Green ArchiTEXT

Green for Growth: The UK steps back from zero-carbon homes?

By Thomas Lane

In 2006, the Labour government gave the housebuilding industry 10 years’ notice to make its products zero-carbon. This ambitious requirement was launched as part of the Code for Sustainable Homes, and included interim carbon reduction targets along the way: 25% reduction in emissions in 2010 and 44% in 2013. Zero-carbon was going to be expensive - adding up to £40,000 per home - but the argument was that the industry would find ways of reducing these costs as the 2016 deadline approached.

About the only aspect of the zero-carbon requirement welcomed by the industry were the clear carbon reduction milestones along the way. This gave manufacturers confidence to invest in zero-carbon-friendly products and galvanised housebuilders into action. A collection of odd-looking homes sprung up at BRE’s innovation park at Garston, near Watford. Zero-carbon made the industry innovate.

That confidence has taken a battering since the last election. The chancellor George Osborne changed the definition of zero-carbon in the March 2011 Budget so housebuilders would no longer have to provide zero-carbon energy for domestic appliances, just heating, fixed lighting and hot water. Confidence has been further undermined by cuts in feed-in tariff rates for renewable technologies.

The biggest wobble, however, came from the 2013 Part L consultation. Instead of the 25% cut in carbon emissions over 2010 as proposed in the Code for Sustainable Homes, the government favoured an 8% cut, citing the election pledge not to place additional burdens on housebuilders during this parliament. This means that housebuilders face a much bigger jump in 2016 to keep the zero-carbon deadline on track. Additionally, the details of allowable solutions, the mechanism for handling how carbon emissions are mitigated off site, has yet to be finalised. The Zero Carbon Hub put forward proposals for managing this process in July 2011 but the government has yet to respond.

The carbon reduction jump needed in 2016 to keep the zero-carbon policy on track may be too big for the housebuilding industry to cope with. This means the date could be shifted to 2019, which would align with the date for all other buildings to be zero-carbon. READ MORE >>

via www.building.co.uk

Seattle University's buildings go carbon neutral with facilities upgrades, offsets

By Mike Thee

Seattle University's buildings are carbon neutral. Just pause a moment and let that sink in.

Yes, that's right-through new infrastructure enhancements and offsets, our campus buildings have completely shed their carbon footprints, further cementing the university's status as a leader in sustainability.

David Brugman, assistant director of utilities and sustainability, is playing an instrumental role in making SU's campus more energy-efficient. It is unknown how many colleges and universities in the country can claim their buildings are carbon neutral, but Brugman believes the list is pretty short.

SU's buildings have achieved carbon neutrality largely through two recent developments. First, a new, highly efficient heating loop serving five facilities has reduced our buildings' carbon output by 18 percent. Second, the university is offsetting the remaining 82 percent primarily by investing in a project that's turning cow manure into power. READ MORE >>

via www.seattleu.edu

A College Town Imagines a New Way of Life

By Scott Carlson

This northern Ohio college town is barely a blip on a map, far away from national centers of power. And yet people here are working on a plan that could make it a model for fundamentally reshaping the American economy and its society.

The architect of the plan is David W. Orr, a professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College. More than a decade ago, he helped inspire a "green building" trend when he dreamed up the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, which remains one of the greenest college buildings in the country.

Now he wants to expand that vision to Oberlin and its surrounding area. The Oberlin Project, as it's called, joins town and gown to create a resilient community for a post-fossil-fuel era. When asked to describe the project, Mr. Orr conjures a picture of life in Oberlin—a city of 8,000 residents and students, 40 miles outside of Cleveland—many years into the future: The town and the college would be powered by renewable energy, with a smattering of new and renovated green buildings at the town's core—the first among them paid for by the college. A "greenbelt" of farms would pump food, wood, and fiber into the city, while a steady stream of money from the college and small businesses, like restaurants and furniture manufacturers, would flow back out to the farms. The college, the local community college, the local vocational school, and the city's elementary and secondary schools would rejigger their programs to prepare students to live in the future: a world short on oil, wracked by unstable weather, relying increasingly on sustainable design, regional industries, and local know-how. The town itself would be a laboratory for a new way of life. READ MORE >>

via chronicle.com

Oberlin Project Envisions New Future for City and College

By Allegra Kirkland

The Oberlin Project, brainchild of the College’s Paul W. Sears Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics, David Orr, has recently taken its first steps toward changing the way the members of the Oberlin community live, work, consume and study at Oberlin. The project, organized around five principle goals, is a concerted effort in what Orr refers to as “full-spectrum sustainability:” an all-encompassing joint venture by the town and College to create a thriving, sustainable and environmentally friendly community in Oberlin.

