November 24th, 2009

Schneider Electric is latest to draw link between building and network energy controls

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 1:17 pm

Categories: building, conservation, energy, engineering, green tech

Tags: Schneider Electric, Network, Physical Security, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, Heather Clancy

Facilities infrastructure giant Schneider Electric has adopted an architectural approach to intelligent energy management that it has dubbed EcoStruxure.

The effort will better integrate the company’s technologies across power distribution and protection systems, data centers (where the company’s sells the APC by Schneider Electric InfraStruxure line), industrial controls, building controls and physical security technologies. The company has positioned these technologies as vital to corporate-wide energy intelligence. The connections between these various components, through open IP and Web services, is also seen as critical.

Most of the pieces of the EcoStruxure approach exist already. What’s missing is the business practices and reference architectures that businesses can use to apply an integrated approach. Look for related training and documentation to emerge throughout 2010, according to the company.

November 23rd, 2009

Chinese wallboard gets a dirty bill of health

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 2:32 pm

Categories: Blogroll, China, air pollution, building, environmental health, federal government, housing

Tags: U.S., Health Care, Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare, Human Resources, Harry Fuller

Some Chinese wallboard imported after Hurricane Katrina is giving off toxic fumes. Numerous lawsuits are already underway.

The feds have just confirmed what we already knew.
The investigators concluded that both formaldehyde and hydrogen sulfide are exuding from the wallboard, especially when it’s damp. There may be sixty thousand homes in the southern U.S. with the imported, dangerous wallboard. It corrodes metal, and is unhealthy for inhabitants. Imported wallboard is now unregulated in the U.S. Currently there are no requirements on content of imported wallboard or its possible health hazards.

November 16th, 2009

Hawaii getting first-hand look at global warming?

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 3:51 am

Categories: Blogroll, building, conservation, engineering, environmental health, global warming, green tech, housing, ocean, research, state government, tidal

Tags: Harry Fuller

The beaches are shrinking in Hawaii. It is not clearly linked to global warming though some website reports leap to make a connection.

Global warming or no, the current beach erosion is closely linked to other human activity. Upscale homes are built next to the beach. Research shows their expensive sea walls change the wave action and actually speed up beach erosion. So the wealthier beachfront developments will be losing their sand faster than other areas. Won’t that affect real estate values? Perhaps there could be a greetech solution: virtual beaches so the homes could be built further from the real ocean to begin with? Solar-powered sand dredges to re-build the beach as fast as it waves away?

November 12th, 2009

Could be a trend--million Energy Star homes

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 12:27 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, building, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, federal government, green tech, housing

Tags: Home, Harry Fuller

The EPA says there are now a million Energy Star homes in the U.S.

TEXAS CITIES LEAD

The top two cities in the nation for Energy Star ratings: Houston and Dallas. Then come Vegas, Phoenix and L.A. Partly this is the advantage of having a recent building boom. But it also shows the widely recognized advantages of an energy-efficient home.

Chicago and Minneapolis with their northerly climate did not even make the top twenty list of U.S. cities.

Says the EPA: “More than 1 million ENERGY STAR® homes have been built in the United States since the program first began labeling homes in 1995. Thanks to the dedication of our partners, families living in ENERGY STAR qualified homes will save more than $270 million this year on their utility bills, while avoiding greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 370,000 vehicles.”

Here’s Heather’s recent blog on the PA’s Energy Star program.

November 12th, 2009

EPA's Energy Star program continues to have teeth

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 8:17 am

Categories: building, conservation, energy, green tech

Tags: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Home, Heather Clancy

Apparently, quite a few U.S. citizens have bought into the arm of the Energy Star program that is designed to improve energy efficiency in the home.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports this week that more than 1 million homes have been “qualified” under the Energy Star program for energy efficiency. That means the people who have worked to have their homes labeled or checked against the Energy Star recommendations have saved $1.2 billion on their energy bills and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 22 billion pounds, according to the EPA. This year, the annual savings in electricity costs will be about $270 million, with emissions reductions equipment to approximately 370,000 vehicles.

What goes into an Energy Star home? There are about 6,500 builders around the country that can represent the insulation, high performance windows, duct work, heating and cooling equipment, lighting and appliances that are part of the rating process. An inspector can come in and rate your home for you. The top markets for Energy Star are pretty much which you might expect: Major cities around the country. But I want to give a shout-out to three midwest communities that have made this a priority, including Des Moines, Iowa; Indianapolis and Oklahoma City.

November 11th, 2009

Green building boom

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 2:41 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, building, conservation, energy, engineering, green tech, housing

Tags: Economic Activity, Green, Recruitment & Selection, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Harry Fuller, Green Building, jobs

A study sponsored by the Green Building Council sees major spending on green building in the U.S. for the next four years. The study finds almost 8 million jobs supported and nearly a half trillion dollars in green building economic activity through 2013. The current level of green building activity is estimated at two million jobs and $100 billion in GDP.

“Our goal is for the phrase ‘green building’ to become obsolete, by making all building and retrofits green – and transforming every job in our industry into a green job,” said Rick Fedrizzi, president, CEO and founding chairman of USGBC.

November 8th, 2009

ZEROlab to measure carbon footprints

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 2:30 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, building, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, green tech, renewable energy, research

Tags: Carbon Footprint, Harry Fuller

The first of what may be many carbon footprint measurement facilities will be located at the University of Waterloo. The lab is being funded by Zerofootprint. They’re hoping to get other ZEROlabs onto other North American campuses.

