The title of this post is what I would've entitled this article about a centralized and scientist-serving heat leak detection program at MIT. But I'm sure they mean well... and the title of the blog is of course "Government technologies": http://www.govtech.com/technology/Drive-By-Thermal-Imaging-Quantifies-Energy-Loss.html

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a way to take thermal images of energy-leaking buildings from city streets and turn the data into both power and financial savings.

A roadside scan of a structure is combined with location and environmental data and run through a computer program that identifies the types and locations of all the energy leaks. A heat flow model calculates the amount of energy loss, and — using the estimated efficiency of the building’s heating and cooling system — that energy loss is then converted to dollars.

The system was developed off of MIT Mechanical Engineering Professor Sanjay Sarma’s concept of “negawatt mining,” [sic] which is the idea of recapturing energy loss from buildings.