Carbon Neutral Building Design Tool

Green Building Studio Launches Beta Program for Carbon Neutral Building Design Tool AEC industry's first BIM tool for architects and design teams to easily determine a building design's carbon neutrality.

SANTA ROSA, Calif., Sept. 21, 2007 -- Green Building Studio, Inc., today announced the beta availability of Green Building Studio V3.0, offering architects, owners, and building design teams the opportunity to use the new web service's advanced capabilities firsthand. The new release updates the award-winning Green Building Studio web service with ground-breaking capabilities for assessing carbon neutrality potential, total PV & wind energy, emissions, total building energy, and water consumption for commercial and residential building design alternatives, interacting seamlessly with leading BIM design tools from Autodesk and Graphisoft.

The beta release has many new features specifically targeted to designers of carbon neutral buildings including:
-- Carbon Neutral Building Check - Automatically estimates the feasibility for each building to achieve carbon neutral status using local grid emission data.

-- US EPA ENERGY STAR Score - Computing each building's US EPA ENERGY STAR score or Architecture 2030's targets.

-- Photovoltaic & Wind Energy - Automatically analyzes the PV and wind energy potential for the building. Summarizes PV potential for every surface on building.

-- Water Use Analysis - Estimates the water needs, savings associated with efficiency measures, rain capture potential, and LEED credits for the building.

-- Daylighting with Energy Savings - Automatically determines LEED Glaze factor for each room with lighting control energy savings.

-- Natural Ventilation Potential - Automatically determines if the building location and loads are well-suited for naturally ventilating the building.

-- Local Weather Data - Providing access to over 60,000 weather locations, ensuring the design team uses local hourly weather data within 14km of your building rather than selecting from the typical 230 airport locations.

-- Corporate Accounts - Providing firm-wide management of users, building designs, building templates, and review of corporate wide CO2 emission, energy and water use analyses. Leverage key staff on every project no matter which office they are in.
See a building designed to be carbon neutral in five minutes using Green Building Studio at http://www.greenbuildingstudio.com/video/CarbonNeutralDesign.html

Access to the beta program is free for existing and potential customers, which will run from September 14, 2007 until later this fall. Beta participants will be asked to provide product feedback to the GBS team. Architects and design teams interested in the beta program can register at http://www.greenbuildingstudio.com. GBS expects the release of the Green Building Studio V3.0 later this fall.

About Green Building Studio:

Green Building Studio, Inc., is the leading sustainability analysis software and services company providing the AEC industry with packaged and custom building energy and resource analysis tools, training, and web-based solutions for sustainable building designers and product manufacturers. Developers of the open-source Green Building XML (gbXML) data standard, GBS provides expert design assistance and operates the award-winning web service http://www.GreenBuildingStudio.com (for architects and engineers).