Calling all 2030 District Challengers: The Answer Is Strategic Imbalance

Let me guess.... you stay awake at night worried about how will you reach your 2030 Challenge goals, when you have no way to manage the strategic imbalance of your energy use across your building stock?

Face it, we are immediately losing the battle if our energy conservation tactics are simply offsetting our organic growth in energy demand. The fact is, to meet 2030 Challenge, we must pursue strategic imbalance--- we must reduce consumption faster than we grow demand. So, what’s an executive team to do when organic growth only makes meeting the 2030 Challenge that much more difficult?

Well the good news is that you don’t have to take radical and financially infeasible steps to meet your 2030 accountabilities. You just need technology and a plan.

Definition: Strategic Imbalance is a condition where success is dependent on increasing the dominance of one side of an equation that is most typically expected to remain in balance.

The basis behind the 2030 Challenge is to get the country’s largest owners of buildings properly incentivized to dramatically reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The 2030 Challenge is noble, but most owners spend all their time worried about what will happen if they cannot prove the reduction in energy use?  Until now, it’s been unclear how an owner will ever be confident that the pace of reducing energy consumption will be faster than the pace of organically increasing demand.  (See chart at top).

There are 4 technology-enabled steps that make 2030 Challenge achievable and affordable. Whether you are considering the challenges of a new building or existing buildings, the first step is always the same:  use a whole-building design performance model.  The second step is to install smart building infrastructure in existing buildings or design smart building infrastructure into new buildings. The third step is to optimize the whole building design performance model into an operational performance model.  The fourth step is to take the performance targets from the operational model and visually compare actual performance using an integrated sustainable dashboard.

Investing in the technologies mentioned above usually shows a 1-2-year simple payback. By creating the tools to ensure strategic imbalance (energy consumption drops faster than organic demand grows), 2030 challengers can set performance standards for new buildings and target highest return opportunities in existing buildings.  Attacking 2030 strategically, provides you the evidence required to defend past, present and future performance.  It’s time we took the 2030 Challenge from the world of aspirational intent and convert it to the world of evidence-based performance using technology-enabled solutions.

Contact AUROS Group for more information on how to activate a technology solution for 2030 Challenge.