2025: A Year of Continued Impact

by Richard Yancey, Chief Executive Officer, Building Energy Exchange

In a year filled with adversity, disappointment, and regression, a highlight, for me personally, was being invited to lecture to an undergraduate architecture class at my alma mater, Wesleyan University.  My lecture, “Building the Your Future,” asked how do we change the way an entire industry thinks about energy? Not just architects—but building owners, facility managers, contractors, engineers, policy makers; how do you scale your impact?  Looking around the darkened hall, I was impressed: no one was asleep, no one was scrolling their phone. The thoughtful and incisive questions, intelligence, and motivation of this group of students provided me with inspiration and confidence.

At Building Energy Exchange (BE-Ex), 2025 was filled with impact and scale:

• We celebrated a decade of WISE (Women in Sustainability & Energy) with five events joined by over 500 folks in all stages of their careers;
• Our Building Performance Partnership continued its national expansion, adding 4 new hubs (Boston/Massachusetts, California, Philadelphia, Aspen) to our existing 5 hub network; creating green lender training for SE Pennsylvania, and building performance standard (BPS) compliance training to be disseminated by the hub network;
• Our annual social media campaign, Daylight Hour, included over 500 participating offices in 24 countries, dimming the lights in nearly 30,000,000 SF of space.  Lutron was the lead sponsor of this engaging campaign, which has reached over 6,500 offices since its launch in 2014;
• BE-Ex hosted a packed, one-day, Heat Pump Expo, in collaboration with NYSERA. The expo featured the equipment of 11 leading solution providers, and allowed hundreds of building owners and stakeholders to talk directly with equipment experts, learn about product availability and performance, and explore this critical heating and cooling technology;
• In collaboration with RMI, we added vital content to our knowledge platform, RetrofitPlaybook.org, including new trainings, case studies, and Planning Guides that help jumpstart Strategic Decarbonization Planning;
• Our newsletter, the exchange, reached nearly 17,000 active subscribers; and
• Our podcast, Radio BE-Ex, had over 1,200 listeners.

We continued to bring our community of leaders, doers, and learners together to learn from each other, hosting 67 events throughout 2025, attended by nearly 4,000 stakeholders.  To highlight just two:

• Our first-ever game night, in collaboration with University of Cincinnati’s Amanda Webb, who created “Let’s Decarbonize!”, a fun, interactive, and accessible game to learn the fundamentals of building decarbonization planning; and
• Our international collaboration, continuing to share knowledge and best practices from around the world, with the Swedish Energy Agency on an invited workshop and public discussion of Thermal Energy Networks.

In 2026, Building Energy Exchange, with our amazing staff and reinvigorated board, will continue to scale our impact.  From helping to unpack the first year of New York City’s Local Law 97 compliance reports to leading a thermal energy network fact-finding delegation to Stockholm to expanding the Building Performance Partnership to more cities and states, and more.

The foundation of our work lies in our incredible community of irrepressible collaborators and participants.  Let’s find strength in each other, while we continue to advance our mission of better buildings everywhere for everyone.

Onward,

Richard.