Green ArchiTEXT

What’s Your Water Footprint?

There are online calculators for energy, for carbon offsets and for determining the carbon footprint of a construction site. Now there’s one for calculating your water footprint, too.

The H2O Calculator is an interactive tool designed to figure the amount water used in your home or business as well as the water used to produce food, purchase products and many other factors – including water utilized to cool power plants to produce electricity.

The calculator was created by H₂O Conserve, a project of ICCR, GRACE, Food & Water Watch, and the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future.

Dockside Green is Going Beyond Green

Dockside Green in Victoria, British Columbia is one of those transformative developments that is changing the face of real estate – and it may be the greenest project of its kind ever in North America. The first phase, a residential complex of condos and townhouses called “Synergy” opened in March 2008; a second ‘residential cluster’, known as “Balance”, will debut in early 2009. And you can expect to hear much more about Dockside Green over the next couple of years.

ArchitectureWeek just ran a fine piece by Brian Libby, capturing the significance of this 1.3 million square foot mixed-use sustainable community:

“The development's first phase recently received LEED Platinum certification and, with 63 points, set a new record for the highest number of points achieved in the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED rating system.

That's one clue that Dockside Green seems to be meeting the triple bottom line of environmental, economic, and social performance that the City of Victoria called for in its original request for proposals. The goal of developers Windmill West and Vancity Enterprises is to achieve LEED Platinum ratings for every building in the development, which would be a North American first. Dockside is also a pilot project for the new LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system.”

I was first introduced to the project myself three years ago while writing The Ecological Engineer. “A Prototype for Green Living” describes Keen Engineering’s pioneering MEP designs that would result in a state-of-the-art biomass energy co-generation plant and on-site sewage treatment:

“There’s going to be a lot of magic happening with Dockside Green,” said Blair McCarry, the lead designer for KEEN (now Stantec). “Its real significance is that the entire concept is based on an assessment of the ‘triple bottom line.’ This development is taking that idea to a new level: creating new jobs on site, revitalizing the local economy with viable businesses, and aiming for a greenhouse gas-neutral community that’s also a net producer of clean energy.”

That magic is taking shape. Becoming real. And Dockside Green is all the more remarkable as a 15-acre former brownfield site located on the city's inner harbor and eventually home to new residential, office, commercial and light industrial space.
State-of-the-art blackwater treatment – using bioreactor tanks and ultra-filter membrane technology – will be a central feature of Dockside Green.
IMAGE: Stantec

The Smart Garage

     IMAGE: RMI

For several decades now, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) has become known for their cutting-edge research on renewable energy technology (Soft Energy Paths), resource planning expertise, and more. Recently, they also launched their Built Environment Team (BET) and Mobility + Vehicle Efficiency Team (MOVE).

A key part of MOVE, launched in 2007, has been to explore efficiency solutions in core automotive and trucking sectors. And a relatively new initiative in this area has been the Smart Garage, a sweeping concept that addresses the seamless integration of vehicles, homes and offices via the electric power grid. RMI hosted the Smart Garage Charrette October 8 to 10 in Portland, Oregon featuring an impressive line-up of participants who represent a wide range of transportation, technology and sustainability consulting areas.

The Smart Garage, according to RMI is:

“…is a new energy paradigm focused on the integration of how we use energy. It is made possible by the convergence of energy in the transportation, electricity grid and building sector enabled by plug-in vehicles. It combines key industry endeavors such as smart charging, Vehicle to Grid, V2Building, and the smart grid.

Smart Garage bridges the transportation, building and electric power sectors by providing electricity as a low-carbon fuel to vehicles and then using vehicle energy storage for responsive services to the power grid. This optimizes the efficiency of both sectors and enables significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”

Read more about this breakthrough concept at ForbesAutos.com and RMI/MOVE.