integrative design

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McKinsey & Co: Energy Efficiency is Like Free Money

August 4, 2009 in analysis, business benefits, energy efficiency, integrative design by nils | Add your comment

Reflection

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:

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Nabih Tahan on Passive Houses and European Home Building

February 4, 2009 in energy efficiency, green building, integrative design by nils | 3 comments

Nabih Tahan's passive house remodel in Berkeley

Nabih Tahan's passive house remodel in Berkeley

Last night BuildItGreen’s South Bay Professional Guild hosted Nabih Tahan, a Berkeley-based architect who was recently featured in a New York Times article on passive houses. Nabih discussed the passive house concept and how it is being applied in Germany and the rest of Europe, as well as his experience building Low Energy Houses (Niedrigenergiehaus – the generation of homes before the passive houses) in Austria and remodeling his conventional house in the Berkeley flatlands into a passive house.

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Zero Net Energy Homes Part 3 – The Federal R&D Agenda

January 9, 2009 in energy efficiency, energy generation, green building, integrative design, policy by nils | 1 comment

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Zero Net Energy Homes
A House

House, ready to become zero net energy (Image by Panoramas, CC 2.0 licensed)

In October 2008, a number of federal government departments and research organizations collaborated to produce the Federal R&D Agenda for Net Zero Energy High Performance Green Buildings (PDF). It’s a fascinating document, its origins driven primarily in response to two energy policy laws passed in 2005 and 2007 (during the Bush administration). In particular, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA 2007) created an Office of Commercial High Performance Green Buildings and a consortium on a Zero Net Energy Commercial Buildings Initiative. This consortium produced the R&D agenda.

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Zero Net Energy Homes Part 2: Some Beautiful Examples

January 7, 2009 in energy efficiency, green building, integrative design, solar electricity, solar thermal by nils | Add your comment

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Zero Net Energy Homes
Cannon Beach zero-net energy house

Cannon Beach zero-net energy house

In lieu of a longer post today, I thought I’d provide links to examples of some of the amazing homes people are building today to achieve zero net energy:

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Ten Energy Predictions For The Next Decade

January 5, 2009 in accelerating change, carbon mitigation, economy, energy efficiency, energy generation, energy storage, green building, integrative design, opinion, solar electricity, transportation by nils | Add your comment

Snow on the San Gabriel Mountains (photo by Jerry Thompson1)

Snow on the San Gabriel Mountains (photo by Jerry Thompson1, CC 2.0 license)

On December 30 of last year (six days ago), my wife and I were in Pasadena, CA visiting the Greene and Greene exhibit at the Huntington Library. It was one of those glorious and rare smog-free days in the LA basin. The air sparkled, you could see for miles in every direction, and mountain range after mountain range was visible – all the way out to the snow-covered San Gabriels. Nowadays, the air is only ever this clear around the Christmas holiday, when the freeway traffic is substantially reduced and a lot of factories shut down for the week. It got me thinking about how the future – say ten to twenty years hence – may be unrecognizable in both dramatic and mundane ways. For example, smog-free days may no longer be rare in LA, once the economy has shifted off fossil fuels. (I suspect the traffic will remain, unfortunately!)

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Amory Lovins Named A World’s Best Leader By U.S. News

November 25, 2008 in business benefits, energy efficiency, integrative design, policy by nils | Add your comment

Amory Lovins
Amory Lovins

Amory Lovins is one of my true heros, and I’m thrilled to hear that U.S New has named him one of World’s Best Leaders in their report this week. Lovins has inspired multitudes (and this blog) with his vision of “getting off oil at a profit” and “drilling for negabarrels under Detroit.” The Rocky Mountain Institute, a “think and do” tank that he founded 26 years ago, takes this vision and makes it happen for Fortune 1000 companies, the military, and governments around the world (including Portola Valley, just up the street from me, where he spoke a few weeks ago).

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AskNature.org – A New Biomimicry Resource and Social Networking Site

November 24, 2008 in integrative design, materials by nils | 2 comments

Spider silk has desirable technical properties that manmade materials cannot replicate yet

Spider silk has desirable technical properties that manmade materials cannot replicate yet

I just visited AskNature.org, [url corrected] a new resource and social site for people interested in understanding how nature has solved various design problems – such as energy conservation, water collection, and energy generation – and how we can use those solutions as inspiration for our own technology.

AskNature is a bio-inspiration website where innovators can learn from nature’s solutions, biologists can find a whole new audience for their research, students can be inspired through science, and collaborators from different disciplines can work together to create innovative, sustainable, bio-inspired designs.

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Sahara Forest Project: An Awesome Example of Mega-Integrative Design

October 17, 2008 in energy generation, integrative design, solar thermal by nils | Add your comment

The Sahara Forest project will use seawater and solar power to grow food in greenhouses across the desert. Photograph: Exploration Architecture

The Sahara Forest project will use seawater and solar power to grow food in greenhouses across the desert. Photograph: Exploration Architecture

The Sahara Forest project represents integrative design at a huge scale. (Integrative design combines multiple design improvements to get an overall improvement that’s bigger than the sum of its components.) As it says on the the Sahara Forest project home page:

The project combines two proven technologies in a new way to create multiple benefits: producing large amounts of renewable energy, food and water as well as reversing desertification.

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Running Some Numbers On Rooftop Solar Energy in 2018

October 2, 2008 in green building, integrative design, solar electricity by nils | 1 comment

Solar power systems installed in the areas def...

Solar power systems covering the areas defined by the dark disks could provide more than the world total primary energy demand in 2006 (assuming a conversion efficiency of 8%). Image from Wikipedia.

I recently asked physicist Richard Muller whether he thought the price-performance of solar electricity generation would follow a Moore’s Law-type curve. He said that this would not occur due to improving the efficiency of solar collection, as the current levels of efficiency – 20-40% – are reasonably high. However, he added

“I do expect the price to drop by a factor of 10, so we will have lots of solar.”

Well, in the nature of things, there’s definitely a limit to how much energy a solar PV collector can get from a square meter of sunlight. (There’s about 1kw of energy in a square meter – as I learned in Physics For Future Presidents, by Professor Muller – so we can expect to get 400 watts or less.) The amount of this energy per square meter we can collect will go up, but asymptotically approach (at best) the physical limits.

On the other hand, I’d argue that the cost of collecting it can go down a nearly unlimited amount – certainly multiple orders of magnitude. So what will solar PV look like in 2018 – ten years from now?