We’re proud of the intelligent, passionate, and hardworking people that make up the Bright Power team. Each month, you’ll get a chance to meet one of them, understand how they contribute to the organization, and what makes them excited to come to work every day.
Meet Andrea Mancino, Executive Vice President, New York.
What are some of the things you like most about working at Bright Power?
Our impact. I saw there was a need to reduce carbon emissions from buildings and knew that working on larger multifamily buildings would have an even bigger impact compared to the residential properties I was working on at the start of my career.
Bright Power also works with a large number of affordable and supportive housing owners and developers. It means a lot to me that we can improve the quality and efficiency of affordable housing to create places where people can be healthy, share a sense of community, and live in a high performing building that they find pride in. Historically, those buildings and populations have been ignored and given the bare minimum.
Tell us about a project or accomplishment for which you’re proud.
Bright Power is working on a pilot project where we aim to create a Passive House or net-zero existing building rehab that’s scalable and cost-effective—all while keeping the building’s tenants in place. This is extremely important. This type of rehab has not really been figured out yet and it has the potential to change our existing building stock for the better in a big way. I’m proud that my team is part of this cutting edge team that will create strategies to address all of the issues and concerns. This is a very exciting learning opportunity both for the industry and for us!
What’s something people might not know about you or your role?
I do a lot of work to connect people in the industry. I consult with government agencies, green building programs, clients, and product manufacturers to ensure efficiency and sustainability goals can be met through proper goal setting and alignment.
After you took over the leadership of the New Construction team, you doubled the size of the team and expanded our services. How did you manage that hyper-growth while keeping client satisfaction so high?
Really listening to our clients and understanding what motivates them. By doing that I was able to know where we may need more support in certain areas. For example, Passive House certification interest was growing among our clients, so I looked to hire people with deeper Passive House experience. Or I learned that some clients were really interested in making sure their building systems were set up correctly, as designed, before occupancy, and I decided to hire another commissioning agent to help us serve the growing number of commissioning projects.
We also focused on getting our internal process right so that we were spending less time addressing consuming busy work. This allowed us to direct our time towards tasks that provided value to our clients and kept everything moving forward.
What do you think is on the horizon for New York, with regards to sustainability?
New York’s energy code, in general, is going to move towards eventually requiring near Passive House or Passive House levels of performance. Moving towards a more performance-based energy code that also incorporates performance-based carbon caps (LL97), will force everyone in the industry to get creative and think beyond simple prescriptive values. You can read more about NYStretch, the new energy code launched by NYSERDA, in my blog.
What are some trends that you are seeing in the industry that excite you?
Greater diversity among all aspects of the industry is exciting. This is a signal to me that not only are we looking for diverse people, but we’re looking for diverse ideas and solutions which will make our buildings higher performing and truly help us decrease our impact on the environment.