>There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...
I can say from personal experience this is not true!
You can help fix other people's mistakes!
I was an energy engineer for a while.
You'd be amazed just how much low-lying fruit there is in terms of energy waste.
I was also GOOD at this job. Instead of doing the brainless measures, I would really dig and do a lot of modeling and data mining and stuff to figure out truly optimal solutions. My fee + cost of measures were easily covered within 1-year of savings, and yet it was an incredibly difficult sell to get people to want to spend the money.
But... I had one client, for whom I had to sign an NDA, that single-handedly blew all the others out of the water. They had been emitting LARGE (like, think ~1 ton/month) quantities of sulfur hexafluoride for years. Sulfur hexafluoride, if you don't know is 23,500 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. This had been going on for YEARS.
Our three-man team came in and was able to find all the leaks with some really nice thermal cameras so they could replace the failed seals and parts.
Sorry for going off-topic, but would you mind sharing a bit more about this business? The domain sounds really interesting to me. My e-mail is also in my profile if that's better.
Could you make your business free if you “don’t” find anything to fix, and then you charge a percentage of the benefit they receive? So if you save them 1 million, then you charge them $250k or some such percent
Yes you can do that, and some companies actually go a step further and pay for the upgrades themselves and become like a pseudo-utility (See ESCO's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_service_company) where people pay them what they were paying, and the company reaps the benefits of the savings,
but it actually gets really complex. Energy prices rise, and the clients needs change, they might sell their building, (who actually owns the equipment?) and it doesn't necessarily create correct incentives. It also delays payment by minimum a year, and it's a lot of additional hassle. (How do you handle disputes for unusual situations like them buying new equipment they didn't tell you about, etc. etc.)
I can say from personal experience this is not true! You can help fix other people's mistakes! I was an energy engineer for a while.
You'd be amazed just how much low-lying fruit there is in terms of energy waste. I was also GOOD at this job. Instead of doing the brainless measures, I would really dig and do a lot of modeling and data mining and stuff to figure out truly optimal solutions. My fee + cost of measures were easily covered within 1-year of savings, and yet it was an incredibly difficult sell to get people to want to spend the money.
But... I had one client, for whom I had to sign an NDA, that single-handedly blew all the others out of the water. They had been emitting LARGE (like, think ~1 ton/month) quantities of sulfur hexafluoride for years. Sulfur hexafluoride, if you don't know is 23,500 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. This had been going on for YEARS.
Our three-man team came in and was able to find all the leaks with some really nice thermal cameras so they could replace the failed seals and parts.