The principle goals of the Oberlin Project are constructing a downtown green arts district, achieving climate neutrality for both city and College, creating a green belt for agriculture and forestry and the realization of these aims as an educational alliance between the College and other local schools. Additionally, in an effort unrelated to the College, the project hopes to serve as a model that can be replicated in towns and cities across the United States.

Ten teams — consisting of educators, city politicians, community leaders and policymakers — are simultaneously working on specific aspects of these overarching goals under the leadership of Orr, College President Marvin Krislov, Managing Director Bryan Stubbs and Eric Norenberg, Oberlin’s city manager. The project is expected to take more than a decade to complete.

As Orr said, “Full-spectrum sustainability is not a simple conversation. … It’s a fancy way to describe a lot of conversations that occur between the boundaries by which we organized the industrial world.” READ MORE >>

via www.oberlinreview.org

The Zero-Carbon House: It’s Just Around the Corner >> Wired

By Nate Berg

Green building and carbon-neutral living might seem like recent ideas, but engineer Jerry Yudelson has been in the environmentally friendly building business for 14 years. Today he directs a consulting firm in Tucson, Arizona, and his name is on a dozen books about green design. Before LEED certification (that’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, to us non-pros) was a glimmer in any architect’s eye, Yudelson was pushing for solar houses. And he still is. He offers his thoughts on where the field is headed, what new tricks are cutting energy use, and which technological leaps may yet take green homes mainstream.

Wired: You can hardly think of a green house without imagining solar panels. How has solar changed in recent years?

Jerry Yudelson: You’re getting solar a lot cheaper now. And it’s being incorporated into roof shingles, so you can actually have solar-powered roofs without putting on separate panels. You’ve got to put a roof on anyway, so if you can effectively make the roof itself a solar collector, you get two for one.

Wired: Bill Gates recently called rooftop solar “cute.” He seemed to think it was a rich person’s toy.

Yudelson: Production housing is where it’s getting interesting. The big home builders are starting to put on 2- or 3-kilowatt systems as a standard feature, and it’s just part of the price of the house. There’s no add-on cost. That’s a real breakthrough.

Wired: What about the systems that really run a house, like heating and cooling?

Yudelson: The real key is the windows. There’s some revolutionary nanotechnology that’s about to go into the glass—different kinds of coatings that make them five to 10 times more energy-efficient than double-paned windows. These windows are as energy-efficient as walls. READ MORE >>

via www.wired.com

Ed Mazria: How New York City Can Achieve Carbon Neutrality in Buildings by 2030

By Jacob Slevin

Are New Yorkers up for the Challenge? Our problems of climate change and diminishing energy supply are greater than ever, but architects and designers can have a significant impact in improving the state of the planet. Buildings are responsible for over 75% percent of New York City's greenhouse gas emissions, and there is a tremendous opportunity to effect real change through energy efficient and innovative design.

Ed Mazria is an architect who is making a big difference, as a preeminent leader and visionary in the field of sustainable design. With a career spanning 45 years, he has been engaged in environmental issues since the 1970s. He is the author of the "bible" of solar design, The Passive Solar Energy Book. Most significantly, he closed his practice in 2006 to start Architecture 2030, a nonprofit that challenges designers to achieve carbon neutrality in buildings by the year 2030. Carbon neutral buildings are ones that do not emit greenhouse gases or offset any emissions by producing renewable energy.

...

How do you see New York City as uniquely positioned to achieve significant greenhouse gas reductions?

Ed Mazria: New York City is already quite energy efficient due to the city's high density and public transportation network. The inherent efficiency of the city's plan and infrastructure will make it easier to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets than in many other locations.

