Heating, cooling and electrifying buildings produces nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, but by employing existing energy efficient technologies and switching to renewables, we could cut 87% of building-related emissions by 2050. So, how do we get there?
Climate Now speaks with two companies working to eliminate the barriers to decarbonizing buildings. Andy Frank, founder of Sealed, explains how Sealed makes it easier for homeowners to implement energy efficiency improvements by reducing upfront costs and managing the improvement project. Jeff Hendler and Zhora Roy of Logical Buildings share how their company empowers real estate managers and building owners with the data they need to optimize their energy usage.
“The first rule of selling energy efficiency is you don’t really talk about energy efficiency. You talk about comfort, health, safety, really quality of life. You really focus on the things that people care about and can feel and can be tangible.” - Andy Frank, Founder and President, Sealed
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Full Transcript and References
James Lawler: You are listening to Climate Now, a weekly podcast that delves into the scientific ideas, technologies, and policies that will help us address the global climate crisis and reach a net-zero future. I’m your host, James Lawler. And today we will be looking at some decarbonization solutions that might hit close to home; or rather, could be IN your home. And your office. I’m talking about ways that we can reduce the emissions that come from the heating, cooling and electrification of our buildings. And there is a lot of opportunity for emissions reductions in this space.
Residential properties alone are responsible for between 17-21% of energy related carbon emissions globally… AND in the US, commercial buildings generate over 800 million metric tons of CO2 emissions every year, which is the equivalent of about 2 trillion miles traveled in a regular gas-powered car, and is over 10% of total US CO2 emissions.
So what are the levers that can be pulled to decarbonize these spaces?
Today, we’ll learn about two companies that are helping customers reduce the energy they use in homes and workplaces, the result of which is a reduction in both monthly energy costs and carbon footprints.
Later in the episode, we will be talking with CEO, Jeff Hendler, and Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Zohra Roy, of the company Logical Buildings. Through data and smart technology, Logical Buildings aims to empower users to make economical AND environmentally productive choices about their energy use.
Jeff Hendler: Right now, do you know how much electricity costs or do you know how, how carbon intense the power is? If you had that information though, wouldn’t you be more empowered?
James Lawler: But first, we speak with Andy Frank, founder and president of a company called Sealed, which helps homeowners finance and contract energy efficiency upgrades.
Andy Frank: At least 40% of the climate challenge can be met by stopping energy waste and that really starts in our homes.
James Lawler: Andy, thank you so much for joining us! Let’s start by hearing a little bit about you. What inspired you to get involved in this space?
Andy Frank: You know, the thing that’s always motivated me in starting Sealed, even before that, is that home efficiency and electrification is really the largest unaddressed climate opportunity, in my mind at least.
I think important for your audience to hear is that at least 40% of the climate challenge can be met by stopping energy waste and that really starts in our homes. and That’s why I’ve invested most of my career in this sector. I’ve seen a lot in this space and frankly, most of what I’ve seen in my career in getting to this point is what doesn’t work.
And there’s been a lot of attempts at different models and the reason that I’m very excited about what we’re doing here at Sealed is because I think we’re, coming together with a mode that has the potential to really scale. And that’s a direct-to-consumer approach to getting around a lot of the big challenges that have proved kind of especially, gnarly.
James Lawler: We’ve heard, you know, for a while that energy efficiency is this huge lever that we have to decarbonize, And we’ve also historically underestimated how efficient we can get. Arguably the energy efficiency lever is bigger than we even think it is. But people have heard of solar energy, they’ve heard of wind and are excited about those things. It’s much harder, it seems, to get people excited about energy efficiency.
And you know, when you’re thinking about things that you want in your house or on your house, you know, you think about solar panels, wouldn’t that be nice. How do you make energy efficiency appealing to people? How do you make that sale?
Andy Frank: So the first thing you do, which simplifies the whole question is you don’t sell energy efficiency, right? That is not something that generally appeals to people. We’ve found at Sealed something similar to the old Fight Club line:
The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club. The first rule of selling energy efficiency is you don’t really talk about energy efficiency. You talk about comfort, health, safety, really quality of life. You really focus on the things that people care about and can feel and can be tangible.
