Feds Unwrap $15M For Corporate Energy Reduction

As hard as it is to imagine, coondoggie writes with news that the federal government just unveiled a new energy bill that will offer $15 million in assistance to retailers who help to build and adopt energy-efficient technologies. "The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the first phase of $15 million awards to retailers Best Buy, JCPenney, John Deere, Macy's, SuperValu, Target, Toyota, and Whole Foods Market. Commercial Real Estate Firms such as CB Richard Ellis, Forest City Enterprises as well as the financials groups also saw some of the money. Along with the money the companies will have access to the DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to design, build, tune and operate at least one new prototype building and to retrofit an existing building project."

Comments

To put that in perspective

[Geoffrey.landis]

To put that in perspective, the current energy use in the US is on the order of a trillion dollars per year.

Fifteen million dollars is trivial.

simple: let the sun in

[lrohrer]

The simple solution is to let the sun in. 1) Install more sky lights. 2) install sensors to dim lights as needed

Next solar HOT water systems for heating/cooling of their buildings.

This is 30 year old technology with a 6-8 year payback.

Where is my check?

Re:Here's an idea

[mcgrew]

Your PC is 200-300 watts (another 150-250 if your monitor is a CRT), but your laser printer is 2,000 watts. Your printer uses more electricity than a dozen PCs.

A photocopier uses even more electricity.

Re:Here's an idea

[MrSteve007]

I've heard this argument from people within my company. It didn't take must to shut them up though. Under most bios setting, you can set a time for the computer to auto-boot during the week.

People start work at 8am? Set the PC's to boot at 7:50. Some people show up a little early, change the boot times.

Within the OS settings, if there isn't any use within 120 minutes, have the system hibernate. Also, our CAD workstations consume ~300 watts an hour. At those levels, overnights and weekends amount to a fairly substantial amount of waste (and waste heat) generated.

At that level of consumption, each system consumes .$90 each night, and $3 per weekend. Multiply that by 50 workstations and per year, and the total amount of wasted electricity $19,500 annually. In a 500 person firm, add a zero to the end of that number. This is a huge amount of waste within corporate America, that only takes 2 minutes to change within a bios.