March 5th, 2008
Next step in greening your office
Two software companies are partnering to provide a service designed to help building managers get greener, and save on energy. The partners are PeopleCube and Building Sustainability LTD. It’s no accident both companies have European roots. There energy prices are hgiher than in the U.S. and the incentives for lowering a corporation’s carbon footprint are greater than in the U.S. or China, for now.
The announcement from PeopleCube and Business Sustainability is due on March 10th. Meanwhile, they are briefing some of their current customers and folks in the blogosphere. Here’s what I learned from a conversation with PeopleCube’s President & CEO, John Anderson.
The new service is designed for large abnd medium-sized enterprises with multiple offices or business locations. It will privde real-time energy use data in a dashboard form. When used to schedule or analyze use of space or cubicles this can be a huge nergy saver. There can be no rational conservation by companies, pointes out Anderson, until they know when and how energy is being consumer in many locations by hundfreds of employees.
The new combined software offering will allow business to reduce energy consumption, and lower a carbon footprint, says Anderson. The first step to saving money on buildings is to reduce the energy being usede by vacant space.
In the U.S. over half of all energy is used by buildings. 12% of all Americna energy use goes for materials and construction, 39% of all U.S. energy use is for running buildings and supplying power to the equipment being used. Being able to reduce heating, air conditioning, lighting, phantom electricity use in parts of an office or factory NOT being used would go a long way toward reducing a corporation’s energy bills.
Anderson says their new software will interface with any building management software, vacation and personnel scheduling programs, office scheduling and allow managers to see what energy’s being wasted and where. It will make hotelling or sharing of work space even easier and more rational. Don’t “turn on” all four floors of an office building if each floor is half empty. The software can also be structured to send that four-person meeting to a smaller room so the lighting and electronics in the large conference room for fifty are not being unnecessarily used.
Anderson says one of the great allies corporations will have ikn saving energy and costs: employees. Thus PeopleCube is working for systems that will allow individual workers to monitor their energy use at work and find ways of saving. Just turning out the lights in an empty office could help a lot.
A newsman since 1969, Harry Fuller has worked for CBS, ABC, CNBC Europe, CNET and was founding news director at TechTV. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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