Energy Information Now Available from Around the Globe

Energy Data Available Anywhere, Any Time

(NREL news feature) – Having rapidly established itself as a “go to” site for transportation and other related energy information, the Virtual Information Bridge to Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (VIBE) is expanding its reach to attract new users across the widest range of energy issues. A sister site to VIBE, called Open Energy Information, has been launched to allow organizations around the world to both post their own energy data and download data, for free.

At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), VIBE is known as a state-of-the art presentation studio on the third floor of Building 16. Its walls are covered with flat-screen monitors aglow with widgets, home pages, Web links and sundry visual cues of the virtual world, all smattered among scores of more conventional pie charts, myriad bar graphs and a plethora of energy data sets.

To the world beyond the Laboratory, VIBE and Open Energy Information (OpenEI) contain that same treasure trove of information and a lot more — with every tidbit of data just a mouse click away from any internet-connected device, anywhere.

http://www.nrel.gov/features/20100108_vibe.html

New ASHRAE Research Attempts to Tie Energy Efficiency & Reference Model

ATLANTA – Ensuring that a common language of “energy efficiency” is spoken by both building information modeling software used by architects and energy analysis and simulation software used by engineers is the goal of new research funded by ASHRAE.

The project will develop open-source reference models by which developers may test their solutions to interoperability between BIM and energy simulation software. The project will focus on the most common thermal features in buildings assumed to have the greatest impact on energy use, and provide guidelines for describing thermal models extracted from BIM and the rules for extracting those models used in whole building energy analysis applications.

The rest of this article can be read here http://www.ashrae.org/pressroom/detail/17243