Smart, green, productive and efficient buildings contribute to urban efficiency and high-performance cities. Buildings don’t turn green with a fresh coat of paint, and building green is not an afterthought. Green, net zero building principles encompass the entire life cycle of a building—from the design and construction phases to the operation and maintenance of the building. Green buildings efficiently select and use resources and engage occupants to live and work in the buildings in a sustainable manner. Those that match their energy demand with on-site energy production can achieve “net-zero” status. Increasingly, green and net zero buildings are demonstrating real market traction - and the benefits are becoming clear. Photo credit: Brad Kahn/Flickr
The technical potential for solar water heating in the United States is about one quadrillion Btu of energy savings per year, worth $8 billion of energy costs and 50 million to 75 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore, some 67 percent of the nation’s commercial buildings have rooftops available for solar water heating, says the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
In making workplaces more sustainable, building technologies are not enough: A great deal depends on how people who work in the buildings behave. Johnson Controls Global Workplace Innovation and the Institute for Building Efficiency worked with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art in London to study what makes an environmentally aware organization. The study found wide...
Start early, seek advice and stay engaged were the three take away messages from interviews with owners and net zero energy buildings (NZEBs) project managers. The Institute for Building Efficiency met with 11 new-construction and major retrofit projects to understand the motivations, the challenges, and the keys to successful projects. Among the insights:
Buildings have vast potential to save energy, reducing costs for owners and easing stress on electric utility systems. Energy efficiency (EE) and demand response (DR) can help significantly. The two are quite different: EE reduces kilowatt-hours used, while DR reduces kilowatts of demand during peak hours of the day.
