Zero Emissions Buildings

Last month, June 2024, the US Department of Energy (DOE) published the first ‘US National Definition of Zero Emissions Buildings’ to a tempered reaction from many in the buildings, energy, and environmental communities. After months of deliberation, the DOE’s somewhat simplistic definition reads: “A building is regarded as ‘zero emissions’ if it is highly energy […]

This Research Note examines an early-stage UK startup, MapMortar which has developed a retrofit twin platform designed to help large commercial real estate portfolio owners and asset managers model and simulate portfolio decarbonization to plan, manage, and execute retrofitting at scale. Founded in 2022 as Mortar.io, the startup changed its name to MapMortar, headquartered in […]

The European Parliament and European Council reached a provisional agreement this month to further reduce the emissions and energy use of buildings across the EU. A staggering 75% of Europe’s aging building stock is considered energy inefficient and this latest piece of legislation will strengthen the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) across the Union. […]

A zero emissions building is not as easy to define as you may think. Should it include embodied carbon, for example, should efficiency and clean energy generation be specific parts of the definition or should it simply refer to the level of emissions, whatever the approach? These are the kinds of questions being discussed in […]