Buildings are unavoidable. We all use them. We turn on the lights, heat and cool our homes, run refrigerators, charge our devices. But buildings use a lot of energy.

In this episode of Watt's Up, Wisconsin, we break down why buildings consume so much energy and ways we can make buildings more efficient. We speak to UW–Madison's Joy Altwies about what makes a building efficient and ways we can make buildings more sustainable, both for the environment and for the people that occupy it. Then, we talk to the founding director of UW–Madison's School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences (CDIS), Tom Erickson, about the new CDIS building on the university's campus, which is striving to be the most sustainable building on campus.