Archives for 2013

Green Light Energy to build a 1 MW PV plant for building materials

October 16, 2013 by Editor inChief ·

USG Corporation has entered into a Solar Energy Power Purchase and Sale Agreement with Green Light Plaster City Solar 1 LLC, a subsidiary of Green Light Energy Corp, to install a solar photovoltaic plant at USG’s Plaster City manufacturing plant in California.

The one megawatt photovoltaic power plant will be installed along with local engineering firm ZGlobal, Inc. (Imperial, California, U.S.), and will provide USG with predictable cost for the portion of electricity supplied by the PV system for the next 20 years.

“We are always looking for opportunities for our plants to use solar energy, and it made a lot of sense to move forward with this renewable energy investment at our manufacturing plant in Plaster City,” said Al Zucco, senior director, Energy and Sustainability, USG.

“This is an exciting project that demonstrates USG’s environmental stewardship and commitment to maintain environmentally-friendly operations.”

Filed Under: Company News ·

New building code a win for energy efficiency, potential loss for utilities

October 16, 2013 by Editor inChief ·

Officials have approved an updated code to reduce energy waste in new homes, while overcoming attempts to roll back the current code’s energy-saving measures, passing a proposal known as RE-188, which adds a new optional compliance pathway to the 2015 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC).

The update allows an energy rating index (ERI), such as the Home Energy Rating System (HERS), to meet the code’s energy-saving goals instead of having to install many prescriptive energy-efficiency measures specified by the code. Approximately 40 percent of new homes are already rated using the HERS system.

“This is a huge win-win for new homeowners, builders, and for energy efficiency — our cheapest, cleanest resource,” said Meg Waltner, Natural Resources Defense Council’s manager for building energy policy. “This is a cost-effective approach that will help cut utility costs for homeowners, give greater flexibility to homebuilders in complying with the code, and create a stronger market for even more efficient homes by giving home buyers an MPG-like rating to compare the homes side by side.”
Read more: New building code a “win” for energy efficiency, potential loss for utilities – FierceEnergy http://www.fierceenergy.com/story/new-building-code-win-energy-efficiency-potential-loss-utilities/2013-10-14#ixzz2hv1VqIA0

Filed Under: Energy Efficiency, Market Oversight ·

Building Products Giant USG Goes Solar In Calif

October 16, 2013 by Editor inChief ·

USG Corp. will soon be going solar at its Plaster City, Calif., plant through a power-purchase agreement (PPA) with Green Light Plaster City Solar 1 (GLPCS1). The building materials giant will take advantage of a 1 megawatt PV plant installed on its campus by Green Light Energy Corp and engineering firm ZGlobal. The project began in September and is slated for completion in December.

USG is one of the largest building and remodeling supply companies, prividing drywall, ceiling panels and flooring, amongst other products for both homes and businesses. As such, it only makes sense that the company would turn to the sun for production of some of its building materials, particularly as grid-supplied electric prices are anticipated to raise. “The 1 megawatt photovoltaic system will provide USG with predictable costs for the portion of electricity supplied by the PV system for the next 20 years,” a spokesperson for the company said.

Filed Under: Company News, Renewable Power ·

Former WW2 Air Raid Bunker Converted Into an “Energy Bunker” in Hamburg

October 16, 2013 by Editor inChief ·

A massive German air raid bunker, which had been derelict for several decades, now hosts a regenerative power plant supplying the surrounding area with green energy. The project is part of the “Renewable Wilhelmsburg” climate protection scheme, which aims to provide the 50,000 Wilhelmsburg residents with CO2-neutral electricity by 2025 and with climate-neutral heating by 2050.

The surrounding neighborhood’s household energy is generated by an efficient combination of energy sources: besides solar energy and biogas, the bunker also uses wood chips and waste heat from a nearby industrial plant, supplying heating energy to local households. The project’s most innovative feature is its large-scale buffer storage facility with its 2 million litre capacity that integrates different eco-friendly heat and power units. The Energy Bunker also feeds the renewable power generated by its solar panels into Hamburg’s electricity grid, thereby supplying 3,000 households with heat and 1,000 households with electricity. Erected in 1943 as an air raid bunker, the original building protected thousands of people from Allied air raids. Four years later, the British Army destroyed the bunker’s interior by means of a controlled detonation. All that was left was the outer shell with its almost three meter thick walls. For almost 60 years, the building served as a war memorial and any further utilization of the premises was restricted to a few adjacent areas.

