City of the future

One of the biggest contributors to greenhouses gases in the U.S. is what you’d least expect — commercial buildings. In fact, the office you’re reading this blog post in right now may have as much of an environmental impact as your commute to work today. Commercial buildings are responsible for nearly 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases — nearly as much as the emissions from all forms of transportation. They are also one of the single greatest operating expenses for companies. Energy plays a significant part in those expenses, particularly when inefficiencies across commercial buildings waste an estimated 15 to 30 percent of the energy they use.

In October 2011, [Microsoft] published a whitepaper that detailed a pilot at Microsoft to make energy-smart buildings. The pilot began with a fairly small number of buildings on our Redmond campus. We took the building management system in some of our buildings and added an additional layer of IT intelligence on top of them. We found that we could reduce energy usage by six to ten percent — all without needing to make a single retrofit to buildings. Today in a story on Microsoft News Center called

[source: http://sustainableindustries.com/articles/2013/04/city-future]