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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