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.

Australia recorded its all-time hottest day on Monday, 7th January (40.33°C average across the continent). In Sydney, a maximum over 41°C yesterday put the buildings to the test. For those using the Buildings Alive platform, the operators' responsive management meant energy peaks were kept under control and on average they performed better than expected for such a sizzling day.

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.

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

In a slick data-sharing exercise, six olympic venues are put under the microscope. Analysis is possible against temperature, opening hours, daylight hours and rainfall.

Around the world, a number of buildings are taking part in the Living Buildings Challenge, a program describing itself as the “most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment”; where in simplified terms, buildings give back more than they take. The current list of six certified projects includes several education and research facilities, a community centre and a home, with over 140 more projects under development. Could a high rise make this list? Should it? And if it can’t, what does that mean for the Living Building Challenge?

The Modi Research Group at Columbia University have published a heat map of New York City's power use, using a predictive computer model. Residents, workers and engineers alike can check how buildings compare to the neighbours. Can we make any comparisons between power use in New York and in Sydney? Is this a mark of a worldwide trend into online sharing of environmental data?

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.

Green Buildings Alive researchers will be presenting at the Australian Alliance to Save Energy Summer Study on Thursday this week.

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?

The ultimate adaptive building with features like a moveable skin or a sweat response in high humidity is still a way off, though it appears from our portfolio wide trials that using more dynamic temperature setpoints in existing buildings is a good early step to more responsive building management.

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?

Over $46 billion in spending for electricity network infrastructure is planned across Australia for the next five years, and as much as $7.6 billion of this is to manage growing peak demand in NSW. Pursuing energy efficiency in buildings can lead to lower operational expenditure, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and new research shows it has the potential to reduce the requirement for some network expansion.

We said we’d report back on how Australia’s first ‘trigeneration precinct’ is performing. Good news! In its first two weeks, the system produced 70,631 kWh of lower emissions electricity, equivalent to a saving of 38 tonnes of CO2-e.

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?

We’ve collated some recent observations that may shed some light on additional ways to improve building performance following this year’s Earth Hour, including seasonal variation in air-conditioning load that provide big opportunities to go 'beyond the hour'.

The University of New South Wales Sustainability website now publishes our energy use, depicting the electricity usage of key buildings on campus in real time. This guest post from UNSW's Sustainability Director, Aaron Magner shows how they did it.

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.

If you use less air-conditioning you don’t need as much electricity, but you also don’t need as much water to circulate through the cooling towers, see the proof from 55 Market Street Sydney.

CIBSE, the Chartered Institute of Building Sustainability Engineers, is hosting a series of seminars in Australia and NZ in November to introduce the Soft Landings tool. The Energy Efficiency Council (EEC) has its annual conference in Sydney on December 2.

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.

Welcome to Green Buildings Alive! **EDIT** The team were online on Wednesday 22nd September. Read the archive of our posts here. We've had a great response so far to our call for more transparency about the environmental performance of buildings.

Attractive young office buildings with green 'bling' get lots of attention, but what about a graceful old dame, maintained with love? Let's see what the data says...

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.

This insight shows the greenhouse emissions intensity in kg of carbon-dioxide-equivalent, per square metre for 53 Australian Buildings. Looks a bit like tangled spaghetti? Find out how to decipher the graphs...

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.