La Bourse / Volume VII / Nº VII.10 / Workbook — the Gainshare employee

An observatory dome on a lodge at dusk, its windows lit, red cloud over the mountains. — Plate VII.10 · Workbook — the Gainshare employeeThe Aperture, Facing Up.Nobody took the heat away. The tray simply had an unobstructed view of something very cold and very far off, and that was enough.

WORKBOOK — THE LUMINOUS GAINSHARE EMPLOYEE

Chapter VII.10 · The Cosmological Frame

For the person inside a gainshare scheme, reading the largest chapter in the edition and reasonably asking what it has to do with their own ledger. The answer is narrow, concrete and worth money: this chapter names an asset your employer owns, has never valued, and cannot capture without somebody inside noticing it.

WHAT A GAINSHARE ACTUALLY IS, IN THIS CONTEXT

A gainshare pays you a defined share of a verified improvement against an agreed baseline. Three words are doing all the work — defined, verified and agreed — and every dispute you will ever have is about one of them.

This chapter is unusually good territory for a claim, for a specific structural reason. The gain here is in a quantity nobody is currently metering. Energy supply is metered to the decimal place, tendered annually and watched by procurement, so any saving there is already contested by three departments before you get to it. Heat rejection is metered almost nowhere. A saving in an unmetered quantity is a saving nobody has already claimed — and the person who installs the meter is the person whose baseline everybody afterwards has to use.

Install the meter. It is the whole play.

PART ONE — DISCOVERY

Days 1–30: find where the gain actually is

Exercise 1.1 — Walk the rejection side (one shift)

Go and look at where your site puts heat. Condenser decks, dry coolers, cooling towers, exhaust stacks, the back of the data hall. For each, write down:

What it rejects, roughly, in kilowatts.
At what temperature, if anyone knows — and note it when nobody does.
Whether it is separately metered.
What is above it: open sky, another building, a plant deck, a canopy.

You are building the table in the executive workbook from the floor rather than from the drawings, and yours will be more accurate. The column that will be blank everywhere is rejection temperature. That blank column is your claim.

Exercise 1.2 — Find the conflict (half a shift)

Somewhere on most sites, one system is paying to make heat while another is paying to get rid of it, within a hundred metres of each other, on separate cost codes so that nobody has ever seen the two numbers on one page.

Find it. Write both numbers on one page. That page is the most valuable document you will produce this quarter and it took an afternoon.

Exercise 1.3 — Ask the three people who already know (one hour each)

The maintenance supervisor, the shift engineer who has been there longest, and whoever signs off the chiller service contract. Ask exactly this, and then be quiet:

"Tell me about a time this plant ran unusually well — not the biggest month, the one that surprised you. What were the conditions? What was different?"

Take notes on the conditions. You will learn in three hours things that are not written down anywhere and will not be, and at least one of them will be about ambient temperature, night operation or a cold spell. That is the mechanism this chapter is about, already observed by people who were never asked.

PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Days 31–45: compute what you are owed

Exercise 2.1 — The displacement figure, built properly

For the system you chose, compute the gain in the order a verifier will check it.

  net radiative cooling power              40      W/m2      engineering class
  useful duty cycle                        40      %         site-specific
  thermal yield  40 x 8,760 / 1,000 x 0.40    140.2  kWh-th/m2/yr
  displaced electricity at chiller COP 4.0     35.0  kWh-e/m2/yr
  at your all-in tariff, 0.25 USD/kWh          8.76  USD/m2/yr

Then multiply by the aperture area that will actually be installed, not by the roof area. Every one of the four assumptions above is arguable and two of them are yours to measure: the duty cycle, which depends on your cooling season and your operating hours, and the chiller coefficient of performance, which your machine's own part-load curve gives you. Measure both and your figure stops being a vendor's and becomes the site's.

Exercise 2.2 — Know the break-even before the meeting

                  0.07 x 100 USD/m2
  break-even  =  -------------------  =  0.20 USD/kWh
                   35.0 kWh-e/m2/yr

If your site's tariff is above that, the project clears and your claim is on a real gain. If it is below — say 0.12 USD/kWh — say so first, before anyone else works it out. A person who brings the number that kills their own proposal is the person whose next number gets believed, and there is no faster way to acquire that standing.

Exercise 2.3 — Separate the four things you might be claiming on

These are different gains with different verifications and different owners, and a claim that mixes them will be cut back to the smallest one.

Displaced electricity. Metered, per kilowatt-hour, the cleanest claim.
Deferred capacity. If peak load falls, a chiller replacement moves out. Usually larger than the energy saving and much harder to verify. Claim it separately or not at all.
Avoided maintenance. Less run-time, longer service intervals.
The meter itself. The measurement did not exist before you built it, and every future claim on that system now runs through it. Ask for recognition of the instrument separately from the saving, because the instrument keeps paying after the pilot ends.

Exercise 2.4 — The baseline, which is the only document that matters

Before anything is installed:

The metric, defined precisely enough that two people compute it identically — displaced kWh-electric, imputed at the machine's own part-load curve.
The period, long enough to include a full cooling season.
Weather normalisation, agreed in advance. This is where your claim will be attacked: a cool summer will be offered as the explanation for your result. Agree the normalisation method before you know which way it cuts.
The verifier, named. Internal audit is sufficient and is usually free.
Two signatures: operations and finance.

An unagreed baseline is not a baseline. It is a future dispute in which the burden of proof lands on you.

PART THREE — DESIGN

Days 46–70: make the uncounted countable

Exercise 3.1 — Put the denominator where you can be paid on it

Ask for one line in the operational pack: energy in gigajoules per unit of real output, with the twelve-month improvement rate beside it.

