Buildings
Reinventing Fire: Buildings
Executive Summary America’s 120 million buildings consume a prodigious amount of energy—42 percent of the nation’s primary energy, 72 percent of its electricity, and 34 percent of its directly used natural gas. They use more energy than any country except China and the whole United States. But the U.S. buildings…
BEM Summit Pre-read
This document was written as preparatory material for all Building Energy Modeling (BEM) Innovation Summit attendees prior to the actual event. The purpose of this document was to provide all attendees with an understanding of the history and current state of the energy modeling industry within the United States. Specifically, this…
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.
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…
Collaborate and Capitalize: Post-Report from the BEM Innovation Summit
In 2011, RMI convened an invited group of key stakeholders within the building energy modeling (BEM) community to increase collaboration and develop implementation plans to address key barriers. This report describes the motivation for convening the BEM Innovation Summit; provides a recap of the group events and discussions; provides a…