Green Building and Manufacturing Articles
All Sustainable Transportation Subsidies Shouldn't Be Created Equal, Experts Say
ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2010) -- When it comes to pumping up the appeal of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), some regions are more ripe for the cars than others, and some consumers' buttons need more pushing than others -- an important policy distinction when shaping subsidies, two energy policy experts say.
In a recent article in Energy Policy, a leading academic journal in the energy field, Steven Skerlos in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and James Winebrake, chair of the Department of Science, Technology and Society/Public Policy at Rochester Institute of Technology, and make the case for a better way to target government subsidies aimed at promoting sustainable transportation technologies.
It turns out that giving consumers who live and drive in regions where the social benefits of electric-boosted cars are strongest, and recognizing the circumstances of consumers -- such as their income, life stage and family size -- gives PHEVs a better shot at both sales and environmental and energy security effectiveness.
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U.S. CAR FLEET SHRINKS BY FOUR MILLION IN 2009
After a Century of Growth, U.S. Fleet Entering Era of Decline - By Lester R. Brown
America's century-old love affair with the automobile may be coming to an end. The U.S. fleet has apparently peaked and started to decline. In 2009, the 14 million cars scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold, shrinking the U.S. fleet by 4 million, or nearly 2 percent in one year. While this is widely associated with the recession, it is in fact caused by several converging forces.
Future U.S. fleet size will be determined by the relationship between two trends: new car sales and cars scrapped. Cars scrapped exceeded new car sales in 2009 for the first time since World War II, shrinking the U.S. vehicle fleet from the all-time high of 250 million to 246 million. (See data at www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2010/update87.) It now appears that this new trend of scrappage exceeding sales could continue through at least 2020.
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Construction employment drops for 35th straight month
American businesses shed 84,000 jobs in December, according to today's ADP Employer Services report based on payroll data. About 52,000 of the jobs lost were in the construction sector. More jobs were lost than had been forecast, but it was the smallest decline since March 2008. "There is an improving trend," said one economist. "We may turn the corner in January or February."
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Qinyuan seeks to boost electric car sales in US
Tianjin Qingyuan Electric Vehicle Co, the first Chinese automaker to break into the United States, hopes to significantly boost sales of its self-developed electric models in the world's second-largest market this year, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.
State-backed Qingyuan is among a growing army of Chinese automakers, including BYD Co partly-owned by U.S. billionaire Warren Buffett, eager to tap the fledgling green car sector in mature markets.
Qingyuan hopes to sell 3,000 self-made electric vehicles mostly in the United States in 2010, 50 percent more than what it shipped there in the past five years, the source told Reuters.
It is also seeking opportunities to sell electric vehicles in Europe where regulators have been tightening up emission rules to tackle environmental issues, the source said.
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Smarter Cars Are Gaining Traction
ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2010) — Lives can depend on a vehicle's moment-by-moment traction. New European technology promises to make cars as good as experienced, alert drivers at sensing and adjusting to wet, snowy or icy roads.
You're heading into a curve at highway speed when you spot a suspicious patch of road just ahead. You have a few tenths of a second to guess if it's wet, snow-packed or icy and adjust your speed accordingly.
Today you're on your own, but within a few years your car might detect that water, ice or snow before you do, calculate how much traction your car could lose, and flash you a warning or even apply the brakes and stabilise the car as much as physically possible.
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Trash to gas: Landfill energy projects increasing
Hundreds of trash trucks across California are rumbling down city streets using clean fuel made from a dirty source: garbage.
The fuel is derived from rotting refuse that San Francisco and Oakland residents and businesses have been discarding in the Altamont landfill since 1980. Since November, the methane gas created from decaying detritus at the 240-acre landfill has been sucked into tubes and sent into an innovative facility that purifies and transforms it into liquefied natural gas.
Almost 500 Waste Management Inc. garbage and recycling trucks run on this new source of environmentally friendly fuel instead of dirty diesel.
In a state that has passed the most stringent greenhouse gas reduction goals in the United States, the climate change benefits of this plant are twofold – methane from the trash heap is captured before entering the environment and use of the fuel produces less carbon dioxide than conventional gasoline.
“We've built the largest landfill-to-LNG plant in the world; this plant produces 13,000 gallons a day of LNG,” said Jessica Jones, a landfill manager for Houston-based Waste Management. “It will take 30,000 tons a year of CO2 from the environment.”
