Heat People Not Buildings: Leigh Christie at TEDxYouth@BeaconStreet

More than 25% of our energy use in cold climates is used to heat buildings. Leigh Christie is working on solving that problem by heating people directly in an efficient and sustainable way. His radical solution is to use a "spotlight of heat" which has been enabled recently by his research at the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT as well as low-cost and accurate motion tracking systems.

My name is Lee Christie,
I am from MIT.

I am here today, the name of my talk
is Heating buildings is stupid.

(Laughter)

You might ask,

OK, why would I say something like that?

That's seems a bit outlandish.

But I am hoping by the end of my talk,
you'll agree with me.

The idea here was,

OK, what can we do
to tackle energy issues?

And this huge problem I came across

was that we actually use
a tremendous amount of heating.

In fact, we use 14,000 terawatt hours
of heat energy per year,

to heat buildings.

That's equivalent
to 27 billion lights bulbs

on all the time year round.

It's roughly 10 to 14 %
of the world's total energy use.

It's staggering numbers.

This ends up about being
3.5 billion tonnes of CO²,

"Greenhouse gases".

Or another way of looking at it,

in dollars, this is 272 billion dollars
of energy per year.

This is just mind-bogglingly
large numbers.

And it doesn't have to be done this way,
it's actually not necessary.

This is sort of a scope, of how big?
I'd like to call, the opportunity is.

The scope is this big, on the left is
the status quo 14.4 petawatt hours

or 14,400 terawatt hours of heat energy.

And there on the right is,
what could be accomplished,

with this radical solution
that I am here to propose today.

So,not only is
heating buildings really wasteful,

it's actually kind of frustrating as well.

Have you ever, for example,
fought over the thermostat before?

I remember doing this as a kid,

like I'd turn it up for a little bit,

and then my dad would turn it back down,

I'd turn it up and then
I'd get smacked or something.

(Laughter)

And this is crazy too.

How many of you have used these before?

Right? Quite a few, right?

They have them in hotels,
they have them in restaurants,

and they waste so much energy.
it's unbelievable!

Literally most of the energy
go straight up

and very little of it actually
radiates down to you.

And how about this?

An airport at 5 a.m.,
that entire airport is heated!

And there's no one even in it!

It's unbelievable.

So let's talk a little bit
about the history here.

How did we get into a situation

where we're heating buildings
that are empty?

Or that we're wasting heat
in these kind of ways?

Well, it's all started with the hearth.

Man sought heat, then came the chimney.

The chimney made it so that
different rooms inside the building

could be heated.

And then, we got central heating.

And once we had central heating,

the entire building was set
to the same temperature.

You heat the air, you heat the walls,
you heat the ceiling, you heat the floor!

Everything gets heated up,
and all that energy gets re-radiated

out from the building.

And if you keep the building
in a relatively high temperature

like we do for most our buildings,

that amount of heat radiation
is much larger,

and much more heat is lost.

So, why not just, you know,
use space heaters for example?

We've all used these before,

they're electric, you know, we could use
renewable energy with them.

The problem with these is that
the beam spreads out

and it wastes a lot of energy.

And not only that, but
as soon as you move to the side,

it doesn't heat you anymore.

That doesn't make a lot of sense.

So here's the crazy solution,
here's the radical solution.

Heat people! It's so simple.
Heat people, not buildings.

And how do we do that?

Well, we do it
with this device right here.

The idea is called local warming.
And it's a Collimated beam of energy.

Think of it as like a heat spotlight.

A heat spot light that can beam
the energy directly at you.

Just like a fireplace,
people might look at this and go,

"Oh, that looks a little bit weird!

It looks a bit like almost a heat gun
or something, a heat ray."

Well, think of it more like a fireplace,

but it's targeted at you.

So, let's talk a little bit about

what has enabled this kind of solution.

This is the Microsoft Kinect,

it's my favorite example
of a motion-tracking device

because it's very low cost,

and there's millions of them
all over the world.

So this is the general idea,

it's that you could have
these units there

that are not just
a practical solution,

but are also architecturally interesting.

It sort of changes the way
we think about buildings.

It blurs the line between
indoors and outdoors.

We call this
the local warming prototype.

It was installed in front
of the Lobby 7 seven at MIT,

that was our first demonstration.

It was a successful demo.

And I'm going to show you right now.

So the idea here is
that no matter where I move,

this thing can track me.

I mean think about it,

if you are in a hallway,
or wherever,

this is something you can do

pretty much in any building,
indoor or outdoor.

So who might like this?

Well, building managers
and owners of course,

because, in many cases,
they have a mandate to reduce

their carbon footprint of their building.

This is one way to do that.

Consumers and home owners
can save money on electricity,

as well as feel a little bit better
about their carbon footprint.

And architects and designers
have more options,

to sort of change the way they do things.

So the challenge is --

this is by no means
a simple thing, right?

You saw the scope of the opportunity,

but these are the very early
steps involved in the research.

So, some of the challenges
for example is,

how do you handle a room
with lots of people in it?

That's difficult. Motion-tracking
ten people is fairly difficult.

But imagine how hard it is
to track thousands of people.

Maybe privacy concerns:

maybe some people
don't want to be tracked.

How do you track people
without invading their privacy?

Low-cost emitters.

This device right here for example:

we've got the cost down to
somewhere in the order

of a couple of thousand dollars.

But how do we drop that cost
down to like a hundred dollars?

Reliability and maintenance.

These things got to be installed
in buildings and outside of buildings.

How can we install them
and maintain them

in a renewable and inexpensive way?

And then also of course the grid:

if the grid is dirty, then anything
you do with electricity is dirty.

So how do we get more
renewable energy

to enable these kind of things?

So here is my vision for 2030.

These are some bold statements.

And obviously it's a little bit like
looking into a crystal ball.

But let's think about
the possible future

that can be enabled by
this kind of technology

and this way of thinking.

We can maybe cut
the CO² emissions of the world

by 50% -- sorry specifically for heat --

all the CO² emissions,

that 3.5 billion number
that I mentioned earlier --

maybe we can cut that by 50%

or save 120 billion dollars
in heating cost per year.

Maybe have a world where
you have direct control:

your own personal thermostat
in the palm of your hand

via your smartphone

to control your temperature

no matter where you are in a building.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)