I've been following the work of Edward Mazria since he published The Passive Solar Energy Book: A Complete Guide to Passive Solar Home, Greenhouse and Building Design back in 1979. It was a great introduction to passive solar design and probably still is. In 2002, he founded Architecture 2030 (http://www.architecture2030.org) with a goal "to achieve a dramatic reduction in the climate-change-causing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the Building Sector by changing the way buildings and developments are planned, designed and constructed."
Looking at the EIA's latest Annual Energy Outlook (http://www.eia.gov/...), he saw that 2030 projections for building energy consumption are in steep decline and that, even though the USA plans to add over 60 billion square feet of new buildings by 2030, the energy demands in those buildings will be so low we won't need any new power plants to service them.
(source: http://www.architecture2030.org/...)
"There is no longer any need to build power plants to meet growth in the buildings sector," says Mazria. "This is a monumental shift... We have essentially created a moratorium on new power plants through efficiency gains in the built environment. We are already beating the targets that we set six years ago."
In the USA, we've "reduced our emissions to 11.3 percent below 2005 levels [in the building sector], even as we’ve added square footage to the U.S. built environment."
Even more, if architects and builders implemented "best available demand technology" on new projects and renovations, they could cut demand in buildings by "more than eight quadrillion BTUs of energy and reduce the equivalent of 145 gigawatts of power plant capacity." As agencies like EIA consistently underestimate technological change in the efficiency and renewable energy sectors (and overestimate the future demand for energy), it's possible that the building sector will follow an even more drastic downward trajectory, saving more energy, more money, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Architecture 2030 has just released a beta version of The 2030 Palette (http://www.2030palette.org/)
The 2030 Palette is an interactive web platform containing a set of principles and actions for the planning and design of sustainable and resilient buildings and communities worldwide.
Since planning and designing the built environment is primarily a visual activity, the 2030 Palette is structured as a visual network of interrelated elements called Swatches. Swatches present highly complex and multi-dimensional information in a readily accessible format organized by category – Region, City/Town, District, Site and Building. Each Swatch contains a written recommendation, rule-of-thumb, images and graphics representing the physical application of the recommendation, as well as more detailed information for its successful application.
Interview with Mazria on 2030 Palette at
http://nextcity.org/...
In addition, last week, analysts at CO2 Scorecard (http://co2scorecard.org/...) concluded that economy-wide efficiency efforts were responsible for three-quarters of the carbon dioxide emissions reductions in 2012, not natural gas, as was commonly thought and frequently reported.
hat tip to http://www.greentechmedia.com/...
savings-in-energy-usage-by-us-building-sector