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Billions and billions of dollars
May 31, 2007

There are about 5 million non-residential buildings in the U.S. I have no idea how many there are in the world, but I would venture a guess the sum of all non-residential buildings in the world is a lot more than 5 million. And I believe it is safe to say that.the vast majority of these buildings are wasting a lot of energy. This wasted energy translates into unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide), which, whether you care more about energy than the GHG, or the other way around, means there's a lot of room for improvement.

So, how do we make them perform better? Where would the money come from to fund significant and lasting improvements?  Assuming we got the money, would we have the people -- the engineers, contractors, and other professionals to do the work?

Well -- first things first. No sense in talking about it if there's no money. Wait - here's some money -- here's $5 BILLION. And, here's a rough plan for spending it -- by sifting it through four multinational energy service companies (ESCOs) as performance contracts that guarantee the energy savings. 
 
Credit the William J. Clinton Foundation for initiating the Clinton Climate Initiative for thinking BIG and doing the legwork to round up five banks, four ESCOs with international reach, and our good friends at ASHRAE and the U.S. Green Building Council. 

For your convenience, I've rounded up the press releases from the ESCOs, ASHRAE, and the USGBC... and here they are:

Read the press releases from the ESCOs: Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Siemens, and Trane.  

Read the ASHRAE press release to learn the role it will play.

Read the USGBC press release.

The details are still being worked out -- but I've pasted below how the Clinton Climate Initiative essentially envisions how the program will work (taken from the CCI website):

The Energy Efficiency Building Retrofit Program will provide both cities and their private building owners with access to the necessary funds to retrofit existing buildings with more energy efficient products, typically leading to energy savings between 20 to 50 percent.

• Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Inc, Siemens and Trane will conduct energy audits, perform building retrofits, and guarantee the energy savings of the retrofit projects.
• ABN AMRO, Citi, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and UBS have committed to arrange $1 billion each to finance cities and private building owners to undertake these retrofits at no net cost, doubling the global market for energy retrofit in buildings.
• These banks will work alongside energy efficiency finance specialist Hannon Armstrong and CCI to develop effective mechanisms to deploy this capital globally. Cities and building owners will pay back the loans plus interest with the energy savings generated by the reduced energy costs thanks to the building retrofits.
• An initial group of fifteen of the world’s largest cities has agreed to participate in the retrofit program, and offer their municipal buildings for the first round of energy retrofits: Bangkok, Berlin, Chicago, Houston, Johannesburg, Karachi, London, Melbourne, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York, Rome, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Tokyo, and Toronto.
  

I'll be following the CCI in future blogs - so stay tuned!

Posted by Michael Ivanovich on May 31, 2007 | Comments (1)