How to turn blueprints green
Even in today’s increasingly energy-conscious world, it’s rare for the subject of energy efficiency to be addressed in the early stages of designing a new building, whether it’s a single-family home or a large factory or office building. Typically, issues about lighting, heating and insulation are left until after initial decisions about the size, shape and orientation of the building have been made.Leon Glicksman, MIT professor of building technology and mechanical engineering, has long argued that that’s the wrong way to go about it, and that in order to come close to optimizing energy use in buildings, it is essential to make those considerations part of the process from the very beginning. And so Glicksman and some of his students have been developing a simple, open-source web application that allows people to do a basic analysis of a proposed building’s energy usage in just a few minutes, making it possible...