Greening up Harrisburg’s Downtown

"GreenWorks Development's Campus Square Building - the home of the Green Center of Central Pennsylvania - was recently featured on GreenLife Pennsylvania. GreenLife Pennsylvania is a documentary series produced by WVIA, the public television station in the Wilkes Barre-Scranton area. The Campus Square Building was featured as a shining example...

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Green Center Announced

Today marked the announcement of the Green Center of Central Pennsylvania, where green technology will be made accessible to the community. The Center will partner with HACC to teach a green curriculum, enabling them to be on the cutting edge of the job market. Business and residents will be able to get information about environmentally-friendly...

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WITF Covers Green Center Announcement

(Harrisburg) -- A new non-profit organization is designed to serve as a "green hub," of sorts, for the midstate. The Green Center of Central Pennsylvania involves a partnership between Harrisburg Area Community College and several businesses. Its multi-pronged mission involves teaching and training people on sustainable technologies. Executive Director Jill Gaito says it will also serve as an information hub to the public on a range of "green" topics.

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Patriot News Green Center Coverage

"By fall, Harrisburg will have a center for environmental technology that will develop, teach and apply green technologies. The Green Center of Central Pennsylvania will help businesses and residents understand environmental technology and how to use it."

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If you're sitting in a conventional office building while you read this, take a moment to listen to your surroundings hum and breathe.

The HVAC system, the lights, the water, the elevators, the power and cooling for technology, the heating and cooling for people: all contribute to making buildings a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions—and a leading energy user. In fact, by 2025, buildings will use more energy than any other category of "consumer." (Already today, in the United States, they represent 70% of energy use.) And 40% of the world's current output of raw materials goes into buildings. That's about 3 billion tons ... annually.

Buildings, in short, are expensive—both in terms of real estate and operating costs, and in what they cost the planet. Fortunately, identifying some key causes brings some key opportunities for creating more green buildings into focus:

Instrumented
Today, many of the systems that constitute a building are managed independently—and many of them are not managed at all for their occupancy, energy use or thermal effect, due to a lack of sensors and monitors that would be needed to do so.

Interconnected
A lack of standards for measuring energy use and carbon footprints isolates buildings' systems from each other and makes practices that can control and manage energy use more difficult to implement. And the lack of standard interfaces across the broad array of devices and systems in a building makes managing them from a central point or plan nearly impossible.

Intelligent
But with an instrumented and interconnected building, building owners and tenants can make better decisions about the building's energy use—and can often rely on the building to "make those decisions" itself. Additionally, smart policies—new government standards for energy efficiency and incentives for architects, builders, developers and owners, so that savings on future operating costs can go to the people making the upfront investments—can combine with incentives for utilities to achieve a reduction in buildings' demands for energy and water.