One of the most important things to keep in context within the framework of this class is, how does this standard relate to the other systems, standards, and methodologies we’ve seen?  Observe:

• ENERGY STAR:  This government-sponsored system is used widely by building professionals and manufacturers.  But, it is somewhat unwieldy with lots of checklists and tools and has been rejected in multiple jurisdictions for being too complicated.
• State programs and codes: There are too many of these to mention, and they range from prescriptive to performance, regulations to codes.  Standards vary from place to place and can be quite helpful in certain areas – if you know how to take advantage of them.
• Architecture 2030:  This organization sets ambitious goals but provides very little framework for how to get there.
• LEED:  This large and dense standard has achieved what we might call “market transformation” due to its position as THE green building benchmark.  But, to achieve certification you must wade through mounds of paperwork and fork out lots of money.
• Passive House:  This simple and straightforward standard places a premium on high performance, but is perhaps not as comprehensive as some of the other systems.

In contrast, the Living Building Challenge asks the question, “what if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?”.  With the LBC, the ideal outcome IS the goal, and there are no choices about whether or not you follow the “imperatives”.  If you are trying to reach Living status, you either “go big or go home”.

This brings me to our field trip last week, the last one of the quarter… we are so fortunate in Portland to live in a community that places such value on sustainable living.  We have not just one but THREE Living Buildings in the works in the city of Portland!   The Oregon Sustainability Center, when it is built, will likely be the greenest high-rise ever built and reassert Portland’s status as a global leader in the green design community.  The Key Delta Living Building in North Portland will be a phenomenal resource to its community once it is fully transformed from the gas station it used to be.  But, as great as those buildings will be, they are not built yet.

The Living Building that IS built, or I should say nearly finished, is the commons, a two-family home in SE Portland that is a labor of love for the brothers building it.  Sticking to the integrity of the Living Building Challenge has been a – dare I say – challenge for the owners, but they have come a long way and will have one of the greenest houses in the land when they are done.  We had a good time on this field trip, and even took a class picture!

All is not necessarily lost though… Abu Dhabi, as the article states, is in fact, loaded, so where there is not a way, there is a bank account to make a way.   Still, will the richest Emirate find tenants to actually move into Masdar?  I hope so, for the sake of this grand experiment, because I would like to see if it’s actually possible.  And since Abu Dhabi seems to be the only ones with enough money to make it happen, I’m rooting for them.

Take, for example, the news that the first net-zero neighborhood in the United States is being built in Boulder. At just 12 homes, it will be a tiny neighborhood, yes, but a photovoltaic-powered assemblage of LEED Platinum homes nonetheless.

Image courtesy of Inhabitat

Also, today I learned from one of the DOE’s daily updates that the U.S.  Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs is committed to being the first institution of its kind to reach net-zero energy use, by purchasing or producing as much renewable energy as it consumes.   The Air Force is actually leading the government charge on energy innovation, and according to the DOE,

“The Air Force currently uses more green power — 426.2 million kilowatt hours (kWh) annually — than any other branch of government, over a third more than the second-place Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and twice as much as third-place DOE.”

Very impressive!  The Air Force has also collectively added several “green stripes” to its uniform (wait, do the Air Force get stripes on their uniform?  I think so?) with several EPA and DOE Green Power awards, including:

• 2003: Green Power Partner of the Year;
• 2004: Green Power Leadership Award;
• 2005: Green Power Partner of the Year;
• 2008: Green Power Leadership Award.

Building improvements at the Air Force Academy will focus on the 6.4 million sf of space already in use, with high efficiency mechanical, electrical and HVAC equipment; security and energy efficiency upgrades to window wall systems; improved building insulation; utilization of natural lighting; and energy-focused roofing replacements.   The goal in making these improvements is to have all its buildings reach or exceed the USGBC’s LEED Gold standard.

And NO, I’m not finished yet.  As IF that weren’t enough, the Air Force’s leadership on renewable energy has led Colorado’s elected officials, military and energy leaders to create the Front Range Renewable Energy Consortium (FRREC) to “collaboratively develop and utilize the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency resources”.  This new consortium includes:

• Department of Defense and military (Air Force, Army, Colorado National Guard);
• DOE and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory;
• Governor’s Energy Office;
• USNORTHCOM/NORAD;
• Xcel Energy;
• Tri-State Generation;
• Colorado Springs utilities.

That list above doesn’t even mention the Air Force Academy’s Army neighbor, Fort Carson, which is ALSO now marching towards net-zero energy status and hopes to reach this goal by 2015.

Whew!  That’s a heck of a lot of bullet points, and a heck of a lot less energy consumption.  Massachusetts, New York, and Wisconsin, you have an answer to this?  California, Oregon and Washington?  …Your move!  Colorado might soon be renamed “The Net-Zero State”…

The good news is, in the meantime, I’ve been able to upload and catalogue all of my photos from the event and add some commentary as well.  Feel free to check out my Solar Decathlon collection on Flickr, where each house has its own set of photos and my corresponding thoughts written alongside.  Note the overwhelming gray clouds in all of the pictures – made for some pretty gloomy photography :-/

Wow, that sky is ugly

I will now wax poetic on my favorite house in the Solar Decathlon, since I haven’t done it yet.   I want to talk for a moment about Virginia Tech’s Lumenhaus. This house was truly lovely, and I am at a loss to explain their 13th place finish.  I felt that this team used every sustainable system reasonably available to a residential customer to create a truly green, net-zero energy home.  And not only that, they did so without compromising on space – the interior of house was perfectly proportioned in its public versus private areas, with some extra special touches thrown in that really sealed the deal.  Case in point: the partitions in the bedroom that not only held your closet, but they separated to reveal a TV and in doing so, created a partition wall between the bedroom and the living space.

