Check-out this TedX from NEEC Board Member, Matt Golden, of Recurve. His talk summarizes the challenge before us as we simultaneously decarbonize transportation, buildings, and the grid, which in California, has led to an anticipated 4GW shortfall during the summer peak. Acting on this emergency, Governor Newsom established a new $160 million statewide Market Access program. In this new program, load flexibility in buildings will be used to address some of that 4GW shortfall. Using buildings in this manner supports California in meeting its carbon goals and provides an immediate and innovative solution to the alternative ways to address the shortfall (e.g. back-up generators). This is a great example of how building efficiency and performance can be leveraged to enable electrification of transportation and other elements of the clean energy transition by filling in needs on the other end in maintaining grid reliability. Kudos to Matt for an excellent talk.

Watch: TEDx Sonoma 2022 Matt Golden on Decarbonizing the Grid 

A recent study conducted by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA), Red Car Analytics (RCA) and the University of Oregon (UO) shows that commercial building operators can reduce the risk of viral spread by more than 25% with two steps: 1) increase ventilation rates by 217%, 2) add in-room filtration units. Unfortunately, most HVAC systems that can handle this increased ventilation and filtration will also dramatically increase HVAC energy usage.

Thankfully, according to the same study, there are higher efficiency HVAC solutions, such as very high efficiency DOAS, that can run efficiently under acute ventilation conditions while using 37% less energy than less efficient HVAC options. To learn more about this study and the ways building operators can adapt their HVAC approaches to foster healthy indoor environments without wasting energy, read the full article on NEEA’s BetterBricks.com.

Join the 2050 Project as we learn about what King County and Washington State are doing to help commercial buildings lower their environmental impact and save money. There are six episodes in this engaging and educational video series. Each episode examines a unique focus between commercial properties and sustainability. And different guests are introduced throughout the series that add a range of perspective to the story. Help us share this important message, and act alongside other community members so that King County and WA State can reduce more emissions from commercial properties.