Energy + Environment

Online attendee registration is now open for Greenbuild, the sustainability conference, which will be held in New Orleans (great city) this year. Click here to register.

The Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has launched a new collaborative initiative, the Lighting Energy Alliance, to increase the benefits of lighting while reducing its environmental and monetary costs. Member utilities and efficiency agencies will direct the work of the Alliance in order to produce the information needed to effectively reduce lighting [...]

The California Lighting Technology Center has published a guide to lighting retrofits for California schools, available free here. Developed in partnership with utilities and lighting industry leaders, it covers proven lighting and daylighting strategies that consistently provide excellent long-term energy savings and lighting quality improvements on K–12 and community college campuses. The interactive electronic document [...]

Lighting manufacturer Precision-Paragon [P2] has published a guide to help building owners and lighting professionals identify and maximize potential sources of energy savings. The 21-page publication, “6 Steps to Getting the Most From Every Lighting Retrofit,” is available for free as a downloadable e-book on the lighting manufacturer’s website here. The guide’s first chapter opens [...]

Rebate organizations have been busy updating their rebate and incentive programs for 2014. While not all of them operate on a calendar year, BriteSwitch, LLC still sees a lot of changes and trends in the industry. Right now, 71% of the country is covered by an active commercial lighting rebate. BriteSwitch has also noticed a [...]

My January column for the Lighting Controls Association blog and newsletter lightingCONTROL summarizes the major lighting changes in the new LEED v4. Of particular interest for general lighting is a new “lighting quality” provision (EQc6, Interior Lighting, 1 point), which lists eight options and requires adoption of at least four of them in the design. [...]

The General Services Administration recently recognized The Green Building Initiative’s (GBI) Green Globes alongside LEED as the two recommended third-party certification systems for the federal government to use to gauge performance of its buildings. Green Globes is a web-based program for green building guidance and certification that includes an onsite assessment by a third party. [...]

Energy efficiency measures are thriving in state capitals around the United States, with several states–including Mississippi, Connecticut, Illinois, and West Virginia–taking major steps that moved them up the ranks in the seventh annual edition of the State Energy Efficiency Scorecard released by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). The State Scorecard shows that [...]

The Illuminating Engineering Society has published an updated version of its authoritative reference on lighting upgrades, LEM-3-13. The document has been organized into three sections. The first describes general issues related to upgrading regardless of technology. The second covers equipment typically used in upgrades. And the third describes four applications (office, retail, school, healthcare) where [...]