Well the 80s were the glory days of energy initiative programs, and as is typical for all large programs that are governed by political machines they became more complicated and cumbersome. The ability to stay ahead or simply keep up with the technology becomes impossible. And this brings us to where we are today in the world of utility-run energy initiative programs.
Since these energy initiatives are primarily based on technological advancements that allow for more output with less power consumption, it is paramount that these programs keep up with the emerging technologies. Otherwise the program committees get caught up in the bureaucracies involved in the approval of products for their programs, and once the approved product list finally makes it into the program schedule they are in some cases ‘old technology’. Far superior products might have been introduced to the market place which would clearly out-perform the ‘approved’ products, but since they are not recognized on the ‘approved’ product schedule the utility company cannot come to grips on how to evaluate them and subsequently provide incentives through their programs.
So the consumer is only provided incentives from the utility company to implement technologies that may not be in their best interest, or in some cases in the best interest of the environment. But they qualify for the money by using products whose technology could be two years old- a virtual lifetime in some technological circles.
Last summer a few of us from Leading Edge Design Group attended a presentation at the brand-spanking new corporate headquarters for one of the major utility companies in New England (who shall remain anonymous- for now). We went there with full expectations of listening the them tout their new ‘Green’ facility that uses storm drain water to flush the toilets and all sorts of other crazy stuff.
Come to find out, the whole focus of this presentation was for the representatives from this utility company to reach out (plead is actually a better word) to us for help. They were in a major dilemma- that their energy initiative program coffers were over-flowing with cash and there we were, half way through the fiscal year and they were afraid that they were not going to be able to unload all these funds! So to address this concern they were going to ‘accelerate’ the incentives for the second half of the year to ensure that they would not be stuck with any money in the till for 2009- that wouldn’t look too good now would it?
It gets better! They went on to inform us that these funds were going to double and triple between the 2010 and the 2012 program years and you could just sense the panic in the air. What are we going to do if we can’t get rid of the funds we have in 2009 and they are going to double and triple over the next few years?
Well guess what? They came clean with the plain and simple reason why they were having problems unloading the funds in 2009 and why they were even more concerned about the next three years of increasing funds. The bottom line was that all the ‘low hanging fruit’ projects had all been picked! They were running out of the basic prescriptive measure projects and they needed our help as consultants to reach outside the box to create new opportunities for their programs, open up new un-tapped arenas for energy reduction measures that they could apply to their programs and unload the funds they would have available to them.
Can you see where I’m going with this now? I like to refer to this syndrome as “dawn breaks on Marblehead”! This is where their retro-active approach to the initiative programs comes back to haunt them. There is all the new and emerging technology readily available that would dovetail nicely into their programs and open up an onslaught of new opportunities, but there is one major obstacle in the way- the program itself and their retro-active ‘approved product’ approach.
Ask and You Shall Receive:
We happen to be heavily involved in the design and implementation of ‘right-sized’, scalable and highly efficient data centers. We have been reaching out to the utility companies for at least five years in a futile attempt to get them to recognize the fact that just because you might be able to purchase an ‘energy efficient’ CRAC unit for $2,500 more then the standard unit, this doesn’t make it the most efficient way to cool a high density data center. They will shell out the incremental cost difference because it is on the infamous ‘approved measure’ list despite the fact that it is not the most efficient way to cool a high density data center. If you cannot quantify the proverbial ‘incremental cost difference’ for them than forget it. It’s like a real estate agent who is trying to determine the selling price for the house you just listed with him and he is completely stumped because nothing else has sold in the area!
We had them on the ropes so we figured we had nothing to lose by throwing out our energy efficient, right-sized approach to the data center and our frustrations in trying to get them to recognize that there are much more efficient ways to power, cool, and provide UPS infrastructure to the data center then legacy ‘big box’ solutions that have been deployed since the beginning of data center time. They confessed to the fact that they clearly understand the potential for energy reduction in the data center, but claimed their calamity was that their relationships are typically with facility manager types and the data centers are typically controlled by the IT types- they simply didn’t have the means to penetrate the data center environment.
Well it just so happened that we were scheduled to have a design kick-off meeting the very next day at a new data center project we were designing for a large industrial customer of this utility- one whom they were very familiar with. So they agreed to join us onsite the next day. They spent several hours with us as we walked them through the process of designing a data center that is built for today with the abilities to scale into the demands of the future with the utmost in efficiencies.
This really seemed to be an eye-opener for them and they left asking us to provide engineering documentation which they could present to their team in an attempt to establish a base line for what a traditional ‘legacy’ data center design for this project would be and how it would compare to our ‘right sized’ design. Once this base line established it could serve as the model for future data center projects moving forward. They could then compare the performance characteristics between the two solutions and develop some sort of a metric on which to base incentives on for right-size and scalable data centers.
Needless to say we were extremely hopeful that we were finally getting somewhere with this utility and incentives for our data center solutions were imminent. So after investing the next two months developing a very thorough and comprehensive engineering study that compared our right-sized solution for this project to a legacy-based solution, we submitted our report with high expectations. Needless to say we were crushed when the first response we received from the utility was, “what is the incremental cost difference between the two systems?”
Actually ‘crushed’ is a very polite way of describing my personal reaction to this institutional response to our 42 page engineering study. Someone else from our office had to speak with them at the time as I was speaking in tongues at the moment. That was August, 2009 and here we are in April of 2010 and this utility company has since hired two separate engineering firms to study the engineering study we did for them and we are still waiting for the results.
So much for incentives in the data center arena I guess and so much for our hopes that this utility company was actually ‘getting it’! Here we presented them with a golden opportunity to open up an untapped source for them apply their incentives to and, since they couldn’t get beyond the “what’s the incremental cost difference” mentality, they are still stuck inside the box – the box that is begging for help.
