But in Australia, the abundance of solar energy means people are encouraged to do their most energy intensive things in the peak of the afternoon. Materials that store and release energy are not new either. The space feels contemporary but without up-to-the-minute materials or design clichés. Using wood as a base material is attractive because it has strength and mechanical resistance that’s hard to reproduce in synthetic materials at the same cost, Swihart says. They’ve created a clear wood material they hope could one day be used for more energy-efficient building. Then they took the material one step further, mixing it with polyethylene glycol, a so-called "phase-change material" that melts at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. "Transparent wood is already a great insulating material when compared with glass," Montanari says. It’s an excellent building material-durable, renewable, good at insulating. This paper presents the Commercial Building Energy Saver (CBES), an energy retrofit analysis toolkit, which calculates the energy use of a building, identifies and evaluates retrofit measures in terms of energy savings, energy cost savings and payback. There’s a reason humans have been building homes from wood for 10,000 years.