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)