A building doesn’t have to be new to be efficient. Today’s leading building owners are retrofitting buildings, converting existing buildings into models of sustainability. Building energy retrofits are investments in efficient technology during building renovation. While most building owners still pursue single technology improvements, market leaders bundle together energy saving technologies to get deeper savings in a more comprehensive approach. Energy performance contracting is one business model that enables building owners to implement whole building retrofits and significantly lower energy consumption and operating costs. Essentially, the upgrades are paid for through energy savings over time. Photo credit: Jack Amick/Flickr.
Third-party financing models like energy services agreements can help attract capital to building efficiency retrofits – but only if financiers can trust the savings projections on which the projects depend. Inspiring that trust will require accepted measurement and verification (M&V) protocols and a new level of information and analytics on which to base the projections. Today’s...
The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) has updated the RetroFit Depot website with new resources, including three new guides. The RetroFit Depot is a resource to help building owners, managers, occupants and retrofit practitioners gain a detailed understanding of the value and process of undertaking deep energy retrofits. The three new resources being launched on the site are:
As China’s service economy grows and nonindustrial buildings proliferate, building efficiency becomes more important to the country’s efforts to reduce the growth in its carbon emissions. Concerns over rising energy costs and energy security have boosted demand for building efficiency technologies and solutions. Meanwhile, the building efficiency market is maturing as a growing number...
How do CO2 cap-and-trade programs really affect economies? Analyses suggest that programs like the European Union Emissions Trading System encourage investments in energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies by pricing carbon competitively. In the long run, this should mean lower electric bills for consumers and significant job creation. Carbon cap-and-trade programs are often criticized as...
China sees building energy retrofits as essential to relieving stress on its energy supplies. But which retrofits work best in which types of buildings in the country’s different climate zones? A research study used computer simulations to analyze energy savings and payback for a variety of methods in office building and retail store prototypes. The research showed that insulation is not as...
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.
The Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE) has filled a substantial part of the long-standing data gap on European buildings with a new report, “Europe’s Buildings Under the Microscope,” published in Brussels on Oct. 14, 2011.
