Kevin Surace is the CEO of Serious Energy, and he's also the one of the best speakers in the country when it comes to detailing the opportunities created through energy efficiency. Energy efficient buildings consume less energy, which means lower power bills, which means cleaner air and less demand for burning coal or natural gas.

Green buildings also achieve higher rental and resale values, creating money in a relatively frictionless way, and put assembly line employees, contractors, electricians, and architects to work. It's a virtuous cycle if there ever was one.

But it's tough to do the performance justice in words. So here you can find some of his most recent speeches and press interviews.

If you're sitting in your office freezing because of chilly weather outside or baking because of accumulated solar heat, you have a problem. And Serious Energy has the solution: the iWindow. It's an easy-to-install window we've created to help better insulate your building. The iWindow snaps into existing frames over the top of existing windows: no disruption to people indoors, no high installation costs. Fast. Easy.

And to let the world know about them, we're holding the "I Want New Windows" contest. Write in why your building needs new windows and you could be one of the winners of 250 square feet of iWindows. (click here to enter) or vote for one of the entrants. (See list here.) We will later tally the votes and select the winners.

Today's entry comes from Tanya W in Northern California. Unlike Nash in Montana, who is freezing, Tanya is being pounded by the heat:

Today's entry comes from Judy from Pennsylvania who works in a building that she says is stuck in the past:

"We in central PA tend to be 10 - 15 years behind the market for these sorts of technologies. It would be great for you to select this building -- a typical mixed use; older building commonly found in many older cities in the US -- so you can demonstrate how effective your product is for retrofitting older buildings."

Vote for Judy if you want her to jump into the modern age, or send us your own tale worthy of an extreme makeover.

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

We recently attended the Clinton Global Initiative 2011, in NYC, and had an amazing time learning about the exciting and important projects that community leaders, around the globe, are currently working on.

You can watch the full panel discussion here:

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.

This is a great like-minded article (“Cut costs and create jobs by retrofitting schools,” by Boonsri Dickinson), similar to our recent blog post on making schools more energy efficient. Dickinson interviews David Myers, president of Building Efficiency at Johnson Controls, and asks some important questions about the value of retrofitting existing buildings to make them more energy efficient.

Over at Green Building Pro there’s an excellent article about the importance of green retrofits for historic buildings (“Greening a Historic School” by Jim Lindberg). In it, Lindberg raises some insightful questions about the penchant for valuing new, environmentally friendly design over re-valuing and retrofitting older buildings.

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.

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.

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.