The Energy Bunker is an integral part of the “Renewable Wilhelmsburg” climate protection scheme for Europe’s largest river island with almost 50,000 residents. By the year 2050, Wilhelmsburg will be transformed into a climate-neutral district. The basis for this is provided within the framework of the International Building Exhibition (IBA), currently taking place in Hamburg. With its dedicated energy projects, the IBA is setting the groundwork for meeting Wilhelmsburg’s total energy and heating requirements in a climate-neutral way by 2025 and 2050, respectively.

Filed Under: Green Building, Newsletter, Renewable Power ·

NASA inspires launch of software for energy-efficient buildings

October 10, 2013 by Editor inChief ·

An interesting startup called Ekotrope is marketing web-based software that allows buildings to be analyzed as they are being designed and built.

It allows design options to be compared in minutes, cutting building construction costs 2 to 10 percent and resulting in buildings that are 40 percent more energy efficient. It’s also used for renovations.

It can analyze entire buildings during the design phase, comparing various component configurations to find the most cost-effective ways to reach the greatest energy efficiency. The software provides an interactive report of a building’s energy performance, allowing users to make real-time decisions and conduct what-if scenarios during planning and construction phases.

Designers also can drill down and analyze wall, roof and floor assemblies.

Step 1: Upload your design(s)

Step 2: Compare designs optimizing for construction cost, payback period or energy savings

Step 3: Choose design options that match the project’s goals

So far, Ekotrope has optimized about 700,000 square feet of building space in 11 states across the U.S.

Designers of a net-zero energy community in Florida used the software.

“When embarking on this new development it was crucial for us to fully understand all of the cost, energy and sustainability build options available to us in detail,” says Greg Thomas, managing member for Green Key Village LLC. “For each individual design plan, this meant considering more than 10,000 unique variables. We also want our buyers to be able to choose from 10 different, fully sustainable designs.”

Green Key Village found the software to be “amazingly sophisticated but easy-to-use, enabling us to intuitively review and compare a wide array of build and material options.”

MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Professor Edward Crawley developed the software, drawing on NASA technology, because he was searching for help in designing an energy-efficient home. He wanted his architect to be able to analyze trade-offs in using various components to find the best energy and investment combination.

Recently, the Massachusetts-based company raised $1.7 million, bringing its total capital raise to $3 million. Part of that money came from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. The state-funded organization invests in Massachusetts clean energy companies to create local, high quality jobs while supporting them in reaching national markets.

Filed Under: Company News, Energy Efficiency, Sustainable Building · Tagged: Blog, buildings, EnergyEfficient, GreenBiz.com, inspires, launch, NASA, Software

A Fresh Set of Grades Measures Energy Use in Residential Buildings – New York Times

October 3, 2013 by Editor inChief ·

In its waning days, the Bloomberg administration is issuing a final batch of grades, this time to rate the energy use of the city’s largest residential buildings. This week, officials released energy consumption data for large multifamily buildings, allowing residents to find out how their co-ops, condos and rental buildings compare with similar structures.

It was the first time any city in the country publicized such data, environmental groups said, and will be one of the most prominent legacies of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s environmental agenda. The city has been tracking energy use among its largest buildings under a 2009 law intended to help reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, an issue that acquired added urgency after Hurricane Sandy.

The heating and cooling of buildings produces three-fourths of the city’s emissions contributing to global warming and sea level rise, city officials said; the 2009 law applies to the biggest energy consumers, buildings of more than 50,000 square feet and multiple-building properties with a total of more than 100,000 square feet.

Annual results for the city’s large office and government buildings have been released since 2011, using the scores under the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program. Residential buildings are not yet rated under that program, so city officials are using letter grades, just as they do with restaurants, to encourage improvements and to guide consumer decisions.

“The benefit is a more informed marketplace,” said Cliff Majersik, executive director of the Institute for Market Transformation, a nonprofit group in Washington that promotes building energy efficiency and advises the city on its rating efforts.

Mr. Majersik warned, though, that to identify the real underachievers, comparisons should be apples to apples. Walk-ups should be compared with walk-ups and luxury towers should be compared with luxury towers. The most efficient buildings use three to six times less energy than the power hogs, according to a report released by the mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability to accompany the energy use data. This means enormous potential for energy savings, officials said, especially with multifamily buildings, which account for 76 percent of the more than 26,600 buildings covered by the law.

