Energy efficiency, as you've no doubt heard, is the low-hanging fruit when it comes to operating expenses. Commercial buildings consume 18 percent of the energy in the U.S., according to the DOE, and roughly 30 percent of it gets wasted or consumed inefficiently, according to the EPA.

If a building owner has a $1 million energy bill and cuts it by 10 percent with no upfront costs, something you can do with building analytics tools like SeriousEnergy Manager and SeriousCapital, there's $100,000 in savings right there.

IDC Energy Insights, in a recent report on building management, has ranked Serious Energy as one of the "major players" in building energy analytics.

Solar Decathlon team from University of Tennessee wins top energy scores for design of a vented double-glass façade system that relied on the super-insulating properties of SeriousGlass.

New York Stock Exchange Selects SeriousGlass for Energy-Saving Glass Retrofit

Sunnyvale, CA – October 3, 2011 - Serious Energy, Inc. today announced that its super-insulating SeriousGlass commercial glass has been installed in the New York Stock Exchange building, a designated National Historic Landmark. SeriousGlass was selected to modernize the 104-year-old building to reduce energy use while maximizing natural daylighting and improving year-round comfort. The SeriousGlass retrofit will increase the thermal performance by almost 60% and reduce solar heat gain by 40% compared to the original glass. Approved by the Landmark Preservation Commission, SeriousGlass enables state-of-the-art, high energy performance for the building without altering the aesthetics or integrity of the building’s historic exterior. The same SeriousGlass technology was utilized for the retrofit of all 6,514 windows of the Empire State Building as a critical part of its whole building energy efficiency retrofit project.

Sunnyvale, CA – September 27, 2011 – Serious Energy today announced a technology partnership with U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), creators of the LEED green building program and LEED Online. Coined LEED Automation, the partnership enables users of LEED to easily sync up data and information with LEED Online, the software platform that manages the LEED green building certification process, and drive continuous improvement in their buildings.

With the economy struggling, it might at first seem counter intuitive to invest money in energy management solutions that make buildings smarter and more energy efficient. Energy upgrades and retrofits can appear to be ‘nice to haves’ rather than ‘need to haves’ when budgets are tight.

Super-insulating SeriousWindows can help reduce energy bills in two ways. They can reduce heating and cooling loads by reducing the amount of heat that is conducted through the window, as well as the amount of heat that is leaked around the window (known as “infiltration").

We get to meet and work with some seriously cool people at Serious Energy. But two of the coolest people would have to be Harker Upper School students, Shreya Indukuri and Daniela Lapidous, who had the vision, passion and dedication to get their school to implement smart energy management tools.

We love this recent article by Ronald Hicks on SustainableFacility.com: “The Facility Manager’s Role.” In it, Hicks insightfully calls attention to the importance of facility teams for ensuring the success of any sustainable building project. We couldn’t agree more.

Launches new release of SeriousEnergy Manager™ Enterprise Energy Efficiency Platform

Sunnyvale, CA – July 19, 2011 – Serious Energy today launched a new release of SeriousEnergy Manager enterprise energy-efficiency management platform.  This new release especially enhances the pivotal role facility teams play in delivering energy savings and occupant satisfaction with greater ease and precision than ever before, ultimately creating more valuable buildings for both building owners and the people who occupy them.  SeriousEnergy Manager 3.1 includes powerful building intelligence reporting capabilities, advanced fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) for HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) equipment, and more sophisticated monitoring and analytics applications.

BOMA Magazine’s recent “Green Guide” issue (May / June 2011) places sustainable commercial buildings at the center of business management – exactly where they should be. As the article’s author, Stephanie Oppenheimer, states, “The surveys are in, and the evidence is growing.” Sustainability isn’t just a quaint add-on, an afterthought, or the icing on the cake. It has moved from a nice-to-have branding initiative to a need-to-have, bottom-line driver.

At Serious, we often cite that windows are the ‘weakest link’ in a building’s thermal envelope.  An interesting statistic in this regard was offered recently by McGraw-Hill Construction Continuing Education author, Katharine Logan.  In her article “The Rise of Retrofit,” she writes:

The theme at the Commercial Real Estate industry’s big spring gathering, the CoreNet Global Summit, is ‘Social Dynamics in the Workplace.’ Here ‘social dynamics’ is short for leveraging social media and mobile device technology. In support of the theme, CoreNet organizers have asked their baby boomer colleagues to actively listen to younger leaders. What they’ve learned is that healthy, sustainable environments are a top priority. When these ‘digital natives’ are not comfortable with the temperature, noise, lighting of their workspaces, they’ll ‘go mobile’ – even if the interaction with co-workers at the office would be a productivity boon. They’re also ready to get involved in their companies sustainability efforts and willing to embrace new technology that will help them reduce their carbon footprint.

A survey of utility executives conducted by Comverge to gauge their opinions on smart grid and energy efficiency issues revealed a widely-held expectation that budgets for energy efficiency resources will increase significantly in 2011. A full 92% of respondents indicated that they anticipate an increase in energy efficiency investments. Of all respondents 50% foresee a rise of 10%, 21% predict a rise of 11-20% and 21% expect an increase of 21-100% of current investment levels.

Yesterday the MIT Technology Review announced the TR50, a list of the world’s 50 most innovative companies, and for the second year in a row, Serious Energy, formerly known as Serious Materials, made the list.  The editors of Technology Review seek out companies with disruptive technologies that are poised to set the agenda for key markets.  While the honorees span industries as diverse as high-tech, energy, biomedicine and materials, the common denominator is that they all use innovation to reshape their industries and transform their markets.

Students at the Harker School in San Jose, CA are driving energy efficiency across their campus with the help of SeriousEnergy Manager – our web-based platform that produces real-time analytics and controls to cut and optimize energy usage.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday, Kevin Surace talked with Hub Culture about bringing a high-tech "walk through walls" mentality to the building materials industry. To achieve high-performing, energy-efficient buildings, Serious Materials tears down technological barriers that have gone unquestioned in the building industry for decades. The driving force behind breakthroughs like high R-value SeriousWindows and SeriousEnergy Manager, our web-based energy management platform are simple: save energy and save money.

SeriousEnergy Manager™ produces immediate energy savings of 10% - 15% with payback in one to two years

SUNNYVALE, CA, September 27, 2010 – Serious Energy, formerly known as Serious Materials, the leading provider of high-tech solutions that reduce energy usage in the built environment, today announced SeriousEnergy Manager, a software-as-a-service platform that provides building owners and property managers with continuous monitoring, analysis, optimization and control of overall energy usage in commercial buildings. Used in over 60 buildings in the U.S. and India to date, SeriousEnergy Manager provides consistently fast energy-savings of 10 to 15 percent for rapid total solution payback in one to two years.

SeriousEnergy Manager™ provides building owners, property managers, and facility teams with advanced energy management, analytics and control to meet the new international energy management standard