Altamont is one of two California landfills making LNG; the other is a smaller facility about 40 miles south of Los Angeles. Other natural gas facilities are being planned by Waste Management at some of the 270 active landfills nationwide, and the number could grow quickly as communities seek to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
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10,000 Companies Prepare to Start Low Carbon Diet Plans on Jan. 1
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich., Dec. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- President Obama and the EPA are gearing up to put the nation on a low-carbon diet and their strategy would do Weight Watchers proud: Count first, cut later.
The counting begins on Jan. 1, 2010 when some 10,000 companies and other entities, including municipalities and even some universities, must start measuring their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
And while it's uncertain when mandatory cuts will be announced - and whether Congress or the EPA will act first - the law firm of Plunkett Cooney said today that polluters might want to start dieting sooner rather than later because their GHG emissions, down to the plant level, will become part of the public record after March 31, 2011.
"New regulations to reduce carbon emissions are coming but public scrutiny will come first," said Plunkett Cooney Senior Attorney. "Companies need to understand that from the standpoint of government regulation and public opinion, the debate about global warming is over. That means it's time for them to develop sustainability plans and carbon reduction strategies before regulators, environmental advocates, shareholders and other groups force them to act."
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Efficient Lighting, With Fewer Wires
At the Fremont, Calif., offices of Redwood Systems, a high-tech start-up, the super-efficient light emitting diode fixtures, or LEDs, that dot the ceiling dim imperceptibly as more natural light comes through the windows.
They also gradually brighten and fade as people enter or leave a room. And the company's 25 employees will soon be able to control the lights over their desks using their Blackberries or iPhones.
Coming up with a new way to power and communicate with lights in the smart buildings of the future is the goal of the computer networking experts — formerly of Cisco — who started Redwood Systems. To do this, they've focused on developing software and hardware that exploits the digital nature of LEDs.
The system that powers today's lights “looks almost exactly like what it looked like when Edison invented it in the 1880s,” said Jeremy Stieglitz, the company's vice president of marketing. “The bulb got better, but the backbone didn't. We wanted to develop a scalable reliable communication system and apply it to office lighting.”
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E.ON lights the way ahead with LED streetlamps
E.ON will today launch an LED streetlight that consumes up to 70% less energy than standard lights and promises to deliver a "step change" in the efficiency of lighting infrastructure.
The energy firm already operates a number of lighting contracts for local authorities and private companies and is now looking to offer the technology to new and existing customers.
"We're bidding for a number of highway and streetlighting contracts and wanted to demonstrate a step change within the efficiency of lighting," Rachel Hodge at E.ON Sustainable Energy told BusinessGreen.com.
She added that the long life of streetlamps – contracts typically run for 25 years – means that it is important to install the most efficient systems available at the start of a project or risk being locked into higher levels of energy use.
The new Marlin streetlight has been in development for 18 months and has been tested successfully at a number of E.ON sites, as well as with two local authorities, the company said.
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Half Of Non-Residential Buildings Will Be Green By 2015 -Study
Green buildings will make up about half of the non-residential building stock by 2015, up from about 15% currently, according to a new study from venture capital firm Good Energies Inc.
This projected rapid growth would represent a surprising change as green building was considered a small niche market only 10 years ago. Both new construction and renovation projects include green building practices, with many developers starting to realize the costs are not as high as they expected.
Greg Kats, senior director and director of climate change for New York-based Good Energies, said he used the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy Environmental Design standards - which include categories such as energy and water use, site location, landscaping and proximity to mass-transit and shopping centers - to define what qualified for a green building in the study. To be counted as a green building, LEED certification wasn't required, but the building had to adhere to LEED standards.
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After review of mountaintop mining, scientists urge ending it
WASHINGTON Scientific evidence that mountaintop-removal coal mining destroys streams and threatens human health is so strong the government should stop granting new permits for it, a group of 12 environmental scientists report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The consequences of this mining in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and southwestern Virginia are "pervasive and irreversible," the article finds. Companies are required by law to take steps to reduce the damages, but their efforts don't compensate for lost streams nor do they prevent lasting water pollution, it says.
