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Summary
In this episode of Clear Haze Exchange, host Marcus Hazelwood recaps Season 2, highlighting the hidden systems influencing sustainability in buildings. He explores the intersection of technology, data, and organizational dynamics in driving sustainable decisions.
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Clear Haze Exchange is an interview-led podcast focused on simplifying sustainability while uncovering the hidden systems, decisions, and long-term impacts shaping our built environment and energy future.
Hosted by Marcus Hazelwood, an energy engineer with 15+ years of experience in sustainability and energy efficiency consulting, the podcast has evolved across two seasons:
Season 1 focused on breaking down the fundamentals—making energy efficiency, building systems, and sustainability concepts more accessible and practical for a wide range of listeners.
Season 2 builds on that foundation, diving deeper into the systems-level thinking behind sustainability—exploring how decisions in design, operations, policy, and business strategy create long-term outcomes.
Each episode features thoughtful conversations with industry leaders, engineers, architects, researchers, and decision-makers who are actively shaping the future of sustainability. From building performance and infrastructure to sustainable chemistry and organizational mindset, Clear Haze Exchange connects ideas across disciplines to provide real-world insight.
This podcast is for professionals and curious minds alike, those who want to better understand not just what sustainability is, but how it actually works in practice.
If you're interested in smarter investments, better systems, and meaningful progress, you're in the right place.
Subscribe to Clear Haze Exchange on your favorite platform and join the conversation.
For inquiries or guest opportunities: hello@clear-haze.exchange
Hey everybody, I'm Marcus Hazelwood and welcome to Clear Haze Exchange. I'm an energy engineer with over 15 years of experience in sustainability and energy efficiency consulting. Many find these topics a little complex, so I created Clear Haze Exchange to help provide clear, actionable insight, clearing the haze, so to speak. We'll cover plenty of topics under the umbrella of energy efficiency and sustainability. Let's get into today's conversation. Welcome back to Clear Haze Exchange. I'm your host, Marcus Hazelwood. Today's a little different. Um, I wanted to do something with the end of the season to kind of recap and highlight the value and really what the whole season was all about. Uh, so instead of bringing on another guest, uh, I wanted to take some time to reflect on season 2, some of the conversations we had, what stood out to me, and where I think we're headed next. Um, first, thank you to every guest who joined me this season and, uh, and everyone who listened, watched, shared an episode, or contributed to the conversation. When I started Clear Haze Exchange, the goal was to make energy efficiency and sustainability easier to understand. But the season made me think about something even bigger. So because of the many challenges we talked about in these seasons and in these conversations, they weren't necessarily technical problems. A lot of them could be organizational and communication problems. There were problems with information communication, priorities, operations, investment, and ultimately decision-making is what all this comes down to. So those were the hidden systems, and they still are the hidden systems that influence what actually happens in our buildings. So looking back on season 2, I wanted to connect a few of the ideas that really stood out to me. So I wanted to start off with this question. Why do we still struggle to make decisions about buildings and sustainability when we have more information, technology, and expertise available than ever before? More data doesn't automatically mean better decisions. It's something I really think about a lot, and I think about, uh, the process that contributes to, um, helping make that better. So one of the biggest themes this past season was Information. We have more building information than we've probably ever had before. Utility data, benchmarking, sensors, building automation, AI, predictive analytics. But more information doesn't necessarily create more clarity. My conversation with Somalia Jones really brought this home. We talked about using utility data to understand what's actually happening across a portfolio, even finding situations where organizations could literally be paying someone else's utility bill. Sometimes opportunity isn't hidden in a complicated engineering analysis, was one of the points that was discussed. It may be something as simple as looking at the utility bills. It's hidden information we already have, but how are we going about acquiring it? Sarah Marix took the conversation further as we explored networks, data, and the future of net zero. The whole idea of getting to a net zero place, not only just for buildings, but for whole organizations. And I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel recently where we discussed that with higher education. So as our buildings and infrastructure become increasingly connected, we gain tremendous amounts of information, but also tremendous complexity. I was listening to a podcast to where someone had mentioned it's not a needle in the haystack anymore. It's a needle in a needle stack. And that speaks volumes because there's a lot of really good information out there. And so it just adds more complexity. My conversation with Mohamed El-Sayed explored how AI is beginning to change energy management and how that has come to reality. He even broke down some different ways to understand how we even use ChatGPT, um, to, from there to the more complex AI tools that are out there. AI can help us process more