Potentially massive savings from building automation
My Clean Break podcast today is an interview with Terry Mocherniak, founder and CEO of Encelium Technologies, which is a supplier of building automation technology with a special emphasis on lighting. It’s incredible how much electricity is consumed by the lighting in big office and industrial buildings, and even more incredible how much of it is unnecessary. A company like Encelium will go into a building and rig rooms with sensors and lighting fixtures with switches and dimmers that allow them to be remotely controlled, either through a pre-established program or through a Web interface. Savings range from 50 per cent to 70 per cent on electricity bills, and the payback can be as little as three or four years depending on the installation. Looked at this way, you begin to realize that the province would get the biggest payback in terms of conservation if it dumped money into building retrofits, or at the very least provided interest-free loans to retrofit projects that could repay the loan within five years. It’s a no-brainer.
Anyway, the podcast is worth listening to if you’re interested.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
September 25th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
it is pretty amazing when you think about much energy could be saved if the ontario government launched an aggressive energy conservation program that features best practices such as office buildings turning off their lights, the use of energy-efficient light bulbs, etc.