And that’s really, really powerful. And does something that renewable energy can’t really do, right. If I put solar panels on my house, that’s great. And I may lower my electricity bill, and I may feel great about having green power, but I’m not going to be more comfortable in my home, or I’m not going to be a warmer in the winter or cooler in the summer.
And so that’s really the big focus that we have in terms of selling energy efficiency, and it may sound obvious, but I can guarantee to you, that’s still the mentality of selling energy efficiency by focusing on reducing your energy, energy usage and reducing your energy bill is still the conventional wisdom in this market. And that’s a big reason that this market has been held back for the last 50 years.
James Lawler: So maybe you could unpack that a little bit for us, because I think it is to your point, fairly counterintuitive that one can reduce one’s energy bill, but actually improve on the energy services that we’re getting like warmth, like cooling, these various things. So how does that actually work?
Andy Frank: Yeah. So our goal with everything that we do is to provide more comfort with less energy with pretty off the shelf technology, right? We’re talking weatherization, heat pumps, which have been around for many years, they’ve become more efficient in the last few years, smart thermostats, things that, that both reduce the amount of energy that leaks out of your home and therefore makes you more uncomfortable.
So if you have a drafty home, for example, my home recently got Sealed. Before it was, it was a nightmare, right? We were walking around with slippers all the time, had to go to bed with a couple of layers that we were wearing all the time had to choose, right? Which bathroom we would go to depending on the outside temperature, it really affects how you live.
And the core cause of that was because we weren’t really living in the inside to the full extent. Right. A big part of the outside was inside our building. So just doing the simple things like weatherization to keep the outside out is a big driver of not only comfort, but also energy waste.
James Lawler: I wonder if you could describe in a typical residential home, what the levers are when it comes to energy efficiency. How do the sort of improvements typically rank in terms of the value that they contribute to energy reductions in a typical home.
Andy Frank: The first thing to really understand is a lot of these improvements work together. Maybe the best example is weatherization and heat pumps. So heat pumps don’t perform nearly the level that they should, if you’re working in a leaky home, happy to go into some of the, the physics of it, but basically you want a tight envelope-
James Lawler: You don’t want to big a hole in your wall.
Andy Frank: Yeah, holes in walls are bad. You know, if you add up all of the air leaks in an average home, it’s like keeping a big window open all year round. Right. So imagine having that open, it just, you’re wasting a lot of energy. So your heat pump in particular has to work so much harder if you have all of those leaks.
So therefore it’s not going to be nearly as efficient as it would be if you’re working in a properly weatherized home. Really the number one thing you can do if you’re focusing on energy waste is to put in heat pumps of some kind, right?
We’re wasting an incredible amount of energy today with our heating and our cooling systems. And that’s because we have a limit with traditional fossil systems of about a hundred percent, right? In other words, one piece of energy that you’re putting in is at best giving you one piece of useful heat energy, or useful cooling energy on the other end.
But with heat pumps, you can be up to three times more efficient than traditional fossil systems, because you’re not creating heat, you’re just moving it. So it’s almost like a little magic trick that we have. So you can get to, 300% or more efficiency depending on the technology and depending on where you are, which can dramatically cut your energy and in carbon footprint,
James Lawler: Could you explain that? Andy, I’m not sure I fully understand that. So how do you get beyond a hundred percent efficiency? I’m not sure I tracked.
Andy Frank: Yeah, we’re not breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
James Lawler: Okay. It sounded like that.
Andy Frank: This is why it’s, again, the closest thing we probably have to magic in the energy efficiency and electrification space. Basically, when you’re thinking about heating or cooling your home, again, you don’t care about the amount of energy that’s used.
You care about the amount of heating units or cooling units that are coming into your home. So there’s a lot of different metrics you can use. The one I love to cite is coefficient of performance. So in other words, if I put a unit of energy in how many units of heating or cooling am I getting out the other end, right?
