Mark Shahinian shares his experience retrofitting dozens of commercial buildings and identifies the structural barriers holding up the industry from decarbonization.
Decarbonization in commercial buildings is totally stuck. Some have declared that it’s because all the efficiency has been wrung out of commercial buildings. Having run retrofits of dozens of commercial buildings I can tell you that’s not the case. Instead, there are a number of structural barriers holding up the industry. Addressing these will benefit both building owners and efficiency/decarbonization industry players.
The opportunity for decarbonization is there. The idea that we’ve wrung all efficiency out of buildings can only be held by people who have never been shown what is going on in buildings. When I was running an ESCO, we’d go into a building and drop energy use between 20 and 30 percent as part of a very standard lighting and controls retrofit. It’s not easy, which is why we don’t see enough of it, but hundreds of thousands of commercial buildings are ripe for decarbonization.
Walk a privately-owned commercial building today more than 10 years old. You’ll see fluorescent tubes everywhere, when LED lights would use 25% of the energy. You’ll see pneumatic thermostats on the walls, which means the building is running on a technology first developed in 1895 – and for which there is a much more efficient digital modern replacement. You’ll see gas boilers running at 82% efficiency, when modern boilers clock in at 98%.
Key points include:
- The split incentive problem
- Lack of trained personnel
- Operational difficulty
Read the full article, Why Commercial Building Decarbonization Stubbornly Refuses to Scale, on Substack.