Serious Energy received quite a bit of press last week when it formally unfurled SeriousCapital and revealed that Grubb & Ellis will help by offering the service to its customer base.

In a nutshell, SeriousEnergy lets commercial property owners upgrade their properties and cut energy consumption with no upfront costs. Overall energy costs go down by around ten percent, so a property owner that has a $1 million utility bill will see his or her bills go down to $900,000. But perhaps more importantly, the lower operating costs allow owners to raise rents. The sale price of buildings can also go up 10X over the amount of savings: $100,000 in savings, in other words, adds $1 million to the value of your capital.

Quiet changed lives for an American hero and his family in Ottawa, KS.  Watch the home tour clip from the November 2011 Extreme Makeover Home Edition now. Thousands of dedicated volunteers work diligently around the clock to complete a build in a week! See how quiet makes the difference.

Visit the show's website for more details on this episode.

Serious Energy joins Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in Ottawa, Kansas to help a family in need of quiet. While serving in Iraq, Staff Sergeant Allan Hill was nearly killed by a roadside bomb. Although he has recovered from physical injuries, Sergeant Hill now suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Loud noises can cause traumatic flashbacks that can be dangerous for Sergeant Hill and his family. Hill has spent almost a year away from his family, treating PTSD. We are very excited to help be a part of reuniting the Hill Family!

The Hill Family 2 hour episode airs November 4th 8/7C on ABC. Please tune in and see the Quiet Soundproofing System – including QuietRock, QuietPutty, and QuietSeal Pro in action!

With over 2000 dedicated volunteers the entire build was completed in 7 days! Truly amazing! Take a look as we take you behind the scenes with Serious Energy Rep Holly Burgess.

When they meet at the 6th Annual North American Passive House Conference this week, the masters of super-sealed, ultra-insulated building design will be seeing and hearing about the latest SeriousWindows technology. Serious Energy will be exhibiting and, on the podium, co-presenters John Semmelhack of the Mid-Atlantic and Graham Irwin of Northern California, will be sharing their  repeatable method for getting accurate predictions of actual energy performance using examples comprised of SeriousWindow models within the Passive House Planning Program, PHPP.

Hear Claire Broido Johnson at Groom Energy Enterprise Smart Grid Conference, November 2nd in Boston.

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

Are you people paying attention?

That's one of the primary, underlying questions in nearly every conversation I've had about smart grids, building efficiency and rate policies designed to reward energy conservation. Various polls show that the public and businesses want to curb their energy consumption to save money and because they acknowledge it is the "right thing to do."

We’ve begun to think of smart buildings as having integrated design with synched and automated systems that are managed for maximized energy efficiency and occupant comfort. Smart buildings -- dynamic, responsive, connected -- stand in stark contrast to the mute, immutable hunks of steel and sheetrock that most buildings still are. In this way, smart buildings are more closely aligned with our smart consumer electronic gadgets and the rest of our hyper-connected lives. They are even taking up residence in the Internet of Things. However, University of Illinois researchers are pushing this level of building intelligence in an entirely new direction: Buildings as living organisms.

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.

Across the board, open data is fueling important discussions about access to information in a post web 2.0 world and what we can do with such data when we have it. Simply put, open data matters because it significantly improves the overall quality and quantity of information, which fuels innovation and collaboration, and accelerates the rate of improvement.

Serious Energy is committed to, and passionate about, creating breakthrough innovations that make buildings smarter, more efficient, more comfortable, and more valuable.

Throughout the Summer of Smart, Serious Energy and GAFFTA are teaming up to host a series of events that are aimed at solving the most important problems facing our cities today. With our colleagues and collaborators, we’ll be creating smart applications and systems to help solve real challenges. And the challenges posed by our buildings are some of the greatest and most pressing.

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.

Just as Passive House and other energy-efficient construction methods are lowering total cost of ownership of residential homes, energy efficient building materials create significant value in the commercial space as well. Case in point:  the Empire State Building, where the New York Times is reporting a plan to create a publicly traded real estate company featuring the building.

North Carolina’s first Passive House, located in Chapel Hill, is also the first  on built out concrete.  Passive House Consultant, and owner of Anchorage Building Company, Chris Senior told Jetson Green that using concrete for the entire exterior of the home helped keep costs “surprisingly reasonable.”

According to the American Express Spending & Saving Tracker, an annual poll of homeowners that aims to understand consumer behavior and trends related to home improvement, 64% of homeowners plan to invest in home improvement projects in 2011.  32% of those homeowners indicated that their plans include “green improvements,” with 31% reporting specifically that they will invest in energy saving improvements in order to realize long-term cost savings.

In an article heralding commercial building deep energy retrofits as the unsung and unseen heroes of global efforts to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, TIME magazine touts the Empire State Building’s energy retrofit as “one of the biggest success stories to date.” With a payback of less than three years and 38% annual energy reduction, building owner Tony Malkin has achieved his goal of making the Empire State Building a flagship project to prove that energy efficiency makes sense for the bottom line.

Planet Forward, a special project developed by George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, provides an Internet forum for experts and interested public to provide their ideas for solutions to energy, climate change and sustainability challenges.

California residents now have access to a new resource to help them plan home energy retrofits and take advantage of the myriad of incentives, rebates and tax credits available from local, state and federal governments.  Energy Upgrade California, a new program developed by the California Energy Commission, local governments, utilities, the California Public Utilities Commission and contractors specializing in home energy audits, upgrades and retrofits, aims to make energy efficiency improvements and easy and attractive investment for homeowners.  The overall program objectives are to reduce household energy consumption, save consumer money on utility bills and create jobs in the building performance industry.