information and recognize patterns that we might otherwise miss. But there still is a fundamental question. Question here: are we asking the right questions in the first place? AI can give us an answer, but people still have to determine what information matters and what we're going to do with that information. Maybe the first step towards better building performance isn't always collecting more data. Uh, maybe it's getting clearer about what we actually need to know. And this is kind of leading up to what I'm really excited about in the next season, and stay tuned for that. But buildings are systems. Organizations are too. Another idea that kept coming up was the relationship between our buildings and the organizations operating them. We tend to think about buildings as systems— HVAC controls, lighting, envelope, electrical— but there's another system surrounding the building, and that's the organization. It's very important to look at an organization as a system, just like the HVAC. They have budgets, they have departments, responsibilities, policies, capital planning, communication, and those systems can have just as much influence on performance as the equipment itself. So my conversation with Umesh explored why sustainable buildings can still underperform. We can design an efficient building. Specifically the right equipment and model the expected performance. Then the building gets occupied, schedules change, controls get overridden, maintenance priorities change. These are all things we run into. And me particularly being in the space of commissioning, I'm thinking about that and I'm testing systems and I'm looking at how buildings are actually being operated, especially with my background in energy modeling where we have to try and predict what may happen with this building in order to identify how this design could be successful or not. So then schedules are, are very critical. So that people and operations side also showed up in my conversation with Amanda Mazzarelli about workplace strategy. Plan can look great on paper, but if it doesn't align with how people actually work and use the space, it can still fail. And then my conversation with Jeremy Miller, Jeremy Miller brought another perspective through Passive Homes, healthy living, and building design. Design. Energy performance matters, but so does comfort, health, indoor environmental quality, and experience of the people inside those buildings. Tom Melton raised another major issue as we talked about the data center boom. We're investing enormous amounts of money in new infrastructure, but who's going to operate it? Technology alone, that's not enough. And so he brought a lot of context in understanding the workforce and, and how, uh, we need to train up individuals out of college to understand this trade better so that we can actually maintain this infrastructure, especially the data centers, uh, that are coming up. The future of high-performance building depends on the people responsible for operating them. Sustainability is really full of trade-offs. Another thing I appreciated this season was the opportunity to explore sustainability outside of just energy. My conversation with Professor Tom Welton about sustainable chemistry. It challenged us to look beyond whether something simple carries the label of sustainability. Uh, what are the broader impacts? Where did it come from? What did it replace? And what happens at the end of its useful life? Von Horne brought similar questions into our discussion about mass timber. This is a technology, uh, very popular in the architectural world on how we can capture carbon emissions or at least reduce them, uh, through using mass timber. And there's a lot of excitement around that new materials and technology, but sustainability isn't about hype. It's about understanding the application and limitations, um, the trade-offs. And that's exactly where these conversations, um, can speak to, to where the hype can be one thing around sustainability, but what is practical? What can we actually achieve now while we're working towards those larger long-term goals? My conversation with Aline Carpentier, uh, about waste in the circular workplace took that idea in another direction. Um, instead of looking at waste simply as something to dispose of, what if waste was actually information? What if we used that? And that really enlightened me about how I think about waste. What can it tell us about purchasing, consumption behavior, or inefficient processes? And my conversation then with ILS, uh, Summit, uh, brought us into laboratories, facilities where energy efficiency has coexisted with safety, research requirements, ventilation, and highly specialized operations. All these conversations reinforce something for me. A sustainable decision isn't necessarily the one that looks best on a single metric. and this is very critical— one metric cannot define how we make decisions. We have to understand the larger system. The other thing that stood out was why good projects don't always happen. Another major theme was value. I've seen technically sound energy projects never move forward. Why does this happen is the question. My conversation with Chris Halpin explored why great energy projects sometimes never happen Energy savings performance contracts can help overcome those barriers. Sometimes the challenge isn't identifying the opportunity, uh, it's figuring out how to actually implement it. Financing, risk, resources, timing, competing priorities. And John Lemons, he showed us how another side of this works through green leases. There's a lot of leases in larger cities where we have high-rise buildings that are leased out. How do we actually achieve sustainability through a lease? Uh, or how do tenants achieve sustainability? Through that. Uh, this means contracts, incentives, relationships. Those can influence whether an energy or decarbonization project actually makes