Sieben Blog

SEA Featured in Environment Illinois Efficiency Report

SEAadmin — Thu, 12 May 2011 02:29:00 GMT

Environment Illinois highlighted Sieben Energy Associates in their “Saving Energy Growing Jobs” report , which was released today. The report describes SEA’s history and the growth of the energy efficiency industry in Illinois stating how “customers who wouldn’t have considered paying for an energy audit in 1990 now actively seek [SEA] out.”

It makes special note of our recent partnership with the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council (MCHC), working with hospitals to tackle their specific sustainability and energy efficiency challenges. The partnership with MCHC demonstrates the increase in public and private awareness of energy efficiency, and the role that SEA has played in that development.

Visit the Environment Illinois Website to read the entire report that includes the SEA case study.

The Importance of a Strategic Energy Plan

Jerry Burin — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Most organizations continue to develop energy initiatives based upon tactical decisions and focusing on immediate concerns, rather than recognizing energy management as a strategic opportunity. Decisions concerning energy focus primarily on operating cost management. The utility bill represents a recurring monthly cost, a budget line item that fluctuates up and down over the course of the year, or compared to prior years (with all the focus associated when the cost goes up). The very fact that energy is predominately viewed as a cost and not an “input” to the operation of an enterprise pushes it to the margins of management planning. Dissecting energy into its many parts offers an extraordinary opportunity to impact the enterprise at almost all stakeholder levels.

Energy costs are a function of its metered usage—most commonly, kilowatt-hours of electricity and therms of natural gas. Fifty years ago, metered energy was a cheap and plentiful domestic resource and its impact on the environment, national security, and Earth’s climate simply weren’t accounted for. Sustainability—the effort to have a less harmful, more benign impact on our environment—wasn’t an issue.

Deregulated energy markets, new equipment and operations technology, the tremendous amount of operating data available for analysis, increasing opportunities for renewable energy usage, and the growing demand from customers, investors, and employees for organizations to demonstrate a commitment to sustainability—all issues driven by energy— present challenges for senior management that rarely get the attention they deserve.

Energy’s long history as simply “the utility bill” to be paid by the accounting department before being penalized a late charge, combined with often-decentralized facilities operations, left little opportunity for a holistic assessment of energy’s impact on the enterprise. A roll-up of an organization’s annual energy cost, a picture of its most recent ten-year growth history, and a projection of its cost trajectory over the next ten years—with the potential for climate-related surcharges kicking in within two to three years—would be a splash of icy water in the faces of most organizations’ senior leadership. This perspective on energy consistently fails to get senior management’s attention.

What can an organization do?

No dynamic, thoughtful organization fails to perform long-term planning. It’s safe to assume that, typically, energy has no place in such planning. But it should! It may not necessarily mirror the timeframe of the organization’s long-term plan but, at a minimum, it should look out over the next three years for opportunities and risks.

Developing a multi-year energy plan can begin with an assessment of current energy management and operations performance. How is energy information organized? How much energy is used annually? How is energy purchased and from whom? Have energy-consuming systems been evaluated for waste and improved efficiency? Does energy play a role in the design of new facilities? Does capital planning assess life-cycle costs of energy consuming equipment? Answers to these questions create a baseline from which future initiatives can develop.

Most importantly, senior leadership must acknowledge a commitment to address energy as an important strategic resource. Such an acknowledgement will serve as the catalyst for energy planning across the enterprise. A strategic energy plan needs a statement of purpose, a vision, and near-, medium-, and long-term goals. Many plan models exist. Pushing the energy agenda to the strategic level provides a wide-frame view of its impact on the organization with corresponding benefits to society as a whole.

Pew Center Conference Review

Jerry Burin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:45:00 GMT

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change held an energy efficiency conference in Chicago on April 6 and 7. This year it was entitled From Shop Floor to Top Floor: Best Business Practices in Energy Efficiency and coincided with their release of a report on the best practices in corporate energy efficency.

Interesting keynote and luncheon speakers ranging from Suzanne Malec-McKenna, the City of Chicago’s Commissioner of its Department of Environment to John Rowe, Chairman and CEO of Exelon Corporation, to former Senator John Warner, helped set the context for the conference—that the world is changing, and that fossil fuel-generated carbon emissions will surely become an economic factor within our society—with an associated cost borne by consumers.

Sustainability and environmental representatives of household name companies such as Toyota, IBM, Best Buy, PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard, Coca Cola and the Mars Candy described their companies’ efforts to establish and attain sustainability goals. A significant focus of their respective strategies was reducing energy consumption through energy efficiency—the notion of optimizing energy use in everything from heating and cooling of buildings to product manufacturing processes.

