The education of building technicians—people who operate the electrical and mechanical systems within skyscrapers and industrial facilities—is critical for long-term energy conservation and efforts to reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels. Forty percent of the nation's energy use and 40 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions come from buildings.
The energy efficiency of buildings depends largely on the skills of building technicians, because even new buildings will not run efficiently if technicians do not operate their systems properly.
For this reason the Building Efficiency for a Sustainable Tomorrow (BEST) Center at Laney College, in Oakland, California, has developed close partnerships with scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. These partnerships add the latest energy efficiency research to the working knowledge of technicians who operate large commercial buildings and the community college instructors who teach building technicians.
In the photo, Andrea Mercado, a senior research associate in the Building Technology and Urban Systems Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, shares her research on energy-usage benchmarking with instructors at a BEST Center workshop in June.