The city consists primarily of occupied existing buildings. It is typically much simpler to design a sustainable building when it is a new construction. Do you see significant environmental improvements being possible in this regard?

Ed Mazria: Most buildings in New York will undergo renovation over the next twenty years. A number will also get demolished. As well, many building enclosures will soon need replacement, particularly post-WW2 curtain wall buildings. Gut renovations of office spaces take place on a regular basis. There is great opportunity to re-imagine and reduce energy consumption in all these buildings. READ MORE >>

via www.huffingtonpost.com

The Oberlin Project and “full-spectrum sustainability”

In this excerpt from his book “Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse,” environmental visionary David Orr talks about The Oberlin project, a joint venture with President Clinton’s  Climate Positive Development Program.

With no prospect for Federal climate legislation anytime soon, however, what’s to be done? The short answer is that, whatever the prospects, we must keep pushing on every front to: change Federal and state policies, transform the economy, improve public understanding of science, engage churches and civic organizations, reform private institutions, educate for ecological literacy, and improve our own behavior. Even without a coordinated, systematic national response, maybe enough small victories in time will suffice. Maybe.

I ended Down to the Wire on a personal note by describing the Oberlin Project, a joint effort by Oberlin College and the City of Oberlin to create “full-spectrum sustainability” in which the parts are integrated to reinforce the resilience and durability of the whole community. Typically, we’ve gone about implementing sustainability as a series of one-off projects unconnected to each other. As a result, work in sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, green buildings, economic development etc. were not designed to take advantage of the synergies that exists between the parts.

Specifically the goals of the Oberlin Project are to (1) rebuild a 13- acre block in the downtown to U.S. Green Building Platinum Standards as a driver for economic revitalization; (2) transition to carbon neutrality by a combination of radically improved efficiency and deployment of renewable energy; (3) develop a 20,000 acre greenbelt for agriculture and forestry; and (4) do all of the above as a part of an educational venture that joins the public schools, the college, a community college, and a vocational educational school that equips young people for decent and creative lives in a post-cheap-fossil fuel economy. The Project, now eighteen months old, is organized around community teams working on strategic issues such as energy, public policy, finance, community engagement, economic development, and education. In plain English “full-spectrum sustainability,” means lots of meetings between different teams and stakeholders because applied sustainability crosses virtually all of the fences and walls by which we organized the industrial world. READ MORE >>

via climateprogress.org

HOK: A Theory of Net Positivity

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity changed the world of science in the 20th century. In 2010, we’re thinking about a new theory that could have a tremendous [positive] impact on the built environment of the 21st century and beyond. While our industry is beginning to learn more and more about zero energy and zero emissions building, (ZEB) or “Net Zero,” our hope is that HOK can lead the way to building these increasingly necessary projects that consume zero net energy and emit zero net carbon. 

In response to Architecture 2030′s challenge to the global architecture and building community, HOK has committed to designing all buildings to be 100 percent carbon neutral by 2030. HOK’s Net Zero efforts are chronicled in several of our blog posts on HOKlife.com.  HOK’s Chairman, Bill Valentine recently authored an article for Contract Magazine about our prototype project, a 170,735-sq.-ft. Class A, zero emissions office building called Net Zero Co2urt.

While HOK is proud to advance Net Zero, we would be remiss to stop there. We’ve challenged ourselves to pose and respond to an important question: What happens beyond Zero? The mathematical answer is positive. HOK is learning a lot about what it means to build a Net Zero building. READ MORE >>

via hoklife.com

Rachel Armstrong: Creating carbon negative architecture

World's First Carbon-Neutral Convention Center Opens

Dublin's newly opened (and creatively named) Convention Centre Dublin is the first officially recognized carbon-neutral convention center in the world (even ahead of the dice-house). It's a feat accomplished with the help of one very sophisticated central brain, which monitors environmental conditions and adjusts energy use accordingly – in real-time.

The design and construction of the building affirm the eco-ethos – it's constructed vertically, which is more energy-efficient than the typical sprawling convention center. It's also made of low-carbon concrete, which helps to offset the carbon footprint somewhat. But it's the temperature and energy monitoring system that really separates the CCD from its peers. READ MORE >>

via popsci.com