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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Behavior, Energy & Climate Change Conference

By Andrew deCoriolis, Director of Engagement

The fifth annual Behavior, Energy & Climate Change conference in Washington really solidified for me that the sustainability movement has much to learn from the social sciences. The event sold out again, with 600+ attendees from all fields of study — government, industry, non-profits and academia. What’s exciting is that the field has moved beyond talking about the “potential” of changing behaviors and has moved into a new phase of active exploration, experimentation and evaluation.

Many of the papers were delivered by people for whom this was the third or fourth year of presenting, highlighting the arc of their research and really demonstrating success in a variety of areas.

Lucid was excited to participate this year as a panelist, focusing on our research of plug load electricity consumption in commercial office spaces. We presented two case studies that demonstrated different intervention strategies for reducing electricity use.

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Occupant engagement: Where design meets performance

Paula Melton at Environmental Building News talked with Lucid’s Director of Engagement, Andrew deCoriolis, as well as other software designers, property managers and researchers about occupant engagement. As we find out in the EBN coverstory article below, from the offices of Microsoft to colleges and universities to households, building occupants are increasingly being made aware of and accountable for their own energy and water use.

Melton explores three main approaches to occupant engagement: 1) designing for feedback, 2) transforming social norms, 3) creating incentives. From the article:

At its pinnacle, occupant engagement describes a building-wide culture in which empowered building occupants are aware of and accountable for their own energy and water use, waste disposal habits, and use of toxic chemicals. But the process of creating that culture—including decisions made by architects and engineers as well as building managers, employers, and other stakeholders—is also called occupant engagement (or sometimes, more clinically, “behavior change”).

… Connecting energy data and existing social media networks is a key component of student engagement. “You need to meet people where they are,” deCoriolis emphasized, and “create a social context for why they’re going there” for energy data. A competition gives students this “social context” in which to track their energy and water use and to make public commitments to changing habits.” Read the full article…

A warm welcome for the newest additions to Lucid’s team

Over the past couple months Lucid’s ranks have swelled with the addition of six new team members: Allan, Alexa, Arturo, Chelsea, Eddie and Ted. The entire Lucid team welcomes everybody on board!

Allan Robles

Allan is a native New Yorker and recent M.A. graduate from the Bren School for Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara. With a keen interest in encouraging behavioral change, he brings years of experience in implementing energy conservation measures. Allan has also organized energy competitions at UCSB and Eugene Lang College: The New School for Liberal Arts, his alma mater. As one of Lucid’s Client Consultants, he is glad to lend his experience to other sustainability leaders.

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Lucid named California Clean Tech “Game Changer of the Year”

Last week at the Clean Tech Innovation Conference in Oakland, Lucid’s CEO, Michael Murray, accepted on behalf of the Lucid team a Resolution issued by the state of California for top honors as a leader in the state’s clean tech industry.

Clean technology is considered a key strategy across the nation and throughout the world to create much-needed jobs, improve the economy and lessen the demand for fossil fuels. Conference organizers hope that by bringing the venture capital community together with the clean technology industry, there will be tremendous potential to link much needed financial resources with innovation to create new companies, jobs and economic activity.

Lucid is honored to have been recognized for its impact on California’s green industry alongside other leaders and innovators, including Bloom Energy, Google, Sungevity and Tesla. For more information about the California Clean Tech conference and the “Game Changer of the Year” awards, visit Grow California.

Occupy Your Building

This month we’ve launched a campaign to raise awareness about “plug loads” — the innumerable devices in commercial buildings that use energy, such as computers, copiers, fax machines, kitchen appliances and electric space heaters.

According to new research by Lucid, plug loads constitute as much as 50% of an office’s electricity consumption. If you’re familiar with recent protests organized by the Occupy Wall Street movement and their motto, “We Are The 99%”, you’ll quickly notice where we got our name for the plug loads campaign.

What’s surprising about Lucid’s findings is that they run contrary to most estimations of plug loads, which typically range from 10% to 30% of a building’s electricity use. Most estimates are based upon simulation modeling and not empirical measurement, so our data provide an important reality check for energy managers, sustainability officers and the design community.

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Halloween at Lucid

Lucid’s annual Halloween party put the energy and creativity of the team on display, with 14 costumed contestants vying for a beloved albino squirrel and other amazing prizes. This year’s winners were Ross “Astronaut” Ruecker, Abi “Tina” Matthias and Kadri “Matador” Jugandi.

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Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education Conference

By Allan Robles, Client Consultant

This year Lucid participated as a session leader and Expo vendor at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Conference in Pittsburgh. A crowd of 1,600, ranging from student activists to facilities managers to key environmental leaders, converged in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, the first LEED Gold convention center and one of the largest green buildings in the world.

The conference opened up on Sunday with words of wisdom from Majora Carter. Majora founded the wildly successful environmental non-profit Sustainable South Bronx in New York City. Majora’s mantra of “Green the Ghetto” has inspired thousands of citizens in her neighborhood and the surrounding boroughs to take action on environmental justice issues ranging from the built environmental to green jobs programs for minorities and people of color. Students were also treated to Student Keynote speaker Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org. There were also opportunities for members of AASHE’s Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS) and those who want to enroll their institution in STARS.

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