Increasingly large corporations are taking a strong look at their energy use, not just to be greener, but to drive down energy expenses. The rising cost of energy has created the incentive to look for greater efficiency. Harnessing real-time sensors in your facility or campus can provide dramatic cost savings that quickly repay this investment.

The next wave of wireless IP-addressable temperature and control sensors are making a big impact. With these wireless devices, there’s very little installation hassle or cost. The system is designed, sensors are put in place, and immediately an organization has a much better understanding of their facility’s energy use.

On the system side, the centralized analysis tools reveal energy baselines so that you can begin to make adjustments in your energy use. The ability to view and control energy use reveals a whole new level of facility maintenance opportunities. For instance, the benefits of switching to compact fluorescent lighting becomes quickly apparent with viewable energy savings.

Patterns of energy use over time also become apparent. Because energy costs rise based on peak demands, the astute facility manager can discern these patterns and adjust demands by staggering the use of high-energy appliances, and dramatically draw down their energy bills. Instead of an early-morning ramp up of all systems, perhaps there are opportunities to run things at night or to run machines at slower speeds and volumes over longer periods of time.

The cost savings can easily equal 15 percent of a yearly utility bill. While that cost savings may not sound like much in the context of a home owner, consider the energy costs of such facilities as a complex manufacturing plant, a hotel, or a large retail outlet. A 15-percent savings in those contexts could easily measure in the millions of dollars.

These sensors and energy analytics tools should usher in a whole new business model for facility maintenance. Instead of just incentive pay tied to facility upkeep measures, facility managers should be given incentives for how efficiently they run their facility. Given the right incentives, owner/operators may be quite pleasantly surprised by how efficiently their operations can run.

Electricity was first harnessed successfully in the “Golden Age of Invention” by Thomas Edison and a number of innovative peers. This age of invention saw the creation and proliferation of the automobile and a great many other devices, largely of a mechanical nature, to improve the quality of everyday life.

Since that time, mechanical skills have flagged as we’ve put more energy into software and system development in our current Information Age. The rise of the Internet has led smart minds on a frenzy of software invention that have dramatically changed our outlook on the world. One could certainly equate the impacts of the “Age of Invention” with today’s “Age of Information” in terms of life-changing developments brought about by human innovation.

The world is now faced with global change that is largely brought about by the way that we live upon the planet. This change demands that we consume fewer fossil fuels, turning to cleaner fuels to reduce our impacts on our planet. There are abundant opportunities to harness free and available energy from our Earth systems with little environmental impact. In this coming age that’s focused on our survival on the planet, we’ll need a strong focus on mechanical solutions along with a broader and deeper understanding of the balance of life on our planet.

The challenges that we face from climate change will need to bring together the brightest mechanical and system-oriented minds, striking a balance between efficient machinery and tools to monitor, maintain and balance energy creation with the minimum of environmental impacts. It will be necessary to unleash a tsunami of creativity and innovation in order to address these overwhelming challenges.

Our mechanical minds have a broad range of challenges to address in order to efficiently harness hydro, biomass, wind, solar, wave and geothermal power. We need new machinery to transform these sources into clean and efficient energy sources at all scales.

The sharp minds that have been honed on software and systems design need to create new tools and systems to monitor our Earth from a granular to global scale. At this point we know that our impacts have pushed our planet into a climate crisis, but we’re just beginning to understand how we got there, and we’ll need far better monitoring and analysis to be able to reverse the course.

We’ve seen what great minds can accomplish when sparked by a flurry of innovation. The momentum is now growing to train our young people to address these issues that are of critical importance. Thankfully, we have an exciting foundation of mechanical and software innovation to build upon. We’ll all need to collaborate to bring the best of both to the problems ahead.

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Matt Ball is editor of V1 Energy and V1 Magazine for the Americas and Asia Pacific.

Cities are beginning to promote the use of green roofs as part of their planning ordinances, because rooftop plantings play multiple roles in making a city more environmentally friendly. A green roof can reduce the energy needs of the individual building while also reducing the overall impact of buildings on the heat island effect of cities.

The insulating properties of soil and plants adds considerable energy savings that is beneficial in both hot and cold seasons. During hotter summer months the soil and plant layers reflect and absorb the suns rays with less intensity than the traditional black roof, driving down the air temperature. Reducing the amount of black roof surface helps mitigate the heat island effect of paved city cores, which can be as much as four degrees hotter than surrounding areas. A study by Environment Canada found a 26 percent reduction in both cooling needs and winter heat loss.

A green roof’s ability to absorb water improves stormwater management. Instead of a deluge of water off the roof and into drains, the roof absorbs a good portion of precipitation, which has implications for less erosion and better water quality. The absorption of water, and subsequent slow release, serves to filter the water, meaning far less energy is needed to purify water in order to make it potable.

Green roofs add to the biodiversity of plant life in a city and they add habitat for insects and birds. The green roof can become a needed sanctuary along the migration path of birds that are faced with a shortage of natural habitat.

Given the stability of the temperature of soil and plants, green roofs can last two or three times longer than traditional roofs that are made of membranes that deteriorate due to the dramatic fluctuation in temperature.

Lastly, green roofs provide an aesthetic and psychological benefit by adding to the green spaces in a city.

Willie Smits is a remarkable man who has founded a university in Borneo, Indonesia, holds a Ph. D. in molecular biology, and is close to completing a second Ph. D. in Agro-Forestry. Smits has also long been an advocate for Borneo’s orangutan population, and has run an orphanage to take in the young of parents that have been killed.

Much of the reason behind the orangutan’s plight on Borneo has to do with the growing number of large oil palm plantations that have clearcut the native rainforest to set up a monoculture of these trees, and have taken away natural orangutan habitat. Oil palm is an important ingredient in many of the foods that we eat, and it is being developed as a leading source of biodiesel.

Smits has witnessed the rapid decline in native rainforest habitat, and the growing number of orangutan orphans has taxed his ability to care for all of them. Seeing this tipping point of the balance of nature close at hand, he has tried to reason with the oil palm plantation owners, pointing out the best soils for the growth of their crops and the ideal locations for transportation to market. While these habitat conservation efforts have had some results, much of the plantation activity is carried out illegally in areas where there are no resources for enforcement.

Instead of simply stopping there, Smits became fascinated with the sugar palm, a close cousin to the oil palm that secretes a sugary juice and is an important food source for Borneo’s indigenous people. Smits pursued the idea that sugar palm juice could be turned into ethanol as a fuel source and devised an ingenious method to tap and transport the juice from a web of these plants toward a central processing center using a network of gravity-fed pipes.

The benefit of this sugar-palm plantation is that these plants do best in their native rainforest habitat among trees of many types. They can grow on steep slopes where other plants can’t, and they hold back erosion that has been a problematic result of the clear-cutting for the oil palm plantations. The sugar palms secrete a large amount of juice that can easily be turned into ethanol, and this ability doesn’t take away from the plants other uses as a food source. The ethanol fuel is provided back to local villagers as a fuel for cooking, which replaces the need for them to cut down trees for firewood.

With the idea in place, Smits set out to prove that a large sugar palm plantation would work. He obtained land that had been deforested and planted 5 million sugar palm trees, as well as more than 1,200 native tree species. After just five years, his plantation is now yielding abundant fuel, and he’s successfully restored the biodiversity of the local wildlife, returned the balance of rainfall to the area, and has improved water quality.

The idea has been such a success that Smits is now being invited to other countries to share his ideas. Smits is speaking to governments in South America and Africa where these plants would do well, in addition to leaders throughout Asia.

The idea of linking conservation with energy production clearly has many benefits, and fits with the symbiotic balance of nature.