Archimede’s demonstration solar plant in Sicily becomes the first to use molten salts to store energy overnight.
This month, the Italian utility Enel unveiled “Archimede”, the first Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant in the world to use molten salts for heat transfer and storage, and the first to be fully integrated to an existing combined-cycle gas power plant. Archimede is a 5 MW plant located in Priolo Gargallo (Sicily), within Europe’s largest petrochemical district.
Green Building Council Italia will be the first organization in the European Union that has decided to implement the LEED green building rating system. In the GBC Italia version of LEED, local standards and codes will be referenced, Italian specific units will be incorporated, and alternative compliance paths will be provided as appropriate to account for regional variances and contexts. The MOU also agrees to collaboration between the U.S. Green Building Council and the Italian group through the sharing of tools, research and information around green building.
“LEED has been very successful in the U.S. in transforming the approach to building design, construction and operation,” said Mario Zoccatelli, Presidente del GBC Italia.“After reviewing all of the existing green building tools out there, we ultimately chose LEED because of USGBC’s history of innovation and its flexible approach.”
A new report by the United States Green Building Council and national energy, housing, environmental, and real estate organizations is sounding the alarm on America’s building stock while citing the many ways in which the Obama Administration can step up on the energy efficiency and sustainability of America’s multifamily and commercial buildings.
Entitled “Using Executive Authority to Achieve Greener Buildings: A Guide for Policymakers to Enhance Sustainability and Efficiency in Mulitfamily Housing and Commercial Buildings,” the study concludes that the current presidential administration has the unprecedented ability to use over 30 existing federal programs worth $72 billion to enhance efficiency in commercial buildings and multifamily housing with no new legislation needed.
A great TED talk by inventor, surgeon and all-around brainiac Catherine Mohr on building green.
In a short, funny, data-packed talk at TED U, Catherine Mohr walks through all the geeky decisions she made when building a green new house — looking at real energy numbers, not hype. What choices matter most? Not the ones you think.
Green design is moving “down market,” where it is most needed.
Green building has been a status symbol among the wealthy. But a transformation is taking place up and down the quiet corridors of the 70-unit affordable housing project that has risen on a grubby stretch of Atlantic Avenue near the Compton border.
The $31-million Casa Dominguez project, built by the Los Angeles-based affordable housing developer Abode Communities, is aiming to be the first multifamily affordable housing project in Los Angeles County to win the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum certification, the U.S. Green Building Council's highest LEED rating.
The building was constructed with a prefabricated framing system that reduced waste. An on-site healthcare clinic and a child-care center lessen residents' need to drive. The playground surface is made from recycled tires, and drought-tolerant landscaping is irrigated with gray water from the washing machines.
The CBS News “Green Eye” blog has a post on the ten companies that could change the world. Number one? China’s Communist Party. That may say something about the author Michael Kanellos’ view of the future of sustainability or it may be strictly pragmatic. Others on the list include GE, Siemens and Nissan.
While start-ups have played a crucial role in getting the green industry off the ground, the future will likely be dominated by large, sprawling conglomerates. Why? Green technology essentially involves revamping the physical infrastructure of the modern world: replacing coal-fired power plants with wind turbines, building homes from materials concocted in chemistry laboratories, and swapping out engines for electric motors. Established companies simply are in a far better position to muster the capital, technological depth, managerial expertise and factory capacity needed.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, the epicentre of smug green consumerism, where self-proclaimed environmentalists drive to wholefood shops to load their fuel-inefficient hybrid SUVs with too much organic produce. They should read Heather Rogers’s stories and weep.
Rogers traveled a long way to investigate the emerging green economy. Her destinations included supposedly organic sugar-cane plantations in Paraguay and tracts of rainforest in Borneo that are being felled to produce palm oil for biofuel.
Having flown all over the globe, Rogers did not try to salve her conscience by buying “carbon offsets,” which are supposed to negate air miles by funding tree-planting or renewable electricity projects in developing countries. When you read her account of the problems with auditing these schemes in India, you’ll understand why.
