, if only during the scarce few hours of the year when they find themselves reaching the limit of their power generation capacity.
Note, however, that all of this discussion of energy efficiency fails to engage the transactive capability of building management systems. Building management systems can automate building controls response to a variety of signals, including price signals arising from dynamic pricing instead of from administrative demand response programs that have been the bread and butter for companies like EnerNoc and Comverge for the past five years.
Energy efficiency, dynamic pricing, and the transactive capabilities of building management systems and smart grid networks are complements; they go hand in hand to create value for all parties, both economic and environmental.