James Lawler: And a unit of heating, would that just simply be the delta between sort of what the heat, what the heat is in the house before you turn the heater on and the heat after,
Andy Frank: Yeah. I mean, you can, you can translate into units, energy units you want. You can think of it all as BTUs at the end of the day. but yeah, it’s, that’s exactly conceptually. That’s exactly right. Um, and so when you’re combusting something inside your home, right.
You may have one. BTU of oil, for example, right. That you’re burning, at best, if you do a really great job of turning that into an efficien theat source, you’re getting another one unit of heat on the other end. Now in practice, it’s usually somewhere between, you know, 75 and 95% because there’s, there’s there’s line losses and other, other combustion losses, but that’s kind of the best you can do.
but with, again, this is the magic trick with heat pumps. You’re not actually using the energy that you’re, that that’s being generated for the heat pumps. So in this case, you know, electricity to actually produce the heat. What it’s doing is it’s leveraging refrigerants inside the heat pump to be able to attract heat from the outside.
So one thing that I think most people don’t appreciate is that there’s always a warm air outside, even when it’s very, very cold. So now with better technology, like cold climate heat pumps, you’re able to take the, the warm air molecules, even when it’s very, very cold out of the outside and attract them through refrigerants inside.
And you don’t need that much energy relative to traditional fossil systems, right. To attract that heat, to go inside.
James Lawler: That’s a very interesting, way of thinking about used to, to achieve that service of heat in the house. so beyond heat pump and weatherization, it sounds like those are the two big things that you focus on. By what percentage does would that typically reduce someone’s and I know it’s the concept of an average home is probably a little bit problematic because they’re so varied, but what kind of,you know, efficiency improvement would you expect to achieve with those to improvements?
Andy Frank: Yeah. So those two and I should have mentioned also heat pump water heaters, which again is a similar technology, but for your, hot water heating needs, that’s another, another big piece of the puzzle, but putting those three things together, um, order of magnitude is about 50%. So you know, it depends on the home could be, could be less than that could be more than that, depending on how well of a job you’re able to do with what those different elements.
But it’s a lot, right? We’re not talking, little percentages here and there. We’re talking about,dramatically reducing both your energy and your carbon footprint. When you, when you put these improvements.
James Lawler: So I’d love to transition to the business model at sealed to understand a little bit better, what the relationship is between sealed and your customer.
Andy Frank: Sure. So at Sealed, we really are doing everything from our customer soup to nuts from beginning to end.
So one of the big challenges in this space is really education, right? People know the problems that they have. They don’t necessarily] connect the solutions to those problems. So the first thing we’ll do is kind of educate you and help you really understand that those drafty rooms that you have are being caused by not by your windows necessarily.
But probably by the poor attic installation that you have in your upstairs. The next thing we’ll do is we’ll actually help gather the information that we need to scope a project. So unlike the traditional approach where the first step is an in-home energy audit, which can be long and expensive and be a hassle, we actually scope your entire project remotely based on the information that you give us, as well as third-party tools and technologies.
So we’ll actually take all that information that you have about your home. We’ll cross-reference that with property records, with Google maps with other tools, and we’ll be able to actually give you a proposal on what we think you should do to your home. and we’ll show you the full financing proposal, then we connect you with a local contractor, oftentimes many contractors.
And this is one of, I think the key challenges with this space is that to really decarbonize a home to weatherize it and electrified in particular, you have to work typically with more than one contractor based on the project that you’re doing. So we’re helping to find not just the best contractors, but also make sure that they’re coordinating and working together. And then after the project is complete, we’ll actually pay the contractors upfront for that work.And then what really makes us special are one of the things that makes us special is that. Payment back to us is completely performance-based. So you only pay sealed if you’re a sealed customer, based on the amount of energy waste that we’re actually able to cut and reduce.
And so we really want to create a, you know, creative partnership with our customers to be able to make this easy as well as affordable.
