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Solar Decathlon Homes Showcase New Technologies | EcoHome Magazine

By Jennifer Goodman

This year’s Solar Decathlon student design competition showed off new technologies and unique innovations in many areas, including alternative energy, passive heating and cooling, and water conservation and reclamation.

Sponsored by the Department of Energy, the biennial Decathlon is a program that challenges collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive.

From Sept. 23 to Oct. 2, 19 teams and their solar-powered houses competed in 10 categories (each worth 100 points) that included engineering, hot-water generation, affordability (a new category this year), market appeal, energy balance, and architecture.

This year’s winner, the University of Maryland’s WaterShed house, was inspired by the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. The nearly 900-square-foot home is made of two rectangular sheds that form a split butterfly roofline which maximizes solar-energy generation and collects rainwater along a central axis. The two sheds are connected by a third, smaller module that houses the bathroom. Rainwater collected from the roof via the central axis mixes with the house’s greywater from the shower, clothes washer, and dishwasher, in constructed wetlands located under the bathroom and along the decks. READ MORE >>

via www.ecohomemagazine.com

New Software Could Help Engineers Create Greener Products

By Sarah Laskow

The greenest product is the one that’s never produced, never sold, never thrown away. But for companies that design and produce the reams of stuff that stock the shelves at Walmart, Best Buy, and your local eco-friendly boutique, closing up shop isn’t an option. Going green rally means going greener by designing products that use fewer resources or less carbon-intensive materials. 

To create a greener product, though, a company first has to figure out how green its product is to begin with. Until recently, the best way to obtain that information has been to commission a life-cycle assessment, a procedure that can take months and costs tens of thousands of dollars. But now, software companies that support product designers are offering tools to create quick-and-dirty life-cycle assessment for products, even while they’re in the design and innovation phase. If engineers make a change to a product’s design, they don’t have to make an effort to understand its environmental impact. They can just glance over to a corner of the screen.  These estimates aren’t perfect, but they have the potential to help companies shrink the carbon footprint of their products. READ MORE >>

via www.good.is

Rise of the smart building

By Adam Courtenay

We expect a lot from anything that has the word “smart” in front of it.

The smart phone superseded the mobile phone; smart televisions are an obvious upgrade from the idiot box and well, computers just keep getting smarter.

So it comes as no surprise buildings aren't just buildings, they can be smart as well.

Michael Zimmerman, who has spent most of his career either working in the IT industry or setting up IT start-ups, is an obvious candidate to create the smart building.

He is the CEO of BuildingIQ, a green technology firm now making waves in Australia and the US.

The company's technology can direct a building to regulate its own energy, thereby reducing its carbon footprint and energy costs. READ MORE >>

via www.smh.com.au

Building the World’s Greenest Data Center

By Nathan Anthony

Cloud computing isn’t new, but it seems poised for a leap forward. Those who use any of the popular online email services—Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc—have been using cloud computing for years, whether they realized it or not. Their emails are stored remotely on servers, and they access their files through the web. The servers—specialized computers linked together over a network—are stored in data centers—warehouse-like buildings that store and power all of the computing equipment. The significance of Amazon’s Cloud Player or Apple’s iCloud, then, is not the technology, but the sheer amount of data that will soon make itself permanently at home in data centers across the country. Email files are small compared to entire music libraries.

But what is the impact of all of that “free” computing? How much power does it take to load everyone’s information on a network, ready to be retrieved on a whim? Or more importantly, why should we care?

David Crocker has an answer to the last of those questions. David, Lia’s father and boss, is the CEO of Steel Orca, the company that thinks its plot of grass in the middle of a former U.S. Steel site is going to be the next big thing in the industry. The Steel Orca Bucks County Data Center, with plans for construction this fall, will run on 100 percent alternative energy sources and arguably be the world’s “greenest” data center. Why build it? “When people talk about environmental damage, they never talk about computing,” Crocker told me. “Well, computing clouds can cause acid rain too.” READ MORE >>

via americancity.org

High-Rise Project Features a First for U.S.: Double Wall Technology

The A. J. Celebrezze Federal Building in downtown Cleveland, Ohio will be the first American high rise to be recladded using double wall technology, the Chicago-based architecture firm, Interactive Design Inc. (IDEA), announced.

The quintessential skyscraper stands 32 stories and showcases a structural steel framework and glass curtain wall. 

Rising energy costs combined with the natural aging of the nearly 50-year-old building’s original façade materials have created the need for a complete building façade replacement, IDEA said.

