Presentations

Join us to learn about the journey of the Monarch School’s Outdoor Learning Studio, its Petal certification, and future ambitions. Originally put forward in 2011:

Greenwashing is a form of spin where green PR is used deceptively to promote the perception of an organization's products, behaviors, or policies as beneficial to the earth's environment, and/or human health.

Join Steve Stelzer as he moderates a panel for the Earth Day HTX Speaker Series called Building Optimization: Modernizing Houston Buildings for a Green Future. Panelists include:

Green Building Resource Center online education event in partnership with USGBC Texas.

District Cooling & Heating (DCH) systems (also known as District Energy Systems and community microgrids) normally distribute thermal energy in the form of chilled or heated water from a central source to residential, commercial, and industrial locations for use in space cooling or heating and/or dehumidification. The conditioning medium comes from a centralized distribution rather than being generated on site at each facility resulting in efficiencies due to serving multiple buildings.

The clean energy economy, decarbonization, net-zero buildings, and smart cities each rely on clean, reliable, and distributed energy.

Jeremy Sigmon, formerly of the U.S. Green Building Council and now with Texas-based manufacturer PowerStack, is working with designers, contractors, and landowners to deploy an emerging, attractive, resilient solution for outdoor power supply in a slender profile known as “Vertical Solar.”

Energy Star Portfolio Manager (ESPM) is a key tool for benchmarking energy consumption developed by DOE which is in wide use these days.

The purpose of this presentation is to affirm its usefulness as the first step to reducing energy consumption in existing buildings by benchmarking their usage. Steve will show his training slides for a city initiative to comply with Houston’s Decarbonization Policy for city buildings adopted this year.

Hemp is a rapidly renewable agricultural source of fiber for the building and fabric industries that is drought and pest resistant, giving it an excellent carbon footprint. It is new to the domestic market and worth learning more about it.

Energy dashboards are beginning to become mainstream in commercial buildings, with residential lagging. This dashboard is off to a great start as it ties to actual usage data from SmartMeterTexas. The idea is that homeowners will choose to manage their energy use more wisely if they have real data presented to them in a coherent fashion. The dashboard indicates comparison graphing from past usage to current along with the change in temperature between the usages. Other screens have other educational energy purposes.