Sadly, Energy Efficiency Products Lack Sex Appeal

A friend of mine is disappointed in the level of demand he’s receiving for the energy efficiency products he represents to commercial customers: heat-exchangers, solar thermal heating, etc. He writes:

I hit up energy efficiency people in the hotel/motel industry all the time. Nothing. Just astonishing. Places like that could save a fortune. My incoming water temp is less than 50 degrees. Since I replaced my cast iron drain system with PVC I am delivering hotter water to the exchanger and my outgoing temp has improved from about 70 to over 80 degrees. Which would you rather heat? I just don’t get it. You would think greed alone would have this thing selling like hotcakes.

I don’t know what to tell you; I’m also saddened by the lack of interest in all this stuff.

Don’t care about ruining the environment? That’s insensitive. Don’t care about saving a ton of money you’re hemorrhaging for no reason at all? That’s insane.

And all these efficiency solutions are the “low-hanging fruit.” That doesn’t bode well for getting the apples from the top of the tree.

The issue, I believe, is sex appeal. These products sit there, passively doing their thing, often totally out of view. People are impressed with lots of noise, pounding pistons, and 700-foot-tall dams. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my colleague John Perlin, the world’s foremost historian on solar energy, who’s a “scholar in residence” at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He was showing UCSB’s good-sized solar PV array to someone who had come for a tour, and was asked, “Can you show me the moving parts?” When he explained that there aren’t any, he was met with a sigh and a clear expression of disappointment.

This is funny, in a way. But it would be funnier if it weren’t so tragic.