March 2009 Archives

A promising initiative to promote renewable energy in homes has been started in Berkeley. The major barrier to installing solar panels is their large upfront cost and long payback period. Even if the savings are there in the long run, homeowners may not have the money upfront to buy solar panels, and they may not want to make a huge investment in a house that they could sell before the 20 years it might take to make their money back. Enter Berkeley FIRST which solves both problems by financing the costs with your property taxes:

Berkeley FIRST (Financing Initiative for Energy Efficiency Renewable and Solar Technology) allows property owners to install solar systems and make energy efficiency upgrades with no upfront cost.

Berkeley pays the upfront costs through the issuance of a new kind of municipal bond. The bonds are repaid from a new line item on participating property owners’ property tax bills over 20 years. Participating property owners pay for only the costs of their energy project.

The program is 100% “opt-in” and property tax expenses remain unchanged for those who choose not to participate.

The result: solar and energy efficiency projects are paid for over a long period of time, in bi-annual installments. The interest rate is fixed. Property owners do not need to access their own capital or credit. And if the owner sells the property, the repayment obligation transfers along with the property itself.

(Via Gristmill.)

Treehugger has a lovely slide show of planned and completed green buildings in China, including a large apartment complex heated and cooled by 600 geothermal wells.

An encouraging article in the New York Times talks about the growing interest in green chemistry:

“Students can earn a doctoral degree in chemistry in nearly every university in the country and not have to demonstrate a basic understanding of toxicology or eco-toxicology — how to design a molecule that doesn’t disrupt the endocrine in some way,” said Michael Wilson, assistant research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

But students, faculty and industry are starting to change that by pushing for programs and courses about alternate design principles, slowly shifting chemistry education.

From the New York Times:

The Energy Department has tentatively awarded its first alternative-energy loan guarantee, breaking a four-year logjam in the federal loan program. The $535 million guarantee will go to Solyndra Inc., which said it would use the money to expand its production of photovoltaic panels at its facilities in Fremont, Calif.

Solyndra manufactures thin-film photovoltaics plated onto cylinders (picture a fluorescent light tube) that collects direct, diffuse and reflected solar energy over a 360° angle. The cylinders are assembled into panels which are easily installed on flat roofs using simple brackets.

More good news on Ontario’s proposed Green Energy Act:

Renewable energy in Ontario could get a massive financial boost with newly proposed feed-in tariff rates.

For those unfamiliar with feed-in tariffs, qualifying projects receive an above-market rate for the electricity they produce, fixed for a given time period (say 20 years). All of the electricity produced is sent into the grid. The costs of implementing the incentive program are then spread across all consumers of electricity. In general, the costs increase a customer’s utility bill only slightly, while stimulating the development of renewable energy. Of all the ways of promoting renewable energy growth, [feed-in tariffs], though not widely adopted in North America, are found by many analyses to be the most cost-effective incentive program.

The feed-in tariffs will support a wide range of renewable energy options, including biomass, biogas, small-scale hydropower, solar photovoltaics, and wind power. Feed-in tariffs have been wildly successful in Germany at accelerating the adoption of solar and wind power to the point that over 10% of Germany’s energy is now produced from renewable sources.

Via Treehugger.

Recent research from the Rocky Mountain Institute highlights the astonishing potential for energy efficiency in the United States:

If the rest of the country achieved the level of efficiency of the top 10 states, we would save 30 percent of U.S. electricity consumption, or 1.2 million gigawatt hours.

This would translate to savings of $100 billion on electricity bills, cutting the equivalent of 60 percent of coal-fired electricity, or avoiding 779 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

In fact, if less-efficient states matched the efficiency levels of top-performing states, we could wipe out enough carbon dioxide emissions to offset both the Netherlands’ and the United Kingdom’s emissions for a year!

An insightful, provocatively titled article from the 100K House blog addresses the importance of taking an integrated, holistic process to green building design, as opposed to the much more expensive approach of tacking on ‘green’ features to a poorly designed building:

In an interview a few weeks ago I was asked what our premium was for building LEED Platinum. The reporter had done some research and found that the highest level of LEED for Homes usually carried a 15-20% markup and wanted to know what the added cost was for our project. It was a difficult question since we don’t have a non-LEED version of the house with which to compare, but eventually I said, “Um … I guess … negative 5%”

Most of the builders and developers reporting high premiums for pursuing LEED are still trying to build the exact same home they have always built … they polish the turd. Rather than redesign the house that has been successful for them in the past, they add solar panels, geothermal systems, high end interior fixtures, extra insulation and other green features. Since the features are add-ons and extras, the price rises as each one is tacked on.

To avoid these extra costs, one must start the home design process with affordability and sustainability factored into every decision.

The inspiring 100K house project in Philadelphia, which aims to build affordable, environmentally friendly housing, has announced a new initiative to build two houses to the Passive House standard (which can reduce energy for heating and cooling by over 90%):

We will definitely return to LEED after this project, but we see the Passive House standard as a great way to improve some very specific aspects of our houses, mainly the envelope and the mechanical systems. In these two areas, Passive House far exceeds even the highest standards of LEED.

