Green Options

Latin America already has the first green building, the Céfira Tower, located on Mar del Plata, a seaside town in Buenos Aires province, Argentina.

The building has been named after Cérifo, the Greek god of the winds because it can get power form the sea wind thanks to a windmill placed on the flat roof. The turbine can generate 4,5 kilowatts of wind power, more than enough to cover the needs of the share spaces.

Besides the wind generator, the tower makes the most of the sunlight, because 80% of the facade is pure glass. The building also has intelligent lights that automatically turn off  when they aren’t needed.

For several years, Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California has been working on systems for rapidly creating buildings with system that is essentially a very large 3-dimensional printer.  Called Contour Crafting, the equipment is able to rapidly build up walls.  Already, test runs have been able to produce six-foot high concrete walls.

One goal of the team developing this technology is to be able to build a house in a day, a goal that they hope to reach within the next few years.  There is some merit to this goal, and the benefits of being able to rapidly and inexpensively produce houses are obvious, though not without some attendant problems.

In case you can’t tell, we like green prefab homes. Many are beautiful and innovative, and the best of them really push the boundaries of green practices. But for most of us they’re aspirational rather than practical. Most of us aren’t building green homes from scratch, and even if we are the number of green prefab providers who can deliver cost-effective complete green prefab homes is still quite small.

Which is why we decided to write about small green prefab rooms or homes - “weefabs” - so small that you actually might be able to put one in your backyard. They could serve as a “room-away-from-home” place for the inlaws, a quiet office or TV room out back, or simply a comforting, tranquil place to just hang out and relax. While not affordable compared to pre-made sheds at Home Depot, you can still secure most of these models without having to take out a new mortgage. Which is good, because at least right now most mortages harder to come by than a protest license in Beijing!

We’ve always liked Modern Shed - whether you live in a Mid-Century Modern home or a traditional Cape Cod style in New England, Modern Shed makes a model that will fit in with your design. They have many green features, and you can get several models for less than $10K. Shipping is included in the price, and they’re designed and shipped so that a relatively handy D-I-Y-er can do the install.

Ancient Egyptian pyramids and Middle Eastern ziggurats are coming alive in the 21st century technology.

A new futurist concept that encompasses green building technology and—according to the developer—can house up to a million people, will make a debut at the world stage in October.

The 2.3 square kilometer Ziggurat Project, undertaken by Timelinks, a Dubai based environmental design company, will be 100 per cent carbon neutral and will run by harnessing the power of nature setting a futuristic pace for eco-friendliness for other similar projects in the pipeline.

Borrowing from ancient ingenuity, the inhabitants won’t even have any use for a car: transport throughout the complex would be connected by an integrated 360 degree network (horizontally and vertically) so cars would be redundant. Biometrics would provide security with facial recognition technology.

Pacific Gas and Electric in California announced last week it will buy 800 megawatts of solar-generated electricity from two companies, enough to light 239,000 homes. Within three years, PG&E will buy its solar energy from OptiSolar and SunPower, which plan to build the world’s two largest solar farms in California as

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Part 2: Green Building Materials

Earlier this week, I wrote about my experience at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. Specifically, I discussed the Ford Escape Hybrid. While I was in Dearborn, I also had the chance to check out some of the “green” materials that Ford is currently using/plans to use in their vehicles.

One of these materials is soy-based foam, which is present in the 2008 Mustang, the F-150, the Expedition, the Navigator, and the Focus. The foam is made by crushing soybeans to get oil, which is then turned into soy polyol. According to Ford, the foam reduces CO2 emissions by 5 million pounds annually. Soy proteins are also eventually going to be used in rubber parts.

The collapsing housing market has wreaked havoc in a variety of industries. Everyone from realtors, to mortgage bankers to builders has seen lay-offs and steeply declining sales. The savviest of the group have realigned their businesses to go after the new markets a recession creates or focused on smaller, still growing niche markets.