James: Beyond providing financing options designed to ease the burden of upfront costs for consumers, Andy talked about role of public policy.
Andy Frank: I think, one of the more under underappreciated policy levers that we have in the, in the clean energy and the climate fight to give you a sense of sense of scale internationally, globally energy efficiency, appliance standards have reduced the same amount of energy as all wind and solar has produced.
James Lawler: That statistic is nuts and it’s so powerful. And you think, I mean, we could probably do much, much better even.
Andy Frank: Absolutely. The craziest part to me is I think a lot of people have a mistaken notion that performance standards are antibusiness or anti-market when I would say the opposite is true, right. They send a really clear signal to the market about what needs to happen and it gets investment to, to occur.
It creates activity. It creates a really a north star for where the industry needs to go. The Biden administration right now is looking at a number of different appliance standards for heating and cooling and in a number of other areas.
But one thing that they’re not looking at is actually going beyond a hundred percent, right. So they have essential. Standards for, um, book furnaces and boilers, um, that at best will get you to a hundred percent again, they probably would never go
James Lawler: They probably, they probably don’t know that they could go beyond a hundred percent. They need to listen to this podcast.
Andy Frank: exactly, exactly. All you,performance standards, nerds out there. Um, listen to climate now. But they’re viewing it as two separate things. They’re also looking to regulate our performance standards over heat pumps that they should be ex efficient, but there’s this big mismatch there, because one thing is in one sense, exactly the same as the other, in terms of, they both do heating and cooling, but they’re not being put in the same bucket.
What we think would make the most sense from a policy prescription is to do similar to what the transportation industry did with, cafe standards. So with cafe standards, you have a fleet wide average that you need to hit. And if you don’t hit that and you have to buy credits from somebody else.
So the Biden administration could do a similar thing for, uh, for the HVAC, for the heating and cooling industry. And that would also mean it’s a lot easier for the existing manufacturers and OEMs to transition from a world today where most of what’s sold is in the heating side, at least is, is fossil heat to one in which almost all of it is sold in electrification.
And this is happening fast, right? If you look at Europe, obviously driven by. The tragedy that’s happening in the war in Ukraine. You’re having countries now that are talking about completely changing their, heating mix from natural gas to heat pumps in the span of a couple of years, right?
In terms of replacement of existing appliances. So I think this is all happening very fast in the market as a whole, and really for the U S to retain our competitiveness and to make sure that as minute as much of that innovation happens here in the U S as opposed to other parts of the world, we really need to push the market through performance standards.
James Lawler: Andy, thank you so much for your time today. It was really, um, a lot of fun to learn about sealed your journey and energy efficiency in the residential market. So thank you again for joining us on Climate Now.
Andy Frank: Thanks, James.
James Lawler: Sealed is providing an impressive service, helping people reduce emissions one house and building at a time. Our next guests come from a company taking data-centric approach. Logical Buildings uses smart building software to collect and provide data to some of the nation’s largest multi-family and commercial real estate managers. Those data give property managers and owners the ability to make informed choices that help to reduce energy use. (They also have an app designed for consumers that we’ll get into later). We start with CEO, Jeff Hendler, who lays out the history and the process of getting electricity to and from the grid to the consumer, and why this industry has been so slow to innovate, even as new technologies develop that could provide cleaner, cheaper energy to consumers and actually improve grid resiliency.
Jeff Hendler: Let’s talk about electricity, how, how was it created? It’s really interesting. The conventional way is taking copper wire, putting it on around a magnet and spinning it. Right. So how do you spin the magnet?
Right. I mean, I could be a gerbil. Right. And get on my bike and go around and spin it. I could get a windmill and that could spin it. I could get solar energy that through thermal chemical type of reaction can create its own power and not have to spin the magnet. That’s another way that. Get around that problem.
Or I could use like burn things, burn coal. I could use nuclear rods and that will heat up a water to create steam, the move, the turbine. now what was most fascinating electricity is that you can’t store it in a massive way. Coal oil, natural gas. You could, you could touch it.