This is the single most valuable thing you can do for your own scheme, and it has nothing to do with radiative cooling. The world manages about 1.3 percent a year of intensity improvement against roughly 2.0 percent output growth. If your site can be shown to beat 1.3 percent, you have a defensible, recurring, site-level number that a gainshare can be written against — and unlike a project, it does not end.

A gainshare written against a project pays once. A gainshare written against a ratio pays every year the ratio improves. Argue for the ratio.

Exercise 3.2 — Ask for the easement to be recorded

This sounds like somebody else's job and it is your claim's survival. If the aperture is installed and the sky-access easement is not recorded against title, a neighbouring development can shade the asset out, the displacement stops, and your gain — and any multi-year share of it — goes with it.

You do not need to draft it. You need to ask, in writing, one question: "Is the upward view of this roof recorded as an interest, or is it just currently unobstructed?" Send that as an email so there is a date on it.

Exercise 3.3 — Write the mechanism down in your own words

One page, and it is for you before it is for anyone else:

What the gain is, physically, in one sentence.
How it is measured, and by whom.
What the baseline is, and who signed it.
The formula that turns the verified saving into your share.
What happens if the saving is larger than expected, and what happens if it is smaller.
When you get paid, and on what verification.

If you cannot fill all six lines from documents you can point at, that is the finding, and the appreciative version of the question is the one to take to your manager: what would it take for every person on this scheme to be able to fill these six lines by Friday?

PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT

Days 71–90: make it hold

Exercise 4.1 — Get the number into the standing pack, not the project report

A project report is read once and archived. The standing pack is read monthly forever. A displacement figure in the standing pack is a fact the organisation has to keep producing, which means the meter has to keep working, which means somebody owns it. That is how a gain survives a reorganisation.

Exercise 4.2 — Recruit the second owner, and give them the credit

One person is a hobby; two is a practice. Give the second owner the credit for the first verified result. It costs you nothing you can bank and it buys the only thing that keeps a scheme alive through a change of management.

Exercise 4.3 — Know how your scheme actually behaves

Check each of these against the document, not against what you were told:

Is the share defined as a percentage of verified saving, or discretionary?
Is the baseline reset annually? A scheme that resets the baseline every year pays you once for a permanent improvement — which is not dishonest, but it is a different instrument and you should know which one you are in.
Is there a cap? Where is it, and what happens above it?
What is the verification, and who is the verifier?
What happens to your share if you move teams, or if the site does well and your unit does not?
Is there a floor, so that a bad year in something you do not control does not take a verified saving away from you?

Exercise 4.4 — The conversation, scripted

"I have been measuring something we do not currently meter. Our condenser side rejects heat at a temperature nobody had written down, and there is roof area above it with an unobstructed sky view. On the assumptions in this memo — which are stated, and two of which I measured on site rather than taking from a vendor — the break-even electricity tariff is 0.20 USD per kilowatt-hour. Ours is above that. I would like to agree a baseline with finance before anything is installed, and I would like to know how a verified displacement of this kind is treated under our scheme before I do any more work on it."

Notice what that script does. It brings a measurement, states the assumptions, names the number that would have killed it, and asks about the ledger before doing the work rather than after. All four of those are why it gets a yes.

Exercise 4.5 — Write the ledger out, with real numbers

Do not argue about a share in the abstract. Put it on a page.

  installed aperture                      2,000    m2        ILLUSTRATIVE
  displaced electricity  35.0 x 2,000    70,080    kWh-e/yr
  value at 0.25 USD/kWh                  17,520    USD/yr
  team share of verified saving              20    %         ILLUSTRATIVE
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
  the team's share                        3,504    USD/yr

Two things become visible the moment it is written down like this, and neither is visible in a conversation.

First, the sensitivity. Halve the duty cycle and every line below it halves. Drop the tariff from 0.25 to 0.12 USD/kWh and the project itself stops clearing — 4.2 percent against a 7 percent hurdle, 0.60 of what it needs — so there is no saving to share and the honest move is to say so early rather than to defend a number that will not survive a verifier.

Second, the shape of the ask. 3,504 USD a year spread across a team is not life-changing and it is not meant to be. What it is, is legible: a share of a metered quantity, computed from a formula anybody can check, against a baseline two people signed. A small number you can point at beats a large number nobody can reconstruct, and it is the one that gets renewed.

Write your version with your own area, your own tariff and your own duty cycle, and take it to the conversation in the next exercise rather than into it empty-handed.

DELIGHT

There is a specific pleasure in this one that is worth naming, because it is the reason people who do this work keep doing it.

It is the moment a quantity that nobody had ever written down becomes a number in a monthly pack. Before: a blank column and a shrug. After: a series, with a trend, that everyone in the building now argues about. You did not create the saving; the sky was always there and the heat was always leaving. You created the visibility, and visibility is the part that pays.

And then the better one, later: somebody who was not persuaded quotes your number back at you in a meeting, for their own purposes, without attribution. That is the moment a measurement becomes infrastructure. It has stopped being yours, which is exactly what you wanted.

APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR TEAM

What do we do here that works better on a cold clear night, and who noticed it first?
Which quantity on this site is nobody metering — and what would it take to put one meter on it this month?
When has this team been paid for something it genuinely did? What made that claim clean, and how do we make the next one look like it?
Where are two cost codes hiding the fact that we are paying twice for opposite things?
If every person on this scheme could describe exactly how the value they create reaches them, on one page, what would change about how we work?
What is the first sign we would see if this measurement were quietly dying, and who would notice it first?