Our experience with Buildings Alive has shown that building performance can improve quickly if operators receive the right information at the right time. Now we've got the opportunity to connect with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Labs and UC Berkeley in the USA to compare notes and see whether these successes can be replicated around the world. Buildings are becoming technologically more complex, and the potential for energy and greenhouse savings are still huge - how much still remains to be shown.

Through the efforts and commitment of their operators, the greenhouse gas emissions from each of the 32 buildings using the Pulse platform reduced by more than 200 tonnes on average during 2012! We look forward to hearing more from you, next year.

Green Buildings Alive is now an integral part of a fully independent venture called ‘Buildings Alive’. We want to work with those who share our vision for the built environment.

Here are some hot fashion tips for summer, and for office workers they might make shedding a few kilos so much easier…

Is it sensible, or realistic, to push the envelope ever further in the pursuit of greater indoor thermal comfort, and at what cost? If we succeed, will it make us happier? On returning from an international conference grappling with these issues it seems there is still a lot of work to do in balancing energy consumption with providing a building comfort level that goes unnoticed.

Want to drill deeper into the new Pulse tool? Lodge your questions for the team who will be online Friday March 16, 11am Sydney time (UTC +11). ...

The new Pulse tool provides a window into the operations of real office towers and the team will be available online on Friday March 16 (Thursday March 15 for Americas) to answer questions and hear your views. Pulse has grown out of a trial focused on human factors in making buildings greener. Our discussions here focus on: changes that cost little; regular feedback to building operators; and trial and error. The premise is 'find out if something works', and if it does - do it again. We're keen to hear what other similar innovations are taking place elsewhere.

Today we unveiled our latest visualisation tool. Pulse updates daily and lets you explore fine-grained energy information from real Australian office buildings. The new tool lets you pick a building, and see what happened inside it yesterday.

Complaints about office building air conditioning surge every weekday morning. Does this reflect serious thermal comfort and productivity concerns? Or could it be that most of us would just rather be somewhere else?

An analysis of 500 million Tweets showed most of us are happiest each weekday at 8am and our mood steadily declines until we’re heading for home in the afternoon. The study published in Science also concluded that people feel generally more positive heading into summer and we’re happier on weekends after a sleep in. However, the buildings complaints database containing 59,494 requests from occupants of buildings logged between July 2008 and yesterday shows people are most irritated by their temperature late morning and we complain less at hometime. Do the two studies contradict each other? What's going on? What can we do to respond for building energy efficiency?

The goal isn't efficiency, it's resource productivity...

GreenBuild Expo was in Toronto this year, the largest gathering of green buildings professionals in the world. We presented a number of lessons learnt from our work with Green Buildings Alive and experiences with the Investa portfolio, and noted where performance management and data are an emerging theme of discussions. Questions and comments are welcome.

I’m just back from the Property Council of Australia’s annual Congress in Darwin, a city renowned for its laidback lifestyle and great weather. But I had to wonder, what will climate change and a carbon price mean for the future of cold beer and air conditioning at the Top End?

Trigeneration technology is becoming commonplace in ‘green’ office developments. Starting yesterday, Sydney now has its first trigeneration precinct, where one building's engine can power another one's energy needs. Why was this necessary?

Most large office buildings try to keep internal air temperatures hovering around 21.5°C in winter and 22.5°C in summer. They do it because the leases require it. But is that in the best interests of the occupants? We’re not sure. With record high temperatures all over Australia this summer we’ve been calculating a shirt-to-jacket ratio as a way to investigate the connections between tenants clothes choices, building management, comfort and energy use. We count the jacket and shirt wearers twice a day, every day, in three large Sydney office buildings.

It’s time to sign off for 2010 and head out for a few weeks’ break. But before we do that, here are a few thoughts on Green Buildings Alive’s first months of ‘life’ and some plans for the year ahead.

From Monday 1st November pretty much anyone who seeks to sell or lease more than 2,000 square metres of office accommodation will be required to disclose their building’s energy efficiency rating.

Take all 18 UK Government department headquarters and pit them against each other in a friendly competition to see who can cut the most carbon. The thing that struck me first when I took a look at all the buildings’ half-hourly data was the mere fact that it existed.

We can safely say that the time for Green Buildings Alive has arrived. Thank you to everyone that posted a comment, sent a note, or simply followed what we were up to during World Green Building Week. The challenge was always going to be what to do next...

The team here at Green Buildings Alive is pleased to be part of Green Buildings Week, a series of events happening all over the world.

It takes a special kind of attitude to be an effective water-saver. It can become an obsession and, at the very least, requires a lot of commitment. Water savings go in peaks and troughs but are not necessarily seasonal.

Here is our first insight and we would love to hear your views! This example shows the monthly averages for energy and gas use between 2003 and 2010 for 53 commercial buildings in six Australian cities.

Buildings have a huge impact on our lives and on the environment and we need to learn how to make them better. This site is an open invitation to share, scrutinise and analyse real building performance data. Join in the discussion about what it all means, share ideas and challenge conventional thinking.