Sport Utility Buildings and McMansions: The Latest Battlefront, in Forbes, is based on the bill dubbed the "McMansion tax" put forth by Congressman Dingell of Michigan. The bill would recognize that large homes are heavy energy consumers and therefore are responsible for carbon emissions. It was an effort to cast blame away from cars while climate change legislation is churning its way through Congress. Forbes writer Mark Mills tries to put it into context:

"To reveal [Congressman Dingell's] insight, it's not especially useful to talk in billions of barrels and BTUs, none of which has much meaning to most of us. The much-maligned SUV may serve as a better unit of measure to frame the energy and political dynamic here. Let's define the annual energy used by a Schwarzenegger-class SUV as equal to, "one SUV."

Mills mostly talks about residences in the first half of the article. If this aspect interests you, there was an excellent radio program on this topic, 9/7/07 "To the Point" on KCRW, available in podcast.

On commercial buildings, Mills writes:

"For commercial buildings, the trends are similar, but for somewhat different reasons. Since your boss, not you, controls how much sporty space you have around your desk, you might not be surprised to learn that the average square feet allocated per worker hasn't changed in two decades. The conventional energy-consuming systems in those buildings--lighting, heating, cooling--have become much more efficient. But there hasn't been one jot of reduction in total commercial building energy use. It went up. The reason? Because those buildings are now full of so many new kinds of energy-hungry things that were rare, or non-existent, two decades back: computers and related modern IT stuff."

For energy efficiency, this is where the action is. Pushing new technologies is easier in commercial facilities, and from these high-rises many ideas trickle down into homes.

Past efforts to reduce building energy use have focused on either changing behaviors or on improved systems like HVAC and lighting. These efforts have failed miserably, Mills writes, at meeting a goal of net reductions in building energy use.

The real hope for significant change in this domain arrives not from hardware or regulations, but from software--Silicon Valley information-technology tamed, civilized and optimized for the building market.

Mills goes on to outline mechanical efficiencies achieved by Trane, United Technologies, and WaterFurnace. He acknowledges that the real revolution comes from the presence of microprocessors in everything and network connectivity for machines. Then Mills finally hits the heart of it:

"Information isn't king--useful, actionable information is. ... When all the equipment in a building is fully networked and interactive, when building systems can react to internal and external changes and demands to traffic, pricing and preferences, and to safety threats and hazards--all effortlessly, seamlessly and, critically, in the background, in ways facilities' managers and homeowners will tolerate--true intelligence and true efficiency will have arrived to the chaotic building sector. And the beneficiaries, along with building owners and homeowners (and the planet itself), will be those new IT-centric companies that glue it all together."

He names leaders in this space, large and small: Siemens, Honeywell-Tridium, Itron, Comverge, Echelon, EnerNOC, Conzerv, Gridlogix, and EDSA Micro.

I've been interested for years in the concept of building systems as (very big) hardware platforms for increasingly sophisticated software. Echelon's building-automation hardware products include a web server with wiring interfaces to several different networking protocols, including IP and LonWorks. Optimum Energy, a Seattle-based company, has been packaging algorithms that make central chiller plants run more efficiently. They replace hours of custom programming per building with a CD of software to be installed, much like we would download iTunes, or buy a GPS navigation add-on for our phones. Gridlogix offers the middleware that lets building owners gather data from disparate automation systems in XML, for a unified view of buildings' performance across the enterprise.

I need to check out two reading assignments from Mills: He recommends reviewing the 1999 book When Things Start to Think, by MIT's Neil Gershenfeld, and "The Internet of Things" in the October 2004 Scientific American. If you've read either of these, or have other recommendations, please share your thoughts in the Comments below.

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Publicly traded companies mentioned in this blog entry:

United Technologies (nyse: UTX)
Trane, part of American Standard (nyse: ASD)
ClimateMaster, a subsidiary of LSB Industries (nyse: LXU)
Siemens (nyse: SI)
Honeywell (nyse: HON)
ITRON (nasdaq: ITRI)
Comverge (nasdaq: COMV)
Echelon (nasdaq: ELON)
EnerNOC (nasdaq: ENOC)