Presentations

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.

‘Green Jobs’ are all over the internet. What is the true intention of the term? Clearly, installing solar panels is a green job, but are green jobs limited to renewable energy positions? Steve Stelzer has researched this subject and has a multi-faceted presentation to help people understand the various green and not-so-green interpretations out there in the job market. In addition, he has some suggestions for “greening up” one’s conventional job.