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The purpose of this handbook is to furnish guidance for planning and conducting a highperformance building charrette, sometimes called a "greening charrette." The handbook answers typical questions such as, "What is a charrette?", "Why conduct a charrette?", "What topics should we cover?", "Whom should we invite?" and "What happens after the charrette?". Owners, design team leaders, site planners, state energy office staff, and others who believe a charrette will benefit their projects will find the handbook helpful.

This paper illustrates the challenges of integrating rigorous daylight and electric lighting simulation data with whole-building energy models, and defends the need for such integration in order to achieve aggressive energy savings in building designs. Through a case study example, we examine the ways daylighting – and daylighting simulation – drove the design of a large net-zero energy project.

It is still early in the collection and analysis of energy performance data, but it is already clear that high-performance commercial buildings—some "almost net-zero buildings"—can be constructed cost effectively, providing productive environments for occupants, reducing operating costs, and enhancing the competitiveness of commercial properties.

This paper describes how net-zero energy buildings will produce, during a typical year, enough renewable energy to offset the energy they consume from the grid.

This conference paper discusses four well-documented definitions of net-zero energy: net-zero site energy, net-zero source energy, net-zero energy costs, and net-zero energy emissions, along with pluses and minuses of each.

This paper introduces a classification system for net-zero energy buildings (ZEB) based on the renewable sources a building uses.

The California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program sponsors the development and demonstration of energy-efficient building technologies. Over the past several years, PIER has developed strategic partnerships with the University of California, California State University, California Community Colleges, and California Department of General Services. These partnerships include a series of demonstration projects coupled with programmatic support to ensure continued deployment of energy-efficient technologies and practices across California. Examples of the latest energy-efficient innovations are described.