Monday, November 14, 2011

Ever Consider having your Installation Whispered?

We've all seen the numbers before. The short version is goes like this: DOD dwarfs Walmart when it comes to number of square feet of buildings owned, maintained, powered, heated and cooled in the USA and elsewhere.

The amount of energy consumed by the world's largest fleet of buildings is enormous, as is the amount of energy wasted due to inefficiencies of every conceivable kind.

Well, there are folks working this challenge, such as my colleague and friend, the mighty Dave Bartlett (pictured, imposingly, above). You care read a bit more about Dave and what he and folks like him do HERE.

As you can imagine, there are cultural as well as technical barriers to work through. Especially for DOD bases that have been able to achieve some good energy savings in recent years and feel like there are no more low hanging energy efficiency fruit to pick, I like this note re: one of IBM's own facilities:
The Rochester campus had recently undergone a comprehensive energy audit resulting in double-digit energy conservation. It seemed highly unlikely to the facilities operations professionals at the campus that anything more could be done. “They (facilities operations personnel) told me that they were already doing everything that could be done to save energy,” said Bartlett. “But we achieved a 3 percent energy reduction in the first few months, and within nine months we managed to get an eight percent reduction in energy use. The work is also estimated to reduce maintenance costs for the site by 5-10 percent,” he added, “and that is real gravy on top of the energy savings.”
If this is right, there are a ton of high ROI opportunities out there for the Services to go after. Makes me want to shout! aab

Photo Credit: Association for Facilities Engineering

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