These interns are worth more than their weight in gold. Literally.

You’re familiar with the figurative sense of the expression “worth your weight in gold,” but when it comes to the role of energy manager, it may be literally true.

For the uninitiated, an energy manager is someone at an organization whose sole responsibility is to find opportunities for financial and environmental efficiencies.

Over on the EDF Climate Corps blog, Jacob Robinson crunched the numbers:

“With the average global body mass of a person being 62 kilograms and the current price of a 1 kilogram gold bar hovering around $39,000, an individual’s weight in gold is roughly $2.4 million dollars,” he calculates. “As part of EDF Climate Corps, graduate-level fellows spend 10 to 12 weeks uncovering opportunities for smart energy management, identifying an average of $1 million dollars in savings per fellow.”

Keep in mind that’s for one quarter of work. It’s fair to assume a year-round employee could add more than $4 million in annual value to an organization. “Like the golden goose,” Jacob notes, energy managers “keep on giving for years.”

Since 2008, EDF Climate Corps has helped more than 300 organizations (looking at you, Google, Apple, Facebook, AT&T and many more businesses, schools, and municipalities) realize $1.4 billion in cumulative energy savings. 

That’s in addition to more than 1.8 million metric tons of greenhouse gas reductions that these graduate students identified – equivalent to taking 6.5 million cars off the road.

See Jacob’s full post for a complete and compelling business case for hiring an energy manager.