Washington, D.C., might soon embark on the nation’s most aggressive renewable energy target: 100 percent by 2032. The CleanEnergy DC Omnibus Amendment Act of 2018 passed a city council vote in November and has since become a topic of great debate. As a result, I find myself asking: Has the quest for energy efficiency gone […]

You can’t open a trade magazine or skim your emails without finding some report or article on the skilled labor shortage we’re experiencing in the construction industry. There’s very little good news out there that the situation will improve in the near term, so we must ask ourselves: what now? Ric Jackson  Back in 2015, […]

Uncertainty continues to be the theme. Who knows what will happen next when it comes to federal funding? Your guess is as good as mine. But by the end of June we’ll have some more answers when Congress submits its FY 2018 budget. What I am seeing is that today’s unknowns are not stopping progress […]

  Green building strategies have always sounded good in theory and on paper, but only now are we beginning to see just how effective they are in terms of real-world financial performance. As you might recall, I provided an update last year covering preliminary findings from an independent study of Bentall Kennedy’s 300 office buildings […]

You are busy with sales calls, continuous improvement initiatives and seeking opportunities to grow your business. You probably don’t have the time to read 400+ pages from the DOE’s Quadrennial Technology Review of energy technologies and research opportunities. So I’m going to break down a few of the highlights and points that have the greatest […]

High-performance windows aren’t just for R&R anymore. A new breed of homebuilders is emerging to appeal to a new breed of consumers who are environmentally conscious, energy-cost conscious and/or just want something different from what everyone else has. Like most businesses, homebuilders need to create points of differentiation to capture the interest of consumers – […]

The residential window market grew 10% in 2013. And according to the WDMA’s recently released Window and Entry Door 2014 U.S. Market Study, we can expect continued growth of 9.1% in 2014 and 8.3% in 2015.

Welcome to the third blog in a series about the DOE’s Roadmap for Emerging Technologies and its potential impact on the future of the fenestration industry. In case you missed the first two, you can find them here: Chasing the Next Low-E In the Year 2030: Part 1 As discussed in my last blog, the […]

The next 15 years might prove to be one of the most significant eras in the history of technologies for doors, windows and skylights. Got your attention? As detailed in my May blog “Chasing the Next Low-E,” the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building Technologies Office (BTO) has a Roadmap for Emerging Technologies in place […]

We are officially 75 percent through the reign of the 113th Congress, and to many the end can’t come soon enough. Predictions that it would become one of the least productive in U.S. history are coming true with the next six months slated to be monopolized by campaigning for mid-term elections and fundraising. Congress Enacted […]