You could put it somewhere, you know, you can take it out when you need it. Electricity is a function of other items, whether it’s a function of the sun or the wind, or it’s a function of water moving, or it’s a function of fossil fuels it in itself. Is is more abstract:, you can’t see it, you can’t touch it, you don’t want to touch it.
Right. But you always need it. We’re completely relying on it. And we take it for granted. That in its own right creates a lot of practical issues, how do I deal with a commodity that everybody needs. And be able to provide a mechanism of the allocating that resource,in a logical fashion, in an economical fashion, in an equitable fashion, in a environmental fashion.
The first steps towards that is calibration being able to measure what is. So all utilities at first had analog meters that just provided monthly reads.
There was no calibration of how much you were utilizing that electricity, you know, now to the hour down to the minute. But what the fact is, in the wholesale market of utilities and power producers, there are pricing mechanisms actually down to five. That are providing,clearing prices of what power plant should be dispatched at a given time to create a functioning grid.
James Lawler: Can you go a little deeper into that? Cause we’ve had a couple of different people in different conversations, try to paint this picture of how power is purchased and dispatched, you know, and then ultimately arrives at the consumers, you know, lightswitch. Would you mind just sort of painting that picture before?
Jeff Hendler: Yeah.
So, you know,the natural way the market evolved was on a wholesale side, because originally since the time of Edison, it was completely vertical monopoly. It was generation, transmission, distribution, essential plant with wires, delivering it to them. And, as the market realized that that wasn’t an efficient market, it didn’t provide any [00:03:00] pricing signals, a lot of waste of resources, a lot of duplication, it didn’t incentivize innovation.
So for the utility, the first piece that got out of was a generation piece, because I was really truly a commodity that if you would provide a market mechanism and a market design of transparency of information That was the beginning of what they call the ISO market, the independent system operator, has regulation on the, of the FERC, which is the federal energy regulatory commission, they set the rules. So just like a federal tariff, how those operate of what gets dispatched, how energy is priced capacity as another piece of that component.
And basically, capacity is basically a payment to generation company. To be there in case needed, So I like to give an example of, a table at a restaurant can sit 10 people, right. And there might be one time of during the year that you only need 10 people.. Well, you still have to pay, that capacity of having a table of 10 people, even though it might be used once out of the entire year.
And that’s a conundrum of the electric industry, but that’s a cost. And that has to, if someone has to pay for it to make, to make the system work,and that’s called capacity,That’s also has a transparent market mechanism and a wholesale market. And then the every hour what’s actually, which plans dispatch that determines the price of a kilowatt hour for that, for that out of kill us for that hour.
And depending, you know, as demand rises and more generation has to be created,the less economical machines come online. So first it starts with the nuke and hydro the clean stuff that’s cheap. And then you get to the more costly or fossil fuel.
you don’t have that calibration and transparency to the end user to have, they should have those, the same market pricing signals, especially today.
I mean, how do you manage your, your energy? Right. Most people, if I say, do you manage your energy from your meter? No hands really go up. Do you manage your energy from your thermostat? Yeah. Most people could say, yeah.
That’s where their hands go. And how do they manage their energy? I’m too hot or I’m too cold, right? Zero, zero information about the market. How right now, do you know how much electricity costs or do you know how, how carbon intense the power is that it might be, it might be cheap, but maybe it’s high. It might be carbon intense.
So if you had that information though, right? Then wouldn’t you be more empowered to make decisions that are a better for your bottom line because, oh, it’s really expensive now. I don’t wanna wait to run the laundry or the dishwasher, or, I’m not going to charge my electric vehicle right now.
If I have electric heat in the house, right. Well maybe, and I have solar. It would be nice if I had a battery, which now is available for the home or the, you know, an apartment sized type of unit that can contain some load. So I could, I could draw off that to smooth out my profile, so to speak.
