Here’s a quick run-down of several energy-efficient projects cited in the article.

Projects at Fairmont Waterfront hotel include a heat-recovery system to preheat incoming city water using heat captured from the hotel’s water system. It saves an estimated 305,380 kilowatt-hours (1,100 GJ) per year and $12,000 per year. Estimated payback is in two years.

In a separate article, Fairmont set a corporate commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 20 percent from its 2006 levels by 2013.

One caveat: the survey was of only 48 people who are in charge of sustainability for their companies. I think that sample size is too small. And, given these folks’ role in the organization, I am afraid their viewpoint is a bit slanted so to speak. But there are lessons to be learned.

My takeaways included:

+ “The green workforce is the general workforce.” – they believed that sustainability would be integrated into existing roles and job descriptions as a prerequisite for employability: Jobs in the future, respondents thought, will require people to bring a certain basic level of familiarity with sustainability issues and competence in skills related to sustainability to the table.

Interesting. I’ve never heard it put quite that way, but I agree with the premise wholeheartedly.

+ “Sustainable products can be competitive – with the right marketplace approach.”

Thumbs up from me.

+ “Sustainability’s bottom-line results might be better if you broaden your view of ROI.” – But to improve its performance, a company needs to do more than reap an immediate financial ROI on its sustainability initiatives. It also needs to consider managing risk, building its brand and reputation, complying with regulatory requirements, and investing in developing future products and services that will be viable in a world where sustainability plays a greater role in driving buying decisions.

There are definitely qualitative benefits that should be considered that are difficult to incllude in your CFO’s spreadsheet.

+ Primary owner of sustainability efforts? COO was 6%, Head of Environmental Health and Safety 6%, Board of Directors 4%, CFO 2%, other = 91%.

Two things: 1) It’s odd that Deloitte did not list Chief Sustainability Officer as one of the options (they were part of the others), and 2) quite obviously the multiple people selected as an owner leads to a lack of accountability, which is not good for results.

+ There is a clear lack of understanding between these sustainability owners and the ARRA funds that are available to them.

That’s bad news for policy makers and even worse news for those heading up these sustainability efforts. I would have guessed the sustainability folks would have been more aggressive in understanding the grants, tax credits, tax deductions, and rebates that are available to them and their projects.

+ Energy efficiency was the across-the-board winner as the most important environmental issue to the business.

EE rated 9 on a scale from 1 to 10 in importance and was the leader in every business sector. Wow, that’s impressive and surprising at the same time. Efficiency does not get near the publicity as other answers like alternative energy and transportation. Someone has been listening and reading this blog.

David Roth of gbNYC (Green Building in NYC) nails it with “What happened at 375 Hudson is a smashing success, but it’s also really nothing more than a pretty down-the-middle retrofit done well. It’s tough to imagine a better advertisement for green commercial retrofits than that.”

Roth continues, “This is common-sense stuff, not a revolutionary leap forward. It’s low-flow fixtures and improving fixtures, not slapping on some solar panels and hoisting a wind turbine. It is, in short, a basic green retrofit — one that happens to grade very highly in terms of LEED points and the sort of building performance metrics Energy Star measures, but not one that would be beyond the reach of most Manhattan office buildings. Which, in a way, is what makes it most extraordinary.”

Now you see why I said I love this story.

From the official press release, here are the main items which earned the LEED GOLD:

+ reduced electricity consumption by nearly 110,000 kWh per year by making changes to the HVAC and mechanical systems and installing variable frequency drives on the cooling tower fans;
+ reduced steam consumption by improving heat exchangers and making other HVAC improvements that reduced heating demand;
+ reduced annual water consumption by 1 million gallons by replacing original restroom fixtures with low flow aerators and new water closets;
+ adopted an expanded recycling program that encompassed not only office paper and waste, but batteries, electronic waste and construction debris;
+ implemented a building-wide Green Cleaning policy focusing on improving air quality and ensuring the purchase of sustainable cleaning and janitorial paper supplies.

That’s as basic as it gets…Down the middle of the fairway stuff…things that every building should do, whether they want a LEED plaque or not.

