The core focus of Building Insights LLC is reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions in the built environment.
We achieve this by offering several services:
Techno-economic Analysis
The best way to make informed decisions about energy and environmental considerations is to develop a detailed techno-economic analysis. This includes the combination of cost analysis (including upfront costs and long-term cost implications), energy analysis, and emissions analysis. This allows clients to analyze direct financial payback and a ‘carbon ROI,’ which helps to prioritize the most cost-effective ways to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions for new building or renovation projects. This analysis can be an effective decision-making tool from the building scale (for developers) to the national scale (for code officials and policymakers).
Techno-economic analysis by Building Insights utilizes several technical tools:
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
LCA is the backbone of assessing carbon emissions and other environmental impacts. Building Insights uses LCA to assess the embodied carbon emissions and other environmental impacts of products (both building materials and consumer products), whole buildings, districts, and cities.
Energy modeling
Energy models are necessary to quantify the energy consumption of new or existing buildings, and to assess the potential energy savings of various energy use reduction strategies. This can be performed at the building, district, or city scale.
Energy auditing
Energy audits are necessary when energy consumption needs to be assessed for existing facilities. Building Insights has decades of experience auditing residential, commercial, and industrial facilities.
Owner Advocacy
Many building owners, developers, government officials, and contractors have ambitious carbon- and energy-reduction goals, but do not have the time to become technical experts in building science. Building Insights has served as an owner’s advocate for developers, land-owners, city governments, federal agencies, and Fortune 500 companies such as McDonald’s and REI when their energy ambitions outpaced their personal expertise.
Owner’s Representative
An owner’s representative can represent the owner’s goals and ambitions in meetings with designers, developers, city officials, and other key players in a given project. Building Insights is comfortable serving in this role with any level of owner participation in the process.
Facilitation and Design Charrettes
It is critical to engage the entire development team early in the design process for an innovative construction project to ensure that there is alignment around the team’s design goals. Building Insights has deep expertise in delivering design ‘charettes’ or hands-on design meetings so that a team can continue with a project under a common understanding and with aligned incentives.
Compliance
Building insights can also help to ensure that building efficiency projects meet or exceed building efficiency or embodied carbon codes, policies, or certification schemes.
Technical Communication
Matt Jungclaus has developed dozens of public-facing and confidential technical reports to summarize the key takeaways of complex, multi-faceted projects focused on building energy efficiency, embodied carbon emissions, and policy. Public-facing examples are listed on the ‘About’ page, and PDF copies are available upon request.
Building Insights LLC 