A Meeting of the Energy-Minded
The Caltech Energy Forum, hosted by Caltech Facilities, celebrated its fourth annual event on October 30, 2014, bringing together 150 industry leaders from a wide variety of specialties including education, entertainment, health care, architecture, engineering, construction, real estate, and energy-service providers. The diverse group gathered in the Athenaeum for a daylong conference, themed “Making Big Data Work,” to learn how Caltech manages its own building data and to learn key success strategies from the five-year history of Caltech’s green revolving fund, the Caltech Energy Conservation Investment Program (CECIP). Caltech has invested $15 million in CECIP to date and has achieved an overall 26 percent return on investment from the program. Speakers included Caltech’s Jim Cowell, associate vice president for facilities; Matthew Berbee, director of maintenance management and energy services; and John Onderdonk, director for sustainability programs. Keynote presenters were Energy Efficiency Funding Group’s founder and president, Mark Jewell, who spoke on the how to effectively sell energy efficiency to an organization’s various stakeholders; and Microsoft’s director of worldwide energy and building technology, Darrell Smith, who spoke on how Microsoft quietly lay the groundwork for the city of the future, utilizing energy-efficient facilities and automated diagnostics.
Photo by Karl Klein