The energy use data, collected in 2011 with 75 percent of the buildings reporting, reveals some interesting patterns. It turns out that buildings built in the 1970s have the highest consumption levels compared with other vintages, especially compared with the structures built in the 1930s.

And in all five boroughs, the highest energy usage per square foot among ZIP codes tends to be in households with higher median incomes.

Filed Under: Energy Efficiency, Facility Management, Newsletter · Tagged: buildings, Energy, Fresh, grades, measures, Residential, Times, York

Architects and Building Engineers flock to NREL

September 18, 2013 by Editor inChief ·

Eight busloads of architects and mechanical engineers toured one of the world’s largest net-zero-energy office building this summer at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and came away inspired with new ideas for how to design and build beautiful, eco-friendly structures on a budget.

Tickets for the tours sold out almost as fast as a Paul McCartney concert, the busloads another reminder of how professionals are embracing high-performance, energy-efficient buildings.

The premier professional organizations for architects and building engineers — the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) — both held their national conferences in Denver this summer, within a few days of each other.

Denver is just 14 miles from Golden, the site of NREL’s main campus and its Research Support Facility (RSF), a 360,000-square-foot office building that Construction Digital Magazine last year named the top net-zero-energy building in the world. A group of NREL engineers including Sheila Hayter, Rachel Romero, and Shanti Pless organized the trips to NREL’s campus — and led tours with help from the architects at RNL and SmithGroup JJR and the contractors from JE Dunn and Haselden, who worked with NREL to design and build the RSF and the new Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF).

Busloads of architects and mechanical engineers recently toured the Energy Systems Integration Facility. Here, they view the high performance computing data center, which will house one of the world’s most energy-efficient super computers. The petascale system will be dedicated to energy efficiency and renewable energy research.
Credit: SmithGroup JJR/Bill Timmerman

“People were lining up at will call to get tickets to the tour,” said Angela Innes, marketing manager for JE Dunn Construction, the main contractor on the ESIF project. “We saw huge interest and got a lot of feedback from architects from all over the world.”

The AIA architects and ASHRAE engineers marveled at the energy efficiency and the aesthetics of the RSF, and some dropped their jaws when they learned it was built in 2010 and 2011 for no more than the average square-foot cost — $259 — of other office buildings in the Denver area. In addition, the engineers saw that using biomass to heat buildings is a viable option for saving greenhouse gases and viewed one of the most energy-efficient data centers in the world.

NREL Shows High Performance is Economical
“Designers of commercial buildings are serious about creating energy-efficient buildings,” said NREL’s Hayter, who chairs ASHRAE’s Planning Committee, is a past ASHRAE vice president, and previously served on the steering committee that developed the original charter for ASHRAE’s Advanced Energy Design Guideline (AEDG) series that shows the way toward achieving 30% or 50% greater efficiency or net-zero energy.

“The architects visiting NREL were pretty amazed at the design of the RSF. They are anxious to learn how to make energy-efficient decisions with a very limited budget — without sacrificing aesthetics,” Pless said. A full-day pre-convention workshop at the AIA conference gave architects the chance to do exactly that: make design decisions with an eye for energy efficiency. The workshop taught them how to use OpenStudio, an Energy Department tool developed at NREL, to evaluate the energy impact of early design decisions such as orientation, massing, fenestration, construction assemblies, and internal building activity. They created baseline energy models and then made what-if alternatives using energy conservation measures pulled from the online Building Component Library, another Energy Department tool developed at NREL.

“We sent 200 of our people to NREL. It was all sold out,” said Nicolle Thompson, director of programs and sponsorship for AIA Colorado. “It was extremely popular. There are so many great projects at NREL, and many of our members participated in building that campus. The RSF and ESIF are getting such national recognition. It’s not easy to build a net-zero building of that size economically. We wanted to show it off.”

Filed Under: Energy Efficiency, Green Building, Newsletter ·

Building Turbines, Inc. Enters the 8 Billion Dollar LED Lighting Market

September 18, 2013 by Editor inChief ·

Building Turbines, Inc. through Green CityPlanet, a fully owned subsidiary of Building Turbines, Inc., has secured a five million dollar line of credit through, Sirius Green Solutions, Inc. The access to these funds will allow for the increase in current sales and distribution of wind turbines, solar and LED lighting; granting Building Turbines,Inc. the working capital necessary, to secure all product and equipment necessary to fulfill large orders that they have in process, with commercial customers, governmental agencies, and state and municipal entities.

