Carbon Lighthouse

Carbon Lighthouse is pleased to announce the completion of its retrofits at the Flood Building, a 300,000 square foot San Francisco structure that survived both the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes. The retrofits involved collecting and analyzing more than 500,000 data points, and the lifetime savings of the project will exceed $1,200,000. The carbon emissions of [...]

Carbon Lighthouse was featured on a special episode of Planet Forward on Bloomberg TV. The episode highlighted our unique approach to delivering energy savings. It showcases a few of the facilities we’ve worked on to date. The title of the piece, “Bringing Old Electrical Systems into the Digital Age,” explores the many retrofit solutions we [...]

Bombarded by information about going green and unsure where to start? Here is a simple, no-nonsense guide to your options for reducing your personal carbon footprint profitably

Ever wonder what that blinking red light on the restaurant bathroom light switch is doing and how the lights know that you’re in there? Understand occupancy sensors here!

Carbon Lighthouse is excited to announce the closure of a project funding round. The funds will be used to help clients finance energy efficiency and carbon neutrality projects throughout California. Investors included private individuals and businesses interested in supporting meaningful environmental change while receiving an attractive financial return. “We are very excited to be able [...]

Forbes.com featured the analysis of Carbon Lighthouse President, Raphael Rosen on the topic of Cleantech Around the World. In a piece entitled, “Why Solar Makes More Economic Sense In Tanzania Than In Florida,” Raphael looked at the energy economics of solar and energy efficiency in different parts of the planet. Forbes’s website has ten million monthly [...]

KIPP Summit Academy, a San Lorenzo, CA middle school, has completed several projects with Carbon Lighthouse to profitably eliminate its building’s entire carbon footprint. Carbon Lighthouse conducted a comprehensive energy study at Summit Academy, collecting more than 100,000 data points on building lighting levels, temperature, and electrical current for five weeks. Carbon Lighthouse used that [...]

Bloomberg Businessweek has named Carbon Lighthouse as one of America’s Top 25 Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs of the Year. We are delighted to have been selected for the award! The Small Business bureau within Bloomberg Businessweek selected us from among more than 300 social enterprises nominated. Other winners included Inventure, Frogtek, and New Resource Bank. [...]

You’ve almost certainly seen turbines before, but probably never heard of microturbines. They are an interesting technology with environmental opportunities and pitfalls

Carbon Lighthouse proudly announced today that to advance its efforts of helping the environment it has become an ENERGY STAR Partner. Our voluntary partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR program underscores our mission of helping our clients improve the energy efficiency and performance of their facilities; we [...]

Tribute to a great scientist

Climate Corps Bay Area invited Carbon Lighthouse President Raphael Rosen to come speak to its clean energy program managers. Raphael spent an hour discussing the mission of Carbon Lighthouse as well as carbon markets more generally: the motivation behind the markets, their shortcomings, and the opportunity to use mandatory markets to improve voluntary ones. On [...]

This post examines several of the key challenges required to model the impact of solar arrays on demand charges.

On behalf of WMS Partners, a leading San Francisco real estate management firm, Carbon Lighthouse obtained Energy Star Certification for the historic Flood Building. Energy Star is a government program that recognizes  buildings that operate with among the highest energy efficiency in their class. The Flood Building’s operable windows, steam heating, and thorough maintenance program [...]

Odds are, you have never paid an energy demand charge in your life, but they are important part of how utility electricity works, and they become a complex problem when solar projects are involved.

The Ghostbusters. Such was the title Emmy-award winning NBC correspondent Scott Budman bestowed upon Carbon Lighthouse engineers when he followed some of our team members around a Palo Alto site. NBC came to learn more about Carbon Lighthouse in general and to witness our energy study in particular, the critical first step in our turnkey, [...]

Though a relatively obscure energy modulating solution for now, it has recently begun being marketed as an energy efficiency panacea. But is it?

South by Southwest,  (SXSW), an event planning organization renowned for its sprawling music, film, and technology festivals, extended an exclusive, complimentary invitation to Carbon Lighthouse to attend its first-ever SXSW Eco Conference in Austin. We met with leading cleantech executives, grantmakers, habitat defense organizations, and policy makers to discuss topics ranging from expected clean energy [...]

