Buildings

Buildings are our nation’s biggest energy guzzlers, using 40% of our energy and 70% of our electricity. As the nation makes strides to improve the energy performance of its building stock, one effective method of doing this is with building energy codes.

In a Feb. 5 cover story of the Boston Globe Magazine, Neil Swidey’s “What if the Lights Go Out?” paints a bleak picture of the state of our regional electric grid.

For champions of the green schools movement, the U.S. Department of Education’s Green Ribbon Schools award program –now in its pilot year—is an exciting opportunity to gain national recognition for years of hard work transforming the way we design, build, and operate schools.

NEEP, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER), is seeking proposals for innovative methodologies that can help reduce the time and cost of data collection. Operational ratings for buildings, which are based on actual energy use (i.e. energy billing data), are great, but don’t paint the full picture of a building’s true energy performance.

Over the past six months, the Northeast has been hammered with unexpected and extreme weather.  Tornadoes tore through Western Massachusetts in June and Hurricane Irene wreaked havoc throughout the entire region in August, devastating Vermont with the worst flooding they’ve seen in 84 years.

First adopted over a decade ago in Australia and Denmark, mandatory building energy rating policies are now in place in over 30 countries worldwide.

Webinar for new product categories and updated specifications for current categories scheduled for August 2, 2011, at 2pm EST. Lighting manufacturers, energy efficiency program administrators, and others in the Solid State Lighting (SSL) field now have more options for promoting and incentivizing energy efficient lighting technology thanks to a recent revision to the DesignLights Consortium’s Solid State Lighting Qualified Products List (