So when there’s high demand times or the price is higher, I won’t be exposed to that. I have no sense today if I don’t have those devices, I’m a smart meter or I don’t have smart load control devices. I don’t have any sense of what my exposure to the market is or what I can do about it.
They don’t see, you know, what their usage is at those times to, even for themselves to learn. Oh, like, you know, when I’m running different appliances during the day and, or I’m cooking things. How much energy really is that right. And what is the cost associated with that?
And also what’s the emissions, carbon emissions associated with that. And that’s what we, we stepped in a couple of years ago to bring that transparency,
James Lawler: Thank you, Jeff, for laying, laying the landscape out. So I’d love to now transition to logical buildings and the business model that you guys have set up.
Jeff Hendler: sure. I mean, I’ll start on the high level. You know, we started with a B2B product of servicing. We actually started servicing a property asset class multi-family buildings. It turned out multi-family buildings are the biggest consumers of electricity and energy now. And carbon the biggest carbon emitters in metropolitan regions
Jeff Hendler: We first focus on the common areas of those buildings, the elevators, the hallways, the rooftop units, AC units, the backup generator. Now taking all this market information of what’s happening behind the scenes, on the ISO those pricing signals, making that relevant to the building operators of those buildings, because that was like the first lowest hanging fruit type of implementation and demonstration that if an end user does this being in the building manager of a massive building, say 300 units.
If he had that information and he’s able to react to it by pre-cooling or preheating, or testing his generator at times when the grid could benefit from that, Um, and show that there’s a cost reduction show. There’s an emissions reduction shows that they could actually provide a service to the grid through demand, response, and earn payments.
Then we prove the theory of our case. And that is if it can empower someone.
time of use energy information and protocol guidance of what to do when then we can make an impact.
James Lawler: But is the ISO data public, like how do you have access to those signals and then be how would you be able to circumvent. The utility, because it doesn’t the utility sit between the ISO and that building owner.
Jeff Hendler: So the good news is, is that that information is public. We happened to be a member of the ISO that helps. We understand what we need to.
You know where to look and what the rules are and what what’s impactful. We’re alsoa federal utility, meaning that we have registration as a power marketer. So it means that we can transact on the wholesale energy, ancillary and capacity markets. And those were important data points that we wanted to know.
Jeff Hendler: If you, as an end user can prove that you don’t need that many KW two to manage your home. Like, remember I mentioned 10 seats at the table as capacity. What if you only need three seats at the table? And you can prove that and how would you prove that? Well, I had a smart meter. I could prove that, you know, from the utility, because they would measure and verify that, Well then I should only pay for three seats…that’s all I need. And I, and I have the capability to prove that. So we did that for buildings. In case of New York city with con ed, that they want to rate case that they were now providing smart meters. That we elected to put into a building for just the common area, one meter that they’re going to have to put smart meters for every single resident and every single retail tenant on the street.
Starbucks, the Dwayne Reed, Walgreens, all these different, you know, street level type of providers you see everywhere, will now have the same type of calibration, of their energy utilization question is can they see. Question is, can they react to it?
Are they providing some type of program?
James Lawler: Because the data, that data from those smart meters is, is for the benefit of the utility more than it is for the end user. In, in that current concept.
Jeff Hendler: Well, that’s, that’s what we’re trying to bring education at. It’s th benefit of everybody. You know, you know it, you know, it, it, it started out again from Thomas Edison. It really is true. It’s, it’s one of the last industries to get on board with a new era of digitization, decentralization. You need those too if you want to really do de-carbonization.
James: So what does all this look like for the user? Zohra Roy, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Logical Buildings joins to lay it out.
Zohra Roy: So for the B2B side, which Jeff touched a lot about with our multi-family clients are commercial clients, industrial clients. We have a product called smart kid AI, which essentially is a virtual power plant software and solutions program.
And this is an integrated technology that is helping. Building owners and operators, combat climate change also empowering their residential and commercial tenants to earn money, enhance building health and reduce their carbon footprint while also achieving ESG goals. So to go back to the concept of smart meters, these AMI.
