Amory Lovins in Portola Valley

October 15, 2008 in energy efficiency, green building by nils | 1 comment

Amory Lovins. Image via Wikipedia

(Sorry for the dearth of posts recently - family events, as well as me having a cold have impacted my ability to put two words together effectively.)

On Monday I got to see my hero Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute address a large crowd at the inaugural address in a new series of Green Speakers in Portola Valley, CA. The talks are in honor of their new, very sustainable Portola Valley Community Center. (They are hoping to be the first LEED Platinum-certified community center in the country.)

Lovins’ talk covered much of the same ground as his Stanford address in September 2007 on Energy Efficiency In Buildings (part 1, part 2). In particular, he presented as examples his home in the Rockies, the Davis energy efficient homes built in the late 80’s and some buildings in Thailand, built in the 90’s. These are great examples, but he’s used them quite a bit, and seems not to have updated his examples recently.

One of my tasks - to get back to my core purpose in this blog of illustrating “profitable applications of green energy (including efficiency) using integrative design” - for the next few months is to find up-to-date examples of the application of Lovin’s and RMI’s ideas and theories and list them here.