Go beyond the conference with Greenbuild 2026 tours across NYC

This one's more for industry professionals than homeowners, but a few details are worth knowing if you're curious about what's possible in home energy upgrades. The Greenbuild 2026 conference is running building tours across New York City on October 19 and 23, open to registered conference attendees, showing off large-scale green building projects.

A couple of tours touch on technology that scales down to houses. One stop is a Brooklyn townhouse retrofit that earned Passive House certification (a standard for very airtight, well-insulated buildings) back in 2018, with triple-glazed windows, solar panels, a heat pump for heating and cooling, induction cooking, and a green roof. Another is a Manhattan building retrofit that cut heating energy by 70% and total energy use by more than half using an all-electric Passive House approach — proof that older buildings can be converted to highly efficient, electric-only systems without losing character or historic approval.

None of this is a program you can sign up for or a rebate you can claim — it's a professional conference with guided site visits. But if you're weighing whether serious insulation and air-sealing work, plus a switch to heat pumps, can actually deliver big energy savings in an existing structure, these real-world examples are evidence that it works, even at large scale.