Green Options

Many of our Bayview neighbors joined us last weekend to celebrate the second anniversary of the Latona Community Garden. What used to be a smelly skanky debris-filled eyesore, is now a thriving organic community garden. The formerly blighted corner has been transformed into a warm and welcoming public space where neighbors gather, local kids play, and organic food is grown.

Several of the neighborhood kids climbing the walnut tree in the Latona Community Garden.

Editor’s note: Localized, distributed electricity grids are a hot topic in the renewable energy world. Today, Joel at Life Goggles takes a look at a product that could make such grids a reality at the neighborhood level. This post was originally published on Thursday, April 3, 2008.

Dutch company Qurrent is developing technology that will enable neighborhood-wide energy networks. Winner of the 2007 Picnic Green Challenge, the system will be used to pilot the concept in the Netherlands.

Because of fluctuating patterns of consumption, homes with wind and solar energy generators can find themselves with surplus energy at some times of the day, but not enough at others. Surplus energy typically gets sold back to the main grid, but as with most electric power transmission, ~30% of it can get lost along the way.

If a group of homes could work together to manage their collective energy generation and use so that higher levels of demand in one home can be matched with surpluses in others, this would help eliminate waste and make it more efficient. Participating homes essentially form a “mini-grid” that shares energy internally before exchanging any with the main grid.

[There are a number of different approaches to communities and building that serve to support sustainability (and often other aims at the same time; sustainable strategies are almost invariably diverse and multi-faceted in the benefits they offer). Over the next few weeks, I intend to take a look at a number of these types of communities and the ways each of them contribute to improving overall sustainability.]

New Urbanism (sometimes referred to as Traditional Neighborhood Design) is a movement spearheaded by the The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). Its goals are “promoting walkable, neighborhood-based development as an alternative to sprawl. CNU takes a proactive, multi-disciplinary approach to restoring our communities.” Improving sustainability is one of the Principles of New Urbanism (see below),additionally, New Urbanism advocates a number of benefits. Although there are broad overlaps between using historical, traditional housing forms (or, unfortunately more often, faux-historical looking buildings) and New Urbanist principles, there is nothing magical about gabled roofs and wood siding, and New Urbanism does not require retro-styled throwbacks (although many examples of it do combine visual historical revivalism with the good community principles it supports).

Much of the attention we pay to green building deals with the parts and pieces and how our buildings work. Greener buildings use less energy for thermal comfort (heating and cooling) and less energy for lighting and draw on fewer resources (and less impact from the materials that are used) in their construction. All of these are good and useful steps to take. However, all of this just takes into account the building itself, and perhaps the site it rests upon. With this kind of focus (or lack thereof) one could envision a community of dispersed “green” buildings all individually well designed and well made, but, in the aggregate, contributing hugely to the destruction of habitat, the depletion of resources, and the net degradation of the environment.