Association of Energy Engineers
New York Chapter
July 2009 NewsletterPart 1
(NOTE: There was no June Part 2.)
Water to Rival Energy Efficiency as Key Concern in Greening Buildings
Reuters, Jun 4 09
MANAGING WATER USE is becoming increasingly important to commercial property owners, contractors, architects and engineers, and more than half say that water efficiency is an extremely important aspect of green building design, construction and related products, according to a recent survey by McGraw-Hill Construction.
Sixty-nine percent of those queried in the survey currently rate water efficiency as being extremely important, and by 2013 that figure is expected to increase to 85 percent, a report on the survey said. It added that the gap is closing among energy efficiency, water management and the reduction of construction waste as contenders for top priority in greening buildings.
Energy efficiency is now considered very important by 91 percent, a perception that is expected to reach 96 percent in 2013. The relative importance of construction waste management, which now stands at 64 percent, is expected to reach 73 percent in four years.
"This finding is evidence of a fundamental shift in the understanding of the composition of green buildings," said the "SmartMarket Report, Water Use in Buildings."
"No longer is the industry equating a green building with just being an energy efficient building," the report said. "There is an increased understanding that saving water can save costs and energy and can reduce impact on climate change."
McGraw-Hill Construction released highlights on Monday of the study that was conducted with support from The Chicago Faucet Company and Sloan Valve Company. Industry professionals representing 180 firms were asked in November about their perceptions and practices regarding water efficiency over a time horizon that stretched to 2013.
The study found that:
• Among building owners, 42 percent said that more than three-quarters of their current projects incorporate water-efficient designs; 50 percent said they expect to incorporate water-efficient practices in at least half of their building portfolios by 2013.
• Primary motivators include reducing energy use (87 percent) and reducing operating costs (84 percent).
• Respondents said on average, applying water-efficient designs and products result in 15 percent less water use, 10 percent to 11 percent less energy use, and an 11 percent to 12 percent reduction in operating costs.
• Increased government regulation and the desire to lower energy costs are expected to spur adoption of water-efficient products and methods.
• 73 percent of respondents are motivated to be more water efficient by energy cost increases, while more than two-thirds said they expect to respond to regulations on wastewater runoff (69 percent) and water efficiency (68 percent).
• Architecture and engineering firms, contractors, owners and product manufacturers can take advantage of the market opportunity with customers by focusing on how water-efficient practices and products can contribute to improved building performance. Current brand awareness is strongest for high-efficiency toilets (cited by 48 percent of respondents), water-saving sinks (30 percent), and waterless urinals (23 percent).
Concerns about "water becoming the new carbon" or "the oil of the 21st century" have already spurred some water
dependent firms -- such Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola -- to pursue new strategies for managing the resource so that business can grow while water use remains flat.
The 40-page study on water use is available from McGraw-Hill Construction for $189.
© Thomson Reuters 2009.
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Push for Greener Buildings Gains Advocates, but When Is Green Really Green?
By Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jul 1 09
THE GREENEST BUILDING, SO THE SAYING GOES, IS NO BUILDING AT ALL. But few colleges are planning to stop campus construction entirely. So if colleges plan to reduce their energy use— and, in hundreds of cases, meet their pledges for climate neutrality— green building will have to get much more ambitious.
For years, college administrators would pat themselves on the back if they earned a silver rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, the leading certification program for green building. Today, gold- and platinum-rated buildings are increasingly common. In years to come, administrators may tout another designation that is generating buzz among many architects, engineers, and builders, even as they ponder how to define it: "net zero."
"The bar has risen exponentially in the past year," says Jeff Ziebarth, who leads higher-education design for the architecture firm Perkins + Will. "We are already seeing proposals, particularly in planning processes, where campuses are focusing on new districts and want them to be net zero." In some cases, asking for net-zero projects could mean committing bigger sums to bigger ambitions.
People can use "net zero" to refer to a building's waste stream, water usage, or carbon emissions, but most use the term in relation to energy. To conjure an oversimplified example, a building that features enough solar panels, wind generators, or geothermal wells to supply all of its energy needs would be a net-zero-energy building.