Golf clap for Tishman Speyer and main tenants Saatchi & Saatchi, Penguin Group, and Turner Construction.

Those four are San Antonio, Austin, Houston and El Paso. The CenTex cities of Austin and San Antonio were widely regarded as the most likely candidates as Austin already is the most progressive with its green building codes and much of the push to pass the state law came out of San Antonio.

Houston, the “Oil Capital of the World”, has a recently appointed Director of Sustainability, Laura Spanjian, and she told the Texas Tribune that her city was “not going to wait” for the PACE problems to get solved. “We have set aside funds to help commercial property owners with the upfront costs of energy efficiency improvements,” she said in an e-mail. “We’re going to find another model in the short-term while the issues with PACE are being worked out.”

Kudos to Ms. Spanjian on her aggressive approach.

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If you have missed some of the prior discussion on PACE on this blog, I recommend the following reading:

The Case for and the Concerns of PACE Financing

What is PACE Financing?

PACE 101 video

Google initially announced its intentions with PowerMeter in early 2009.

Cisco has also recently announced its intentions to be in the Home Energy Management space.

Below is a picture of the Cisco product.

The installations were to be performed by a company call SunRun. On Tuesday, June 29th, SunRun announced it closed a Series C round of funding for $55 million led by Sequoia Capital and joined by existing investors Accel Partners and Foundation Capital.

For those of you not wise to the VC world, Sequoia is the biggest and baddest Silicon Valley VC that there is. You may have heard of prior early stage investments like Google, YouTube, Apple, Yahoo!, and Cisco, among others.

Original investor, Accel Partners, is bigtime too with investments in Facebook, Veritas, and comscore.

Similarly, a recent report from Matter Network states that Goldman Sachs has begun covering the solar sector, including First Solar and SunPower.

We’ve talked quite a bit on this blog about green investment, so if you’d like read more here.

Underlying image CC licensed by Flickr user supafly.

Green Squared admission… I am a Top Chef fan.

So, I was particularly intrigued that Top Chef Master Rick Bayless had two of the highest certifications with Frontera Grill and Topolobampo.

I love the notion that they are trying to aggregate data on the energy savings that are being retrofitted.

More interesting to me is the discussion further into the article that touches on what might be Deutsche Bank’s ultimate motivation.

Mr. Hattem, who said Deutsche Bank would have no proprietary stake in the data, hopes that lenders will not only finance more retrofits as a result of the project, but also use the information to create a new securitizations market.

“The idea here is that if underwriters can determine a predictable savings from retrofits,” he said, “then they can create a financial instrument backed by these savings to sell on the open market.”

Now this type of thinking will jump start the retrofit business as capital for the improvement projects has always been the biggest impediment.

I also found this quote from a project manager at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and a member of the advisory committee spot on:

“There is an almost universal lack of understanding of building energy usage,” said Luke Falk.

I agree wholeheartedly, Luke. More building owners and managers need to wrap their heads around that usage and controlling the costs surrounding it.

The fund, managed by a P.G.&E. subsidiary, Pacific Energy Capital II, is the largest single solar leasing pool to date, according to the company, and marks the growing interest of utilities in the renewable energy financing business.

The $100 million in financing is expected to fund solar installations for 3,500 homes in Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

I’m curious when funds like this will be created for Energy Efficiency projects. A solar kilowatt is just as effective as saving a carbon based kilowatt, so when will the smart money start to catch on?

Not surprisingly for us at Green Squared, energy efficiency, according to speakers at the conference, remains the most salient aspect of the industry’s move to sustainability, and is the one benefit that’s most easily recognized by consumers.

And this is the first I’ve heard of energy efficient mortgages, but I LOVE THE IDEA.

The energy efficient mortgage treats savings on energy as an addition to the borrower’s income. While these loans exist mostly in theory, “you need to start demanding these,” he said.

While no one to date has systematically estimated the actual value green adds to a home, Porter (along with at least one other speaker at the conference) referenced early research calculating that every $1 in annual energy savings brings roughly $20 in additional value. Finding enough data to reach such a conclusion is one problem, and further complicating things is that fact that the bottom line on how much energy is saved ultimately depends on the behavior of the occupants of the home.