Several notable takeaways:

Establish big reduction goals—even if you don’t know how they’ll be met. Big goals inspire people.
Increasingly carbon will be measured as part of the manufacturing and delivery process of bringing a product to market—lots of carbon is embedded in the supply chain—expect to see carbon indices on consumer products as commonly as we see the ingredients of food products listed on their packaging labels.
Electric utilities will be big drivers of energy efficiency to offset the need to build more power plants—increasingly utilities will de-couple their profit motive from the sale of power and find the means to remain profitable as they reduce power sales.

Over the course of two days, speaker after speaker took the opportunity to demonstrate how their organization was focusing on energy efficiency to help meet sustainability goals. The conference served as a wake-up call for companies that, to date, have failed to heed the signs that sustainability, and by inference energy efficiency, is a mega trend at our doorstep.

Craig Sieben to Lead Discussion at Wall Street Journal Conference

SEAadmin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Next week, March 3-5, the Wall Street Journal is once again hosting its premier environmental event for chief executives and policymakers "who are shaping the green business market." This year’s ECO:nomics Creating Environmental Capital Conference will be held in Santa Barbara, California at the Bacara Resort and Spa.

Just a few of the many leaders who will be participating are Dr. Steven Chu (Energy Secretary), Robert A. Iger (President and CEO of The Walt Disney Company), Peter Voser (Chief Executive of Royal Dutch Shell), Michael G. Morris (Chairman, President, and CEO of American Electric Power), T. Boone Pickens (Chairman of BP Capital Management), and Amory Lovins (Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute).

The Wall Street Journal describes the motivation for the conference as follows:

At this critical moment, with prospects for a global carbon emissions regime in flux, there is an urgent need for new answers. Corporate CEOs and entrepreneurs alike must alter their strategies to address a continuing recession and extended regulatory uncertainty. Where should decision makers focus? Find out at ECO:nomics, where the best minds in business and policy uncover the real risks and opportunities in the fast-changing world of environmental capital.

Craig Sieben, who participated in the event last year, was once again invited to serve as a Discussion Leader on the third day of the conference. He will be in attending events throughout the conference. Besides sharing his own expertise on energy efficiency with others, Craig is sure to come away with fresh insights from leaders and speakers that will help shape the valuable strategic perspective that we at Sieben Energy bring to all of our client engagements.

The three-day event promises to be a highly informative, influential, and entertaining. Attendees should come away with a better understanding of today’s strategic opportunities and risks at the intersection of business and environment.

Carbon Cuts in Copenhagen: Energy Efficiency as the First Step

Todd Edwards — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:29:00 GMT

The U.S. will agree to carbon cuts during the upcoming Copenhagen summit, but will they be enough? Concern is growing over the amount of carbon that the U.S. will agree to limit in the coming years. This concern is not a one-way battle; US law makers appear weary over too high of expectations in carbon reductions while Europe and other key climate change combaters seem skeptical of the US’s non-committal stance to be an equal partner in the fight against global warming. It is widely agreed that climate change is a global issue which transcends national boundaries and dismisses domestic political debacles regardless of their seemingly weighty importance on a sustained economy. Nevertheless, limits are in the foreseeable future for the US, albeit likely lower than the limits proposed in Europe.

Just how carbon reduction targets will affect business-as-usual is somewhat unclear, but, at least in the short-run, energy efficiency provides a mechanism to improve the bottom-line while reducing the environmental impact from daily operations. In the long-run, energy efficiency will still be providing financial returns which can subsidize investments in cleaner and renewable fuels. The first step is finding the opportunity for savings today for the benefit of tomorrow.

Energy Efficiency Earns

Craig Sieben — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:20:00 GMT

Every business needs to optimize its energy use, particularly in a tough economy. A recent McKinsey study, “Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy,” concluded that energy use in all of our 100 million buildings can be reduced by 23% through an investment of $520 billion in efficiency measures by 2020. These investments would save a combined $1.2 trillion (net present value) and prevent 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions each year.

While this is a fascinating macro analysis, Sieben has recently completed a set of five studies for clients looking for low cost energy efficiency savings that they could immediately implement. Our engineers identified an average of 7% savings, requiring an $80,000 investment, returning $200,000 per year. On a simple return basis, these clients will earn over 200% on their investment!

Efficiency Street is a new Wall Street, with earnings that just can't be beat. Kudos to our friends at McKinsey for writing an excellent document that shows how energy efficiency can generate huge earnings.