Choices in Sustainability
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Net Zero Energy Vermont » Bill Maclay
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Opinions & ideas on energy use, climate change, and the economy in Vermont
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Net-Zero Building Design Comes to Maine
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 [...]
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Net-Zero: Lessons from the Field
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 [...]
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Building Energy Statistics – Do they make sense?
Image via Wikipedia There are many measures used for building energy efficiency: total kBtu, kBtu/sf/yr, kWh/yr, therms/yr, kWh/sq.m/yr, $/yr or kBtu/person, and more. But determining when to use which metric, and even more important, how to make sense of a comparison of the energy efficiency of two different buildings, is no easy task. An Example [...]
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Same Size, But 33% Renewable in Upper Austria
Image via Wikipedia Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (VEIC) recently invited Christiane Egger from O.O. Energiesparverband, an organization similar to VEIC located in Upper Austria, to visit Vermont. O.O. Energiesparverband functions to promote energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy in the federal state of Upper Austria. What is interesting is that the state of [...]
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Four Must Do Steps to Win the Energy Challenge
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 [...]
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