Green Building's Open-Source Push

Green building geeks now have a more powerful tool for developing next-gen building designs with minimal environmental impact. Software engineers at the Energy Dept.'s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) launched this week an update of their plug-in for SketchUp, Google's open-source 3D building modeling tool. With a growing list of features, the latest version of the free OpenStudio plug-in will enable architects to create more detailed simulations of their designs' energy efficiency, and marks another step in the effort to make advanced green building design tools widely available at low or no cost.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu spoke earlier this year about the need to provide this kind of technology via open source. "We should be inventing a new way of designing buildings," he said at an event in San Francisco, describing an idea for a program that would pinpoint things like the most efficient window orientation for a particular site, and help architects tweak their designs to maximize a building's energy performance. Google SketchUp, with NREL's continuing work on the OpenStudio plug-in, is a step in that direction.