Northeast

Hot off the press, NEEP has just released a report entitled “The Smart Energy Home: Driving Residential Building Decarbonization”.  This report builds on NEEP’s multi-year effort in the smart energy homes space, and brings the role of controls more clearly into focus, outlining their importance for decarbonizing residential properties.

Every city climate action plan I have ever read references moving to zero energy buildings as well as  more stringent or zero energy building energy codes. These are great plan elements and certainly are “doable” things to include in a plan. That said, zero energy buildings are not all that easy to accomplish across the broader market, and they certainly won’t happen without a substantial supportive effort.

You’ve probably seen the infamous “duck graph”, and then hopefully you’ve read “Teaching the Duck to Fly”. Well, now maybe we have the next example of zoomorphism in the energy world – the butterfly graph.

The commercial buildings market is very complex, with wildly divergent ownership, management control, and building characteristics. Buildings range from strip malls to office towers to convention centers to big box retail stores. Ownership could be local government, merchant builders (who build and then sell), local family businesses, international corporations, and fast food franchises. Each ownership category makes decisions very differently from the others. Some commercial buildings are incredibly complex, some buildings are cookie cutter simple and repetitive.

Thank you for taking the time to read the very first issue of Building Decarb Central.

You may be wondering where the idea for this newsletter came from, or why we’ve decided to tackle the issue of building decarbonization, so let us shed some light.

Welcome to the latest REED Rendering issue, a series of blogs where we bring your attention to interesting trends that we see in the data and the stories behind those trends.

When people bring up Bigfoot, they often cite evidence that lacks credibility. Even with the lack of tangible, physical proof of Big Foot’s existence, people are still willing to embrace the beast as fact. This is how myths persist. The folklore of Bigfoot has not ceased in recent years, and the same false narratives continue to be passed around the internet.

Myths exist in every facet of our lives. From cryptid creatures like Bigfoot haunting our Pacific Northwest, to the notion that eating before swimming increases risks of muscle cramps, myths permeate our culture.

The ability of an Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP) to heat homes in the dead of winter may seem too good to be true. This technology is no figment of your imagination - it has us quite excited because it promises to deliver heat in subzero weather. ASHPs warm our houses by extracting heat from the outdoor air. But, if you live in a cold climate, it’s hard to extract warmth from temperatures near or below freezing.