Smart Energy

Garbage Warrior

KJ and I just watched Gargabe Warrior and we recommend it to all interested in green building.

Oliver Hodge’s award-winning documentary chronicles the life and work of visionary Michael Reynolds, the radical architect-engineer who has been designing and building self-sustaining, eco-friendly homes out of disposable materials for 30 years. Battling opposition from bureaucrats, politicians and big business, Reynolds strives to show the entire world that “Earthship Biotecture” is the key to preserving mankind’s future on earth.

And here’s what Narz has to say on Amazon:

Garbage Warrior will not give you the latest cutting edge information about sustainable design (though it certainly is a great primer), nor is it a full biography of Mr. Reynolds (though it covers the period of his life relevant to the film superbly) or of the ins, outs & tangents of the Earthship movement. What it did do, for me, is whet my appetite for more & reminded me why I am interested in this type of thing to begin with. This movie is pure inspiration, what you do with it & where you take it is up to you!

It’s a nasty habit, this human tendency to prognosticate. As someone famous once said, Prediction is hard; especially about the future. But they trendy are trending once again with New Year’s predictions, lists of things to come, and other varieties of magicxal thinking so we’re going to wrap ‘em and roll ‘em on it.

A few days ago we brought you Earth Advantage Institute’s top ten list of trends in green building for 2010. Today we find seven more (actually, these mostly duplicate the Earth Advantage list) trends of highly effective green builders:

• “Rightsizing” of homes. A larger home no longer translates into greater equity. (Right, and a good choice for #1, as the Obama administration pumps money into cleantech, including for the hiring of local resource conservation managers.)
• Off-Grid Ready buildings – also known as  Net Zero Buildings. (We’re eager to see a design that actually works; here’s our critique of one that likely doesn’t.)
• Eco-districts. Portland, Oregon, is already on the bandwagon with this one, encouraging the creation of greener communities where residents have access to most services and supplies within walking or biking distance.
• Home Energy monitor and display. (A lot of gadgets of this nature were revealed at the recent Consumer Electronics Show; see Treehugger for a round up of devices.)
• Energy labeling for homes and office buildings.
• Building information modeling (BIM) software.  With buildings contributing roughly half the carbon emissions in the environment, CAD software for building design has produced new add-on tools with increasingly accurate algorithms for energy modeling as well as embedded energy properties for many materials and features.
• Financial community buy-in to green building. [We blogged about a UK community leading the way in this trend.)

“Cleantech”: at this point, it’s more of a venture capital bit of jargon than anything else, but Shawn Lesser of Sustainable World Capital (as reported by cleantech.com) has compiled a list of the top-ten research institutions in the U.S. doing work in cleantech. Washington State University is number ten.

With legacy expertise in agriculture, power and applied engineering, WSU’s Clean Technology program is rapidly growing in the cleantech-centric Pacific Northwest. Plant science is the engine behind the opening last year of the Bioproducts Science and Engineering Laboratory, Battelle’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratories and the recently funded Washington State Algae Alliance. One of the main objectives is the commercialization of aviation biofuels with partner Boeing Commercial Airlines. Notable cleantech spinouts: GoNano, Ajuga Biosciences, BioGasol, Schweitzer Engineering Labs, and Integrated Engineering Solutions.

Architect Johnna Barrett has plans for five ready-to-build homes ranging in size from 1,800 to 2,500 square feet. The series of plans are called SUSTAIN houses and they look pretty good. (Wish I could say the same for the SUSTAIN Web site, which makes some common though easy to fix blunders with its implementation of Flash). Here’s what SUSTAIN is claiming you can build from their plans:

All exterior and interior materials have been specified to earn LEED credits, and with proper site selection and following the LEED checklist included with your home plans, you can easily be LEED gold or platinum certified.  We want to show that environmental consciousness can be beautiful.  All of our home plans have been independently reviewed and carry the Designed to Earn the Energy Star seal. This means that when built according to specifications you can count on an annual energy savings of 20-30% over similar homes built to code.

The plans come with very specific lists and instructions for contractors and landscapers, so you get what you expect to get in the finished building.

Willow House, designed by Johnna Barrett

I just finished this video for work. It features CIRCUL8 Systems’ Gary Wegner talking about the power of poop and nutrient recovery. Instead of treating manure as “waste,” Wegner demonstrates that instead manure is an essential source of nutrients. If we waste manure, he says, we risk running out of the nutrients essential to growing plants, animals and ourselves.

For more information on why Gary’s work is so important, check out this article in Scientific American on a critical and rapidly diminishing resource: “Phosphorus Famine: The Threat to Our Food Supply.”

A new report from McGraw-Hill Construction says that the by-value retrofit-renovation market share for green building will grow to 20-30 percent by 2014. The report synopsis on Environmental Leader says that the current value of the retrofit-renovation market is between $2 and $4 billion and that that should grow to to $10-$15 billion in the next five years. Here’s a couple of snips with details:

The report also reveals that owners and tenants with green retrofit experience are likely to do more green retrofit projects. Seventy percent of owners who have engaged in green retrofit or renovation activities are planning to continue to do so for over 15 percent of future projects and 24 percent will do so on over 60 percent of projects, according to the report.

Another finding shows that the downturn is encouraging the adoption of energy- and water-efficient practices in renovation projects. Sixty-two percent of owners expect to recoup their investments for energy-efficiency improvements within 10 years.

The complete report is $189 and is available here.

Post-Kartrina and the Trailer Trash debacle, interest among designers in green pre-fab housing units has soared. (We wrote about a very expensive and, to us, not very plausible design a few weeks ago.) The Atlantic has an interesting piece in the December issue about New Orleans housing activism and green building. Some snips:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency shuttered its long-term recovery office about six months later, after a squabble with the city over who would pay for the planning process. Since then, depending on whom you talk to, government at all levels has been passive and slow-moving at best, or belligerent and actively harmful at worst.

In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life…. if you step back and look at the big picture, in fact it’s the most efficient pattern possible, because all those random activities actually create a very efficient sort of discovery process.

DSIRE is a handy-dandy site for answering the question “how do I go green?” when you want help making your home or office more energy efficient.

DSIRE is a comprehensive source of information on state, local, utility, and federal incentives and policies that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. Established in 1995 and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, DSIRE is an ongoing project of the N.C. Solar Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.

Here at Smart Energy Advisor we haven’t made a big deal out of it, but Karen is an alumni of the national Sustainable Building Advisor program. As her blushing groom to be, I like to brag about that from time to time and the NSBA program folks just handed me the opportunity, as their marketing folks have done a handy job building a portfolio of success stories to share with those of you eying the program with willful intent. They’ve got a long article with success stories on the NSBA site but, being a videographer myself, I’ll go for the visual embed:

ZeroHouse is an interesting design by architectural firm Specht Harpman that recently caught my eye. I wonder how I can get a review copy of this building? ZeroHouse was featured a couple months ago in Dwell magazine’s Prefab issue. Here’s the bottom of the article — and the ‘graph featured on the architects’ blog: Read the rest of this entry »