Green Building Elements

Move — to Louisiana:

According to SolarPowerRocks! Louisiana has a state tax credit of 50% for solar roof installations, the most generous state subsidy for solar — Combined with the 30% Federal tax credit for solar that we all get now; (you knew about that, right?) so in Louisiana you can put a solar roof up, paying only 20% of the cost: (30% + 50% = 80% off).

The way this credit is designed it will benefit modest homeowners the most. If you need a $25,000 system, you get the full 50%. If you need a larger system you get less than 50%, because it maxes out at $12,500.

So, if you have ten plasma tvs and a pool pump and run the A/C day and night, you won’t get as much help with running all that…but

Read more at Cleantechnica…

U of Kansas grad students have just completed their chic Buffalo House at Springfield in Kansas City, designed with a very elegant approach to sustainability.

We are seeing more climate conscious design in architecture: In this case; the rain screen.

A skin over the house is designed to manage and harvest occasional heavy precipitation, to provide protection from premature decay from moisture intrusion.

I like the way the rain-screen is carried up over the roof and mounted flush with the photovoltaic solar panels on the roof for a sleek look while also protecting the building.

Like a skin over the building; this Cumuru wood cladding is designed to shed rain water separately from the structure of the building. Rain screens deter rainwater intrusion into walls - by shedding most of the rain and by incorporating storage to reuse the rainwater - which you can see below the doors here.

There’s 8 other sustainable features, as well.
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Remember when we had the idea that investing in real estate was a safe bet? It was such a commonplace idea that this would generate a return on the investment, that it became a cliche: “As safe as houses”.

Now, despite our real estate values dropping like a stone, there is still part of your building that you can use to generate a certain return yearly.

That is that abundant farmland that you have on your roof.

You didn’t know you have farmland on the roof? Northern California’s PG&E thinks so. If you have solar potential (a flat roof or 20 degree slope to the South, Southwest or Southeast with no shade) you could actually generate a decent return on investment, regardless of your declining property value, from your sunshine harvest.

You could earn 8% a year on an investment in a solar roof. How?
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These days, there are more and more options for those of you who want a small wind turbine out in the yard or on your roof. They range from the standard to the somewhat bizarre, and come in sizes that can power several major appliances all the way up to your whole house and beyond. In the right conditions, wind power can be much more economical than other renewable energy options such as solar or geothermal.

Traditional propeller-type wind turbines remain the best options for residential settings outside of urban areas. They are efficient and time-tested, and the leading manufacturers of these turbines have been at it for a long time. Two of the leaders are Bergey Windpower and Southwest Windpower. Bergey makes several versions of its Excel turbine suitable for home use. The Excel can be connected to the electrical grid and is big enough to power an entire home.

Southwest Windpower makes the Skystream 3.7 turbine (shown at left), an innovative machine that has a number of advances specifically targeted to residential users. It is meant to be tied to the electricity grid, and in reasonably windy conditions could power an average home.

In the past few years, a number of new manufacturers have come out with radical turbine designs intended to make wind turbines easier to install and better for tightly packed suburban and urban environments. Most of these turbines are vertical axis wind turbines, or VAWTs. Instead of spinning on a horizontal axis like their propeller-based cousins, VAWTs rotate around a vertical axis. The key advantages are that they can be quieter, are more amenable to the swirling wind conditions found in urban environments, and can have a smaller overall footprint (both tower width and height). The downsides? The companies that make them don’t have long track records, and the turbines are less efficient because a portion of each turbine is always spinning into the wind.

One example is Mariah Power, who makes the Windspire wind turbine (shown in the upper right image above). Each Windspire turbine is 30 feet tall and two feet wide, and it resembles a sculpture as much as it does a renewable energy device. The cylindrical structure makes it very quiet and compact, meaning you could install multiple turbines alongside one another for more power. Each unit should provide from 10-50% of the electricity for a typical home depending on where you live in the country.

Another example is Helix Wind. The company make several vertical axis turbines that, in my opinion, most closely resemble a ram’s horn. The complex (and weird or beautiful, depending on your sensibilities) design efficiently transforms variable winds into clean electricity. Their largest model, the S594, can provide 50-100% of a typical home’s electricity use under the right conditions.

So, now that you’re intrigued, should you run out and buy a new wind turbine for your rooftop or back yard? Read the rest of this entry »

Cash, that most basic element of our economy, can be in abysmally short supply for new young families scraping by on marginal jobs.

Sustainable housebuilding may not be foremost in their minds.

