Behavior change goes mainstream with LEED “occupant engagement” credit

By Andrew deCoriolis, 
Director of Engagement

Something exciting in the energy world is happening. When Lucid started in 2004 the untapped potential for building occupants to impact energy use by changing their behavior was barely on the radar as an outlet for energy efficiency. After much pushing, prodding and proving, we are seeing behavior change and occupant engagement move into the mainstream.

Last month the U.S. Green Building Council officially released “Pilot Credit 59: Occupant Engagement” for the LEED for Existing Buildings (EBOM): Operations & Maintenance rating system. The credit is an acknowledgment of the growing influence that occupants bring to bear on building performance, as well as an outline for how to frame behavior change efforts.

Lucid was excited to lend our expertise to the development of the credit. The final language reflects the feedback and engagement process we have been employing with our customers.

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Campus Conservation Nationals: building a national behavior change platform

By Andrew deCoriolis, 
Director of Engagement

One of the most rewarding aspects of the work Lucid does is getting to watch people engage with, organize around, and become empowered by resource data in their buildings. As with any other type of data, energy information is only effective when it’s utilized. In Lucid’s case we have always focused on engaging people with contextualized information to make better resource use decisions.

Campus Conservation Nationals (CCN) has emerged as one of the more exciting projects we’ve been involved with: back in 2009 Lucid helped found, pilot, and now scale a national electricity and water reduction competition in residence halls on college and university campuses.

During the 2010 pilot competition our goal was to create a platform that would engage building occupants and allow campuses to organize a program that connects behavior with building performance in a measurable way. CCN 2010 showed us just how powerful a common platform could be, so we spent the next year revamping and expanding to include more schools, new technology, and additional educational opportunities.

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Seattle 2030 District: the power of transparency and collective goal setting

By Andrew deCoriolis, 
Director of Engagement

Two weeks ago Lucid announced a partnership with the Seattle 2030 District, an initiative to reduce carbon emissions 50% by 2030 in 1,100+ buildings in downtown Seattle. As part of the effort, Lucid will be tracking resources used in these buildings and displaying performance data on a publicly accessible Seattle 2030 Building Dashboard.

The goals of the initiative are tremendously exciting, and the District has already witnessed impressive progress. Already 25% of the square footage of buildings in the District have enrolled, and they’ve achieved nearly a 6% reduction in total carbon emissions.

What is perhaps most exciting about the Seattle 2030 District, though, isn’t the carbon or number of high profile buildings and partners participating, but rather the precedent it sets.

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Editorial: California utilities propose Green Button API

By Michael Murray, CEO

Earlier this month, the California investor-owned utilities (IOUs) filed with the Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) their plans for implementing a Green Button API. Also known by the mouthful of acronyms Open Automated Data Exchange (OpenADE) and the Energy Services Provider Interface (ESPI), the March 5th filings demonstrate that California is forward-thinking in engaging third party software providers such as Lucid to promote energy efficiency. But the filings also reveal painful bureaucratic hurdles in the utility regulatory process that are a drag on progress.

First some background. Last fall, the White House challenged utilities to provide energy consumption data in a portable, machine-readable format through a “Green Button.” Since then, numerous utilities including the California IOUs have signed on to the initiative. Today the White House announced nine new utility supporters, including NSTAR (Boston), ComEd (Chicago), PECO (Philadelphia) and Baltimore Gas & Electric, among others. Primarily focused on the residential sector, the Green Button allows homeowners to download their consumption history in an XML format and then upload that file to third party service providers.

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Introducing the new Building Dashboard Management Portal

By Vladi Shunturov, CTO

In February we announced the 2.0 release of Building Dashboard for the web. One of its great new features is the Management Portal, an online tool that allows our customers to manage their Dashboard, and much more.

Our customers have asked for more control — that is, control over things like building metadata, photos and green features, and competitions. The new Management Portal makes it easy to take charge of this information and update it on the fly.

To start, we’ve made it a lot easier to update your building profiles pages with the most basic information, like occupancy, location, and building type. Within the Management Portal you can upload new avatar photos for your building, change its location on the map, and input new occupancy or square footage data.

