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No one really wants to say this out loud, but the fact is that a LEED design alone won’t give you an energy-efficient building. Architects don’t want to say it because it sounds like they’re not doing their jobs when they design LEED buildings. The U.S. Green Building Council doesn’t...

Long before there was LEED , long before Energy Star , there was CBECS . The Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey, as CBECS is formally known, provides a statistical baseline for the energy consumption of U.S. buildings. Never heard of CBECS? You’re not alone. But that doesn’t mean...

We didn’t plan it this way, but it just so happens that the 2011 FMXcellence honorees provide a pretty good picture of how FM departments are using sustainability to meet organizational goals. The FMXcellence program isn’t limited to green efforts. The ultimate test is adding value —...

President Obama came into office championing energy efficiency. But the biggest energy effort of his first two years — the cap and trade plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — never passed Congress. And the November election results mean cap and trade is off the table. But energy efficiency...

Some things seem so obvious that it’s hard to believe that other people don’t get it. You almost have to think that they actually do understand the point but for some reason don’t want to admit it. For facility managers, the benefits of making investment decisions based on life-cycle...

Ten years ago, the idea of winning acceptance for green buildings represented a big challenge. In hindsight, green design seems more like it was an opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of. Green buildings bring real benefits, not just to the environment, but also to the people who use them and the...

Reports from McKinsey & Company are not on the required-reading list for most facility managers. McKinsey is a consulting group that targets senior management, and they’ve made a name for themselves by analyzing opportunities and challenges that have strategic importance. Lately, McKinsey has...

The rationale for commissioning is pretty straightforward. Invest a modest amount of money to find things wrong with a building, fix those problems, and get the investment paid back in a short period of time. Sounds logical. But top management often sees things differently. The executive viewpoint may...

At the heart of the House and Senate climate-change bills is cap-and-trade, a complex system that, put very simply, requires companies to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions. Opponents of cap-and-trade like to call the idea cap-and-tax. But the preferred alternative to cap-and-trade, in the eyes of...

Not long ago, any time you got an X-ray, the doctor would pull out a big floppy rectangle of film. Now, there’s a good chance the doctor will call up the images on a computer screen. In the not too distant future, the old approach to X-rays will seem as antiquated as mercury thermometers. On the...

Of all the developments in the building industry over the past 10 years, I can’t think of one that’s had as much impact as the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED system. Wouldn’t it be great if the same thing turned out to be true for the next decade? That is, LEED not only serves...

Justifying an energy efficiency project requires facility executives to walk the fine line between salesmanship and exaggeration, said Richard Lubinski, president of Think Energy Management , at the Facility Decisions conference and exposition in Las Vegas. (For more on his session, click here .) To...

Want to improve your chances of convincing bean counters that investments in energy projects are worthwhile? Stop talking about payback periods and start talking about return on investment, said speakers at the Facility Decisions conference and exposition in Las Vegas. Alan Whitson, president, The Corporate...

Utilities have long offered rebates and other incentives for energy efficiency. In the early and mide-90s, for example, rebates helped drive a market shift from T12 lamps and magnetic ballasts to T8s and electronic ballasts. By the end of that decade, the amount of rebates had dropped. But the tide has...

Do you think of utility incentives when you're planning a new construction project? Maybe you should. If you're considering a green building, you should visit your utility to see if they have energy efficiency incentives for new buildings. For example, Southern California Edison has a program...

It’s too late to prevent all the harm that will be caused by climate change, say some experts, so we now have to start dealing with the new risks. The idea of adapting to shifts in the climate is gaining momentum in the face of evidence that climate change is already taking place, and will continue...

YouTube probably isn’t the first place you’d think to look for information about new data center designs. But Allstate is proud enough of a recently opened data center that it made a video about the facility and posted it on YouTube. The video covers some of the green measures adopted by...

In a word, top management wants to have its cake and eat it too, suggests a report from CoreNet Global . Is the recession goes on, senior managers want corporate real estate execs to cut costs while simultaneously adding value. The key to doing that is to focus on corporate outcomes, not on real estate...

As a structure, the Empire State Building is about as far it as can be from the one-room schoolhouse. But the Manhattan landmark has taken on a little of the function of a little red schoolhouse. The Empire State Building is now a virtual classroom for lessons on how to plan and carry out energy upgrades...

When it comes to saving energy in the data center, the HVAC system receives the lion's share of the attention. And rightly so. But that doesn't mean the other aspects of the data center don't offer energy saving opportunities, said Munther Salim at NFM&T during a Tuesday session on data...

Barack Obama’s honeymoon period has already come to an end. Between concerns about the cost and content of the stimulus package and the administration’s bad habit of picking nominees who failed to pay their taxes, the glow that surrounded the new president has dimmed. Add in the other major...

I was wondering whether to buy tomatoes as I walked through the mid-sized grocery store in my neighborhood the other day. Like everyone else, I was concerned about getting sick from eating contaminated tomatoes. In the produce section next to the tomatoes was a sign. It reported the concerns about tomatoes...

I got a surprise reading about results from a new survey conducted by the Uptime Institute . According to the survey , communications between IT and facilities are good or excellent in 57 percent of the companies that responded. In 59 percent of companies, communication was formal, structured and active...

If you’re a facility executive responsible for data centers, the following undoubtedly makes immediate sense. As servers, storage devices and other IT gear get smaller and more powerful, they generate more heat. That translates into greater cooling load in the same space, which in turn means more...

Rebates for energy upgrades have become more widespread in the past few years. But finding them isn’t necessarily easy. The incentives may not be well publicized, the programs don’t always last very long, and money is available on a first-come, first-served basis, so if you’re late...