Despite the recent hubbub in D.C., the Department of Energy continues to make progress on the goals it set at the start of this Administration. So far this month, the DOE announced an agreement with 200 nations to amend the Montreal Protocol to phase down the production and use of HFCs. It also released a study showing its Loan Programs Office–which funded the first 5 utility-scale PV projects–seeded that market, resulting in the private follow-on financing of 45 other utility-scale solar PV projects.
Dr. Ernest Moniz, an American nuclear physicist and the Secretary of Energy, sat down with Charlie Rose to discuss the Paris agreement on climate change, which is set to take affect, and the latest DOE activity:
Don’t worry, building operators, as you’ve not been neglected! Also in October, the DOE announced the Smart Energy Analytics Campaign.
It’s a program that encourages the use of a wide variety of commercially available Energy Management and Information Systems (EMIS) technologies and ongoing building monitoring practices to help uncover energy-saving opportunities and improve building performance for the long run. Innovations in EMIS have automated data analysis and made it possible to apply analytics to everyday building operations. The analytics embedded in EMIS can enable building operations staff to achieve significant energy savings, often with rapid payback. Through the Campaign, owners, facility managers, energy managers, and operators of commercial buildings across the country will receive expert technical support and national recognition for their efforts. Learn more and join the campaign here.
But what on Earth does that have to do with Mars?
Across the country, if building data analytics best practices were adopted by all target buildings in the U.S. commercial sector, the result could total over $4 billion in savings. And just a few weeks ago, Elon Musk announced the massive SpaceX Heart of Gold rocket designed to colonize Mars:
Heart of Gold is more than three times the mass, and generates over three times the thrust, of the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo mission. Image from waitbutwhy.com.
Musk projects the first batch of tickets aboard this massive new rocket to run $500,000 each…meaning the energy savings in our commercial buildings could fund the first 8,000 brave colonists! Frustratingly, the European Space Agency announced today that it has lost contact with an experimental Mars probe shortly before its planned landing on the red planet.
