Buildings
Do You Really Know Where Your Electricity Is Coming From?
Four years ago, I was part of a group of graduate students from UC Berkeley and software engineers from Google and Climate Corporation who met at a hackathon. We unexpectedly discovered that by pooling our combined skills, we could solve a problem that hadn’t been cracked. For the first time,…
Next-Generation Controls: The Missing Link of High-Performing Buildings
With many exciting advances in data analytics, machine learning, grid integration, user interaction, and renewable energy technologies entering the buildings industry, it is easy to get caught up in the vision and potential of high-performance buildings. The unfortunate reality is that many buildings designed to high-performance standards struggle to deliver…
An Award-Winning Efficiency Program in Fort Collins, Colorado
Like other forward-thinking cities, Fort Collins—a city of 167,500 located in northern Colorado—had a goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. However, following a Rocky Mountain Institute e–Lab design charrette, the city decided to see if it could push that goal up 20 years. RMI’s Stepping…
Thinking Outside the Bulb: Innovative Companies Switch on Lumens as a Service
The transition to low-cost, highly efficient clean energy technology is being accelerated by an accompanying revolution in innovative business models to deploy that technology. This new approach can be seen in a number of clean energy markets; whether the underlying technology is a recent innovation, such as solar photovoltaics (PV),…
Does Wasting Home Heating Make You See (Infra)red?
Have you ever wanted x-ray vision, or to see the hidden features of your home? The City of Vancouver has launched a new effort to make energy use more visible to its residents, complete with rainbow-colored images of their homes that show details invisible to the naked eye. Using…