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.

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.

A quick look around the wide world of better building performance in cities. Including a live-streaming virtual conference from London, an innovative Heat Map, the intserection of art and data, our own datalyzer updated, and a musing on the chemical rewards of 'disclosure.'

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?

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.

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

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.

Monash University's Energy and Water Manager, Dr Rob Brimblecombe, reports from their campus in South Eastern Australia. A year of data shows that temperature setpoints can be 2 degrees higher in summer, keeping people comfortable and saving energy.

Data visualisation is a constantly developing discipline that incorporates elements of programming, graphic design, science and research. Green Buildings Alive's mission is to share data, and we mainly use graphs to visualise the secret lives of commercial buildings. But there’s a wider world of intriguing ways to share data and to draw meaning from it.

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.

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.

Building occupancy rates and electricity use should in theory be closely linked if buildings are well managed. In practice they may not be. We look at energy data for a selection of buildings that experienced periods of substantial vacancy. One explanation: it's easier to run a full building efficiently. What do you think?

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.

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.

Around the world, organisations are launching projects that share real measurements to verify and improve what it means to be ‘green’. Here are two new overseas initiatives that have caught our eye. Is transparency part of the Zeitgeist?

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...

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.

Debunk green building myths with real data! The Green Buildings Alive team will be available in a live blogging session to answer your questions on this new resource for real building performance data. Online Event Wednesday 22nd September (12 noon Aust EST, GMT +10)

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...

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.