TEDxHarkerSchool was held in San Jose, CA, on October 22nd, 2011. The event "focused on fostering youth entrepreneurship through inspiration and learning from successful entrepreneurs." Our CEO, Kevin Surace, was on hand to inspire and instruct. His major takeaway? Well, to paraphrase the famous Platonic quote, the dramatic rise in global CO2 levels is now the mother of all re-invention.

Sunnyvale, CA—November 3, 2011— Serious Energy, Inc., a leader in energy efficiency solutions that increase the value of buildings, today announced it has retained the Clean Energy practice group of Grubb & Ellis Company, a leading real estate services and investment firm, to identify opportunities with occupiers and owners across the U.S. interested in making energy efficiency upgrades to their buildings. Grubb & Ellis will introduce Serious Energy’s building upgrade service at zero cost to building owners.

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

Greenbuild 2011 is right around the corner (this year, in Toronto from October 4 -7) and Serious Energy will be there. Come meet the team and learn about how we're making buildings smarter, more energy efficient, more comfortable, and more valuable!

The Empire State Building was awarded LEED Gold Certification last week. SeriousGlass technology was used in the retrofitting of the building’s 6,514 dual pane windows. As reported by the Environmental Leader, the no-disruption retrofit glass system  iWindow is the same technology adapted and priced for wide-spread commercial use. (Check this space soon for another NYC historical landmark announcing a SeriousGlass window retrofit.)

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.

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.

There are few better places to get a bead on the role real estate is playing in overall corporate strategy than at CoreNet Global’s regular gatherings. The concept of commercial workspace value has evolved well beyond the dollars and cents of square footage. Corporate real estate professionals at the CoreNet Spring Summit in Chicago last week were striving to quantify how value might rise with the higher productivity and improved health of people.

The Empire State Building today announced the completion of a building-wide window refurbishment. The initiative is one of eight measures implemented at the Landmark as part of an innovative energy retrofit project announced in April 2009 with President Bill Clinton and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The building's 6,514 windows were refurbished through a groundbreaking process that reused 96 percent of the existing glass and frames. The initiative alone will directly reduce building energy costs by more than $400,000 annually.

Former President Bill Clinton appeared on the David Letterman show.

Besides touching on his daughter's wedding, he also managed to steer the conversation to a topic near and dear to his (and our) heart: the absolute importance of "fixing" buildings so that they're more energy efficient.

The problem is building operations and materials consume (use) the most energy globally – of any other industry sector. The largest contributor to C02 generation is our buildings (52% vs. passenger cars of 9%).

We can re-invent and re-think how we build and re-build our buildings to save the most money, and save the most energy – beyond anything else. Going green has to be economical. It’s a tough challenge, but we’re doing it; building and homeowners are doing it; architects and developers are doing it.

Architects Thompson Naylor and Hartman Baldwin are working with Allen Associates to design and build an exemplar energy efficient, sustainable community in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara, CA, built on an infill site.