September 11th, 2007
Living green, building better
The above picture shows one of the homes designed and built by Michelle Kaufman Designs.
GoingGreen, Davis, CA–green building panel. Malcolm Davis, Michelle Kaufmann Designs. Lyndon Rive, Founder & CEO, SolarCity. Kevin Surace, CEO, Serious Materials. Frank Ramirez, CEO, Ice Energy.
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The panelists agree it takes a few years to get new builidng products into the system.
KS: You have to make new and green products that look and smell the same to the sub-contractor. Baby-boomers and architects may want to use green products, but the sub-contractor wants the product to look and work just like the old one. If it looks like drywall and works the same, it’s fine.
MK: We feel our builidngs are lower cost to build, they take much less time than traditional building.
KS: Right now the demand for green building materials is actually higher than our ability to produce. We are developing R-10 to R-12 windows now that will replace the traditional R-3 glass. So though it costs more in the beginning, it pays back in energy savings over time. You have to have a payback for the owner.
KS: When we are sold out we cannot even fill 1% of the U.S.drywall market. These green building product plays take a long time.
LR: California is the leading American state for solar yet it still produc es less than 1% of California’s electricity.
KS: Some large cities like New York and San Francisco are speeding up permit process for green buildings. [Dare I say "green light for green construction?"]
FR: we went through a two-year process to become a California energy envelope regs certified technology…that process and our approval did more for us than anything else we’ve done
MD: Construction’s the only industry in America that has become less efficient in the past twenty years and we are working to reverse that
FR: I think we are seeing a major change in electric utility politics. Building more gas-guzzling generating plantsis not thre answer. Oxnard just rejected a PG & E plant and communities like that are driving the use of energy conservation technologies such as we make. This makes better use of what we already have.
A newsman since 1969, Harry Fuller has worked for CBS, ABC, CNBC Europe, CNET and was founding news director at TechTV. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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