Building Energy Resilience

Saving energy and promoting sustainability are the core philosophies underlying all of our client project work at Cx Associates. This strong shared belief in sustainability is part of our company’s culture. So about 18 months ago, we began brainstorming about other areas where we could extend this philosophy in our company beyond actual project work. One of the first things that came to mind was commuting, and we began to consider how we could encourage our employees to use the most environmentally-friendly means available for their commute back and forth to our office in downtown Burlington, Vermont.

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:

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.

Sustainability – defined here as the responsible management of natural resources to create a more robust, independent and environmentally conscious organization – is a pursuit being explored by more and more companies. The challenge for many corporate leaders and managers is how to initiate change in their company’s culture. How do you create such a sea change authentically: something that won’t sound like a gimmick or start with a bang and fizzle out within a brief period of time? Over the years I have seen a pattern to the steps taken by clients who have been successful in creating a corporate culture of sustainability.

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.