Green Building & Manufacturing Articles

In Search of Net Zero
GOLDEN, Colo.--It takes a certain ruthlessness to create the greenest office building in the nation.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy, is midway through construction of a $64 million project that lays claim to that title. The architects and engineers have spent hundreds of hours calculating the energy use of every aspect of the building, from the elevator to the exit signs. They have tweaked the design again and again with the aim of getting the 218,000-square-foot building to perform at net zero--meaning it will consume so little energy that it won't need to draw a single electron from the grid.
The calculations leave little margin for error, however, so project manager Eric Telesmanich is girding for a new role as energy enforcer next summer, once the lab's 750 employees move into the building, located on NREL's campus in this Denver suburb. No personal mini-fridges or microwaves or space heaters.
If he has to, Mr. Telesmanich says, he will do an outlet audit and unplug any unauthorized energy hogs. "We have to be the police," he says. "We're introducing our occupants to the new energy culture."
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Untold Levels of Oil Sands Pollution on Athabasca River Confirmed
ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2009) -- After an exhaustive study of air and water pollution along the Athabasca River and its tributaries from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca, researchers say pollution levels have increased as a direct result of nearby oil sands operations.
University of Alberta biological sciences professor David Schindler was part of the team that conducted a long term air and water study and found high levels of Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds. PACs are a group of organic contaminants containing several known carcinogens, mutagens, and teratogens. The highest levels of PAC's were found within 50 kilometres of two major oil sands up graders.
Schindler says that government and industry have claimed the pollution is a naturally occurring seepage from the oil sands deposits and are not related to the oil sands industry
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Milling and Drilling in Cyberspace
ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2009) -- Machinists, numerical control programmers or mechatronics engineers -- trainees in engineering jobs often have to master complex equipment. In the future, trainees will practice and learn milling, turning, drilling and programming routines son a virtual model.
A trainee carefully clamps a workpiece in a lathe. He must program the machine correctly before he can machine the part. This is a tricky task and the trainee will have to solve a similar problem for his final exam. Therefore, he is learning to handle such equipment at a vocational school. However, rather than standing in front of a real machine, he sits in front of a computer. The control panels and the lathe behind it appear on a monitor. A computer guides the trainee step by step.
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A Greener Way to Get Electricity from Natural Gas
ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2009) -- A new type of natural-gas electric power plant proposed by MIT researchers could provide electricity with zero carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, at costs comparable to or less than conventional natural-gas plants, and even to coal-burning plants. But that can only come about if and when a price is set on the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases -- a step the U.S. Congress and other governments are considering as a way to halt climate change.
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Bloomberg Drops an Effort to Cut Building Energy Use
After intense opposition from building owners, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has dropped the most far-reaching initiative of his plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The plan, which the owners said was too costly, called for all buildings of 50,000 square feet or more to undergo audits to determine which renovations would make them more energy efficient, and for owners to then pay for many of those changes.
The mayor wants to go forward with the proposal to require energy audits, but now is leaving it up to the building owners whether to undertake the changes called for by those audits.
It would have put New York far ahead of other cities in the green-buildings movement. Many cities require that newly constructed buildings be energy efficient, but do not impose those standards on existing properties. Some 22,000 buildings, together accounting for nearly half the square footage in the city, would have been affected.
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Energy Efficiency Technologies Offer Major Savings, Report Finds
ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2009) -- Energy efficiency technologies that exist today or that are likely to be developed in the near future could save considerable money as well as energy, says a new report from the National Research Council. Fully adopting these technologies could lower projected U.S. energy use 17 percent to 20 percent by 2020, and 25 percent to 31 percent by 2030.
Achieving full deployment of these efficiency technologies will depend in part on pressures driving adoption, such as high energy prices or public policies designed to increase energy efficiency. Nearly 70 percent of electricity consumption in the United States occurs in buildings. The energy savings from attaining full deployment of cost-effective, energy-efficient technologies in buildings alone could eliminate the need to add new electricity generation capacity through 2030, the report says. New power generation facilities would be needed only to address imbalances in regional energy supplies, replace obsolete facilities, or to introduce more environmentally friendly sources of electricity.
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GE Wins $1.4 Billion Order for Oregon Wind Farm
Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- General Electric Co. won a $1.4 billion contract to supply turbines and services for an Oregon wind farm that would be bigger than any completed so far and supply a tenth of Southern California Edison's renewable energy.
GE, whose equipment generates one-third of the world's electricity, will supply 338 of its 2.5-megawatt turbines to Caithness Energy LLC to be installed in 2011 and 2012 and will hold a 10-year service contract, the companies said in a statement. About 400 people will be needed during construction of the wind farm and 35 to run the plant, GE said. "We like wind," Steve Bolze, who runs GE's power and water division, told Bloomberg Television today. "This is our largest contract we've signed this year, the third largest in our history. We have been in the business since 2002. It is significant."
The Shepherd's Flat project, when finished, will supply energy to the U.S. west coast grid, including Southern California Edison, Les Gelber a partner at New York-based Caithness, said in the statement. The two-year construction project, to begin in 2010, entails building about 85 miles of road and 90 miles of power lines that will connect to the grid. Shepherd's Flat will provide enough energy to power 235,000 average California homes and have the capacity to generate 2 billion kilowatt hours a year, the statement said. GE Energy Financial Services will also invest an undisclosed amount in the project.
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GE: National Christmas Tree Now 100% LED.
