Autodesk crunches numbers for green designs

Cleantech Award Winner

If there’s a new green office space, highway, airplane or sewage treatment plant getting built, chances are that Autodesk software helped design it.

In March, the San Rafael-based software giant – which claims more than 10 million users of its flagship product Autocad – launched Eco Materials Adviser, a database feature of Inventor 2012 that allows engineers to measure and reduce their environmental impact while meeting emerging standards in the design industry.

“We have an incredibly robust carbon accounting system,” says Lynelle Cameron, the company’s director of sustainability. While helping designers go green has been Autodesk’s mission for decades, the recent upswing in climate-conscious business and investments pushed them further.

“We saw a boom around 2008 in cleantech sector companies who were addressing the very toughest environmental challenges of our time,” she adds, “and we want to make sure they have the very best design software” to do it.

The company’s software is making a green impact on San Francisco alone, from the new energy-efficient California Academy of Sciences to the Bay Bridge seismic retrofit and Presidio’s Doyle Drive project. Used from China to India to Brazil, Autodesk software influences what gets built on the rest of the planet as well.

“We use their building information and tools to bring efficiency to the construction process,” says Atul Khanzode, director of virtual building at DPR Construction in Redwood City. Many in the construction industry favor Autodesk because “it’s fairly simple to use – that’s why we like it.”
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Fast Company recently named Autodesk one of the 10 most innovative companies for its Sustainability Workshop, an online portal that helps mechanical engineering students learn about energy efficient design.

And while the firm’s Corporate Finance Approach to Climate Stabilization Targets, or C-FACT, enables companies to set goals for greenhouse gas reductions, its TelePresence technology further reduces the cost and pollution of travel.

“Climate change is one of the important issues we’re facing,” says President and CEO Carl Bass, “and Autodesk supplies design and engineering tools that can help combat this issue.”

Now, with nearly $2 billion in revenues and a best-in-class technology for green development, Autodesk faces the challenge of “driving behavior change” as well, says Cameron.

“We’ve focused on educating designers and engineers so they can make more informed decisions about what they’re designing and building – whether it be a bridge, a bicycle, a sports car, a sneaker or an office tower.”