Event presented by Reimagine Buildings Collective
Friday, August 14th from 12pm-1pm eastern (Virtual)
Two-thirds of the fossil fuel we burn is squandered before it benefits anyone, much of it lost as waste heat. That's Evan Mills's opening move in a column arguing that the Abundance movement has been counting the wrong thing.
Mills is an energy systems analyst and a former senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His point is that "energy abundance" and "abundant energy" are two different goals, and the abundance movement has mistakenly fixated on the second one. Heat pumps use 75 percent less energy than a furnace. LEDs use 90 percent less than an incandescent bulb. Get more service out of every unit and the supply problem shrinks before anyone builds new generation.
Lisa White's Phius piece makes the same case at building scale. Passive buildings, she writes, are "the capacitor or critical resource for the new grid". The load that a building never creates is generation, storage, and transmission that nobody has to build.
The gap between the two pieces is what we'll explore in the Reading Club on Friday. Mills's roadmap is device-level, and envelopes never come up. White starts a step earlier, with the load itself. Which one do we lead with when we're arguing outside our own community?
The readings
Energy abundance is not the same thing as abundant energy. Evan Mills, The Hill, July 31, 2026. Short. Start here.
Facilitating the Renewable Transition Part I: Passive Buildings and the Grid. Lisa White, Phius, March 2023. Longer and more technical.
White wrote two more installments, on peaks and timing and on grid-interactive technologies and demand response. Neither is homework, but you can do it for extra credit if you like! 😜
About the Summer Reading Club
Part of Reimagine Summer in the Collective.
Coming across a great idea is one thing. Getting to dig into it with a virtual room of sharp Reimaginers is another. This is a standing invitation to do the second one.
Every two weeks, we'll share a short, curated set of recommendations, each hand-picked by our Summer Sessions experts: an article to read, a podcast to listen to, a video to watch, or a case study to pick apart. Yes, it's a reading club that also assigns podcasts and videos. We contain multitudes. 😉 These are the pieces shaping how leading practitioners think right now, across high-performance building, decarbonization, resilience, and health.
Then we gather to talk it through, trading takeaways, pushing back, and figuring out together which ideas are worth bringing into our own work.
No quizzes or book reports…just bring a reaction, a question, or a hunch you want to think out loud with people who get it.
Four Fridays this summer: July 17, July 31, August 14, and August 28.
Become a member of the Reimagine Buildings Collective to join the conversation.
The Reimagine Buildings Collective is where we bring together builders, designers, and changemakers driven to create healthy, climate-ready buildings so that we can share hard-won lessons, level up our practices, and build the networks we need to thrive. Join us!