Additional Resources
AIA COTE Top Ten: The best green buildings across the country. This is a great resource with lots of images and diagrams to help communicate green building effectively.
LEED User: Working on a LEED project? Get LEED user. Seriously, it's that good. LEED User helps get building projects LEED certified with tips, checklists, sample documentation and forums.
Building Green: And their Environmental Building News is another great resource with more broadly applicable technical information about green building compared to LEED User, which is really exclusively focused on LEED, but brought to you by the same folks.
Rocky Mountain Institute Tools and Resources: A great list of tools and resources from RMI, one of the country's leading sustainability think tanks.
Net-Zero Energy Buildings: A Classification System Base on Renewable Energy Supply Options
New Buildings Institute Webinars: A great series about getting to Net Zero Energy
DOE Solar Decathlon: Construction document sets and project manuals from all of the US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon entries by year.
Heat Pump Systems: A good, accessible, and not overly technical review of the different types of energy efficient heat pumps that are available.
NREL: Commercial Buildings Research and Software Development
Software
Sefaira: Free subscription to high performance based design
COMFEN: tool designed to support the systematic evaluation of alternative fenestration systems for project-specific commercial building applications.
Trane Trace: Design-and-Analysis software program that helps HVAC professionals optimize the design of a building's heating, ventilations and air-conditioning system based on energy utilization and life-cycle costs.
eQuest: The Quick Energy Simulation Tool
DesignBuilder: Software tool for checking building energy, carbon, lighting and comfort performance
Simergy: Graphical user interface (GUI) for EnergyPlus, facilitating the cycles of analysis through all the stages of design.
Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES VE): Offers software, training, and consulting in helping businesses reduce the carbon emissions of buildings.