Green Gone Wrong is primarily a fast-paced travelogue, which leads to some loose ends and an uneven structure. In India, for instance, we are told that a carbon-offsetting project is “perhaps” composting ash into organic fertiliser, “but I saw no trace of it”. (Having done my share of “touristic” journalism, I've experienced similar difficulties: on a flying visit, it is hard to tell whether you're looking at part of the problem, or part of the solution.)
Scientific Certification Systems will add information on more than 2000 green building products to ecoScorecard’s web-based green building tool, the organizations announced today. This collaboration strengthens ecoScorecard’s ability to deliver calculations and documentation for the ever–changing “green” landscape at no cost to architects and designers.
Designers, builders, contractors and remodelers will now have access to a wide range of information about how products from almost 3000 SCS-certified manufacturers meet LEED and other ratings systems’ requirements. ecoScorecard users simply plug products into their online project tracker and the tool provides meaningful information about credits for green building rating systems. Continue reading Scientific Certification Systems and ecoScorecard Announce Collaboration to Serve Green Building Professionals
Sustainable Fellwood, a new mixed-use, mixed income development in Savannah, Georgia, won a National Homebuilders Assn. 2010 Energy Value Housing Award for energy efficiency. (Photo courtesy Sustainable Fellwood)
Energy-efficiency measures in the southern United States could save consumers $41 billion on their energy bills, open 380,000 new jobs, and save 8.6 billion gallons of water over the next 10 years, finds research from Duke University and the Georgia Institute of Technology released today.
On average, each dollar invested in energy efficiency over the next 20 years will reap $2.25 in benefits, concludes the study, which also shows that the construction of dozens of new power plants could be avoided.
New appliance standards, incentives for retrofitting and weatherization, upgrades to utility plants and process improvements were among the policies researchers considered.
“We looked at how these policies might interact, not just single programs,” said researcher Etan Gumerman at Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
“The interplay between policies compounds the savings. And it’s all cost-effective,” he said.
Working with the University of Washington and northwest power industry organizations, a group of WSU researchers received $2.5 million from the Department of Energy to develop a program to train engineers in clean energy and the smart electric power grid.
The program is one of 54 around the U.S. that is set to receive Recovery Act funds for smart grid workforce training projects. The three-year project will develop a set of courses in clean energy and smart grid engineering.
“WSU’s power engineering program has been a leader in developing a safer, more reliable electric power grid,’’ said Candis Claiborn, dean of the WSU College of Engineering and Architecture. “Now, this grant will help WSU to better prepare our students to address the grand challenge of safe, reliable and clean energy in the 21st century workplace.’’
The power industry is facing the challenge of an aging workforce, with one-third of its workforce eligible for retirement in the next 10 years. Furthermore, the number of programs educating power engineers has decreased. Many of the existing programs do not have the resources to incorporate rapid advances in technologies, both in clean energy and in the smart electric power grid, into their curriculum, said Anjan Bose, Regents professor in the school of electrical engineering and computer science.
While the WSU/UW project will strengthen existing degree programs in power engineering, it also allows for the development of an undergraduate certificate, graduate level certificates and a professional master’s degree in the area of clean energy and smart grid engineering. Those who are working in the power industry currently will be able to take the courses online, so that technicians, for instance, will be able to receive an undergraduate certificate or those who have an engineering degree will be able to receive graduate training that will allow them to become involved in research and development.
“The project team proposed here is perfectly positioned to train and educate the engineering workforce needed to operate, maintain, deploy, design and innovate in the areas of clean energy and smart grid,’’ Bose said. “We recognize that it is not enough to train the engineering workforce needed to deploy new clean energy sources and operate the smart grid, but we also need to cultivate the engineering talent that will invent and design the next generation green technologies and information technologies for the power sector.’’
WSU and the University of Washington are the largest engineering colleges in the northwest. Both have a long history of cooperation with the power industry in the region. WSU received a gift in 2008 from Puget Sound Energy (PSE) for the development of a renewable energy course. Both universities are also part of a Department of Energy regional smart grid demonstration project throughout the northwest that is designed to expand upon existing electric infrastructure and test new smart grid technology.
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein
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