Sean Fitz of Kenn for Green has an article about cool roofs featuring the Menlo Park Green Ribbon Committee’s Alex Cannara’s crusade to get us all to install or retrofit cool roofs in Menlo Park and around the world:

Painting your roof white your cause this process to be greatly reduced, which in turn reduces the heat and infrared energy produced. This in turns keeps structures and areas cooler causing less energy to be expended in cooling.

But It's Delicious!

Remember when you were a kid and your Mom told you to do something “just because I said so.” Didn’t that make you not want to do it? But when she said “if you do it, I’ll get you some ice cream!” you were much more motivated, weren’t you?

Don’t tell me what to do; instead, make it worth my while to do the right thing – and then I’ll probably do it.

There was an interesting post a few days ago on the Consilience blog about local incentives and mandates for green buildings around the country:

I particularly like the Portland “feebate” program, which:

… allows the city to assess a fee against developers who have constructed buildings that only meet the state building code. But this fee is waived for buildings that achieve at least a Silver LEED certification. Buildings which achieve LEED Gold or Platinum certification will receive rebates for their accomplishment. This will be a self-sustaining program by using the fee revenues collected from those buildings which are not LEED certified to finance incentives for the green buildings.

The fact that the program is self-sustaining is critical in these cash-strapped times.

There are other approaches to incentives – for example, Sunnyvale’s new green building program includes FAR (floor area ratio) and building height incentives for achieving goals above the base mandate; for residential buildings, the bonuses include height and density, for multi-residential, and additional lot coverage for single-family homes.

What green building mandates and incentives are you particularly excited by? Answer in the comments section.

We're leaving money on the table by not improving energy efficiency (image by pfala, CC 2.5 licensed)

Would you spend $520 to save $1,200? That’s the choice McKinsey & Co is offering to the U.S. about energy efficiency. In their new report on energy efficiency, released last week, McKinsey shows how the U.S. can reduce its non-transportation energy use by 23%, eliminate the emissions of 1.1 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually, and save $1,200 billion, for a cost of about $520 billion.

They do recognize that achieving these results requires some new thinking on our parts:

Such energy savings will be possible, however, only if the United States can overcome significant sets of barriers. These barriers are widespread and persistent, and will require an integrated set of solutions to overcome them – including information and education, incentives and financing, codes and standards, and deployment resources well beyond current levels.

The report not only provides the conclusions, but also the steps we can take to address barriers and achieve the desired results. They suggest an overarching strategy, including the key point that “energy efficiency is an important energy resource to help meet future energy needs…” and the need for an integrated portfolio of different approaches to unlock the full potential of energy efficiency.

Link

Playing With Fire (image by charles chan, CC 2.0 license)

An article in Sunday’s Science Daily reports on research showing that more than half of the Earth’s warming since the dawn of the industrial age is due to the heat released from our energy use, not atmospheric warming due to the greenhouse effect.

While the greenhouse effect is still a significant contributor – and will become more so as GHG levels in the atmosphere rise – simply the heat released when burning fuels is also being stored in the atmosphere, as well as in the earth, sea, and arctic ice.

The researchers have calculated that the heat energy accumulated in the atmosphere corresponds to a mere 6.6% of global warming, while the remaining heat is stored in the ground (31.5%), melting ice (33.4%) and sea water (28.5%). They point out that net heat emissions between the industrial revolution circa 1880 and the modern era at 2000 correspond to almost three quarters of the accumulated heat, i.e., global warming, during that period.

Their conclusion is that simply capturing our CO2 emissions, will not prevent global warming. We have to actually reduce the amount of heat we are releasing into the world via our energy use – which mostly involves burning things, and therefore generating waste heat.

The good news is that solar photovoltaics, wind power, even solar thermal generate much less, or even negative, waste heat than either conventional energy sources, or nuclear energy. And of course energy efficiency is the cheapest and most cost-effective mitigation we have at our fingertips.

Link

In addition, the article mentions offhandedly that connecting the Queensland and South Australian electricity grids would “likely pay for itself quickly just in increased efficiencies brought to the existing grid.”

The average Australian household could pay up to 30 per cent more per year by 2025 for electricity generated from coal and nuclear power than from concentrating solar and hot dry rock geothermal power, according to clean energy organisation DESERTEC-Australia.

This idea illustrates the kind of synergies that we need to find throughout the energy economy.

Link

(H/T to Benjamin Chambers for the link to the article.)

Smokestacks (image by shoothead, CC 2.0 licensed)

Some good news from China this week, and a blueprint for addressing the huge amount of energy used, and GHG’s generated, by the built environment:

• China has become the world leader in building clean coal power plants, although they have a ways to go still, according to this New York Times article.
  

  China’s improvements are starting to have an effect on climate models. In its latest annual report last November, the I.E.A. cut its forecast of the annual increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases, to 3 percent from 3.2 percent, in response to technological gains, particularly in the coal sector, even as the agency raised slightly its forecast for Chinese economic growth.

• The World Business Council for Sustainable Development just published a report on the changes needed in the building sector – which uses 40% of our end-use energy, and contributes 40% of the greenhouse gases – to chieve the energy usage rduction goals prescribed by the IPCC. I’ll be blogging more about this report later this week, but for now, here’s the link to the report:
  

  “Energy efficiency is fast becoming one of the defining issues of our times, and buildings are that issue’s ‘elephant in the room’. Buildings use more energy than any other sector and as such are a major contributor to climate change,” said Björn Stigson, president of the WBCSD.