The article is a summary of recent scientific studies of the consequences of blasting the tops off mountains to obtain coal and dumping the excess rock into streams in valleys. The authors also studied new water-quality data from West Virginia streams and found that mining polluted them, reducing their biological health and diversity.
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to this growing scientific evidence of the damages, they wrote, adding: "Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science."
New permits shouldn't be granted, they argued, "unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems."
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Do Smart Meters Curb Energy Use?
It's said that information is power but could information mean less power, when it comes to electricity use? Environmentalists and makers of so-called smart meters are convinced that's the case. They say if consumers could see in real time how much power they're using, they'd conserve more. But some behavioral economists say no way. They say electricity is so cheap that real-time information might lead people to run their lights and gadgets even more.
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Lighting up from the sky - solar-powered rooftop batteries
Energy-starved India could soon use its abundance of sunlight to power one megawatt (1 MW)-capacity rooftop storage batteries to electrify homes and offices, an official said.
The government is in talks with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US to use its prototype of 1 MW-capacity rooftop storage battery, Power Secretary H.S. Brahma told IANS here.
“We are in discussion with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a partnership to install the 1 MW rooftop storage battery it has developed recently,” Brahma said.
The union ministry of power has proposed the tie-up with MIT under the Indo-US Science & Technology Forum to develop the prototypestorage battery into a commercial product for meeting India's growing energy demand.
The proposal was discussed during the visit of US Energy Secretary Steven Chu to India Nov 12-14 under the clean energy cooperation between the two countries.
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Insurers 'Green Up' Gray Coverage Areas
“Greenwashing” sounds like a reference to environmentally friendly laundry products, but when the term is applied to construction or property management operations, it can signal decidedly unfriendly consequences for participants in the building process, such as lawsuits and organized protests.
Joseph Fobert, senior vice president and practice leader for the real estate solutions group of Chartis Insurance in Tampa, Fla., explained that when builders, contractors, real estate owners or managers promise to undertake green-building processes, if finished construction projects fall short of promised levels of greenness, then one or more project participants might face allegations of greenwashing—or green whitewashing.
The promise, he explained, can take any number of forms.
For example, a real estate owner for a business complex may tout the prospect of a certain amount of savings on energy bills.
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New Ways to Improve Water Efficiency
In the U.S. and most of the industrialized world, building occupants take for granted the simple convenience of filling a glass with clean, drinkable water at the kitchen sink. Yet worldwide, nearly a billion people globally have no access to safe drinking water, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Americans use an average of 100 gallons of fresh water each day, with a total 4.8 billion gallons a day going down the drain. Furthermore, a 2003 survey by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revealed that at least 36 states could suffer local, regional, or statewide water shortages by the year 2013.
Water also needs to be transported and treated, meaning that each drop of water represents some expenditure of energy. Public water supplies and treatment facilities in the U.S. consume an average 56 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) a year—enough electricity to power more than five million homes for an entire year. Moreover, the EPA reports that approximately 4% of the nation's electricity consumption is used for moving or cleaning water and wastewater.
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Moving Forward with BIM in 2010
As we move into 2010, I wanted to take a look back at how Building Information Modeling (BIM) helped shape the year 2009 for the AEC industry. In attending different conferences and seminars in 2009, I realized the interest in BIM is growing in all areas. Products manufacturers began to see the need to have BIM content for their products. Facility owners started to ask questions about BIM. States, such as Wisconsin and Texas, adopted BIM as the design tool of choice for their state projects. College campuses around the nation are moving toward BIM. It is exciting to see how a technology can change an industry.
With the interest that was shown at the AIA Convention and Expo and Greenbuild Expo, BIM will become a driving force in the AEC community in 2010. It was just amazing to me to see the interest that BIM has generated. In attending these conventions for the first time, it surprised me to see the vast levels of knowledge. There were people there that had been using BIM for several years and then were many people who were just getting their indoctrination into BIM. I had not realized the engineering community was as far behind the architectural and construction communities as it relates to where BIM implementation is concerned. Being a part of the Reed Construction Data booth, my eyes were really opened to the lack of acceptance of BIM in the engineering community. BIM can be such a powerful tool for engineers, I think in 2010, the community as a whole, will realize the need to incorporate BIM into their design process. (Side Note) It is great to work for a company that realized several years ago, what a powerful tool BIM can be and then go out and become a leader in the BIM process.
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