Five barriers to energy efficiency savings: What we can learn from Google and GE

Google and General Electric know a bit about making money and creating shareholder value. It's no surprise, then, that they're sages when it comes to energy efficiency. A panel discussion at a recent Fortune Brainstorm Green session -- which included Google’s Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl and Gretchen Hancock, project manager for corporate environmental programs at GE -- germinated a list of five key roadblocks to energy efficiency. First, a panel primer from the Environmental Defense Fund's Innovation Exchange:

Here’s a business conundrum for you: energy efficiency saves serious money, cuts carbon pollution, requires low tech solutions, and is a known quotient, having been around since the 1970s. So why are so many companies still not taking the necessary steps to identify and eliminate these inefficiencies?

“What we learned in Econ 101 doesn’t hold true when it comes to energy efficiency – the notion of perfect markets, where information flows freely and people are maximizing their value,” notes Environmental Defense Fund’s Gwen Ruta. “Instead, it’s as if companies across the globe are walking around with a hole in their pocket with coins dribbling out nonstop.”

How is it that smart companies who are vigilant about monitoring the bottom line, stock price, customer satisfaction and much more let this wasteful “dribbling” occur? This question launched a robust discussion at a Fortune Brainstorm Green session last week titled “A Trillion Dollar Opportunity: The Hunt for Energy Efficiency.”

We posit often about how companies and property owners leave money on the table; dribbling coins (nonstop) from their pockets is a new one. What are the main barriers to energy efficiency and how can companies try to overcome them? According to Innovation Exchange's recap:

Barrier #1: Information overload and lack of focus. There’s a ton of information out there about energy efficiency – and what companies should do to reap the savings – but it’s diffuse and challenging to wade through. Companies need help focusing in on the right tools and content and prioritizing where and how to begin. GE conducts through regular energy “treasure hunts” inside a given company where selected employees come together for a jam-packed three-day working session to identify energy efficiency savings at a chosen manufacturing site. The results are impressive – each treasure hunt typically identifies opportunities to reduce energy spent by 20% – and proves that when people have the information, data and focused time to spend on this challenge, huge savings can be found.

Barrier #2: Structural limitations. This is a big one. Companies of all sizes suffer from a siloed approach to business, where business units and operational departments are managed by separate budgets, performance timelines, product cycles and more. Finding energy efficiency savings requires employees throughout the company to share information and make trade offs in order to achieve strong results. For example, there may be an increase in cost to the R&D budget around energy efficiency efforts, but balanced by a result in savings that will show up in the facilities management budget. Most likely, these two divisions communicate rarely and have little in common – including different bosses who may not communicate well among themselves, either. Why would one take on a cost for the other to reap the savings? Google takes a “total cost approach” that is geared to precisely avoid this problem. And GE’s treasure hunts bring cross-functional teams together over the three-day activity which by definition helps break down silos. According to Gretchen Hancock, the more people from different departments are involved, the better the results of these treasure hunts are.

Barrier #3: The solutions are small and diffuse, not few and mighty. There is no single “gee whiz” step that companies can take to ensure they are reaping all the benefits of energy efficiency for their organizations. It takes time for companies to unearth where and how they can save both cash and carbon through energy efficiency. Some employees may be attracted by bigger, more appealing sustainability projects or cost savings efforts that are being considered or launched by their company. To avoid this problem, the hunt for energy efficiency savings should be institutionalized throughout companies as a continuous process, not one-off events. Energy efficiency savings should be one of the metrics that business units are evaluated on, and therefore, regularly measured and reported on.

Barrier #4: Cultural resistance within companies. As Gretchen Hancock noted, some companies hear the phrase energy efficiency and think, “Didn’t we tackle this problem in the 1970s?” In companies where innovation and excellence is the expectation and the norm, executives may believe that the “low hanging fruit” of energy efficiency is either too low-tech to consider or has been dealt with decades ago. But the fact is that energy efficiencies exist where even super bright executives might not expect to find them. Aging equipment can cause inefficiencies, new technology enables new savings and employees need to be trained and retrained on efficiency issues and practices.

Barrier #5: Those super-short ROI expectations. We all know how Wall Street expects speedy ROI for corporations across the board. As a result, public companies have a strong disincentive to invest in processes, products or technologies where recouping the costs may take anywhere from 1 to 5 years. This short-term thinking leads to short-term strategies, and serious money being left on the table.