CR Herro explains why buildings — which he says consume 70% of electricity and account for 40% of total emissions — waste roughly half the energy they use, and how demand-side energy management can fix it through thermal mass, efficiency, load shifting, solar orientation, and battery storage. He argues the daily peak-and-trough demand curve costs society $1.2 trillion a year, and that time-of-use pricing can shift behavior toward flattening it.
00:00:07:11 - 00:00:43:03
CR Herro: Let's talk a little bit about demand side energy management, because it really comes from push towards reducing, can made impacts that are just in the global climate. And so there's energy efficiency, there's electrification, reduced consumption of resources that all go into understanding the emission cycle around carbon as far as its total embodied carbon carbon accounting and energy accounting give us the tools to understand the magnitude of the problem and to prioritize into identify strategies and have the most impact.
00:00:43:03 - 00:01:11:12
CR Herro: But buildings consume 70% of electricity, 40% of the net total energy, and therefore account for 40% of the total emissions. Buildings are incredibly bad at using energy and water and materials and and so when you look at the consumption of energy by a building for every 1000 units of energy, only half of it actually gets consumed as useful impact to the human life.
00:01:11:13 - 00:01:34:16
CR Herro: The other half out the door wasted. So a big opportunity is one to talk about eliminating waste. And then another big opportunity is really talking about can we sacrifice some of the lifestyle without being painful to further reduce that decision makers, whether it's municipal government or whether it's home builders, whether it's supply chains don't have a problem because they're busy and they're selling things.
00:01:34:16 - 00:02:14:05
CR Herro: And so there's a lack of effort being applied to a problem that they don't feel. And the negative consequences are changing the environment and accumulating our landfills and impacting intergenerational quality of life in the future, because people just don't perceive the significance of the waste in the poor consumption of energy as it occurs today. And so there's this problem, right, that buildings of this massive consumer of energy, the consumption of energy, produces global climate change and contributes to a massive negative impact to the sustainable nature of our globe.
00:02:14:09 - 00:02:35:09
CR Herro: The upper left corner, the dashed lines are the normal consumption in the winter and the dashed line and the red is the normal consumption, the summer of energy in a residential home. And when the sun comes out, if you've got a four kilowatt array on the top of that building, it can produce energy and reduce the consumption pattern to the solid line.
00:02:35:13 - 00:02:56:16
CR Herro: And what it means to utilities is they still have to have all the infrastructure and cost, whether you have solar or not, because look at their peaks. Their peaks are the same in both of those scenarios. And so the pushback from a utilities perspective is, you didn't do anything that that that allows us to pass savings on to the consumer.
00:02:56:18 - 00:03:20:04
CR Herro: You made energy when I didn't need energy and reduced your energy demand, but it didn't change the grid. So that's why demand side energy management is the topic of the day is because this is the beginning of the problem. So we can start doing things which are some of these graphs. The upper right corner is if we think like we thought when we built houses before, there's heating and cooling.
00:03:20:07 - 00:03:37:07
CR Herro: We do things called thermal mass. During the day they warm up and it takes a while before that heat in the summertime to make it into the condition space. And in the winter they hold that heat, and it takes a little bit longer for that heat to be let go. And what that does is it delays and reduces heating and cooling costs.
00:03:37:07 - 00:04:01:10
CR Herro: And then lower right corner is just the impact of energy efficiency. Instead of that red line, which is a conventional home, you shift it down to a lower energy demand and reduce the peak. So we think about those load shifts. We think about solar, we think about load shifting. There's pieces of the solution in there. And all of those pieces are called demand set energy management.
00:04:01:10 - 00:04:31:01
CR Herro: It's how we start taking the lifestyle behavior of humans and the way they consume energy and start applying construction and science and physics and load shifts to start moving those energy around. And then we'll couple it with things like, can we be smarter in our heating and cooling system? Can we have a change in the way we orientate solar so it makes energy farther or closer and overlaps those peaks?
00:04:31:01 - 00:04:47:28
CR Herro: And then number six, the kind of fix all of everything is we can we take all the energy make in the middle of the day, put in a battery and discharge it when the sun goes down to make better use of it? And the answer is, yeah, all of this works. All of this costs money. All this costs carbon to manufacture.
00:04:47:28 - 00:05:24:15
CR Herro: So, right. We have to find a balance that at net net creates the recipe, as it were, to consume the least amount of energy necessary for society to function well and have something that has a low embodied carbon cradle to cradle. And so what we're really trying to do is take all of those peaks to all these strategies and create this level, and utilities can do this and create a lot more harmonious use of generating power and consumption of power when more thoughtfully design.
00:05:24:15 - 00:05:59:10
CR Herro: And the honest answer is, is we just don't do that because nobody has been incentive to not just turn things on when they wanted it. And so there's things happening that will create a cost to consume energy at peak. It's called time of use. So if we have a higher cost of energy during that peak, because utilities and higher cost of energy than we could cost justify or at least behavior and sent people to preheat their house before the peak heating, run their dishwasher when the energy's cheap.
00:05:59:18 - 00:06:37:01
CR Herro: In the United States today, that diurnal curve every day, where we consume a bunch at a peak and then consume a little of a trough, that curve costs our society $1.2 trillion, with a T every year in inefficient energy production consumption. If we just like, did the things we talked about smarter construction, smarter appliances, a little bit of battery storage, that $1.2 trillion of social costs that all of us can pay for an efficient grid becomes available to do things like, I don't know, pay teachers, paper roads go to a greener economy, right?
00:06:37:02 - 00:06:49:27
CR Herro: I mean, it's it's an amazing stick and a carrot that if we leveraged it well, we can start taking those energy efficiencies and start making much better decisions.