Building Energy Resilience

When I was managing business energy efficiency programs at Efficiency Vermont (EVT), I diagrammed the web of market forces that affect decisions around energy efficiency in buildings. I’ve recently been encountering those market forces and new vectors that I hadn’t even considered back in the nascent days of EVT. As a result of these encounters, I’ve realized how fundamental people are to a successful transformation of our building stock into efficient and sustainable structures. People tend to fall between the following camps:

Retrocommissioning (RCx) is rapidly growing in popularity as a tool to cost effectively reduce energy use in existing buildings. A recent study by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab showed that commissioning existing buildings yields significant energy savings and can provide a substantial return on investment. Utility programs are embracing the concept and taking a variety of approaches to helping their customers find providers and engage in an RCx process.

What is light pollution? It's light that goes where it is not useful. The human race evolved with dark skies at night. The advent of electrification has lead to a proliferation of nighttime lighting that we use to help us find our way and to increase our security in the dark.

Understanding Commissioning

I recently received an RFP for building commissioning services that included the following statements:

A coworker recently forwarded a link to a posting in the Environmental Leader by Kathy Miller, mentioning that it related to some of my blog posts. In How to Engage in Sustainability with Higher Purpose, Dr. Miller points out the importance of corporate vision to sustainability, and recognizes that engaging people increases their commitment to the business and its goals. These are recurring themes in my thinking.

PETM, or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, has been on my mind lately since Vermont is still recovering from the impacts of Hurricane Irene. While the direct impact of the storm was on relatively small numbers of people in a world of 7 billion humans, we in Vermont have a tight knit community. We feel each other’s pain.

Energy resilience will result from energy solutions for buildings that allow communities to improve building energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions, and increase our energy options. I’ve been struggling with the barriers to increasing energy resilience in our built environment for my 30-year career. I have known since I was a teenager that the way we live is unsustainable and have been dedicated to changing that. Yet while I’ve been part of numerous success stories, they comprise only a small patchwork of policy and programmatic innovations and a few projects with progressive building owners who were willing to move beyond the norm. It is simply not enough.