• From Treehugger, a list of twitterers to follow on green building and green architecture:
  

  There are some great people twittering about the latest in eco-friendly architecture and building design. Check out a few of the people we think you should follow to stay updated.

Roundup Time! (image by williac, CC 2.0 licensed)

Some more roundup links. These pages have been hanging around in my browser for weeks, waiting for me to blog about them. As with the links I posted earlier this week, I consider these “go to” articles and sites – continuously interesting and relevant.

• Honestly, the most interesting article I’ve read on the economic crisis, because it suggests the problem is structural and provides a prescription for addressing it. (From the New York Times a few weeks ago.)
  

  Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

• Another take on the same idea as Soddy’s (above), expressed with a bit more verve by Joe Romm of Climate Progress.
  

  Yes, homo “sapiens” sapiens have constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations.
  

• Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air, by David JC McKay, is a detailed investigation, with numbers but without hard math, of how Britain can replace all its energy use with renewables. Very thorough, well-researched, and easy to read. The whole book is available on the web as PDF and HTML – you can also buy it from the site.
  

  “For anyone with influence on energy policy, whether in government, business or a campaign group, this book should be compulsory reading.” Tony Juniper Former Executive Director, Friends of the Earth
  

Let me if you have a chance to read any of these pages or sites. I’d love to hear what you think.

2009 AIA Convention Registration, Moscone Center, SF (image by F.J., CC 2.0 licensed)

I got my first issue of GreenSource magazine a few days ago (a gift subscription from my daughter – well done Julia!) and it’s filled with good stuff.

One of the many fun features is a page on “GreenSource Top AIA Convention Picks” – referring to the American Institute of Architects convention which was held last week in San Francisco. They list twelve sessions, from the dozens on the program, that they think would be of the most interest to their readers. Well, even though I live in the Bay Area, I missed the convention, but on the AIA convention site I found they have handouts from many of the sessions, including a number that GreenSource recommended.

On the AIA 2009 National Convention Education Seminar Materials page you can find such presentations as:

• The Art and Science of Designing to Net-Zero
• Carbon Neutral Buildings, Fact or Fiction?: Moving from Buildings to Communities
• Applications of BIM to Sustainable Design: Performative Environments, Strategies for Incorporating Green Approaches into BIM

Obviously, just having the materials is not as good as attending the sessions themselves, but they often do allow you to get a sense of the topic.

I hope the AIA keeps this page up and open to the public – it’s a great resource!

Mount Hood, Oregon (image by Tony the Misfit, CC 2.0 licensed)

The New York Times on Sunday reported about Solar World’s new solar panel plant in Oregon. The Germany company is making a big ($300 million) bet that the United States is the place to be if you are a solar panel manufacturer.

The message for solar companies, Mr. Pichel says, is “get your butt over to the U.S. if you want to participate and get some of that stimulus package money.”

Solar photovoltaics still account for less than 1% of the electricity generated in the U.S. today. However, the article reports that in various markets, including California, the number of solar panels installed is doubling every year. At that kind of growth – even if it slows down slightly due to the current recession and credit crunch – in five to ten years solar electricity could account for a much more significant share of the electricity supply.

I’ve been focused lately in the blog on energy efficiency, and not so much on alternative energy sources, so it’s good to see that there’s still a lot of momentum going on there!

Links

I surf across hundreds of articles a week as I learn more and more about green building, energy efficiency, and climate change. Most are interesting, but a few become touchstones that I end up talking about with others, and returning to again and again. Some candidates for that status that I found in the last week are below:

• In a New York Times Op-Ed, Bjorn Lomborg (of The Skeptical Environmentalist fame) argues that emissions reduction goals like the Kyoto Protocol are never going to work. Instead, we have to replace our dirty energy sources altogether with non-polluting sources. (Of course, increasing energy efficiency is a cheap way to replace half our energy usage.)
  

  Fortunately, there is a better option: to make low-carbon alternatives like solar and wind energy competitive with old carbon sources.

  Lomborg set of a firestorm of controversy when he argued in 2001 that although global warming was important, we would be much better off as a planet investing in other areas of human suffering, such as finding a cure for AIDS and wiping out malaria. He now has a more recent book about climate change specifically: Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (Vintage)

• Green Building Advisor’s Peter Yost describes the goals of the Thousand Home Challenge put up by Linda Wigington of Affordable Comfort.
  

  Encourage all manner of organizations to undertake deep energy retrofits, document the way in which 1,000 of these projects from all over the country achieve 70%+ total household energy savings, and develop the tools needed to make it possible to do thousands more

• In “Forgotten Pioneers of Energy Efficiency” on Green Building Advisor’s “Musings of an Energy Nerd” blog, Martin Holladay describes the Saskatchewan Conservation House, built in 1977, the shining – and forgotten – example that would later influence Dr. Feist in Darmstadt to develop the PassivHaus.
  

  The nearly airtight building had triple-glazed windows, R-40 wall insulation, R-60 roof insulation, and one of the world’s first heat-recovery ventilators.

• Treehugger reports on Professor Eberhard Jochem, recently awarded the first Bayer Climate Prize. Eberhard, of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI), has shown through his experiments and theories that improving energy efficiency 80 percent in the industrialized nations is not only possible, but profitable.
  

  More than almost any other researcher, Professor Jochem has worked out and proven that improving energy efficiency is the central lever for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the various areas of our industrialized society.