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Columnists: Agneta Persson, WSP Sweden
Published on: 6 Apr 2016
Seeing is believing – that’s why we need to improve our visualisation skills!
Despite what many of us in the energy-efficiency community seem to believe, only a few people have a personal relationship to a kWh (or whichever unit you’d like to express energy demand in). For that reason we need to develop methods to convert energy into terms people can visualise and understand.
One of my childhood friends had problems getting his head around the concept of money. Instead he used to convert everything into an ice cream currency. If something cost 8 SEK it was equal to 8 ice creams (this was a long time ago…). And he knew that was a lot because it would take a long time before he had had 8 ice creams.
This example has nothing to do with energy efficiency. But we in the energy-efficiency community can learn an important lesson from this anyway, since lacking the ability to visualize the impact and importance of energy efficiency measures is one of the main reasons why many cost-efficient measures are still not carried out. Improved visualisation can help resolve a large part of the energy-efficiency gap, and we simply have to improve our skills in using both existing and new visualisation technologies.
Another of my friends is something of a Swedish pioneer in the visualisation field. He’s the Property Department Manager in a medium sized Swedish municipality. For a long time he was frustrated that the politicians and other decision makers in his municipality didn’t understand what opportunities they missed when they turned down his requests for funding cost-efficient energy-efficiency measures. They simply didn’t see what he saw. Then he started to keep track of the cumulated impact of the measures he managed to get funding for, and included graphs showing this in his new requests for funding . Fairly soon he started to win most of the arguments on which energy-efficiency measures to implement. Because now the decision makers could also see the impact of the measures.
IEA’s multiple benefits model is a giant leap forward when it comes to winning arguments on energy efficiency. But the visualisation part still needs to be developed. Together with some of my colleagues at WSP I had the opportunity to analyse if and how this IEA model could be used in a Swedish context. We carried out the analysis on behalf of the Swedish Energy Agency, and we used the multiple benefits model to analyse eight different energy-efficiency projects that had been carried out partly financed by the Energy Agency. The projects were truly diverse, from better bicycle lanes in Moheda, to in-deep renovation of post war residential buildings in Eskilstuna, and a model for industrial energy efficiency in SMEs in Tranås.
Our project team discussed how to capture all the benefits and how to present the results. We also had a lot of discussions on the different “levels” of the 15 benefits in IEA’s model. Early in the project we decided to make an attempt to visualise qualitative assessments of the benefits divided into the four categories - Individual, Local, National and Global, and to use WSP’s tool Orbis to do this. We then created a colouring code where green means improvement, yellow unchanged , red worse, and finally grey for not applicable. After that we developed an interview guide with questions related to all the 15 benefits in IEA’s model, and paid a visit to each of the eight project managers on our list.
All of the interviewed project managers were very satisfied with the results of their projects. But much to our surprise (and I guess to theirs too) they hadn’t reflected much on project benefits in addition to saving energy and money. Through the interviews we discovered that the eight projects had four to twelve benefits in addition to saving money and kWh, and that the way different actors benefitted from the projects varied significantly.
In Moheda, for instance, the new bicycle lanes lead to increased asset value of the residential buildings due to increased safety and reduced heavy traffic. The Lagersberg retrofitting project led to improved health and well-being and reduced unemployment. And in addition to IEA’s 15 identified benefits we identified some other values that can be achieved thanks to energy-efficiency, such as improved access to democracy through travel-free meetings in the Let’s meet without travelling in Dalecarlia County project.
The project managers were even prouder of their projects when we left than they were before we had arrived. And they became prouder still when we presented them with the Orbis visualisation chart of their respective projects. They had never before seen all the benefits of their own projects so clearly. Even energy-efficiency experts are not always aware of all impacts of their actions, which is my third example of the importance of visualising.
Our conclusions from the assignment are that the IEA Multiple Benefits model can transform projects’ additional values from invisible to visible, and that a visualisation module could provide an overview of the otherwise complex and diverse additional benefits of energy efficiency measures. However, the visualisation application needs further development in order to achieve comparable results between different projects and different assessors. In the meantime, let’s put our heads together to both improve and stimulate the use of new and old visualization technologies. Because seeing is believing!