Plug and Play, one of the world’s largest incubators and organizers of startups, invited Carbon Lighthouse to address more than 500 individuals from leading corporations and investment firms including: Sprint, Vodafone, Best Buy, Tivo, Intel, Motorola, Google, Chevron, Samsung, Canon, Barnes & Noble, Vantage Point, DBL, Global Catalyst, and others.

Separating the marketing of a popular type of light from the reality.

Here we finish our examination of which is more emits more carbon dioxide: a gas powered car, or an electric car charged from a grid that is 100% coal-fired?

Here we explore the amount of energy and carbon dioxide a gasoline car uses to go one mile, and begin to compare it to an how much energy and carbon dioxide an electric car uses to go one mile.

Taylor Engineering, a design engineering firm with many publications on advanced energy efficiency, topics invited Carbon Lighthouse to come speak to its team about carbon markets. We shared our mission to make it profitable for every organization to become completely carbon-free, profitably, and talked in depth about the role to be played by effective carbon [...]

Why is everyone so excited about electric cars? Are they really better for the environment if half (or all) of a country’s electricity comes from coal? Read here to find out!

Odds are, you have been misdirected to this page. But if you came to learn about wasted energy usage and standby loads, then you are in luck. “Vampire loads,” “Phantom Loads,” or “Standby loads” are the power that devices use when you are not using them. Yes, frustratingly, every time you leave a computer, coffee [...]

Summer is upon us: what is it that those magical air conditioners are doing to the hot air? The basics start with sensible and latent heat.

Carbon Lighthouse was invited to address a Spanish course at CPS, an Oakland, California school with a strong environmental mission. Carbon Lighthouse was delighted to translate our “carbon-free profitably” mission into Spanish, spoken by more than 500 million people around the world. We discussed the nuances of energy engineering, energy project finance, and verifiable carbon [...]

How do we heat a room? If your answer is “by adding energy to the room,” then the good news is you are thinking like a physicist, but the bad news is you’re wrong.

What’s an economizer? If you’re asking that question, you are not yet an energy efficiency fanatic. That’s okay. This post is for you.

What does all the confusing energy jargon mean, and how does it relate to real life? What are BTUs, joules, therms, tons, and kilowatt-hours, and how do they compare to jelly beans, a can of soda, or a block of melting ice? This post aims to simplify the nomenclature by relating units of energy measurement to fun, every day items.

How do people actually know how much energy is coming out of a solar array? How do people measure energy efficiency savings? This article discusses some of the most common and useful energy engineering tools.

What a boring title. Those pendulous words, however, describe one of today’s most exciting and far-encompassing opportunities to help the environment while saving individuals and companies money.

Much time is spent talking about solar project finance. Not least of all by us: here, here, and here. There are a number of reasons for this: solar projects involve large dollar amounts, they are more commonly financed than efficiency projects, and they are highly visible. They are, however, generally less profitable investments than energy efficiency projects. Which leads to a reasonable question: why don’t more people implement energy efficiency projects?

Reasonable, but mysterious.

Updated from earlier post – thank you Emma for your helpful feedback! If you have questions, you may always email us at info {at} carbonlighthouse.com. We’ll do our best to answer as soon as we can! Roof top cooling towers are a critical aspect of energy efficiency in buildings. They can provide a way to [...]

Where it Doesn’t Work In previous entries ([1], [2]), we’ve looked at how solar project finance works from the perspective of homeowners and building owners as well as how project financiers earn their returns on investment. Given that solar project finance works and solar energy is much desired, why isn’t solar everywhere? Here we consider [...]

The Pieces of the Financing Puzzle In the last installment, we explored why solar project finance is necessary, and how homeowners and commercial real estate owners make payments through leases and PPAs. Where matters get messy is in examining how project financiers earn a return on their investment. Don’t they simply make money by lending [...]

Why it’s Needed The appeal of solar power is simple: a tireless source of clean energy, a compact solar module that allows any property owner to locally generate power, and durable equipment without moving parts that can operate for 40 years and then be recycled. The obvious question is why isn’t solar power everywhere. The [...]