Leigh Christie has a striking fact in his Tedx Talk, Heating Buildings is Stupid. He says that 14,000 TerraWatt hours per year is used to heat buildings. That equates to twenty seven billion light bulbs on year round, or ten to fourteen percent of the world’s total energy use. This activity releases 3.5 billion tons of CO2 emissions, and wastes $272 billion in energy costs annually.
Christie’s radical solution is to heat people, not buildings. With his team at the MIT Senseable City Lab Leigh has developed a heat spotlight that beams the energy directly at inhabitants.
Using a device as simple as the Microsoft Kinect can track humans in a space. Christie calls his unit the Local Warming device and demonstrates the unit during his talk.
http://senseable.mit.edu/localwarming2014/#
Building managers, homeowners and construction companies can all benefit from this localized and personalized heating method. The unit demonstrated costs around a thousand dollars but Christie thinks that the cost needs to be closer to one hundred dollars.
Christie is well aware that his radical solution has plenty of challenges ahead before wide scale implementation. Motion tracking ten people can be difficult so keeping tabs on a large crowd or workforce will be a large issue. Privacy concerns may arise if people do not want to be tracked.
His vision is a broad use of his robotic heaters by 2030. Christie believes that we can cut CO2 emissions by fifty percent and save $120 billion dollars per year in heating costs. More importantly is the goal for people to be able to control their own personal heating needs.
Local Warming is an incredible set of ideas to develop. Christie is passionate and engaging as a speaker and will no doubt push these heating units as far as possible. Heating people instead of full buildings and spaces is worth pursuing.