IDEA was the chosen architect for the $121 million project, led by partner Charles Young. The façade replacement is scheduled to begin this spring and to be completed in 2015. READ MORE >>

via www.durabilityanddesign.com

Smart Grid City

Chicago invented the skyscraper. Can it pioneer the best urban sustainable-energy strategies as well?

By Ann Lok Lui

Chicago’s historic skyline has always been a source of pride for city residents. And while few new buildings are currently going up, building owners have developed a plan to capitalize on the latest advances: Smart-grid technologies that will convert the city’s iconic skyline into what backers call a “virtual green generator” by retrofitting highrise buildings and the existing electrical grid to a new hyper-connected intelligent-communications backbone. Simultaneously, researchers at local universities, among them the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have been developing their own cutting-edge smart-grid technology.

“We want to make Chicago a hub for smart-grid manufacturing and deployment,” said Andrew Barbeau, the managing director of the Center for Electricity Innovation at IIT. “Energy generation, delivery, and management is a trillion-dollar marketplace, and we are really trying to make Chicago a center for that.” Chicago has long been a leader in innovation for electrical utility and power industries, he added, even when the West Coast was attracting much of the software and tech jobs. “Chicago never gave up on what its strengths are, and is prepared to make a comeback,” he said.

In fact, the Windy City is a likely birthplace for what could be the largest-ever smart-grid pilot. It has a captive market of building owners—interested in reducing their utility bills and attracting green-conscious tenants—cheek-to-cheek with top electrical engineering universities. Public support and cooperation from local utilities has also made for fertile ground. The Chicago Climate Action Plan, launched in 2008 by Mayor Richard Daley, plans on retrofitting 50 percent of industrial and commercial buildings by 2020. READ MORE >>

via www.archpaper.com

New building tools detect varied shades of green

By Julie Wernau

If you plop a green building in the middle of nowhere, is it still green?

That's exactly what businesses, sustainability experts and planners are trying to find out. The growing "green buildings" movement is taking a new direction with the development of computer models that go beyond measuring a building's carbon footprint and attempt to quantify the amount of energy people consume to reach that building.

...

Experts say the ability to quantify the energy spent getting to and from a building could force businesses to reconsider what it means to be "green." Transportation emissions account for 29 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the newly quantifiable data could spur development in urban areas served by public transportation over so-called greenfields. READ MORE >>

via www.chicagotribune.com

Designing for a dry world

By Charles Redell

As climate change exacerbates droughts, architects are focusing on water efficiency.

When architects were designing a new 200,000-square-foot biotechnology lab in 2009 to accommodate the University of California, San Diego’s burgeoning student population, the Golden State was in the midst of a withering drought.

No surprise then that water conservation became a focus of the team at Portland’s Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects. They created a system to harvest condensate that collects on the building’s air conditioning coils during hot summers. That water – supplies of which grow as temperatures rise and the air conditioning is cranked up – is piped elsewhere to irrigate the campus during dry months.

The university, which is seeking LEED Platinum certification for the lab, will also reclaim much of the wastewater from the building’s 150,000 square feet of wet bench labs and restrooms as well as from the air conditioning system. That should help slash use of potable water by 360,000 gallons annually. READ MORE >>

via sustainableindustries.com

In the Air

Description

In the Air is a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city.

The visualization tool is a web-based dynamic model which builds up the space the components generate, where through data crossing behavior patterns emerge. The results of these data feed a physical prototype of what we have called a “diffuse façade”, a massive indicator of the air´s components through a changing cloud, blurring architecture with the atmosphere it has invaded and mediating the activity of the participants it envelops.

Project Goals

The project proposes a platform for individual and collective awareness and decision making, where the interpretation of results can be used for real time navigation through the city, opportunistic selection of locations according to their air conditions and a base for political action.

Exhibition

In the Air is on display at Medialab-Prado in Madrid through January 11th.

via www.intheair.es

Cluster | Connecting cities: an interview with Sascha Haselmayer

‘Connected Cities: Your 256 Billion Euro Dividend’ is a comprehensive handbook by Aida Esteban Millat, Sascha Haslemayer and Jakob H Rasmussen that illustrates through a selection of handpicked case studies how innovation in services and mobility can contribute to improving the economical, environmental and social values of our cities and questions ‘why‘ their uptake is still relatively slow respect the opportunities they present. Sascha Haselmayer co-author of the book and general director of Living Labs Global, spoke to Cluster about how harnessing the power and potential of the new digital platforms may impact cities in the future. READ MORE >>

via www.cluster.eu

IMAGE: Interlace Invent