From the category archives:

Energy efficiency

Net-Zero Building Design Comes to Maine

Bill Maclay on September 13, 2011

On a sunny day in July, I was happy to find myself in Boothbay, Maine for the grand opening of our most recent net-zero project, The Bosarge Family Education Center at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Heralded by the press as “The Greenest Building in Maine”, this educational center is the first net-zero commercial/institutional project [...]

{ 0 comments }

Net-Zero: Lessons from the Field

Bill Maclay on July 20, 2011

I recently had the chance to travel to Montreal and present one of our Vermont projects, the net-zero Putney School Field House, at the international ASHRAE conference. This was an exciting chance for us to share with others how it really is possible to achieve net-zero in the cold climate of Vermont. This was also a [...]

{ 0 comments }

Net-Zero Energy Buildings: Semantic Antics

Pat Heffernan on October 26, 2010

Is obfuscation one of your goals? I didn’t think so. It does seem to be a goal in many architectural, energy efficiency and sustainability circles though. The terms zero energy building, net-zero carbon, net-zero energy cost, zero net energy, net-zero energy site, net-zero electricity, near net-zero, and net-zero ready…are all tossed about to describe a [...]

{ 0 comments }

LEED buildings: The Gap between Promise and Performance

Pat Heffernan on May 25, 2010

The Promise A recent opinion piece by Alec Appelbaum in the New York Times caught my eye. In “Don’t LEED Us Astray,” Appelbaum wrote about the promise represented by the grand opening of 1 Bryant Park, a new LEED platinum-certified office tower in New York city. The tower is the first to rate platinum, the [...]

{ 0 comments }

Four Must Do Steps to Win
the Energy Challenge

Bill Maclay on March 15, 2010

Image by geofones via Flickr At the 2010  Efficiency Vermont’s Better Buildings Conference, Andy Shapiro of Energy Balance and I offered an “Energy Challenge” to the audience of architects and building owners to begin a broad based campaign to track building energy performance. This challenge extends not only to collecting the data for your business [...]

{ 0 comments }

Building Energy Metrics

Bill Maclay on March 5, 2010

Image by Paul Garland via Flickr How many people would buy a car without knowing its estimated mileage? Comparatively, how many people would build a building without knowing an estimated energy performance? While all consumers have documented miles per gallon estimates for their vehicles, almost no building owners know how much energy their building uses, [...]

{ 1 comment }

Net Zero Energy Buildings: Stable Returns in an Unstable World

Bill Maclay on September 18, 2009

Faced with multiple challenges from environmental pressures due to climate change, energy price volatility and the economic downturn, we have never had a better time to build wisely. But we’re not talking about any ordinary buildings—we are talking about the design and construction of buildings that minimize the use of natural resources and energy. Such [...]

{ 0 comments }