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.

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.

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?

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.