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Fortune 100 Energy Efficiency

By March 30, 2010Energy Rant

One of the downsides of the surging awareness and growth in energy efficiency and renewable energy, in my opinion, are all the Johnny Come Lately energy services arms of giant corporations.  Companies include Lockheed Martin, United Technologies, Eaton, and Chevron.  These giants have revenues of $45 Billion, $53 Billion, $12 Billion and a meager $176 Billion, respectively.  Poor Chevron’s revenue dropped from $275 Billion from the year prior.  Maybe they should focus on their core business and leave the energy saving to the rest of us.  Among these, only measly Eaton isn’t in the Fortune 100 (Eaton comes in at 207 on the Fortune 500).

Why do these giants want to get into energy efficiency?  Revenue from their energy efficiency services wouldn’t show up on the first six significant digits of their total revenue, but yet this is huge business compared to peons like Michaels Engineering and dozens of other service providers.  Lockheed probably charges the government more for one tire on an F-35 joint strike fighter than we earn in a year with 40 people.

On the other hand, these behemoths have to get huge projects like those for large college campuses or military bases to be worth their while and to be cost effective to carry their crushing overhead.  This leaves plenty for us little guys to fight over.

On the third hand, they provide competition for the other titans of performance contracting, including Trane, Honeywell, Siemens, and Johnson Controls, and I’m all for that.

Having provided technical support and program evaluation for dozens of utilities, I don’t think we have yet seen any requests or applications for incentives from these giants, for their customers.  Why would they leave all this free money their customers could claim on the table?  Could it be they don’t want anyone looking at their underbelly?  Customers should demand this.  But then again, customers are typically state and federal government entities.  Even though these incentives are theirs to lose, it’s really ours.  So who cares?  What a racket.

Of course most of these huge companies, except Lockheed and Chevron I believe, use performance contracting to peddle their wares, whether customers need the stuff or not.  As mentioned last week, they’ll “give away” studies and other services, and sometimes even equipment to hook (or harpoon) these customers.

Within the past couple years, one of these performance contractors had seduced a local school district by offering them “free” equipment in exchange for maintaining their buildings’ heating, cooling, and control systems over 10-20 years.  What were they thinking?  Remember last week; nothing is free.  The whole spectacle can be most vividly portrayed in Warner Bros’ Hansel and Gretel episode on Bugs Bunny.   Guess who the characters represent.  As soon as reality set in and the invoices started coming for the maintenance services, the district wanted out yesterday.  Another happy customer.

On a couple unrelated notes:

A group of scientists wants to create a new unit for energy savings, the “Rosenfeld”.  He may have been a great guy, but I would vote no on that.  All the units and named thermodynamic cycles I can think of are named after one or two-syllable names, and Rosenfeld doesn’t just roll off the tongue.  Joule, Newton, Volt, Tesla, Kelvin, Rankine, Curie, Diesel, Otto, and Watt.  The only major oddball I can think of is Fahrenheit.  There should be a contest to replace that.  He deserves it because it’s such a stupid scale.

The Rosenfeld thing would replace kilowatt-hours, three billion of them to be exact.  What about Mr. Watt?  This is a diss to him.  What is special about three billion kWh: it’s supposed to be the annual output of a 500 MW power plant.  Per my calculations, it’s closer to 4 billion kWh.  And who is ever going to use this metric?  “The results of our study indicate that you can save 0.00016 Rosenfelds with a two year payback.”  I think they would eject us from their building and not pay us for such pathetic looking savings.

So there you have it, a “Rosenfeld” is too long, too much, incorrect, goofy, and it runs roughshod over Mr. Watt.

Then there’s this laugh out loud headline, suitable for an article in The Onion.   “Warning Biofuel Targets May Hit Oil Industry”.  Just think about that for a moment.

Jeff Ihnen

Author Jeff Ihnen

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