For builders who thought going green was the answer there’s some bad news. While the hype surrounding green building features would make one think this trend would last forever, a recent study by the New York Times reveals some holes in this theory.

Ninety-three percent of all home buyers, both nationally and in the New York metro area, are not willing to pay more for green or energy efficient features when building a home, according to a recent independent study commissioned by The New York Times Customer Insight Group.

Home automation systems (such as Colorado vNet and Control4) are becoming a necessary amenity in any high-end home, but are they also a new tool in our fight to reduce energy use and global warming? After all, these systems are designed so that you can control your high-end AV components, home security system, lighting and HVAC from one device (or via the web from somewhere else), so why not add energy conservation to the mix, right?

The idea is that these high tech systems will minimize or eliminate the wasted energy from lights left on by accident, vampire loads from home equipment in the “off” state, thermostats set too high or low for usage patterns or climate conditions, etc - the automation systems themselves will set things right even if you forget. We’ve certainly written about how important it is to kill of these wasteful elements, but are they big enough to warrant buying one of these systems just to reduce them?

Every once in a while you come across an idea that just lights you up. Styrofoam has long been one of the unmoveables when it came to recycling (too bulky, not much money in it) and there wasn’t a viable replacement for it. Easy to make, lots of it, hard to sustainably dispose of, what are you going to do? Reducing the amount of it in packaging is one path, but is only less bad. What about an option that is all good?

I found a contender: Ecovative Design has come up with a number of products for packaging, building insulation, foam core (think: surfboards) and ye olde beer cooler that do away with styrofoam, using agricultural waste. And, making this even better, the ingredients for the product will come from local sources, whichever is the most prevalent in the area that it’s made.

So rather than trucking the same ag waste 1000s of miles to other regional factories, they have come up with a product that can flex what it contains without compromising the quality or integrity. For example, cellulose pulp from areas with lots of paper mills, and rice hulls in Texas, where a lot of rice is processed.

And it’s compostable, biodegradable, and if sent back to Ecovative, recyclable. Take that, styrofoam!

Over the past few months we’ve noticed quite a bit of interest in geothermal heating and cooling amongst our site visitors, and in particular in geothermal heat pumps. We’ve also had many questions from people about exactly what they are and how/if they should consider them as an eco-friendly heating/cooling option. If this describes you, then read on - these systems ARE incredibly promising technologies to heat and cool your home, but they’re also more complicated than your typical AC or furnace unit. We’ll try to help clear the air!

We get into quite a bit of detail below, but before you get into that here’s a very quick summary of geothermal heat pumps:

• Geothermal (or ground source) heat pumps can be incredibly efficient, delivering 3-6x as much energy for heating and cooling as you use to power the equipment;
• They are in some ways a renewable energy system, since they use the heat contained in the earth to provide heating / cooling;
• They do require extensive installation work, including excavation or drilling to install subsurface pipes; and
• They are more expensive than traditional heating/cooling equipment, but the payback period is less than five years almost everywhere in the country due to their greater efficiency.

Despite the narrowing gap in cost between green building and traditional “to-code” building, most builders and home buyers still perceive the green option to be significantly more expensive.  The reality is that due to increased builder education and an influx of affordable green building products, a building can be built green within the same budget as a non-green building.  According to Clark Wilson, CEO of Austin based Green Builders, Inc., “It’s our job as builders to find those green products that don’t drive up the price of the home.”  Rick Hunter of the St. Louis green building firm Sage Homebuilders agrees:  “With proper planning and a little experience, building green, even certified green, can be done for about the same cost. We are building certified green homes at the highest levels of certification for less than 1% cost increase.“  For an informative breakdown on how green buildings cost from 0 to 2% more than non-green buildings, check out “The True Costs of Building Green” from the folks at Buildings.com.

Now that green building is an affordable option, it’s time to change the way we frame the affordability debate.  Too long have supporters of green building been on the defensive, forced to justify the costs of building more energy efficient, healthier, more sustainable homes.  Instead of focusing on the costs of making your building green, let’s talk about the costs of not building green.