Posts Tagged ‘cap and trade’

What are our conservation targets?

February 1st, 2010 by Lucas Klesch

Cap and Trade is coming in 2010 regardless of whether Congress passes the legislation, as the EPA is set to enact its Regulations under the Clean Air Act.  The question is do you know what the targets are? & How poised you are to help alleviate a building owner’s concern for rising electricity and fuel costs?

Based on emissions in 2005 here is a composite look at the overall reduction levels proposed by Congress.  The EPA regulation is likely to be a little more aggressive up front because this will reduce the lifetime costs associated with the energy reductions needed to combat climate change.

  • by 2012, cut by 3 percent
  • by 2020, cut by 17 percent (House) or 20 percent (Senate)
  • by 2030, cut by 42 percent
  • by 2050, cut by 83 percent.

For more info on Cap & Trade and how it actually works, go here: http://www.facilitiesnet.com/green/article/How-Cap-and-Trade-Regulations-Work-and-Who-May-Be-Affected–11359

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Posted in Energy savings, Sustainability | Comment »

Cap & Trade Bill to Create Billions in Revenue

June 10th, 2009 by Lucas Klesch

The Congressional Budget Office reported that the legislation on Cap & Trade once enacted would result in $24.4bn in profit from $845.6bn in revenue from 2010 to 2019.

The report estimates that the bulk of this money would come from the selling of offset emissions (greenhouse gas credits) at a price of $15 per tonne in 2011 rising to $26 in 2019.

Imagine if you could factor in that additional savings from doing an efficiency project to your building what the ROI would look like!  Even capitol projects will look extremely attractive.  This is going to work just like utility incentives do but with a much higher $/sqft impact on the ROI.

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Posted in Energy management, Real world stories, Sustainability | Comment »

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009

May 22nd, 2009 by Lucas Klesch

Slowly making its way through a committee on capital hill is the combined energy and climate change bills that really look to enhance the synergies of a “Three Pillars” approach to this legislation.  The three pillars in this case are:

  1. A federal Energy Efficiency Resource Standard (EERS) that reduces cumulative electricity usage by at least 15% and natural gas usage by 10% by 2020.
  2. A Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) to increase overall production to 25% by 2025.
  3. A greenhouse gas cap/standard that reduces overall emissions to 20% below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% below 2005 levels by 2050.

The EERS and RES standards together can reduce the cost of meeting the climate goals under a cap and trade program by reducing the overall cost of electricity and reducing monthly demand.  The reduction in demand is through efficiency improvements lowering individual monthly utility costs.  Renewable energy makes electricity more affordable since utilities will not need to spend money on building expensive new power plants.  The efficiency standard also have the added benefit of creating jobs for the emerging market of energy assesments and drives the overall demand and carbon dioxide emisions lower.

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Posted in Energy efficiency and buildings, Energy management | Comment »

The Simple Case for Data Center Energy Benchmarking

March 18th, 2009 by Lucas Klesch

Lawrence Berkeley National Labs threw out a statistic that stated data center energy costs can be 100 times higher than those of typical buildings.  Another statistic thrown around by EPA is that data centers accounted for 1.5% of overall US electrical spend in 2006 and it is expected to increase by 1% or more by 2011.  Poor energy efficiency can obviously have a dramatic effect on the bottom line, reduce the competitiveness of the data center and may even reduce up time which is so crucial to the data world.

Typically data centers have been reluctant to participate in Benchmarking of energy performance through EnergyStar because they do not want to document how costly poor data center management and design is, and they fear the looming carbon tax through cap and trade.  It is understandable that the industry is concerned about being an open book for criticism given some of the real constraints on server rooms in terms of temperature control, power reliability and particulate reduction.  Being from an industry that needs data and servers to work flawlessly every minute of every day, we understand this, but every one already knows you are typically a high energy user.

The good news is that starting at Benchmarking and allocation of energy end uses within a building with data centers, we can understand how energy is used and begin to clean up the inefficiencies. Benchmarking is a tool for understanding across an organization and can serve these important purposes:

  1. to establish a baseline of typical energy use
  2. to provide comparison to similar facilities
  3. to highlight improvement opportunities
  4. to highlight maintenance and operating issues
  5. to highlight best practices for future improvements

In this day and age it should be universally understand that awareness, i.e. know where you are at, always leads to a better place.  Energy cost reduction drops to the bottom line and in the case of data centers can reduce inefficient operation, provide more uptime and customer satisfaction, and positions you for the future where that energy savings translates to less carbon use and cash through trading on an open market.  Its almost like double-dipping on the profits from energy reduction.  How can that be bad?

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Posted in Energy management, Sustainability | Comment »