San Francisco City Hall Oldest Building to Earn LEED Platinum
SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco’s 100-year-old City Hall is now the oldest building in the U.S. to receive LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
May 2015
Yellowstone Project Uses Batteries for Solar Power
MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS, Wyo. —At the Lamar Buffalo Ranch field campus in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, a distributed energy system that combines solar power generation with re-used car battery packs is now online.
Green Seal Revises GS-42 Standard
WASHINGTON — Washington D.C.-based Green Seal introduced a revised version of GS-42, its standard for commercial and institutional cleaning services, the organization confirmed on May 19.
The revised standard has been reorganized to make the requirements for certification clearer and more streamlined. General criteria and leadership levels for the standard, however, have not changed. Any service currently certified does not need to meet additional requirements to maintain certification, according to Green Seal.
Energy Execs Focus on New Growth Strategies
HOUSTON — Fluctuating commodity pricing and a volatile environment have pushed energy executives to focus on new growth strategies and to implement significant changes to their business models, according to the results of the 2015 Energy Industry Outlook Survey conducted by KPMG, an international audit, tax and advisory firm.
KPMG announced the findings on May 20 at its global energy conference in Houston.
Mark Foster
Mark Foster has joined Green Generation Solutions LLC, (GreenGen) a Washington-based company experienced in engineering and implementing energy efficiency plans in commercial properties, as manager for the company’s European market. In this capacity, Foster supports GreenGen’s European operations, providing a full range of energy, water and carbon reduction solutions for GreenGen’s commercial property owner clients in Europe.
Power and Energy Meter
Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management announced the newest addition to its PowerLogic portfolio of power and energy meters. Capabilities once reserved for more advanced meters now come standard in the PowerLogic PM8000 series, allowing it to deliver superior revenue accuracy, power quality compliance and analysis ideal for industrial and critical power facilities, as well as electric utility feeder meter applications. The PowerLogic PM8000 series is highly accurate, extremely reliable and helps ensure contractual obligations for power quality.
GE Lighting Honors Lighting Design Achievement
CLEVELAND — GE Lighting, headquartered in Cleveland, recently honored a team of architects for their lighting design at Square Inc., a mobile payments startup company that is based in San Francisco.
Acoustics: The Sounds of Sustainable Design
As the field of sustainable design grows and matures, more practitioners are turning away from a field that is based only on clear-cut metrics and realizing that the fuzzier areas of human comfort and productivity are very important as well. Consequently, space acoustics are garnering growing attention in sustainable projects.
Experts Examine Future of Energy Performance
VANCOUVER, Wash. — Determining a building’s energy efficiency based solely on using predictive energy models and specifying certain design and construction attributes may be a thing of the past by the time the next generation of architects and engineers join the workforce, according to the New Buildings Institute (NBI), headquartered in Vancouver.
Connecticut Plans Energy Efficiency Measures
HARTFORD, Conn. — Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced May 12 that new energy efficiency measures planned for Connecticut Valley Hospital (CVH) in Middletown and several Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices throughout the state will reduce energy costs at those locations by more than $3.3 million per year.
The measures are being implemented under the state’s “Lead by Example” initiative, which was designed to reduce energy use in state and local government buildings.