This year, GE has created America's first National Christmas tree outfitted from top to bottom with energy saving LED technology, including many light strings and ornaments used on previous year's trees. Inspired by the efforts of American families to "reduce, reuse and recycle," the tree is the most energy efficient tree in our history--consuming only 6000 watts of energy, compared to 18,000 watts on last year's tree and an average of 40,000 watts on National Trees in the traditional, all-incandescent light era.
The wattage reduction was possible because GE has, for the last three years, been gradually trimming the tree with more LED (light emitting diode) lighting, which is powered by tiny computer chips and has up to twenty times the life of traditional incandescent lighting. Since they last so much longer, the company was able to reuse more than half the LED light strings from previous years' trees. They also retrofitted ornaments from previous years with new LED light strands.
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Store Of Value
Battery technology may play a key role in the growth of wind and solar energy, two such variable power sources that large-scale storage capacity is needed to make them reliable contributors to the grid.
Peak electricity demand keeps rising. But in many countries, "grid stability hasn't improved--it has decreased," says Hans Schreck, a general partner at Munich-based venture-capital firm TVM Capital. Mr. Schreck gave a presentation at the Dow Jones Clean Energy Summit in Frankfurt in October. Dow Jones, a News Corp. company, is also publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
Wind and solar could be part of the solution, but only if a way is found to store their sometimes intermittently generated power. That's just what some energy specialists think is about to happen.
Pike Research, a consulting firm in Boulder, Colo., forecasts that the total utility energy-storage market will grow to $4.1 billion in 2018 from $329 million in 2008. Of existing storage at the grid level, 98% is pumped hydro, or moving water uphill during periods of low demand, and running it downhill through turbines to generate power when demand is high. But "we're running out of valleys and rivers," Mr. Schreck says.
Battery manufacturers haven't yet produced a model large or cheap enough to use for utility-scale storage, but to some that represents a potential opportunity.
Pike Research expects lithium-ion batteries to be a major part of the utility storage market, forecasting that they will make up 25% of that market by 2018.
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The Efficiency Fix For Climate Change by Joe Hogan, CEO of ABB.
Today, like every other day the past few years, mankind will release more than 116 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Emissions are rising faster now than in any other decade, in spite of our concerns about climate change and without new policies our daily emissions will reach 140 million metric tons by 2020.
As governments struggle to finalize a new, globally acceptable climate treaty, the difficulties are clear.
Yet there are still grounds for optimism, mainly because we already have solutions we can use to build a low-carbon energy supply.
As technological advances have made wind and solar power increasingly competitive, they have become the fastest growing segment of the energy market. There is great interest in offshore wind power, in the Desertec project that involves tapping solar power generated in the Sahara desert, and in similar initiatives in the Gobi and Mojave deserts. This is an encouraging sign that we are moving toward large-scale renewable power production.
But if we're serious about developing low-carbon power sources, we also need to develop a power system that can deliver them: a flexible and efficient smart grid that will effectively balance our energy consumption with the availability of wind and solar power. The technology is available now, but it needs to be implemented.
We also need to put renewables into perspective. Our only major source of renewable power today is hydro, which supplies 19% of the world's electricity�less than 3% comes from other renewable sources. Clearly they should be just one part of our overall strategy to combat climate change.
Surprisingly, our best prospect of reducing emissions is one that gets little attention: energy efficiency. Projections by the International Energy Agency show that using energy more efficiently has a greater potential to curb carbon dioxide emissions over the next 20 years than all the other options put together.
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U.S. Patent Office to Speed Clean-Energy Technologies
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. began a test program to speed patent reviews for clean-energy technologies so they can be brought to market faster.
The program, announced today by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, would initially reduce by 12 months the processing time of 3,000 applications for inventions intended to improve the environment and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The current processing time for such applications is 40 months.
Locke, at a press conference today, said he would like to see the "final determination, yes or no," ultimately reduced to a year.
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The Green Facade
Rick Fedrezzi, the founder and president of the U.S. Green Building Council, is a fresh-faced man with the exuberance of an evangelical preacher. And his flock is rapidly growing. On a warm Phoenix evening earlier this month, 28,000 architects, engineers, and real estate developers crowded into Chase Field for the opening session of the USGBC's annual Greenbuild conference. A giant screen at the front of the stadium displayed cheerful animations of solar panels curving toward the sun and green skyscrapers shooting up like flowers. As the euphoric soundtrack reached a crescendo with the Black Eyed Peas' "Let's Get It Started," Fedrizzi bounded onstage. "Our movement has reached not just a tipping point but a leverage point," he called out jubilantly. "And we finally have one long enough to move the world."
But two studies released this fall added a sour note to the clarion call. At the beginning of November, Greener World Media issued a report by Rob Watson. The editor of GreenerBuildings.com, Watson is renowned for developing the USGBC's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system (popularly known as LEED). Watson's report included impressive data on market trends, land impact, and water efficiency for LEED projects. When it came to energy savings, though, the numbers were discouraging. "Some LEED buildings are not performing as expected given their design and technology elements," Watson stated bluntly. "This is an area of controversy and a source of great attention by the U.S. Green Building Council."
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Passive House Standard
The Passive House Standard is a design methodology that champions a super insulated, airtight home or building that uses 70-90% less energy for heating than a conventional new home or building. This high performance standard is achieved through maximized passive solar gains, reduced heating loads, efficient ventilation of fresh air, and significant size and cost reduction of the heating system, which in some cases can be eliminated altogether.
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