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Aligning technology, environment, and policy at Bay Area Policy Forum

By Allan Robles, Client Consultant

The Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California hosted their 3rd Annual Bay Area Policy Forum in downtown San Francisco. This year’s Forum focused on two timely and relevant themes: environment and technology. Fifty masters candidates – the next generation of public policy makers – were present along with representatives from SFEnvironment, various software companies, environmental non-profit organizations, and public policy research institutions.

The “Technology and Policy” panel with Lucid’s Director of Engagement, Andrew deCoriolis, provided  a unique perspective of how public policy affects companies working on energy management and efficiency – from financial incentives to stringent building operation and management standards. The diverse panel also included the CEO of TiE Global, PK Agarwal; MIG’s Joan Chaplick; Metamarket’s CEO, Michael Driscoll; and Policy Associate Daniel Krimm.

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Bringing Utilities into the Now

By Michael Murray, CEO

If utility companies standardized how they report data, software tools could easily provide a user-friendly interface to track building performance.

The last decade has seen substantial progress in green building, but recently I’ve been acutely aware of a persistent, frustrating, nagging obstacle to energy and resource conservation in commercial buildings. The obstacle is partly technological, but mostly regulatory. It involves the utility companies.

The information captured by utilities—how much electricity, water, or natural gas our buildings consume and when—is essential to improving efficiency. Energy benchmarking, monitoring-based commissioning, demand response, and performance contracting all depend upon data which utilities don’t make readily available. When we want electronic access, they provide inscrutable paper bills. When we want 15-minute intervals, they provide monthly totals. When we want to benchmark our building in EnergyStar, we have to assemble a year of billing history and manually enter the information into energystar.gov. This is inconvenient, costly, and an obstacle to progress.

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Announcing new resources to help teachers bring Building Dashboard into the classroom

By Chelsea Hodge, Client Consultant

Every company dreams of their customers coming up with innovative new ways to use their product. We here at Lucid are lucky enough to have had this dream come true on multiple occasions. Some of these innovations that we’re most excited about are the incredible ways in which teachers have brought Building Dashboard into the classroom and turned it into a powerful learning tool.

After years of hearing stories from teachers about their success using Building Dashboard in the classroom, we decided that we needed to stop hoarding these great ideas to ourselves and start sharing them with all of our customers. Five documents that we’re unveiling today — a Guide for Educators and four sample lessons — mark the beginning of this effort.

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Exciting new features and improvements released in version 2.0

The new Competition App 2.0

By Vladi Shunturov, CTO

This month we’re excited to announce a major new release – version 2.0 – of Building Dashboard. Back in April 2010, the launch of Building Dashboard Network 1.0 created a big splash in the building industry. For 2012 our talented team of engineers and designers has cooked up another remarkable version of the product that we hope you’ll love. Check out some of the new features below:

Efficiency improvements
We’ve made dozens of user interface changes that are designed to enhance your experience with Building Dashboard. Loading times are faster. Transitions are smoother. Based on extensive feedback, interactions with graphs, apps, and widgets have been made even more intuitive.

New Competition App
We’ve launched an entirely new Competition App. Now it’s easier to look at competition standings, assess your building’s performance, and search for other competitions across the Network. Competitions can even be made between unique groups of floors or buildings.

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More utilities adopting “Green Button” to provide customers with access to their energy data

Lucid CTO, Vladi Shunturov, and U.S. CTO, Aneesh Chopra

By Michael Murray, CEO

Back in September, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, challenged utilities to provide energy consumption data in a portable, machine-readable format through a “Green Button.” With your building’s consumption information typically only available in a proprietary bill-pay website (or, worse, in inscrutable paper bills), the opportunities for applying software to energy data have been limited. The idea behind the Green Button is to open the opportunity to ratepayers and software companies to create innovative applications that analyze, interpret, and transform utility data into meaningful and actionable information.

The Energy Information Administration counts 3,273 traditional electric utilities in the United States. Getting all of them to agree on a data format and then implement the Green Button is an ambitious goal. That’s why I was pleased to support the effort by being invited to speak at the U.S. CTO’s meeting today in Santa Clara called “Transforming the Energy Landscape.” Convened by Chopra of the Obama Administration and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the conference brought leading companies and the CIOs of California’s investor-owned utilities into one room to talk about the “energy apps” of the future.

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