sense. And then with John McNamara, we looked at solar power. Solar can create tremendous value, but the important question isn't simply should we install solar? It's whether it makes sense for the particular building organization and energy strategy. And this really connects me back to my conversation with Dave Ray, which was— he kicked off our season in, in early— was it March that we started the season? We talked about sustainability as an ROI and how facility decisions influence long-term value. That raises a question I've continued to think about, which is what happens when we stop treating sustainability as a separate objective and we start looking at it as part of making better business decisions. So people ultimately make it happen. And that brings me to my, my conversation with Dominique Haddad about successful sustainability. We can have the technology, we can have the data, we can have a technically sound solution, but somebody still has to communicate that idea, build the support, and move it forward. A facility manager may care about reliability, the finance may care about costs, Leadership may care about risk, sustainability may care about emissions. They're looking at the same project through different lenses. So, the challenge is connecting those perspectives. And I think that something our industry needs to continue to get better at is really communicating that across those different departments, those different lenses. And I love the conversation with Dominique when we talked about champions that help make that happen. We have to find those sustainability champions that can speak the language, but also translate technical information and into a more achievable sounding conversation that really speaks the language of those different departments from finance to leadership and can actually help implement that successfully. So what did season 2 really teach us? Uh, when I step back from all these conversations, I see a common thread, uh, whether we're talking about AI, energy efficiency, building operations, sustainable materials, solar, workplace strategy, data centers, waste decarbonization, we keep running into a similar question, and, and that is, do we have the right information? Do we understand the actual problem? And are the right people involved? How do we choose between competing options? And ultimately, how do we know if something is worth doing? That's what I mean when I talk about the hidden systems. The— throughout this whole season, we talked about the hidden systems, the systems that people don't always discuss or aren't always apparent from looking at an organization from the outside. So sometimes the problem we can see isn't actually the problem we need to solve. We may see that there's a problem, but that's— there may be a deeper problem from the hidden systems that we're not looking at that we need to take a bit of a deeper look at in order to understand better. So a building consuming too much energy might have an equipment problem, but it might also have an operational problem, a data problem, a communication problem, or even a capital planning problem. Sometimes that biggest opportunity isn't finding a better solution, it's developing a better understanding of the problem. This was a point that I really, really thought was good in one of my discussions. So what's next? And that leads us to where I want to take, uh, this next season of Clear Haze Exchange. Season 2 spent a lot of time uncovering these hidden systems, but understanding them is only the beginning. The next question is, what do we actually do about them? How do we determine what information actually matters? How do we evaluate competing options? How do we communicate technical information to people making investment decisions. How do we do, or I should say, how do we determine whether something is actually worth pursuing? I'm not gonna give too much away yet, but, uh, the next season I wanna take some of the conversations a step further, not just understanding the challenges, but understanding how we navigate them. So as we close season 2, I'll leave you with this. We spent a lot of time talking about the future of buildings, smart buildings, AI, net zero, renewable energy. New materials, new technologies, and all those things matter. But behind every one of them is something much less flashy, and that's a decision. Someone has to decide what information matters. Someone has to decide what option makes sense, and someone has to decide whether that investment is worth making. Technology doesn't make buildings better by itself. All this AI, uh, is super valuable, but technology alone still needs someone to help navigate with it. It can compile complex amount of data, but we have to have someone who can navigate and move, uh, that data and information towards a decision. So, technology really doesn't make buildings better by itself. People do. People have to make the efforts to make this technologies work for them and their organization. And maybe the future of sustainability isn't only about creating smarter buildings. Maybe it's also about becoming smarter about how we make decisions. So, to every guest who joined me this season, thank you for sharing your knowledge and perspective. And to everyone who listened, watched, shared, or joined the conversation, thank you for being a part of Clear Haze Exchange. Season 2 helped us uncover more of the hidden systems shaping our built environment. Next season, we're gonna start figuring out how to navigate them. I'm Marcus Hazelwood. Thanks for listening to Clear Haze Exchange, and I'll see you next season. Let's keep clearing the haze. Thanks for listening to Clear Haze Exchange. New episodes drop every 2 weeks. You can catch Clear Haze Exchange on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and more. Let's clear the haze about sustainability and energy efficiency together. Subscribe now and join the conversation.