U.K. neighborhood records its electricity use on the street

From GOOD Magazine: A little feedback can go a long way. In Brighton, in the United Kingdom, a group of residents living on Tidy Street are recording their daily electricity use on a giant infographic painted on the street outside their homes.

Participating residents were given new electricity monitors for The Tidy Street Project, and the piece itself was created by the local street artist Snub. Each day the total electricity use from the previous day is marked on the street and compared to electricity consumption in other parts of the U.K. and the world.

The project has been running for roughly three weeks and already the participants’ electricity use has dropped by 15 percent. Imagine what we could do here in America if we had smart meters and real-time energy use displays in our homes.

Read the full article in GOOD Magazine

Financing campus sustainability: Caltech’s energy conservation investment program

Lucid recently attended the Smart and Sustainable Campus Conference hosted by NACUBO (the National Association of College and University Business Officers). This is our second year attending the conference, which we have found to be a really valuable experience. Since the audience is more geared toward campus administrators, operations managers and staff the content tends to be focused, detailed and solutions oriented.

One of the challenges we hear over and over again, from colleges and universities of all sizes, public and private, is that there isn’t enough money in their budgets to invest in energy efficiency and conservation. Given this common problem, one of the most interesting talks this year was delivered by California Institute of Technology’s Energy Manger, Matthew Berbee, and Sustainability Manager, John Onderdonk.

Among the many interesting initiatives they are working on, including the recent instillation of 2MW of Bloom Energy fuel cells through a Purchase Power Agreement, it looks like they might have cracked the funding nut.

Read the full article

Architype Review interview with Lucid’s CEO, Michael Murray

Lucid’s CEO, Michael Murray, sat down for an interview with Architype Review, a design resource for architects, students, clients and educators promoting innovation in the field, during last year’s Greenbuild conference and expo.

Michael’s sage observations about the increasingly important role of building occupants are intended to help vendors push the boundaries of what is possible in advancing innovative design and architecture.

Human behavior is often overlooked in the areas of architecture and environmental performance. There are technical and design-related solutions to minimize resource consumption, but there are behavioral issues as well. Even the “smartest” green building can have “dumb” occupants who waste electricity. Our technology is aimed at encouraging greater interaction between occupants and the built environment, and promoting a greater understanding of the invisible flows of energy that power our spaces. The more visible we can make energy use, the more attention it will get.

The “building of the future” that we envision is not necessarily a new form with new materials, but rather a highly interactive structure in which energy use is everyone’s problem and requires building occupants’ consideration to manage it effectively.

Read the full Architype Review interview

LEED customers talk about USGBC’s Building Performance Partnership

USGBC introduces the benefits of the new Building Performance Partnership (BPP), which focuses on tracking and managing building consumption over time.

Watch the BPP video from USGBC on Vimeo

“Little changes, big impacts”: An Adobe customer success story

A customer success story about Lucid Design Group is featured in Adobe’s Customer Showcase. From the story:

Personal choices, such as unplugging appliances, turning off lights, and enabling energy-saving features on your PC obviously make a difference in resource consumption. But, generally, people are too far removed from numerical data to really understand how small changes in daily habits can have a big impact on the environment.

In Building Dashboard, physical structures — not people — have profiles. A compelling use case is found at Hamilton College, a liberal arts college in upstate New York, and one of nearly 100 U.S. educational institutions including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford that use Building Dashboard to support key sustainability initiatives aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions in residence halls, classrooms, dining facilities, and sports arenas.

Read the full customer success story at Adobe.com

Bill Nye’s Climate Lab exhibit at Chabot Space and Science Center

Bill Nye’s Climate Lab, an exciting new hands-on exhibit at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, explores the effects of climate change on Earth, offering missions and activities that increase climate literacy and teach energy-saving strategies.

We’re also thrilled that it highlights Building Dashboard as a smart grid solution in its Green Design Center.

Chabot partnered with Emmy-award-winning science educator Bill Nye (the Climate Guy!) and world-class science advisors to inspire kids and families to reduce energy consumption and find solutions to a warming planet as part of this innovative educational initiative.

Read more about the exhibit or visit the Climate Lab website

Maximizing Energy Savings Through Building Occupant Engagement: A Case for Real-Time Energy Monitoring

By Andrew deCoriolis, Director of Public Programs

New energy efficiency opportunities in buildings
In the United States electricity consumed in buildings represents 2/3 of all electricity consumed, equating to roughly 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Americans spend 90% of their lives in these buildings. How we build buildings, and how people act in those buildings has a tremendous impact on the world economy and ecology.

In the world of commercial building energy efficiency, there are two general categories of energy efficiency measures used to reduce energy and operating costs of buildings. The first involves upgrades or substitutions of equipment (lighting, HVAC systems, etc). The second involves operational changes such as modifying HVAC set points, or checking scheduling and economizer cycles. The first category is retrofits, and the second category is low- or no-cost operational improvements; both are in the purview of the facility manager. A third category is emerging, however, which is often overlooked and which does not revolve around the facility manager: behavior change on the part of building occupants.

Read the full article

Pandamonium at Phillips Academy in Andover

It’s Pandamonium at Phillips Academy in Andover! Andover students filmed this conservation short for the Green Cup Challenge national video competition. The 2011 Green Cup Challenge includes some 40 Northeast boarding schools in a race to reduce their energy use by the highest percentage within a four-week period.

If the panda parody is lost on you, check out these Panda Cheese commercials.

President Obama’s “Better Buildings Initiative”

In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed new efforts to improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings across the country. The “Better Buildings Initiative” is intended to catalyze private sector investment through a series of incentives to upgrade offices, stores, schools and other municipal buildings, universities, hospitals, and other commercial buildings.

Through the “Better Buildings Challenge,” the Administration is challenging CEOs and University Presidents to make their organizations leaders in saving energy. Partners will commit to a series of actions to make their facilities more efficient. They will in turn become eligible for benefits including public recognition, technical assistance, and best-practices sharing through a network of peers.

The Administration is also working to improve transparency around energy efficiency performance. Other goals of the Better Buildings Initiative include:

  • Achieving a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency by 2020
  • Reducing companies’ and business owners’ energy bills by about $40 billion per year
  • Reforming outdated incentives and developing a new competitive grant program for states and local governments that streamline regulations
  • Making financing opportunities more readily available for commercial retrofit projects

Read more about the initiative at WhiteHouse.gov or on the White House Blog

USGBC, Lucid, and the “Building Performance Partnership”

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and Lucid Design Group announced a collaboration to bring Lucid’s Building Dashboard to LEED building owners at Greenbuild 2010 in Chicago. The participating buildings are part of USGBC’s Building Performance Partnership and will continuously report on their building’s energy and water use.

The Building Performance Partnership (BPP) is a program engaging LEED building owners and managers to optimize the performance of buildings through data collection, analysis and action.

“Working with Lucid to pilot an automated performance reporting system will advance LEED and green building to the next level,” said Scot Horst, Senior Vice President, LEED, USGBC. “Ultimately, the environmental benefits of green building need to be continuously verified. Using Lucid’s software in this pilot will be a model for how the industry advances automated, third-party monitoring in the future.”

USGBC’s goals for BPP are to build a comprehensive green building performance database, enable standardization of reporting metrics and analytics, and establish new performance benchmarks. LEED Online will also be expanded to include actual performance data from buildings.

Read more about BPP in Lucid’s press release, explore “dynamic LEED plaques” on BuildingGreen.com, or go to USGBC’s website.

Page 4 of 512345