The company has experienced encouraging success in its initial bidding, fueled by rapid feedback in its channel development. Out of the estimated eight billion dollar LED market; Building Turbines is in various stages of bidding, signing and installing over 16 Million dollars in government and municipal contracts that they have identified, with plans of bidding on, and securing hundreds of millions of dollars more. These bids for securing private,governmental and municipal entities are being processed with rapid submittal and awards notifications. Building Turbines, Inc has already secured a variety of Approved Vendor listings; including, but not limited to, The Federal Government, State of Texas, Harris County and The City of Houston. The submission process to become Approved Vendors for other companies, cities and states, is also currently being undertaken. Any future bid submittals will automatically carry the Approved Vendor Status for that region or company.

“The addition of the Line of Credit, will allow us to install our backlog of LED lighting projects, in parallel, and secure much larger projects, continuing to increase the inflow revenues, which allow for continued expansion into all areas dealing with urban Green Energy Solutions. We believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and as government agencies convert from the old florescent tube lights,to new LED lighting systems, these numbers will dramatically increase,” stated John Graham Sr., CEO of Building Turbines, Inc.

About BUILDING TURBINES, Inc: www.buildingturbines.com Based inAustin, Texas, Building Turbines, Inc. is focused on the design and manufacture of patented rooftop wind turbines; as well as, vertically integrating into other renewable energy solutions to complete a totalGreen Energy Solution for any urban environment.

Filed Under: Company News ·

Asia Smart Building Market Growth set to Explode

September 18, 2013 by Editor inChief ·

Asia will consume 45% of world energy by 2030 and buildings are the big consumers. The unprecedented urbanization rate in Asia relies on smart buildings to reduce climate change impact. From a latest report published by BSRIA, the smart building market will grow from the current size of US$ 427 billion to US$ 1,036 billion in 2020, creating vast opportunities for advance building technologies and services.

Smart cities realize a sustainable urban development in many Asian countries. Smart cities are more focused on the ICT infrastructure but should also include eco, sustainable, green and low carbon cities, which address on various green elements.
Songdo IDB and Fujisawa are two smart cities under development in South Korea and Japan. China has 36 smart cities underway. Singapore will become a smart nation by 2015 and Iskandar is the flagship smart city in Malaysia. Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor will be the smart city of the future India. China is building a RMB 250 billion low carbon model city in Tianjin.

Smart cities create vast business opportunities for ICT, software, electronic hardware and low carbon industries. ICT and software companies are growing in the smart cities market now. System and service providers form partnership with the government and become a private investor.
Net zero energy building is more a concept than a hard target in most of the Asian countries except Japan. Net zero energy buildings usually used to demonstrate low carbon technologies.

Smart grid in developing countries is more important to upgrading the basic power grid infrastructure, while in developed countries it is about the grid communication system. It is more urgent for China and India to upgrade the power grid to accommodate the growing power demand. Different countries are at different development stages in smart grid. China government promised US$150bn to upgrade power grid in various aspects. Many other Asian countries governments also inject money in smart grid development. Electricity market in Asian countries is still monopolised and state-owned, except the fully deregulated market in Australia. Manual demand side management (DSM) has been used to solve power shortage problems in developing countries. Automatic demand response (AutoDM) is just starting in Asia but the existing market on DSM creates the business opportunities for AutoDM.

Buildings need to be integrated to smart city and smart grid in ICT, energy and low carbon aspects. Government, end user and building owner have different drivers for smart and green buildings. Smart buildings are growing in smart cities; green buildings are also the major trend in Asia in new building developments.

The latest BSRIA report identified six key trends in smart building design. Industry should not focus on the additional cost in smart buildings but should aim to provide suitable products and solution for smart buildings. The research also found some building systems have a significant increase in the construction budget compare to 5 years ago.
Outlook: Asia will take 43% of the global construction market by 2020 and China, India, Japan and Indonesia will be the biggest in the region. The Asian smart building market will reach US$1,036 billion in 2020, driven by the urbanization, smart cities and government commitment on carbon reduction.

Filed Under: Green Building, Newsletter ·

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