Meters are unlocking trillions of data points that can be accessed through our products and allow building owners and operators to make decisions based on the insights that are provided in our software tools. We also have a technology team that does installs and can help sort of create a smart building.
holistic view of your portfolio and make decisions to help, you know, reduce your energy costs through energy efficiency measures, and then what you call a demand response aggregators. So we work with utility utilities like con Edison, where during times when the grid is stressed or peak demand we can work with our clients to reduce their electricity usage during these times, and then earn revenue through the utility.
James Lawler: So I want to see if I understood correctly. Let’s say that I’m a building owner. I can come to logical buildings and to begin your technology team could install smart meters. And you could also sell me your technology so that your software, a subscription to your software, which would allow me to visualize all of the data that’s streaming off the smart meter to better understand my energy use patterns and the costs that are associated with those use patterns so that I could then maybe adopt more cost effective use patterns going forward.
Zohra Roy: Yeah. So one correction is that the utilities will install the smart meters and. We’ll come in and plug into that data.
James Lawler: Oh, I see.
Zohra Roy: Yeah.
Jeff Hendler: Yeah.
so yeah, I mean, logical buildings is an integrator. We work with existing utility. We work with existing connectivity infrastructure. So if you’re, you know, Verizon, Comcast, you know, whoever you are out there…we’ll work with you on that because conductivity is a prerequisite to success.
James Lawler: So Zohra, what is grid rewards and how does that connect to everything we’ve just talked about?
Zohra Roy: Sure. Yeah. So greater rewards is a B2C product that we launched. It’’s still fairly new. It was launched in spring of 2021, and it’s really the first personalized energy, carbon intelligent intelligence and revenue generating software that can be accessed by small energy users. So everything that we’ve been talking about so far has been, you know, larger commercial buildings, multifamily, larger energy use users.
And so what grit awards does is it helps the small energy users, leverage the same sort of data insights through these secure integrations that logical buildings has worked with Essentially what grid rewards does is it helps empower us new Yorkers and now folks in California as well, do their part to help reduce, you know, dirty power plants from coming online and also save some cash.
So how does that work? Folks can download the application and go through a very simple, uh, set up process and then they’ll have access to hourly level down to 15 minute intervals information on how much energy. You’re using in your home, your apartment, and what that cost is, and how carbon intense that is.
And then similar to the demand response opportunities that our larger clients have access to, grid, wards users have the ability to also take part in these peak demand events. So typically in the summertime, um, you know, con Edison will call a few demand response events when the greatest is stressed and they’ll ask energy users to lower their consumption rather than turn off more power plants to meet the demand. And so this is what we call a virtual power plant. So through logical buildings, we’re able to activate all of our energy users, whether they be large or small, to shift their usage. And that’s the movement that we’re calling shift, the power where thousands and thousands of people and buildings are joining together to stop some of the dirtiest power plants from running.
James Lawler: What is the total emissions reduction potential of your technology?
Jeff Hendler: Well, you know, emissions really is a construct as a metric based on usage. You know, all emission calculations are starting with like, well, how much energy are you reducing? Which is the source of the emissions. We’ve seen, you know, 20% reductions of energy usage.
Just like out of the gate, you know, a 20% reduction in emissions, that’s pretty impactful now, you know, going into the summertime, actually the percentage is higher because there’s a lot more usage.
So we, and we’ve seen apartments that reduce 50% of their emissions. And because they’re just more higher carbon content in the summertime because of the generation creating that. we see incredibly significant and we already have the data to back it up.
James Lawler: Thank you Jeff and Zohra for joining us and teaching us about what you’re doing at Logical Buildings. And thanks again to Andy Frank for joining us to talk about how Sealed is retrofitting homes to be more energy efficient. That’s it for today’s podcast. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or colleague. If you have a comment for us, email us at contact@climatenow.com or leave us a review. Connect with us on social media… however you’d like to get in touch, we’d be happy to hear from you. Thanks for listening. We hope you’ll join us for our next conversation.
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