There is a running joke in our business that electrical engineers don’t know anything about energy efficiency. It is only a joke. One of the sharpest energy guys I have interviewed was a physics major who started on the ground floor of an energy efficiency consulting firm filling orders of equipment they also happened to sell. In 10 years he worked his way up to really understanding how buildings and their complex systems work and he became a manager of a team of energy engineers teaching his group how buildings work and how to model them.
This article made laugh out loud. MBAs developing energy management plans and reducing businesses’ carbon footprint. Maybe I need an MBA to consult with my doctor prior to my next gallbladder surgery. I can see it now. Replace lighting in a half million square foot manufacturing plant (nothing wrong with that) and install 100 kW of photovoltaic and dedicate a focus group to reduce energy consumption. Meanwhile there are what we call piles of cash ablaze scattered about the plant in the form of process, system, and controls waste, on both the supply and demand ends of energy consuming systems.
Beyond shutting things off and installing equipment that is more efficient than option A, energy efficiency is domain of the physical sciences. The root of energy efficiency expertise is calculus, followed by physics, and core courses in thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics. If job candidates have anything less than Bs in any of these courses we discard them as candidates.
Arm an engineering graduate with an MBA and you may have a powerful weapon to put out these fires. An MBA could make a rousing case to embrace energy efficiency as a profit enhancer, risk reducer, and marketing tool – much better than I can. But there are already enough engineers in our business who don’t know what they are doing. We evaluate their work all the time. We don’t need political scientist MBAs cluttering up our market. I might as well look up a culinary chef to do a wheel alignment on my car. Jacque Pepin, are you available?