Such buildings are exceedingly rare at colleges, and those that exist are generally relatively small. Oberlin College's Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, a 13,000-square-foot building whose environmental achievements have been both celebrated and debated, is one of the largest. It has been used extensively to teach students and visitors from other colleges about green building. A 2,200-square-foot environmental-technology center at Sonoma State University, and the Cliffs Cottage, a demonstration house at Furman University, are others.
A small building that recently opened at Washington University in St. Louis is designed to meet the Living Building Challenge, one of the most demanding green-building rating systems in the world. It will be not only net-zero energy, but also net-zero water, as it will harvest rainwater for drinking. (And through the use of composting toilets, it will produce no wastewater.) Such features came at a price: The 2,900-square-foot building cost $1.6-million.
But even more conventional structures are getting closer to a net-zero-energy ideal. Last year, Ohlone College, a community college in the San Francisco Bay Area, opened a 135,000-square-foot, $58-million center for health sciences that is essentially off the grid about half of the year. The structure draws heat and power from geothermal technology and photovoltaic panels.
In decades to come, there may be pressures— even beyond the voluntary American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment— to ramp up the energy efficiency of conventional buildings, heading toward zero energy. Last year, Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts, formed a task force of architects, developers, environmentalists, and energy experts to lay out a plan for making net zero mainstream in the state by 2020 and mandatory by 2030. The state hopes to start work on its first net-zero-energy building within a few years.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (HR 2454), which narrowly passed in the U.S. House of Representatives last week, has mainly gotten attention for its cap-and-trade requirements. But it would also establish requirements for energy codes for buildings that would gradually reduce their energy use, reaching a 75-percent reduction by 2030. The bill, which still needs approval by the Senate, says that the Department of Energy should support the development of net-zero energy building.
D. Randall Lacey, an engineer who helps direct design and construction at Cornell University, is starting work with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a division of the Department of Energy, to form the national Center of Expertise on Net-Zero Carbon Campuses, which will study net-zero-energy buildings as a way to keep a campus's carbon footprint from growing.
Green Questions
Exactly what a net-zero building is is not as clear as one might think.
Paul A. Torcellini, an expert on net-zero-energy buildings at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, says that the best and clearest examples of the buildings are those that are not tied to the grid. But most green buildings are tied in, because they are using energy when the wind isn't blowing through their turbines or when the sun isn't shining on their panels. Therefore they are selling some energy back to the grid when they have an abundance and buying it back when they need it.
And for net-zero definitions, that's where the difficulty comes in, he says: What if you are selling wind or solar energy back to the grid, but buying dirty coal energy? What if you are selling an abundance of solar-electric energy to the grid, but using some natural gas for heating? At what point does one cancel out the other?
This might seem like nitpicking, but accounting in sustainability is often focused on details like these, because advocates and officials have to show what they are getting for their sometimes considerable investment in green technology.
The energy questions are tough enough. If an institution tried to achieve net-zero water or net-zero waste in a particular building, the issues might get tougher. Net-zero waste might be the toughest among them; a college would have to evaluate and adjust its purchasing operations, with attention down to the smallest items, then figure out a way to compost or recycle those items.
Mr. Torcellini says that striving for designations like net-zero water or waste may create problems that are too big for designers and college administrators to grapple with. "We can at least measure energy, and we know where to measure energy, and that's at the point of purchase," he says. "That's a starting point."
With the basic challenges that colleges face with energy, Mr. Lacey wonders whether investment in getting to zero in new construction is a good idea right now. A net-zero project might be a great experiment or a great statement on a single structure, he says. But committing to net-zero energy for all new construction only focuses on energy consumption in buildings to come, not the consumption of the existing built environment on the campus. In building a net-zero-energy structure, costs go up as the design gets closer to zero, he says.
"It's an issue of diminishing returns," he says. An institution should try to make its new buildings highly energy efficient, he says, but it might be better to spend the money that would make a building net zero on older buildings, which are generally less efficient.
