It’s official. The United States WILL save $1.2 trillion in savings. It was first assumed by 2020 by “investing in energy efficient buildings”. That’s according to a new study from McKinsey & Co. report. This new report called, “Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy”. It reports that 900,000 new jobs could be created and 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gas could be reduced annually.
The catch before was about $50 billion a year needs to be green buildings over the next ten years (report 9 years ago)
However, the report adds that if we actually do what they recommend! Can you say we are talking about a 23 percent drop in energy consumption!
The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) reports that the USGBC estimates that this reduction is equal to the entire U.S. fleet of passenger cars and light trucks. More importantly that’s equal more than 200 million vehicles. Bye. Most noteworthy off the road.
Now Fast Forward to 2017 and GreenBiz reporting Citibank seeing the Green!!
Nearly a decade ago, in 2009, McKinsey & Company’s Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy report cited a $1.2 trillion energy-savings opportunity in the United States alone. This was a financing opportunity of about $520 billion to retrofit building systems such as lighting, HVAC and windows across millions of properties.
This order of size requires capital-market and institutional investor participation. But to date, appropriate structures and enough aggregation have been lacking. Solutions to deploy energy efficiency at scale are urgently needed to discuss climate change.
Fast-forward to 2017. According to Navigant Research’s report “Energy as a Service,” the annual global market for energy (or efficiency) as a service expecting NOW to reach $221.1 billion by 2026. But are the financing options finally in place to support a turnkey solution that can be implemented across a broad range of business sectors?
A recent transaction breakthrough provides some of the essential building blocks. We need a programmatic, multi-site, multi-state Efficiency Services Agreement (ESA) for a Fortune 100 company.
In conclusion, Energy Efficiency is a flexible, market-proven solution. In addition, it is an example that turns kilowatts into “negawatts”. All by financing 100 percent of the cost of efficiency upgrades and monetizing the energy savings. Finally, a negawatt is a unit of saved energy.