The goal, as always, is to pursue this new standard in an affordable manner … Our goal is to adhere to the same requirement as the 100k House project and build this home for less than $100 per square foot in hard construction costs. With any luck this will allow us to provide one of the most affordable Passive Homes ever built in the US.

Zerofootprint is launching an international prize to be awarded to the best designs for re-skinning five buildings in Ontario to make them far more energy efficient. The goal is to dramatically reduce the energy required to heat and cool buildings, which are responsible for roughly 40% of our carbon dioxide emissions.

It is clear … that any solution to climate change will by definition have to be a solution to the built space in our cities. Rebuilding is not an option and traditional retrofitting is inadequate, and invasive. There is however another option—re-skinning. Usually necessary because a thermal barrier needs to be created to gain any significant energy efficiency, re-skinning has many other advantages such as: It can be used to hide a cheap retrofit; It is potentially non-invasive; It can make a ho-hum building into a handsome green role model; It can be used to engineer an energy reduction of as much as 70%; Re-skinning can be smart — solar, thermal, media, vegetation etc.

To jump-start this process Zerofootprint has announced an international award, The Z-Prize, among architects, engineers, and designers—“The Zerofootprint Skin Renewal Award”—to be launched on May 11, 2009 at the Discovery ‘09 Conference in Toronto. The goal will be to develop a smart, reproducible, aesthetically pleasing, cost-effective, energy-efficient solution for the re-skinning of buildings. Zerofootprint has assembled a distinguished group of architects, designers and engineers to guide the competition/award.

As a follow-up to my earlier observations on the decline of the world’s oceans I highly recommend this wonderful talk by Sylvia Earle — full of lush videography testifying to the power, beauty and diversity of our oceans — as she receives the 2009 TED prize, and calls on us to

ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.

Sylvia Earle points out that only a fraction of 1% of the oceans are protected from degradation, that 90% of the biomass of large fish has been removed in the last century, that half of the coral reefs are threatened, that we are still killing a truly endangered species, the blue-fin tuna, and that carbon dioxide is acidifying the ocean and threatening the long-term survival of many fundamental species. The world’s oceans soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, produce most of our oxygen, and provide abundant food. Sylvia Earle calls the oceans our “life-support system”, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see why. Dr. Earle wraps up her talk by emphasizing what is still in our oceans and very much worth saving. She calls for the creation of marine reserves to nourish, protect, and enhance the biodiversity, resilience and richness of the oceans. There is still hope. There is still time; but, there is precious little of it:

For the children of today, for tomorrow’s child, as never again, now is the time.

Since high-efficiency photovoltaic cells tend to be expensive, one way to reduce the cost of solar panels is to concentrate sunlight from a large area onto a very small cell. A new development from a company in Toronto called Morgan Solar greatly simplifies the concentrating components to drive down the cost of concentrated solar power (their goal is to move below $1 per watt by 2011). Morgan Solar’s design can focus the power of 1000 suns onto a high-efficiency solar cell about the size of a baby’s thumbnail. From the Technology Review:

Nicolas Morgan holds up a square piece of clear, molded acrylic about a centimeter thick and shines a penlight directly at its flat surface. A green beam enters the acrylic and bends toward the center of the square. Morgan repeats the process at different points on the surface, and each time, the beam darts toward the center.

The acrylic component—called a Light-Guide Solar Optic (LSO)—is a new type of solar concentrator that could significantly lower the cost of generating electricity from the sun. Unlike existing designs, there’s no need for mirrors, complex optics, or chemicals to trap and manipulate the light. “It’s pure geometric optics,” says Morgan, director of business development at Toronto-based Morgan Solar.

(Via Gristmill.)

I am increasingly alarmed by the precipitous decline of the health of the world’s oceans. I recently finished Taras Grescoe’s “Bottomfeeder: How to eat ethically in a world of vanishing seafood”, in which Taras warns us that oceans are in danger of becoming dead zones populated only “by jellyfish, bacteria, and slime”. Today the Toronto Star reports that the top predators in the ocean are starving because the prey fish they rely on for food are overfished.

In Canada, scientists said Atlantic cod in the Gulf of St. Lawrence are becoming skinny because they are having more trouble finding reliable sources of small prey like capelin. In Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, striped bass are turning up emaciated because of shrinking supplies of herring and anchovies.

Whales too are having a difficult time finding prey, which researchers say might be affecting their ability and decision to mate. For many endangered whale species, diminished food sources could mean their populations will have trouble recovering.

Seabirds are being particularly hard hit as they choose not to mate because they can’t guarantee food sources, Stiles said, citing the example of puffins in Norway where there was a 64 per cent drop in the number of birds having chicks in one year.

The problem is that as stocks of larger species are depleted, fishermen work their way down the marine food chain and fish smaller prey. Biologists warn that there might be little left in the world’s oceans as fishermen fish out the seas.

What kind of world do we want to live in? If that world includes healthy oceans, abundant with fish, we should consider establishing marine reserves free from fishing. Taras Grescoe points to New Zealand as a hopeful example, where the establishment of marine reserves has restored biodiversity, boosted populations of fish, and won converts among the fishermen who now benefit from a stable catch.