But both Mr. Lacey and Mr. Torcellini say that most architects are not doing the sort of integrated design that a net-zero-energy building would require— and colleges are not holding architects to that challenge. Clients miss out on design elements that do not cost more but can dramatically affect the energy efficiency of a building, like passive-solar design. Colleges could also work with third-party companies that can provide capital for energy features, which might keep upfront costs down, Mr. Torcellini says. When clients work in these elements early, there are always ways to meet a budget, he says.
"Unfortunately, what is happening with energy efficiency is that people have thought about it in terms of trying to add things on to the project and then justify them as being cost effective," Mr. Torcellini says. "If you try to tack it on at the end, you'll never get there."
© 2009 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
With Something for Everyone, Climate Bill Passed
By John M. Broder, NYTimes, Jul 1 09
WASHINGTON — As the most ambitious energy and climate-change legislation ever introduced in Congress made its way to a floor vote last Friday, it grew fat with compromises, carve-outs, concessions and out-and-out gifts intended to win the votes of wavering lawmakers and the support of powerful industries.
The deal making continued right up until the final minutes, with the bill’s co-author Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, doling out billions of dollars in promises on the House floor to secure the final votes needed for passage.
The bill was freighted with hundreds of pages of special-interest favors, even as environmentalists lamented that its greenhouse-gas reduction targets had been whittled down.
Some of the prizes were relatively small, like the $50 million hurricane research center for a freshman lawmaker from Florida.
Others were huge and threatened to undermine the environmental goals of the bill, like a series of compromises reached with rural and farm-state members that would funnel billions of dollars in payments to agriculture and forestry interests.
Automakers, steel companies, natural gas drillers, refiners, universities and real estate agents all got in on the fast-moving action.
The biggest concessions went to utilities, which wanted assurances that they could continue to operate and build coal-burning power plants without shouldering new costs. The utilities received not only tens of billions of dollars worth of free pollution permits, but also billions for work on technology to capture carbon-dioxide emissions from coal combustion to help meet future pollution targets.
That deal, negotiated by Representative Rick Boucher, a conservative Democrat from Virginia’s coal country, won the support of the Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry lobby, and lawmakers from regions dependent on coal for electricity.
Liberal Democrats got a piece, too. Representative Bobby Rush, Democrat of Illinois, withheld his support for the bill until a last-minute accord was struck to provide nearly $1 billion for energy-related jobs and job training for low-income workers and new subsidies for making public housing more energy-efficient.
Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican staunchly opposed to the bill, marveled at the deal-cutting on Friday.
“It is unprecedented,” Mr. Barton said, “but at least it’s transparent.”
Mr. Waxman defended the deal making as necessary to address a problem that affected every region and every industry.
“We worked hard to craft compromises that addressed the legitimate concerns of industry without undermining the environmental integrity of the legislation,” Mr. Waxman said. “Tackling hard issues that have been ignored for years is never easy.”
In its odyssey from introduction in late March to House passage, the climate-change bill sponsored by Mr. Waxman and Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, grew to more than 1,400 pages from 648 pages.
Although watered down from the original vision, it was still the first time either house of Congress passed a bill imposing a limit on the emissions blamed for the warming of the planet. The legislation awaits action in the Senate.
Despite all the concessions, President Obama worked hard for the bill and called it an extraordinary step for the nation. He said in an interview Sunday that the compromises had been necessary to moderate the different effects of greenhouse-gas controls on different parts of the country.
“I think that finding the right balance between providing new incentives to businesses, but not giving away the store, is always an art; it’s not a science because it’s never precise,” Mr. Obama said.
One of the major changes in the bill came early at the insistence of Democrats from Southeastern states, including John Barrow of Georgia, G. K. Butterfield of North Carolina and Bart Gordon of Tennessee. Prodded by utilities in the region, they pressed for a weakening of the national mandate for renewable energy.
The original bill called for all utilities to secure 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources like wind, solar, hydro and geothermal energy by 2025.
This was seen as either impossible or enormously expensive in the Southeast, which does not have abundant supplies of such energy. The standard was weakened to 15 percent by 2020, with states given the ability to reduce it further if they cannot meet the target. That helped win Mr. Gordon and Mr. Butterfield’s votes. Mr. Barrow voted no.