Commercial Buildings
Who Needs Skeletons? We’ve got Servers in the Closets.
IT Industry analysts estimate there are over 11 million servers in use in 2012, growing to almost 13 million by 2020. While many large data centers are addressing energy use, half of the energy consumption for U.S. data centers comes from small server rooms and closets. These server rooms are…
Deep Energy Retrofits in GSA Buildings
GSA, DOE, FEMP, and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) convened a charrette at GSA offices in Washington, D.C. on March 4, 2013 to explore opportunities for deep energy retrofit ESPCs. The goals of the charrette were to: 1) Solicit input from energy service companies (ESCOs) on achieving deep retrofits and provide…
Working Together for Sustainability: The RMI-BOMA Guide for Landlords and Tenants
This guide is the result of a 2011 workshop put on by RMI and BOMA International to address some of the nontechnical barriers to energy efficiency in commercial buildings, especially those barriers related to split incentives between building landlords and tenants. This guide provides a framework for instituting cooperative and…
Achieving Passivhaus Standard in North America: Lessons Learned
To help mitigate climate change, the incremental approach to making homes and buildings less bad or 30% better than code is not going to work. We need aggressive, actionable solutions now. The Passive House standard (Passivhaus in German) is one of the world’s most aggressive, proven, voluntary approaches to radical…
Going Deeper: A New Approach for Encouraging Retrofits
This paper describes a new approach to demand-side management that promotes whole-building projects and encourages owners, energy service providers, and utilities to work together for significant energy savings.