“Ultimately, the lab will be a repository for the ongoing carbon measurement and benchmarking of building types, institutions, businesses and cities,” said Ron Dembo, founder and chief executive officer of Zerofootprint. “That information, when made available on an open source basis, will allow developers and policy-makers to better understand the benefits of efficient design and development.”

Dembo’s a grad of University of Waterloo, which is in Ontario, Canada.

Zerofootprint points out that much is know about the carbon footprint of cares and trucks. SUVs only account for 3% of the carobn footprint in North America. However, buildings and cities account for 50%. Yet we know much less about the carbon footprint of urban systems and buildings.

November 6th, 2009

Update on Chinese wallboard with a side order of sulphur

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 1:36 pm

Categories: Blogroll, China, air pollution, building, environmental health, housing, law & politics, research

Tags: chinese wallboard, toxic, sulphur, drywall, Hurricane Katrina, coal ash

Lawsuits. Post-pollution huffing and puffing. Perhaps a hundred thousand homes with sulphur exhaling wallboard. Questions of free trade vs. consumer protection. This one’s got a lot of fingers pointing in different directions.

Here’s a recent summary of some of what’s happened. I first blogged about this Chinese import issue back in March.

Here’s S 1606, a bill that would require overseas manufacturers to make products that meet American industrial regulations. It is NOT legal in the U.S. to use sulphur-bearing coal ash to make wallboard. That’s apparently what happend in the Chinese drywall. And we all know that China has mountains of coal ash. The Chinese drywall was imported across the Pacific after Hurricane Katrina because U.S. domestic production was suddenly not enough to meet demand. That meant it was profitable to ship wallboard thousands of miles to the southern U.S.

The problem is so widespread there’s a conference today in Sarasota. It’s devoted to sharing all the many investigations and test results tracking the wallboard and its possible toxic effects.

Some research indicates there is a chemical trail that is causing the problems with the imported wallboard. There is elemental sulfur in the wallboard. That reacts with tiny amounts of carbon monoxide in the air and that can produce carbonyl sulfide. In turn that reacts with moisture and produces hydrogen sulphide and even sulphuric acid. So the sulphur-bearing wallboard is particularly problematic in the humid U.S. Gulf Coast region.

An opposing theory about the sulphurous wallboard: blame some sulphur-fixing bacteria.

November 6th, 2009

Seeking a bright idea on light bulbs

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 1:24 pm

Categories: Blogroll, air pollution, building, conservation, energy, engineering, federal government, green tech, law & politics, research

Tags:

Often the lightbulb is used a cartoonist’s symbol for a bright idea. Right now the U.S. government is hoping for a bright idea on lightbulbs.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is running a contest, and to enter you need a thousand new-fangled light bulbs that are energy efficient. The DOE’s L-Prize got its first official entry from Philips. The Philips entry is an LED bulb and would work in the standard socket. The LED bulbs can be dimmable and run off direct current. They produce no heat, a major point of efficiency compared to incandescent that regularly convert large amounts of electricity into heat.

One rule: the inner gets $10 million but the bulbs then have to be manufactured in the United States.

Another rule, the winner has to be a bulb that will replace the omnipresent standard 60 watt incandescent bulb, largely unimproved in decades. Here is the DOE’s L-Prize website. The testing will take months because the bulbs will be turned on and left on for nine months.

November 5th, 2009

X-Prize competition for ultra-efficient car speeds ahead

Posted by Harry Fuller @ 12:02 pm

Categories: India, air pollution, building, cars & traffic, conservation, energy, engineering, environmental health, federal government, fossil fuel, green tech, law & politics, petroleum, renewable energy, research

Tags: West Philly, Tata, ZAP, Delta Motorsport, X-Prize, fuel efficiency

Ten million dollars will go to the team that has designed, builds and runs the best car with a minimum of 100 MPG rating. The X-prize folks have now narrowed the field to 53 designs submitted from across the globe. Among those making the cut: Tata Motors of India and engineering students at Cornell University. Of the car designs moving forward: 28 are in the Mainstream Class and 25 in the Alternative Class.

Here you can find a list of the teams in the final competition. American universities are Cornell and Western Washington. There is also one public high entered: West Philly. Read about them here.

The only car makers I recognize on the list: Tata and ZAP. Tesla did not make the cut. Ooops. None of the big guys dare put their engineering to this test. Honda, Mercedes, GM, Toyota–nope.

One team is entering a Toyota chasis. They promise a “steam combustion” engine in a Prius! The two areas of concentration seem to be: highly efficient energy use, of course, and then very light materials in the vehicle itself.

Britain’s Delta Motorsport is building an electric car with a small hydrogen fuel celland small back-up internalcombustion engine.
Delta Motorsport’s X-Prize entry.

The X-Prize Foundation recently got $5.5 billion from the federal government for this clean car competition.
“Our clean energy future depends on our ability to design and commercialize new highly-efficient vehicles that are cost-effective for consumers and use significantly less energy,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “This funding will support cutting-edge, American innovation that can help us fundamentally transform personal transportation and address the global climate crisis.”

Here’s what the X-Prize folks have to say about their own mission: “The X PRIZE Foundation is an educational nonprofit prize institute whose mission is to create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. In 2004, the Foundation captured world headlines when Burt Rutan, backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built and flew the world’s first private vehicle to space to win the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE.”

For the fifty-three competing vehicles performance testing will begin in spring 2010 and winners will be announced in September 2010. Exact dates and locations will be announced shortly. This could be fun to watch.