Keeping The Lights On

Disagreeing With The New Yorker On Stimulus Vs. Sustainability

March 30, 2009 in analysis, green building, opinion by nils | Add your comment

Eustace Tilley Considers Electric Cars

I'm a big fan of the New Yorker, and read most issues cover to cover. Their politics usually align with mine, and I always enjoyed Hendrik Hertzberg sticking it to the Cheney administration. But I have to take issue with some of their economic opinions. In particular, David Owen's Talk of Town, Economy Vs. Environment, in the March 20 issue got me hot and bothered.

Owen's basic position seems to be that to be sustainable we can't spend, and if we spend we're not sustainable. Therefore, the stimulus package and a long term goal for sustainability are incompatible. (With the subtext, apparently, that stimulus is more important.)

I have several issues with Owen's position. For example, Owens doesn't say much about spending on sustainability - there $15 billion of that. Much of that, because it's focused on energy efficiency, will result in improved productivity. It turns out you can get a lot of productivity from sustainability improvements. It's one of the magic tricks - called the "triple bottom line" - you spend less or the same up front, you save more, and you're healthier and more productive. In this case sustainability is actually directly improving the economy.

The First Passive House: 17 Years of Warm, Healthy and Comfortable

March 27, 2009 in analysis, green building by nils | Add your comment

The kitchen of one unit in the first Passive House (photo by xxx)

The kitchen of one unit in the first Passive House (photo by H.G. Esch)

I just ran across this delightful article about the first Passive House, built in Darmstadt Germany in 1992. The article describes the process the builders went through to model and design it, a four unit residential block, then to build this new type of building, even creating the new highly efficient windows and doors by hand.

The article follows the building through its first 15 years of operation (it's still occupied). The team led by Dr. Feist instrumented the house thoroughly and did extensive measurements throughout its first fifteen years to validate their models. When Amory Lovins saw the house and the measured results in in 1995, he said:

Individual Action Is Not Enough

March 26, 2009 in agriculture, analysis, energy efficiency, green building, opinion, policy by nils | Add your comment

Someone entered this topic in an online forum to which I subscribe:

The main problem with lowering the carbon level is down to individuals, to behaviour, to good citizenship and that is the biggest challenge of all... how many times to you see careless behaviours? how do you change that?

I just had to respond. I think this attitude is the best way to make sure that end in the end, nothing good happens. I'm reprinting my comment on the topic below, unedited (even though you all know about passive houses already).

Thermal Bridges, Passive Houses in the UK, and Spray Foam

March 24, 2009 in energy efficiency, green building, materials by nils | Add your comment

Chain link fence (get it?) - (image by James Jordan, CC 2.0 licensed)

As I've been surfing green building sites and articles over the last week, I ran across these interesting items. I hope you find them useful.

Do you know what thermal bridging is? I didn't until a few weeks ago. Here's a good overview from the Green Building Advisor website.

Thermal bridging occurs wherever assembly components with low R-values relative to surrounding materials span from the inside to the outside of a building assembly.

Green Building Incentives – Arlington County’s Approach

March 23, 2009 in green building by nils | Add your comment

Arlington's Courthouse Square (image by Helgas Lobster Stew, CC 2.0 licensed)

I posted last week about my project, along with some other Menlo Park residents, to get some incentives for energy efficient buildings into the Menlo Park building code. I put out a tweet on Twitter the other day to see if any of my "tweeps" had suggestions for me. Chris Cheatham, of the Green Building Law Update blog, turned me on to the Arlington County (Virginia) incentives.

How Should Local Planning Commissions Reward Energy Efficiency?

March 20, 2009 in analysis, energy efficiency, policy by nils | 2 comments

It's code for something! (Image by Marco Fedele, CC 2.0 licensed)

As I discussed in my earlier post, Code changes and incentives are critical for energy independence, it's going to be tough to change the energy efficiency of our building stock until building and planning commissions provide incentives to owners and builders to take those extra steps, and spend that extra money.

Code Changes And Incentives Are Critical For Energy Independence

March 18, 2009 in accelerating change, energy efficiency, green building by nils | 1 comment

Clovers at Blarney Castle

Patricia hit the nail on the head in her last post, No Blarney here! - Turning up the Heat:

Where are the codes and incentives?

Or rather, how do we get people to build and renovate houses to energy efficiency levels that are significantly above code?

The Architecture 2030 website has a great reference on how much beyond code you must build to achieve their interim and final energy efficiency goals. For example, in California's we have a new 2008 version of the energy efficiency code, usually called "Title 24." To meet the Architecture 2030 interim goal of buildings that use half as much energy as their conventional peers (the "initial 50% reduction target"), buildings in California need to be 10% more efficient than required by this new building code.

Slideshows About The Passive House Concept

March 17, 2009 in energy efficiency, green building by nils | Add your comment

Bronwyn Barry's Passive House Conference Report

I was contacted the other day by Bronwyn Barry, a designer and rater at Quantum Builders, and a member of the Passive House California organization up in Berkeley, so I did what any normal internet user would do - I Googled her. And I was excited to find, as one of the first results, a slideshow she'd made and put up on Slideshare. It's a trip report from her visit to the 3rd Annual North American Passive House Conference held in Duluth last November. And, not only is Bronwyn's presentation there, but there are several others, including one from Tim Eian, a German-born architect now working in Minnesota, and several others:

Biohaus: First Certified PassivHaus in the U.S.

March 13, 2009 in green building, opinion, policy by nils | 2 comments

Front View of the Waldsee BioHaus

The other day I posted about one of the first passive houses built in the U.S. I just ran across another passive house example - this one is the first U.S.-built home to be certified to the German Passivhaus standard. The house was built at the Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota in 2006, partially funded by the first-ever grant to a U.S. recipient by the German environmental foundation Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU).

The First U.S. Passive House – Super-Efficient, Affordable

March 11, 2009 in green building by nils | Add your comment

The Big Wall of Windows

While the passive house concept is taking off in Europe, where over 10,000 passive houses have been built, there are still very few in the States. I have posted before about Nabih Taleb's passive house remodel in Berkeley, and I've heard about a few more which I'll be posting soon. But this month the Taunton Press's Green Building Advisor website is featuring an article on America's first "passive house."

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