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.

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.

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.

Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Energy, ventured into what some of you readers might think of as enemy territory this week. Namely, he appeared on the "After the Bell" segment of Fox News to discuss the bankruptcy of Solyndra, Serious Energy and energy markets in general.

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.

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.

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:

Twenty college teams from around the world are competing in the 2011 Solar Decathlon, organized by the U.S. Department of Energy -- and SeriousWindows have been used in three of the projects!

We’ve got some serious news! Our industry leading soundproofing system – including QuietRock, QuietPutty, and QuietSeal – was included in an upcoming episode of Extreme Home Makeover: Home Edition. It will air November 4th, 2011. Our own Holly Burgess was on hand for the fantastic "makeover". Here's a behind the scene look at the project and the amazing show:

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.

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

Really nice blog post at Planet Forward with a great accompanying video clip (shown below)... The key point in both is accounting for total cost of ownership of a house.

Sure, building a Passive House will create more upfront costs; but when you weigh the energy savings over time, payback awaits the wise, not to mention the  increased comfort high-tech ventilation affords.

Watch the clip. And no need to rewind when the architect gets to the part about "no furnace." That’s right. He said it.

Last week Serious Energy's CTO, Brandon Tinianov, spoke with Connie Kwan from Triple Pundit about the importance of improving energy efficiency of our existing building stock and our innovative window retrofit solution for the Empire State Building.  Without wasting a single pane of glass, Serious Energy upgraded all 6,514 windows in the Empire State Building with SeriousGlass technology, improving the thermal performance of the windows by up to four times and contributing to whole building energy savings of 38%.

Checking in on Chicago’s impressive recycle-reuse-energy-efficient-everything-retrofit, Elemental Building at 1610 N Honore Street, the home’s super-insulating fiberglass SeriousWindows are standing up to the harshness of their first mid-western winter.

Blake Bilyeu, Oregon-based builder and Passive House extraordinaire, explains in detail how the home he built saves money thanks to its energy-efficient design. The Bilyeu House is so airtight that it scored an ACH 0.2, it features Series 925 SeriousWindows, an energy recovery ventilation system, and solar hot water heater. While these features amounted to a net increase of about 6% in the overall budget of the house, Blake drives home exactly how that cost pays for itself and then some when you factor in incentives and future utility bills.

In a speech at Penn State University, President Obama announced the Better Buildings Initiative, a program aimed at achieving a 20% improvement in energy efficiency of America’s commercial buildings by the year 2020 and saving $40 billion per year in utility bills.  With the Better Buildings Initiative, the Obama administration is looking to make energy efficiency retrofits easier and even more attractive.  The initiative will work with government and the private sector to increase access to financing for energy efficiency projects, improve tax incentives for building owners, and award grants to local and state governments that streamline regulations and enact measures to attract private investment.

One of the most stringent performance requirements of the Passive House Standard is the air tightness of the building shell.  Air tightness refers to the ability of the building to prevent air infiltration through unsealed joints in the structure and around windows.  Air tightness plays a central role in the performance of a Passive House because air infiltration leads to uncontrolled heat gain and heat loss and lowers the ability of the house to heat and cool itself passively.  While refreshing a home’s air through ventilation is important for indoor air quality, a leaky home ventilates poorly, letting too much cold air in during the winter and not enough during the summer.  It is better to have an airtight home with a whole-house ventilation system.

With energy efficiency measures nearly complete, including our unique window retrofit, Empire State Building manager, Tony Malkin, now turns his attention to addressing the building’s energy supply. Just recently announced, the Empire State Building will purchase 55 million kilo-watt hours of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) - enough to offset its entire yearly energy consumption.  These RECs, more than any other commercial purchaser in New York buys, will come from wind power facilities owned by NRG Energy.

Planet Forward's special report on PBS investigates the paradigm-shifting retrofit project undertaken by Tony Malkin to make the Empire State Building a pioneer in energy efficiency.  The report highlights the importance of improving energy efficiency in existing buildings because the approximately 4.8 million commercial buildings in the U.S. account for 18% of our energy use.  However, perhaps most importantly, Planet Forward emphasizes that proving the financial case is the key to making commercial retrofits part of the mainstream - "green for green's sake only appeals to those who are already green."  That is exactly what Tony Malkin has set out to do.  The eight measures he implemented, including upgrading all 6,514 dual pane windows with SeriousGlass technology to make the window up to 4x more insulating, will save the Empire State Building $4 million dollars a year and will pay for itself in only 3 years.  Now that makes sense!

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.