Advertisment

Filling the Green Gap

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

The biggest gap in the greening of our workplaces, homes, cities and planet lies in one word. Not technology, cost, intent, law, government, policy...though all those contribute. The gap is in information. What's possible, the impact, how, how much, who can do it.

Advertisment

Take the simple problem of buildings in most of India. The top floor warms up terribly in summer. The most popular solution, throwing in extra air-con or cooling, is not just expensive: it's stupid. Think. First you let the floor heat up like an oven. Then you spend extra cooling the oven. Ask: What's the problem? The top floor heats up. Why? Because it has direct sunlight. Solution? Cut the sunlight.

Treat the problem (direct sunlight) rather then the symptom (the floor heats up). When you have fever, do you treat it by sitting in a fridge?

Then you need to know what the treatment is-and what it will cost, and what impact it will have.

When I was figuring this out for my South Delhi house four years ago, where we really ran too much of air-con, I looked around, and found several examples. One was just next door to us, the ITC Green Center, which had done amazing work leading to a LEEDS green-building platinum rating. Two, a USAID-sponsored project that was startling. Working on two identical buildings in Hyderabad, they found a 20-degree drop in rooftop surface temperature with just a white coating (see ld2.in/u2).

Advertisment

I was convinced. I used my maximum-minimum recording digital thermometer (picked up for around $50) to record my top-floor temperature over several days in June. Next year, we covered the rooftop with cement sheets (there are better options, I know today), and repeated the measurements. I had a 9 degree drop in top-floor temperature. We almost stopped using air-conditioning on the top floor..

In India, cutting down power drawn is not really about the energy utility bill. The much bigger saving is on backup costs-equipment capacity, and running costs.

So here's the no-brainer dummies' guide to saving energy:

Find out where you're wasting it (look around, look at your bills) and why. How can you cut it down? If it's lighting, how can you use more natural lighting, and more efficient lighting? If it's cooling, how can you cut down the cooling need?

Find out the known, available ways of cutting that wastage. Heat-reflective paint is a great example. But it translates and scales equally to technology areas.

Check how much equipment is always on in your office, whether it's needed or not. You'll find servers, network routers, phones-adding up to many hundreds, even thousands, of watts. A few hundred IP phones can waste nearly a kilowatt all the time-including at night. How can you cut that down? Power down equipment not in use? Consolidate servers?

If you can cut down standby power waste, you hugely cut down backup costs-such as the sheer idiocy of running massive generators for a four-hour power outage at night, with zero workers in the building.

Work out investment versus returns. Often, you can get returns in a year or less. If your company's planning an expansion, you can save faster-scaling down new equipment needs.

There are times when the investment is less than the immediate savings. And yet, for lack of information, those simple steps are not taken.

Advertisment