USGBC Wants an Environmental Label for Every Building

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Environmental Leader

Every building in the U.S. should have a label as to its environmental impact, said the U.S. Green Building Council’s president at the Healthy Buildings meeting.  At the same event, IBM told how it is taking green buildings one step further with bright-green buildings, which converges green buildings with intelligence, said an IBM executive, reports Central New York News.

Rick Fedrizzi, president of the U.S. Green Building Council, would like to see a label similar to nutrition labels found on food packaging on the side of every building, that discloses the quality of the air, water and other environmental factors inside, reports Central New York News.  Fedrizzi was the opening keynote speaker at the Healthy Buildings 2009 conference.

Fedrizzi said in the article that indoor environmental quality ranks near the bottom of the nation’s policy issues, and to change that, more research is needed to demonstrate the links between health and indoor air quality. He also noted that green building research attracted less than 1 percent of all federally funded research in 2007.
Jane Snowdon, a key executive at IBM’s Intelligent Building and Smarter City Research at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., told an audience at the Healthy Buildings 2009 conference that buildings need to be smarter because they consume 70 percent of the world’s electricity, 12 percent of its potable water and 40 percent of the raw materials used globally, reports the newspaper. T hey also create 136 million tons of waste per year worldwide, she said.

The smart grid would play an integral role in making buildings more energy efficient.  As an example, National Grid, a utility in New York and New England, has applied for $200 million in federal stimulus money to create a smart grid in three states involving 200,000 customers, reports the newspaper.

Christopher Cavanagh, director of new products and services for the utility, told Central New York News that smart meters, appliances and monitoring systems will let consumers choose to consume energy when it’s cheaper — generally at night, or off-peak hours — and let the utility manage demand for energy.

To help building owners garner financial savings from green building practices, a new nonprofit organization was formed earlier this year to support and promote environmental sustainability among property owners and managers nationwide.

The Association of Green Property Owners and Managers (AGPOM) offers several services to members including a cost-effective Green Building Plan, green insurance products that provide discounts for going green, and Green Premium Plus, a program based on renewable energy credits (RECs).

Could a Solar-Hydrogen Economy Supply All Our Energy Needs?

by

Lloyd Alter, Toronto

on

09. 6.09
Science & Technology (solar)

TreeHugger has never been a fan of the hydrogen economy; the gas is more of a battery than a fuel as it takes a lot of energy to make the stuff. We have called it nothing more than a front for the nuclear industry.

But Derek Abbott, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia, makes a persuasive case that it is perhaps the most effective medium for using and storing solar energy, and explains in Physorg..

He looks at all of the technologies for making hydrogen and settles on solar thermal, driving Stirling engines.

"The fact that there simply is 5,000 times more sun power than our consumption needs makes me very optimistic," Abbott said. "It's a fantastic resource. We have the ingenuity to send man to the moon, so we definitively have the ingenuity to tap the sun's resources."

Despite the improvements in silicon solar cells, Abbott argues that they suffer from low efficiencies and high environmental impact compared with solar thermal collectors. Solar cells require large amounts of water and arsenic; Abbott calculates that manufacturing enough solar cells to power the world would require 6 million tonnes of arsenic, while the world's supply is estimated at about 1 million tonnes. Even the overall solar cell design is fundamentally flawed, he says. Solar cell semiconductor reliability drops as temperature increases, yet large temperature differences are required to increase thermodynamic efficiency. For this reason, semiconductor technology is much better suited to lower powers and temperatures, such as pocket calculators.

On the other hand, solar thermal collectors are specifically designed to operate under hot temperatures. The idea is to use a curved mirror to focus sunlight to boil water and create steam, which is then used to power, for example, a Stirling heat engine to produce electricity. The system has already been demonstrated in California's Mojave Desert, which has been using a solar thermal system to heat oil in a closed-cycle instead of water for the past 20 years.

He then suggests hooking these up to generators and using the power to electrolyze water and make hydrogen.

"Governments should begin by setting up sizable solar farms that supplement existing grid electricity and provide enough hydrogen to power buses," Abbott said. "Enthusiasts will then buy hydrogen cars, retrofit existing cars, and refuel at bus depots. Then things will grow from there. You gotta start somewhere."

Then he goes off what I would have called the deep end by suggesting that liquid hydrogen is the most efficient way to transport the stuff, even though this requires a huge amount of energy.

(See What Is The Carbon Footprint of The Space Program? for how much). No problem;

Since the sun supplies a virtually unlimited amount of energy, the solution is to factor in the non-recurring cost of extra solar collectors to provide the energy for liquefaction. His calculations show that the cost of a solar collector farm used to produce hydrogen is still lower than a nuclear station of equivalent power.

In some ways, Abbott sounds like those early nuclear proponents who said that they would provide electricity that was "too cheap to meter. " But you can't help but be intrigued by his conclusion in the Physorg article:

"There is so much solar that all you have to do is invest in the non-recurring cost of more dishes to drive a solar-hydrogen economy at whatever efficiency it happens to sit at. I show in my paper that if you do this you come out cheaper than nuclear and you take up less than 8% of the world's desert area. ... So let's begin now, what are we waiting for?"