Friday, April 19, 2013

Just over a month ago, I attended the New York State Green Building Conference in Syracuse, NY. The two day event was developed by SUNY's Environmental School of Forestry and the Upstate Chapter of the NYS Green Building Council. Day one took place at the Gateway Center, a new building recently completed by ESF that has achieved LEED Platinum certification. It is a really cool building! Because ESF is a forestry school, the design incorporates a lot of wood, all of which is FSC certified. It also features a green roof that provides a wonderful view of the city below, populated by an interesting assortment of native plant species. But the building's neatest feature has to be the power plant in the basement (with the exception of solar generation, most buildings have to bring their power in from off-site--and while campuses tend to have their own power plants, almost all have them in separate buildings). They have a bio-fuel (wood pellet) fired furnace that generates steam for power production along with three natural gas micro turbines that will provide the balance of electricity for heat and cooling. In addition, this power produced on-site will provide four other campus building with thermal and electric energy, and will reduce the College's carbon footprint by over 20%. They'll have interactive exhibits to view the system in the near future, and after that, you can go visit the new cafe and Roosevelt exhibits on the main floor. Here's a link to with more information about the building: http://www.esf.edu/welcome/campus/gateway.htm.

On day two, one of the more interesting talks at the conference was given by Alex Wilson on the topic of Resilient Design. Alex is the founder and President of the Resilient Design Institute, and he began his presentation with some pretty eye-opening statistics about the dramatic increase in summer temperatures, annual precipitation, the expanding periods of drought in some of the most vulnerable regions of the country, and the rising number, frequency, and intensity of high impact storms (Katrina, the Labor Day storm of 2011 that hit New England, and Superstorm Sandy were just some of the featured events). The costs associated with these storm events are just staggering (and still being amassed to date). So, what is Resilient Design? According to the Institute, 


"Resilience is the capacity to bounce back after a disturbance or interruption of some sort. At various levels —individuals, households, communities, and regions — through resilience we can maintain livable conditions in the event of natural disasters, loss of power, or other interruptions in normally available services.
Relative to climate change, resilience involves adaptation to the wide range of regional and localized impacts that are expected with a warming planet: more intense storms, greater precipitation, coastal and valley flooding, longer and more severe droughts in some areas, wildfires, melting permafrost, warmer temperatures, and power outages.

Resilient design is the intentional design of buildings, landscapes, communities, and regions in response to these vulnerabilities.”


The talk made me think about the design of our house and wonder how resilient it would be if challenged by the conditions mentioned above. Certainly the winds that come off of Onondaga Lake are significant, and the 90 degree days that spanned a good bit of July last summer created some uncomfortable temperatures, but the big question is how long would our house maintain a comfortable temperature if we lost power in January? I'm not sure. We don't have a wood stove to fire up and keep us warm, and the solar we have wouldn't even work to provide hot water without the on-demand system that it depends on for distribution.

I think the work that Alex is doing to get the building industry and the public at large to think about resilience is worth consideration, and I'll be interested to see what impact his ideas have on the building industry and standards in the coming years. For more information on the concept or the Institute's work, here's the link:

http://www.resilientdesign.org/

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Hi: Sorry, somebody pointed out that it might be inspiring to include how much we spent on all of our energy for the year I mentioned in the previous post: $942 is the grand total. This is less than a quarter of what we spent to heat and light our old house that we'd renovated, insulated, and that was approximately the same square footage. One big difference is that here in central New York, natural gas is the dominant fuel source, and right now, it's cheap! We used a mixture of oil and electricity in the old house.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Hi:
It's been a long time without a post, but that's what happens when your subject becomes your habitat: life just takes over! I did want to share some information with anyone who happens upon this, about our current energy consumption. I used the Energy Star calculator to compare our energy use with other homes of similar size, occupancy, and climatic conditions. Not surprisingly, we fared much better than the average home. Here's a link to the site so you can go through this exercise too:

https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=HOME_ENERGY_YARDSTICK.showGetStarted

Blower Door Test #1

For the calculator, I entered our kWh and therm readings for a year. We have four full-time residents (I didn't count the dog), with many visitors who come for weekends and more. In case you have forgotten from earlier posts, we rely on natural gas for heating, our hot water when the solar thermal isn't producing enough (which was only fully operational half way through the year I used), and for our gas cooking stove. Everything else is electricity (remember too, that over 95% of our lights are LED or fluorescent and every appliance within the house has an energy star rating). All told, we used 458 therms, and 5,897 kWh. Based on the Energy Star metric, we rated a 9.7 on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the most energy efficient. I guess because we are a country addicted to our cars, Energy Star provided the following information to help us understand our impact, "Annual pollution resulting from energy use in this household is 4 MtCo2eq of greenhouse gas emissions--the equivalent of .78 car." So, we still need to plant some trees!

While the calculator is an imperfect tool, the results are still positive. However, a more realistic gauge of our efficiency would compare us to the segment of the housing stock that has been built or improved to higher energy standards. Perhaps the US Green Building Council has this information, at least for LEED Homes? Any ideas?

And yes, I'm still working on the paperwork for certification.