WEBVTT

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My name is Lee Christie,
I am from MIT.

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

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(Laughter)

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You might ask,

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OK, why would I say something like that?

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That's seems a bit outlandish.

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

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The idea here was,

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OK, what can we do
to tackle energy issues?

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And this huge problem I came across

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was that we actually use
a tremendous amount of heating.

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

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to heat buildings.

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That's equivalent
to 27 billion lights bulbs

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on all the time year round.

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

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It's staggering numbers.

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This ends up about being
3.5 billion tonnes of CO²,

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"Greenhouse gases".

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Or another way of looking at it,

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

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This is just mind-bogglingly
large numbers.

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

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

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

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or 14,400 terawatt hours of heat energy.

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

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

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So,not only is
heating buildings really wasteful,

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it's actually kind of frustrating as well.

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

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I remember doing this as a kid,

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

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and then my dad would turn it back down,

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

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(Laughter)

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And this is crazy too.

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How many of you have used these before?

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Right? Quite a few, right?

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

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

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Literally most of the energy
go straight up

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and very little of it actually
radiates down to you.

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And how about this?

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

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And there's no one even in it!

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It's unbelievable.

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

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How did we get into a situation

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where we're heating buildings
that are empty?

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

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Well, it's all started with the hearth.

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Man sought heat, then came the chimney.

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The chimney made it so that
different rooms inside the building

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could be heated.

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And then, we got central heating.

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And once we had central heating,

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the entire building was set
to the same temperature.

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

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

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out from the building.

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And if you keep the building
in a relatively high temperature

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like we do for most our buildings,

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that amount of heat radiation
is much larger,

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and much more heat is lost.

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

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We've all used these before,

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

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The problem with these is that
the beam spreads out

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and it wastes a lot of energy.

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

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it doesn't heat you anymore.

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That doesn't make a lot of sense.

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

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

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And how do we do that?

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Well, we do it
with this device right here.

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

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Think of it as like a heat spotlight.

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

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

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"Oh, that looks a little bit weird!

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

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Well, think of it more like a fireplace,

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but it's targeted at you.

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So, let's talk a little bit about

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what has enabled this kind of solution.

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This is the Microsoft Kinect,

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

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because it's very low cost,

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

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So this is the general idea,

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it's that you could have
these units there

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that are not just
a practical solution,

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but are also architecturally interesting.

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It sort of changes the way
we think about buildings.

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It blurs the line between
indoors and outdoors.

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We call this
the local warming prototype.

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

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that was our first demonstration.

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It was a successful demo.

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And I'm going to show you right now.

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

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this thing can track me.

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I mean think about it,

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if you are in a hallway,
or wherever,

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this is something you can do

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pretty much in any building,
indoor or outdoor.

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So who might like this?

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Well, building managers
and owners of course,

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

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their carbon footprint of their building.

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This is one way to do that.

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Consumers and home owners
can save money on electricity,

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

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And architects and designers
have more options,

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to sort of change the way they do things.

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So the challenge is --

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this is by no means
a simple thing, right?

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You saw the scope of the opportunity,

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

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So, some of the challenges
for example is,

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

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

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

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Maybe privacy concerns:

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maybe some people
don't want to be tracked.

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How do you track people
without invading their privacy?

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Low-cost emitters.

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This device right here for example:

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

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of a couple of thousand dollars.

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

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Reliability and maintenance.

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

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How can we install them
and maintain them

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in a renewable and inexpensive way?

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And then also of course the grid:

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

NOTE Paragraph

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So how do we get more
renewable energy

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to enable these kind of things?

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So here is my vision for 2030.

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These are some bold statements.

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

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But let's think about
the possible future

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that can be enabled by
this kind of technology

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and this way of thinking.

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We can maybe cut
the CO² emissions of the world

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by 50% -- sorry specifically for heat --

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all the CO² emissions,

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that 3.5 billion number
that I mentioned earlier --

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maybe we can cut that by 50%

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or save 120 billion dollars
in heating cost per year.

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Maybe have a world where
you have direct control:

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your own personal thermostat
in the palm of your hand

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via your smartphone

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to control your temperature

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no matter where you are in a building.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)