Hey friends,

After a fun week in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Realcomm | IBcon conference, I'm feeling very energized!
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Here are three of my highlights from the conference:

1. Meeting you—By my count, I met 25 of our 350 Nexus Pro members and many more podcast listeners. It was great to meet many of you for the first time face-to-face!
2. The best: Thano—Of the educational sessions I attended, Thano Lambrinos' session on QuadReal's smart building strategy was hands down the best. He included costs and savings projections—a rare deep dive.
3. Carbon intensity—As John Petze told me after the conference, decarbonization has never been more emphasized and that was great progress. My highlight here was Auros Group's Craig Stevenson on how we MUST marry building science (Passive House + energy modeling) and data science (analytics software) together.

To be honest, I was craving more education. Specifically, my opinion is that our industry needs more stories on overcoming real life obstacles in real life buildings. And many of you told me something similar.

Speaking of real life buildings, if we really want to digitize and decarbonize them, we need controls. You can install all the fancy software and sensors you want, but if the loads themselves aren't digital, good luck to you.

And according to the latest Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), the reality is that most buildings still need to make investments in controls. Here's my math from table B-1:

• 21% percent of buildings (at most) have digital HVAC controls (16% have a BAS, 5% have smart thermostats)
• 17% of buildings have occupancy sensors controlling lighting
• 5% of buildings have a lighting control system
• 1% of buildings have plug load controls

We need to rapidly close that gap.

—James

P.S. Did you attend a smart buildings conference this fall? Hit reply and tell me what you learned! Are you (like me) craving more education?

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✖ At the Nexus

Here’s everything we published this week:

★ PODCAST: 🎧 #075: Anto Budiardjo on Smarter Stacks and solving the integration problem to enable digital twins—Episode 75 is a conversation with Anto Budiardjo, CEO of Padi and collaborator on many industry initiatives and thought leadership that we unpack as part of Anto's long background in our industry.

We took a bit of a deeper dive into integration, specifically the challenges with it historically, how it's time for a new paradigm, and where are the open source connection profiles initiative fits. Then we discussed how Padi helps enable what we're all needing, which is interoperability.

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★ LIVE BROADCAST: 📅 How Local, Grassroots Collaboration Creates Smarter Buildings—Our fifth live broadcast is a discussion featuring members of the our Nexus Pro community and the BIG - Building Intelligence Group community talking about how local, grassroots collaboration can create smarter buildings and how anyone can lead the charge in their city or region. Sign up!

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🔎 Signal vs. Noise

Only the best smart building resources we consumed this week…

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★ DECARBONIZATION: Act Now: We Must Decarbonize—Leaders from RXR Realty, JLL, Empire Realty Trust, Hudson Pacific deeply discuss how real estate will decarbonize. This one's worth it.

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★ MAINTENANCE: The Persistent Threat of Uninspected Elevators—Missed elevator inspections are rampant and there are intense workforce issues at the heart of the backlog. File this under "technology must be able to help here".

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★ WOAH: This U.S. city just voted to decarbonize every single building—Ithaca, NY became the first city (that I know of) to commit to full decarbonization. And by 2030 no less.

👉 Go deeper: They selected BlocPower to manage the transition. Pro members can read more about this unique firm here and here.

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★ NEW-TO-ME: New startups sliding across my desk and into the Nexus Vendor Landscape this week...

• ​Myrspoven—Yet another Advanced Supervisory Control for HVAC company

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That's all for this week! Thanks for reading. 👋