Can a Reality TV Show Help Cut America's Power Bill?

Tristam Coffin looks like someone you'd imagine being a Whole Foods "sustainable facilities" coordinator—he sports jeans and a casual button-down shirt, with springy blond locks brushing over his collar. Not too long ago, Coffin was standing in a kitchen at the back of a Whole Foods store in San Francisco when he saw something he considered extraordinary: three men in suits.

Before long, the three men, holding pens and notepads, climbed to the store's roof, looking at ducts, pipes, and the assorted mechanicals that make up the cardiopulmonary system of a modern grocer. The trio weren't Coffin’s co-workers—they were his buttoned-up equivalents from hotel giant Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. They are part of a unique exchange program organized by the U.S. Department of Energy that packages the most boring possible topic—corporate energy efficiency—into a reality television show for the web. The project and its first season are available here.

This energy exchange swap is the latest initiative of the DOE's Better Buildings Challenge, an Obama administration push to encourage commercial, public, industrial, and residential buildings to be 20 percent more energy-efficient within a decade. Whole Foods and Hilton are already members of the challenge, and volunteered to participate in the promotion. Think of it as a kind of "Freaky Friday" experiment where companies exchange energy teams to diagnose facilities with fresh eyes. The DOE worked with a marketing and public-relations company to frame the exercise in a cable-TV-ready format (complete with a tame outtakes reel).

Viewers get to watch a Hilton team feeling claustrophobic inside a tiny Whole Foods kitchen. You see Coffin and two Whole Foods colleagues overwhelmed by the size of the Hilton San Francisco, the biggest hotel on the West Coast. “You could fit about five of our stores in there,” Coffin says, walking into the ballroom.

What the men from Hilton found at Whole Foods' Ocean Avenue outpost was a store with modern touches that was nonetheless losing money through its roof. Intake pipes were sucking in cool San Francisco air as vents exhaled warm air from the store. They concluded that making use of the warm air by repiping the heat into the store would quickly pay for itself, and the store’s energy bills would drop. Meanwhile, the trio from Whole Foods developed an appreciation for the complexities of hospitality: every guest wants a nice hot shower, so a hotel has to deliver hot water to every floor at any moment. It's got to be just right on the 30th floor without being too hot on the 12th floor, because hotels make money by making guests happy, not by saving energy.

Or, as Whole Foods' global energy coordinator Aaron Daly put it in an interview, "Energy is cheaper than losing a customer."

Not exactly Keeping Up With The Kardashians-level high jinks, but then again, the DOE's main job is overseeing nuclear materials and national laboratories, not entertainment. But what the episodes lack in narrative propulsion they make up in symbolism. The problems experienced by the six men, all of them "Property Brothers" for the corporate set, represent challenges Americans are just beginning to face. Hilton, Whole Foods, the 250 other companies and organizations that belong to the Better Buildings Challenge, as well as everyone who heats and cools a home, office, factory, or store—they're all trying to find the right balance between cost and comfort.