Energy in Transition
Solving the energy trilemma
Top 5 Ways ZNE Can Make Life More Comfortable During Global Weirding
2017 was a weird year as far as weather goes, hitting close to home for our DNV GL family. A colleague in Colorado evacuated due to flash flooding in July. A month later, our DNV GL Houston office employees were left without power for days after ...
8 Reasons Electric Trucks will be better at off-roading
In 2013, I published a blog about electric vehicles from the motorhead perspective. Four years later, nearly every supercar brand uses a hybrid or full-electric as its halo car, electric cars have broken 0-60 marks that were never dreamed of by p ...
The Quest of doing Laundry: Calculating cost, emissions, and values
Around this time last year, there were several exciting events concerning water usage. For one, LEED version 4 officially took over the LEED version 2009; one of the changes is the inclusion of process water in the Indoor Water Use Reduc ...
Buildings are for people: Engaging occupants on resilience
Recently I was on a panel at the Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change conference that explored the relationship between human engagement and climate resilience and discussed effective behavior change strategies for resilience and energy efficie ...
Partnerships for smart and sustainable cities
Cities face a wide range of challenges: maintaining and replacing aging infrastructure, managing maintenance costs, rapidly changing technologies, ensuring proper data security and performance management, and resource constraints that affect all of t ...
The utility's role in zero energy and resiliency
At the past two Conference of Parties (COP 21 and 22), worldwide goals are being developed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, plan for extreme weather events, and pave the way for affordable and clean energy communities. Policymakers, city planners, ...
The Trajectory to Net Zero Energy Buildings through Utility-Enhanced Energy Efficiency
In January 2008 the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) published its ASHRAE Vision 2020: Providing tools by 2020 that enable the building community to produce market-viable NZEBs (Net Zero Energy Build ...
Data, data, sensors, sensors, everywhere!
After attending back to back smart city conferences—VERGE (Where Technology Meets Sustainability) and Smart Cities Week (every smart technology under the sun)—I have to say that everyone recognizes the enormous potential to do good with Big Data ...
Stop putting wind turbines on buildings!
A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle outlined why the new Public Utilities Commission headquarters at 525 Golden Gate Avenue isn’t quite as green as planned. The LEED Platinum building was “touted as the most energy-efficient buildin ...
The City of Madison—breaking new territory in sustainability planning
Sustainability is an issue that is on many people’s minds, but not everyone is certain how to tackle this rather amorphous concept. One group that is tackling it is cities, and not just the usual suspects like large, coastal cities. Other cities, l ...