The South Carolina Building Performance Association (SCBPA) is a new 501(c)(6) not-for-profit trade association being formed to represent the companies and professionals working in South Carolina’s home and building performance industry.

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) issued a joint request for information (RFI) for next-generation building technologies in support of their respective Green Proving Ground (GPG) and High Impact Technology (HIT) Catalyst programs.

Several changes to a proposed standard to address building energy performance in rating programs are open for public comment. ASHRAE Standard 214P will provide a standardized approach for determining and expressing building energy performance in a rating program.

The need for practical building modeling applications along with the need to transform the design approach to a collaborative process from a sequential process will be explored in an upcoming specialty conference organized by ASHRAE.

The technical program has been set for the ASHRAE and IBPSA-USA SimBuild 2016: Building Performance Modeling Conference. The conference takes place Aug. 10-12 in Salt Lake City.

QA Graphics announced that it has launched an updated version of its Energy Efficiency Education Dashboard™ (EEED). In response to an industry shift away from plug-in applications, the new version uses HTML5 to build design features that allow for a better user experience with reduced security risks.

While many building rating programs exist, there is not anything in the industry that standardizes the contents of those programs, ensuring users are knowledgeable about what impacts their ratings. A proposed standard from ASHRAE, now open for public comment, would serve as the “backbone” of such rating systems.