RMI reinvents fire whilst AGIMO delivers a cold shower
Rocky Mountain Institute have been hard at work again, this time putting out a collective call to action for people and organisations to help in 'reinventing fire'. As they put it: Reinventing Fire: driving the business-led transition from oil, coal, and ultimately gas to efficiency and renewables is about thinking through some of the fundamental assumptions we make about energy generation and consumption. It's by no means a call to revert to agrarian modes, simply to think and make insightful choices about energy consumption, generation to drive mass scale transformations of energy efficiency. Find out more about the RMI Reinventing fire initiative at http://www.rmi.org/Content/Files/Fall09Appeal_Brochure.pdf. Whilst the focus is US-centric, the principles apply universally.
One of the aspects that I find some encouraging in their approaches is the integration of information technology as a transformative feedback loop that helps us better understand energy sinks - areas of high energy use - and how our own living and work practices contribute to these. It's this aspect of ICT that is sorely missing in the work that I've seen generated by AGIMO in Australia as they work on Federal Government 'Green IT' initiatives. Sure, ICT uses energy as one of those energy sinks, but to focus efforts on that as a single mode issue misses the point. Green IT initiatives should not be just about transforming ICT operations - ICT is also about enabling and communicating information, providing greater insight into patterns of energy use and where improvements and efficiencies can be found, or connecting up problems with people for solutions, but at scale.
Take the following snippets from RMI about the value proposition behind Solar generation:
- Every 70 minutes or so, the sun supplies the Earth with enough energy to run global civilization for a year
- An average square meter of land receives each year as much energy from the sun as is in a barrel of oil, and it falls reliably, freely, and relatively evenly on rich and poor alike.
- The world’s electricity use could in theory be provided 20 times over just by modern 20-percent-efficient solar cells on the rooftops of buildings in the 1 percent of land area that dense cities already cover.
- Solar power is always in stock, never runs out (even at night when it’s shining elsewhere), is safe, and never threatens us with terrorist plots.
- Thirty years ago, few utility managers thought about influencing a home’s or a factory’s power consumption. Now, many smart utility managers are doing just that, sniffing out places—swimming pools, water heaters, air conditioners, manufacturing equipment, commercial lights—where sharing information with consumers to inform smarter choices can retime use, cut costs, and curb emissions.
- The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has found up to 188 billion watts of such “demand response” potential in the United States
As a Canberra based individual, I spend enough time traipsing around at night to see the scale of lighting and unthinking use across a large variety of facilities. How nice it would be to see the principles behind RMIs reinvention of fire taken up seriously in large scale facility management and community design more broadly. Come on AGIMO, time to get serious and move beyond the greenwash of tokenism - lets dig a little deeper in our efforts to achieve serious levels of energy efficiency. Let's go beyond the server rooms and data centres..