As we enter the Roaring 20s and continue the "What's next?" conversation surrounding societal, technological, planetary, and human behavioral changes, I think it's important for us to consider the role of buildings in all these arenas — ideally, healthy buildings.

According to a Navigant Research study in 2018, the global building stock is expected to increase 13% by 2028, and other research estimates the total global building stock will double by 2060. Should these estimates be correct, that's the equivalent of building an entire New York City every month...for the next 40 years! Consider that growth, combined with research that contributes 40% of greenhouse gas emissions to buildings, and we have a big opportunity in front of us.

On a recent visit to Melink, President and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council Mahesh Ramanujam highlighted his mission to transform buildings by first focusing on the people inside of them. Considering people spend 90% of their lives inside buildings, the more people associate buildings with human health and personal well-being, the more the conversation for smarter and more efficient buildings can be accelerated.  While Mahesh is a great influence on the advocacy front, Melink is in a great position to offer building owners tangible solutions for tackling these challenges. 

How Melink Innovates Healthy Buildings

Innovation is a core principle at Melink, and 2020 brings about exciting opportunities across all of our products and services to make an impact in the world:

• Melink PositiV®  is a building health monitor that provides trend data for the key metrics of building pressure, CO2, temperature, and humidity. Negative pressure can lead to a multitude of "Sick Building" syndromes that ultimately lead to decreased employee performance, increased sick days, and unhappy occupants.

• Melink's core Test & Balance services ensure that buildings are performing as they were designed to support and protect the occupants.

• Intelli-Hood® measures the cooking activity at the kitchen hood level to ensure the operator is using only the energy required to exhaust cooking effluent based on the demand, in addition to ensuring enough replacement fresh air is delivered to occupants.

• Our Solar & Geothermal division is busy working to rapidly scale the adoption of these core building technologies and innovate around barriers to entry. The price of solar continues to decline as efficiencies increase, leading to a transformative time in the solar industry as we go beyond grid parody. In most cases, we offer our solar customers the ability to lock in their kWh rate for the next 30 years at prices below $0.025 / kWh. With the rapid rate of innovation in the battery storage sector, I'm confident new technologies will emerge that mitigate net-metering laws and allow building owners to more efficiently install power plants on their roof via solar.

• Plus, our geothermal team continues to push the boundaries of hybrid thermal loop systems in an effort to remove significant bore-field cost in geothermal projects. Our new HQ2 is a living laboratory to drive the innovation necessary to responsibly heat, cool and power the buildings of the future.   

So, "What's next" for Melink? Changing the world, one healthy building at a time. Sound familiar?

Contributed by Randy Miles