Green Building Articles

Pedestrian Promise - Home buyers will pay for walkability.
A new study from CEOs for Cities reveals that homes in more walkable neighborhoods are worth more than similar homes in less-walkable neighborhoods, pointing to a bright spot in the residential real estate market.
The report, "Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Housing Values in U.S. Cities" by Joseph Cortright, analyzed data from 94,000 real estate transactions in 15 major markets provided by ZipRealty and found that in 13 of the 15 markets, higher levels of walkability, as measured by Walk Score, were directly linked to higher home values.
"Even in a turbulent economy, we know that walkability adds value to residential property just as additional square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, and other amenities do," says Cortright.
You can download a full copy of the report at
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First Wisconsin, now Texas mandates BIM for state projects
Apparently, even Building Information Modeling is bigger in Texas. The Texas Facilities Commission announced yesterday that it is requiring a BIM model for all state design and construction projects. The state agency oversees all real estate development for the state including state buildings and all state University systems. Currently, the Facilities Design and Construction division is managing 125 projects valued at over $500 million.
Wisconsin mandated BIM for all projects with a budget of $5 million or more in July, as BIMBoy reported in June. The Texas mandate goes even further.
Like Wisconsin, Texas has been studying BIM and how it can be used on state projects for years. The FDC has developed a set of standards and guidelines that all private sector partners will have access to prior to any involvement in a state project. Along with the guidelines, FDC has created an interoperable BIM template that all private sector partners will have made available to them for any State project. The TFC has also stated an ambitious goal of closing the gap "between it and the General Services Administration, the first major governmental agency to adopt BIM for new construction."
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ASHRAE Research Targets Tying Together BIM, Energy Efficiency
Ensuring that a common language of "energy efficiency" is spoken by both building information modeling software used by architects and energy analysis and simulation software used by engineers is the goal of new research funded by ASHRAE.
The project will develop open-source reference models by which developers may test their solutions to interoperability between BIM and energy simulation software. The project will focus on the most common thermal features in buildings assumed to have the greatest impact on energy use, and provide guidelines for describing thermal models extracted from BIM and the rules for extracting those models used in whole building energy analysis applications.
"This research will promote the inclusion of energy efficiency measures in the early design of building model development," said Mark Clayton, Ph.D., principal investigator for the project. "It is expected to greatly increase the efficiency and accuracy of energy analysis and allow building designs to achieve higher levels of energy efficiency."
The project is one of 13 approved for funding by ASHRAE at its 2009 Annual Conference, totaling some $1.6 million.
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Green Building Initiative launches two certification programs for green building professionals
The Green Globes Professional and Green Globes Assessor Programs will Promote and Expand Green and Sustainable Building Practices
Today the Green Building Initiative® (GBI), one of the nation’s leading green building organizations and exclusive provider of the Green Globes green building certification in the United States, today announced the availability of two new personnel certification programs for green building practitioners.
The certifications, Green Globes Professional (GGP) and Green Globes Assessor (GGA), will help expand the knowledge base around accepted sustainable building best practices including Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), as well as extend the reach of the Green Building Initiative as it responds to growing demand for Green Globes certification.
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Efficiency can help Northwest meet 85% of new electricity demand
The Northwest can meet 85 percent of its new electricity needs over the next 20 years solely through conservation, and do so at half the cost of building power plants, according to the Northwest Power Planning and Conservation Council.
That's a radical concept in an industry that typically meets growing demand by adding new production. Yet by all indications at the state and federal levels, energy efficiency's day has arrived. In the draft of the 20-year energy policy blueprint that the advisory council is slated to vote on today, it's at the top of the region's shopping list.
"This plan is all about energy efficiency," said Tom Eckman, the council's manager of conservation resources. "In the next decade, that's it. That's where the action is."
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U.S. Urged to Back $500 Billion for ‘Green’ Buildings
Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama should back a $500 billion plan to make U.S. buildings more energy-efficient because it would aid the economic recovery, increase energy security and reduce global warming, two policy groups said.
The plan would increase the energy efficiency of 40 percent of commercial and residential buildings by 2020, generating about 625,000 full-time jobs, and saving families $300 to $1,200 a year in energy costs, according to the proposal today by the Center for American Progress, a research group that advises Democrats, and the Energy Future Coalition, a nonpartisan alliance.
“Rapidly improving the efficiency of our existing buildings is essential,” the Washington-based groups said. The $500 billion would come from a combination of public and private funds, according to the report released today.
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Rebuilding America: A Policy Framework for Investment in Energy Efficiency Retrofits
Investments in building efficiency retrofits can simultaneously address the challenges of economic recovery, energy insecurity, and global warming by laying the foundation for sustained economic growth, driving demand in the construction and manufacturing sectors, and creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs across the country. Retrofitting our homes and businesses will also slash consumer energy expenditures, increase real estate values, and provide low-cost, near-term reductions in global warming pollution.
Today, buildings account for 70 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption and 40 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Yet much of our housing and building stock is old, inefficient, and unnecessarily wasteful. While building codes and green building standards offer a tool for achieving deep improvements in energy use for new buildings, half of the buildings that will be standing in 30 years already dot our landscape. Any strategy to capture the benefits of energy efficiency in our “built environment” must include a program to retrofit our existing stock of residential, commercial and industrial structures.
Deep building retrofits can cut energy use by 20 to 40 percent with proven techniques and off-the-shelf technologies. Best of all, they can pay for themselves from the energy they save. “Rebuilding America,” a national program to cut energy waste in buildings, could reduce energy bills economy-wide by hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Energy efficiency retrofits also create good local construction jobs across the country at a time when well over a million construction workers sit idle in a sagging housing market. Demand for the manufactured products needed to retrofit buildings will also result in jobs by revitalizing the manufacturing sector and contributing to sustainable, long-term economic growth.
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