But one young couple in Wales managing on an annual income of just $10,000 went ahead and built their own cheap home anyway, sustainably, mostly out of materials from “a rubbish pile somewhere.”
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American Honda Motor Company presented its new Micro-sized Combined Heat and Power (MCHP) Deluxe co-generation unit at Greenbuild 2008 in Boston, Massachusets.  The unit has been around for a while (in Japan since 2003, and here in the US since 2007).  The system provides home heating or water heating along with power generation in one package.  It also includes a generator to provide power during an outage.

When installed in combination with a furnace system such as ECR International’s “freewatt,” homeowners can expect to save between $500 and $1,000 per year on their power bills.  This is achieved through the power-generating capabilities of the MCHP, plus the fact that the “freewatt” system provides additional electricity as a by-product of its heating process.

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New York City goes green by launching a 100% wind and solar powered billboard this Holiday Season.

As alternative energy continues to be the hot topic in our flailing economy, New York City sets an environmental example by launching Times Square’s first 100 percent eco-powered billboard.

The billboard powered entirely by wind and sun, is the first such sign in New York City. It will be erected by Ricoh Company, Ltd., a Japanese company that strives to be outstanding in all areas of the environment, society, and the economy. Their first eco-signage project dates back to April 2003 in Osaka, Japan.

Powered By Wind Turbines and Solar Panels

The electricity for the billboard will be produced entirely by solar and wind power and stored in 16 batteries. No electricity will be purchased from local power companies.

Sixteen wind turbines and 65 solar panels will produce an average of 98 kwh of electricity per day (93 kwh from wind power and 5kwh from solar). To put the savings into perspective: the same amount of electricity required by an ordinary sign would result in as much as 18 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The batteries can hold four days worth of supply. However if there is insufficient wind or solar power, the sign may not light up, an eventuality that Ricoh readily accepts.

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Cascade Engineering has just launched its SWIFT Wind Turbine in the United States and Canada. Quieter than a whisper, SWIFT provides businesses and homeowners in windy environments an effective solution to lower energy bills and reduce carbon emissions.

Built on unique, patented technology, the SWIFT Wind generates electricity by harnessing the power of the wind providing a clean energy source for domestic, community and industrial use. Optimally sited, this turbine will produce approximately 2000 kWh of electricity per year. One of the quietest wind systems available, it generates less than 35 decibels of noise at all wind speeds Read the rest of this entry »

Could the economic downturn hurt the green movement?  Thomas L. Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist of the New York Times, breaks down the possibility in today’s Bailout (and Buildup) of a tight economy and lower fuel prices leading to a greater reliance on foreign oil and a postponement of a national switch to cleaner energy.   It is understandable that economic worries have pushed environmental worries to the background for most Americans, but as Friedman points out, a financial stimulus package is an ideal way to kill two birds with one stone - inject money into the United States economy, but invest in green technologies.

Recently, we talked about the impressive return on investment for those who choose to install a photovoltaic system next year due to the Senate rescue package in The Future of Home Solar Power.  Starting next year, the United States Government will pay for 30% of your cost to go solar.  One of Friedman’s suggestions is a national renewable energy standard for utility companies, forcing them to produce 20 percent of their power through clean energy sources, including such non-CO2 producing sources as wind, solar, nuclear, and biomass.  He mentions a proposal by Andy Karsner, the former assistant secretary of energy, to increase tax credits for investing in clean energy.  But perhaps there is a way for homeowners or companies to recoup their investment in home solar and set a national energy standard for utility companies at the same time.  I propose the following addition to the renewable energy standard: increase the percentage of clean energy that utility companies must use but allow the utility companies to buy some of that power from homeowners and companies.

That’s right, let’s allow the utility companies to buy clean power from us. Read the rest of this entry »

Utility-scale windpower is an important and growing part of the US energy portfolio. Farms ranging in size from dozens to hundreds of turbines can produce in excess of 60 megawatts of power. Plans for gigawatts of wind power are being proposed all over the globe, and new wind farms are regularly being proposed that outstrip one another to be the largest in their respective locations, or in the world. At the far end of the scale, the largest size wind turbines have a rotor diameter of 126 meters (413 feet), and are estimated to be capable of producing 20,000,000 kilowatt hours of electricity annually (enough to power as many as 5000 European homes). Since the power generated by a turbine increases exponentially as it gets larger, new turbines will continue to grow in size.

But small-scale turbines are perhaps a more exciting realm of development. The standard, propeller-style turbine is well established, and there are many suppliers for this kind of generator in a range of sizes. In 2007, Home Power Magazine had a roundup of more than a dozen small wind turbines ranging from 8 feet to 56 feet in diameter (the latter of which is far larger than even a large, inefficient household would need for their power requirements). Green Building Elements had a review of this article last year.
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