It’s an engineer’s dream: A 220,000 square-foot office space designed with performance as the ultimate priority. Most building projects start in the mind of an architect and are then passed off to engineers, who have to figure out how to make the building function well, but the new net-zero National Renewable Energy Lab office building, in Golden, Colo., started with the engineering.

So it is that the building is a rather unusual “H” shape, with the lobby area connecting two wings, because the project’s engineers determined that shape would maximize daylight and thus reduce energy needs.

The building is meant to be a national showcase and a teaching tool, in addition to serving its primary function as office space for NREL.

“The overarching goal is to demonstrate that highly energy efficient and marketable net zero buildings can be built using available technologies and techniques today,” Jeff Baker, director of the Office of Laboratory Operations for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s (EERE) said during a webinar about the building’s technologies yesterday. 

Stadiums, transportation, food and souvenir vendors, communications infrastructure … hundreds of elements go into planning the Olympic Games.

From the point of view of London’s economic development agency, Think London, that means hundreds of opportunities to test and showcase sustainable, energy-efficient technologies, products and services.

Perhaps more importantly, the Sustainable Games may be a way to attract green businesses and cleantech companies to London — permanently.

If you think IT and sustainability are two totally different worlds, think again.

Most of what is referred to as “smart” these days — smart transportation, the smart grid and smart cities, for example — is made intelligent by processors, sensors and analytical software, and of course the servers that make it all possible. So it’s not surprising to see tech giants like IBM wanting to create a smarter planet, Cisco wanting to craft smart tech solutions for utilities and companies, and plenty of other, smaller companies wanting a piece of the action.

But while the money and hoopla surrounding all things smart can cloud the issue a bit, the point is that infrastructure in this country is sorely in need of an overhaul. In its Smarter Cities Virtual Leader Forum today, IBM recapped what it’s doing to make education, transportation, government, energy and healthcare smarter. It sees cities as systems of systems.

Concerned about the impact of climate change, some state and local governments are aggressively pursuing carbon neutral status and adopting policies and strategies aimed at reducing their carbon footprint. Over the next few months, we will be discussing what it takes to attain this goal and highlighting cities and states that are leading the way.

Six cities always are among the top 10 green U.S. cities no matter who compiles the list: San Francisco, Berkeley, Austin, Seattle, Chicago and Boston.

Our Going Carbon Neutral series starts with Austin, the only city so far with the political will to formally commit to this goal and start the journey.

California last week became the first state to integrate green building practices, largely based on the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Efficiency and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, into its statewide building codes.

It was a big, Governator-style move, but while the USGBC officially supports CalGreen, and most in the green building world see it as a net-positive step, not everyone is thrilled about it. In fact many architects, engineers and city planners that fully support the integration of green building practices in the building code are concerned about the challenges involved in implementing and enforcing that code — and those are the building professionals who are advocates of green building in the first place.