Episode 11: Energy-Efficient Buildings
By: City Of The Future
Tags: City Of The Future, Building, Climate Change, Energy Efficiency, Cities

Eric Jaffe: If the goal is getting buildings to adopt new technologies, then that tech will have to be affordable and accessible.

Vanessa Quirk: We talked to some folks at Sidewalk Labs who are trying to tackle that very issue.

Rachel Steinberg: Hi, my name’s Rachel.

Jenny Chen: Hello, I’m Jenny.

Vanessa Quirk: Rachel Steinberg and Jenny Chen have been working on a solution to help buildings get more energy-efficient. It’s called Mesa.

Sidewalk’s Rachel Steinberg and Jenny Chen have been working on Mesa, a solution to help office buildings get more energy-efficient. It’s an easy-install energy savings kit that automates energy use, bringing us one step closer toward a more sustainable future. (Image: Sidewalk Labs)

Rachel Steinberg: Mesa is an energy optimization or energy savings kit, and it comes with a mix of sensors and smart devices that enable more granular data to be collected about a space. Non-identifiable, so this is only information about what’s happening within that space.

Eric Jaffe: Okay, so no information about you or me in the space, right? Just things like electricity use and temperature?

Rachel Steinberg: Yeah, exactly.

Jenny Chen: Mesa takes all these inputs, optimizes for the most energy-efficient results, and makes adjustments, automatically.

Vanessa Quirk: But Surely most modern buildings are already doing some of these things automatically? Like turning off the lights at night?

Rachel Steinberg: Something that I found surprising is that buildings are quite manual. So a lot of times you really depend on a human to make sure that the lighting’s off, or the heating is on, or the cooling is on.

Jenny Chen: Most buildings are using scheduled heating and cooling, which means they will decide the set point by time of the day and a day of the week.

Rachel Steinberg: There’s still a lot of wasted energy, even within scheduled buildings that just try to get heating and cooling for assumed times, not really the actual work times, so you could have your office being cooled on a weekend when no one’s there.

Eric Jaffe: So over the weekend I walked by the Columbia Architecture School building and all the lights were on. Nobody’s there. Nobody’s even allowed to go in there.

Rachel Steinberg: Yeah.

Eric Jaffe: All the lights were on and I was just thinking, “This is obviously timed or scheduled and it’s supposed to come on, because it’s during “normal library” hours but it doesn’t understand that things have changed. There’s nobody here, but it could.

Vanessa Quirk: The irony, too, that it’s an architecture school.

Eric Jaffe: How about that?

Vanessa Quirk: You’d think that they’d be the ones that were on the vanguard of automating their building there.

Rachel Steinberg: Yeah, but I think that gets to the point that this is really hard to do.

Vanessa Quirk: Jenny and Rachel have been focused on making it easy. Which is why Mesa is pretty simple to install.

Rachel Steinberg: Each piece is very much like plug it in, stick it on the wall, and you’re ready to go.

Vanessa Quirk: Once building owners know more about energy use in their building, they can then make better informed decisions about which energy-efficient upgrades are right for them.

Jenny Chen: When they have options to either invest in an installation or better window or more efficient HVAC system, they will have better ground to make their decisions.

Vanessa Quirk: This cuts energy waste — and helps buildings comply with new energy regulations.

Rachel Steinberg: And then, even beyond the measuring piece, it’s hard to manually adjust energy use constantly. It’s like you need to just have an energy guru standing around your office, seeing where people are leaving and what you can cut. And instead, if you have an automated energy guru, then you don’t need to worry, like, “Did Jamie turn off the thermostat at night or turn off the lights?” So you really do need some tool that focuses on how you take all of this data in one place and then use it to adjust the energy use. This is a tool that will just take care of it. And that’s part of why we’re mainly focused on under-resourced, understaffed buildings that probably don’t have someone staring at a building management system all day and optimizing it and tweaking things. It really is supposed to be an aid to supercharge or superpower some of the existing understaffed buildings.

Eric Jaffe: Mesa helps building owners automate things like heating and cooling, so energy is only being used when it’s actually needed.

Rachel Steinberg: We have an algorithm that accounts for: are people in this space comfortable, and at the same time, are we saving energy?

Vanessa Quirk: I, for one, would be incredibly happy if office buildings stopped blasting AC in the middle of the summer — not just for my personal comfort, but for the planet!

Eric Jaffe: And I know a lot of us at Sidewalk Labs, including myself, would actually be very interested in seeing how much energy we use as an office, and how to mitigate it.

Vanessa Quirk: And Rachel told us about a new kind of lease you can try when you have real-time energy data in a building.

Eric Jaffe: They’re called green leases.

Rachel Steinberg: Green leases end up adding components into the lease that align incentives for both the landlord and the tenant to care about energy use, to add transparency into what energy is being used and share in being able to cut that energy use.

Eric Jaffe: So building owners have lower operating costs, and tenants get lower energy costs — it’s a win-win.

Vanessa Quirk: Plus tenants are actually happier when they know that their building owner is actively addressing their carbon footprints. That Rocky Mountain Institute report showed that tenants with green leases are more likely to renew.

Eric Jaffe: And it’s examples like that that could convince all buildings of the advantages of energy-efficiency.

Vanessa Quirk: Including those smaller, under-resourced buildings that have to be careful with their cash.

Rachel Steinberg: There’s certainly big equipment upgrades that you can work on, but it’s just unattainable to maintain affordability of buildings. It becomes a complicated, big investment decision. And that’s where I think a lot of these easy-install, affordable technologies that get you a lot of the savings, or a lot of the easy-to-cut savings, have a big impact. If you’re saving even 10% of the energy, but in general, things like Mesa can save 20 and even 30% of the building’s energy, just imagine every single building in the U.S., in North America, in the world, saving at least 20% of its energy. That’s a huge impact. Even through small changes, there’s a lot that we can do.