The rainwater collection system/awning over the front door

But I’m not going to stop there.  The exterior screens were cut steel and then bent by hand in a pattern that was meant to direct sunlight into the house but also maintain privacy.  The awning over the front door doubled as a rain scupper, and drained water into catchment basins under the house… which could be recycled in a closed-loop graywater system.  The skylight in the bathroom… the geothermal heating system in addition to the roof PV array… and if all this hotness weren’t enough, to move this house, all you needed to do was put it on a giant set of wheels and hitch it to the back of a tractor trailer, and you’re on your way!

Metal sunscreen and panel system as seen from the inside

I’m not the only one who thought the Lumenhaus was pretty great, however; the Virginia Tech team was approached by NBC during the Decathlon and the team is now in negotiations to move the house to Rockefeller Center so it can be on the Today Show, which may happen in mid-November.  Also, the team of bloggers at Inhabitat did a great write up of the house on their blog, which included some beautiful photos that I will now borrow to show you how nice the house is -  if only it had been sunny while I was visiting!

courtesy of Inhabitat

courtesy of Inhabitat

Everyone loves a section detail! courtesy of Inhabitat

Congrats to VT for such a job well done, and let’s hope they get some of their technology upgraded in time for the Solar Decathlon Europe competition next year – since they are the only team from the U.S. Solar Decathlon to compete overseas too!

courtesy of Inhabitat

http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/10/16/germany-wins-the-2009-solar-decathlon/

I’m on location at the Decathalon and trying desperately to stay warm and dry, but I’ll have more news and photos later…

But what does this have to do with climate change? Well that’s easy: designing and showcasing solar houses is a great way to promote renewable energy, which reduces our dependence on fossil fuels, which means less carbon emissions, which means slowing down climate change. And the DOE has been holding this competition for a while now, so the idea of promoting renewable energy in homes is not exactly new to the Federal Government. But how can we make this information more valuable directly to homeowners? Slowing down or reversing climate change is a complex task and homeowners could be a key factor in the process by both reducing energy consumption and using more renewable power at home.

…And one way to learn is by staying tuned to my blog and reading more about the Solar Decathalon! So stay tuned!

The LAGI did this using some big math.  For those of you who might be scared off by numbers, I will simplify it as much as possible:  LAGI determined that the total energy usage of all the people on Earth in the year 2030 will be approximately 678 quadrillion Btus.

That’s 678,000,000,000,000,000 Btu.  (!!!)

Through a series of somewhat complicated equations (which you can view on the original post), they convert the Btus to kilowatt hours and determine how many kW-h would be produced in a single year on a square meter of land (400 kW-h).  This yielded a total of 496,804,500,000 square meters required for total energy production – which is 496,805 square kilometers, or 191,817 square miles.  They then divide up this total number into chunks and place them strategically onto each continent.  And when you look at it in this way, it not only seems possible to achieve solar power for the whole world in 2030, it seems practically easy.

The LAGI goes on to examine the same thought experiment with wind power to similarly manageable results.  Check that out, with other statistical comparisons, here.  As an extension, I’d like to see how much silicone – or other relevant materials – would need to be harvested from the Earth to produce all of those solar panels, and ultimately how many millions of pounds of greenhouse gases would be emitted in the process.   Hey – it’s a great idea!  So we may as well have all the facts in front of us, right?

So if anyone has any numbers on how much silicone we’d need to harvest to achieve solar power for all in 2030, please let me know, thanks 

Which is why, in my most recent e-newsletter from Architecture 2030, I was pleased and not surprised to discover that they had spent so much time poring over the 1428-page Waxman-Markey climate bill in the House of Representatives.  I am going to take Ed’s word for it, as I do not have the energy (or enough caffeine) to read a 1428-page bill, when he tells me that the 29 most important pages of the bill are contained in Section 201, which requires updating national building energy codes to meet the following energy reduction targets:

• in 2010, 30% below the baseline energy code (IECC 2006 and ASHRAE 90.1-2004),
• in 2014-2015, 50% below the baseline energy code, and
• every three years after, out to 2029-2030, an additional 5% reduction.

Simply put, this is totally awesome. If designers and architects are going achieve lower energy buildings, we are going to need the building codes to be our guides, because our clients usually won’t pay for it on their own.  This is starting to change, certainly, but frankly there are not a whole lot of people in the building industry that are getting paid for anything right now.  This portion of the bill will not only regulate new construction, but it will encourage people who can’t afford new buildings to reconsider renovation as a viable option.  And both of these things NEED to happen:  new construction should be more energy efficient, while renovation should happen on a broader scale.  The GOOD NEWS is, clients, developers, and builders need to work openly with architects, designers and engineers to make this happen.  Which means, everybody gets back to work!

To read more about the awesomeness of energy efficiency in buildings and the implications of this climate bill, read the complete analysis (with fun graphs and everything) in Architecture 2030′s latest e-newsletter.