ICAST Partners with Greystar in Utah
Greystar Property Management in Utah has contracted with ICAST to perform green upgrades across three of its properties. The energy efficiency upgrades will be installed at Riverbend Apartments in Taylorsville, ParkVue Apartments in Salt Lake City, and The Cottages on 7th, a 55+ senior living complex in Sandy. A total of 480 apartment units will be serviced.
ICAST to retrofit ~800 units in New Mexico
ICAST will undertake green upgrades at three properties in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Vista Del Sol Apartments, a 16-building property with 168 units, and La Ventana Apartments will receive green upgrades to its 232 units across 14 buildings. Energy efficiency upgrades to Three Fountains Apartments will primarily focus on a central boiler replacement plus some Gas saving measures that will impact tenants living in the 410 units across four buildings.
New Staff Members!
ICAST recently hired 3 new members to its growing team. Samantha Privett is the new Data Analyst with the Engineering Department. She recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Pat Pritchard is our new Purchasing Manager and has decades of experience in procurement in various industries including the building and clean energy industry. Gagee Raut joins the growing team of Energy Efficiency Engineers at ICAST. She has a Graduate degree in Engineering from the University of North Carolina. ICAST welcomes these new members to its team!
Xcel Energy plans to retire two coal plants, and rely more on wind and solar
Xcel Energy submitted its plan to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission in June, laying out extensive options on how it could source electricity to meet growing Denver metro-area demand in coming years. The bulk of the change will be retiring two coal-burning plants, Comanche 1 and Comanche 2 in Pueblo, and by 2026 replacing them with projects generating nearly 55 percent of its electricity from renewable sources.
‘Funnel-vision’ to pioneer cheap and efficient solar energy
A team of experts from the University of Exeter has discovered an innovative way of generating photovoltaic (PV) energy that could make solar energy more efficient. The new technique relies on ‘funneling’ the sun’s energy more efficiently directly into power cells, such as solar panels or batteries. This ground-breaking method has the potential to harvest three times the energy compared with traditional systems. The researchers believe their breakthrough could result in solar panels, no bigger than a book, producing enough energy to power a family-sized house.
A house printed in a day using peat material created in Estonia
Cut peat blocks were already being used for building houses thousands of years ago. Now, scientists at the University of Tartu have developed a material which could make it possible to print energy-efficient houses out of milled peat and oil shale ash using a 3D printer.