A firsthand account of the floods in Queensland. Australia has been living in the (climatic) future for some time, facing the prospect of desalinization plants and admitting that most of their agriculture is not viable, given soil both saline and infertile, and the decade long drought. The government is buying up the water rights in the Murray Darling basin because it’s cheaper than agricultural subsidies, and the rural vote is given disproportionate weight in Australian law. There is a dark poetry in the fact that Queensland’s export coal mines are underwater today. None of this is to say that climate change is necessarily behind the floods or the drought or the bush fires from a few years ago, or the mad cold winter in Europe this year, or the forest fires in Russia this summer. We won’t ever be able to attribute any particular weather event to anthropogenic CO2, but all this is the kind of thing one ought to expect if one opts to change the composition of the homeworld’s atmosphere:
Retrofits pick up the pace
A look at the current state of Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing across the US. Legislation enabling this financing mechanism has been passed in half the country, and implemented at the city or county level in Berkeley and Boulder among others, but because the Federal Housing Finance Administration (Fannie and Freddie’s boss) chose to treat this particular property assessment as a lien, all the programs have been frozen since last July. Lawsuits and legislative fixes abound, but in the meantime, people are struggling to find other financing mechanisms for these financially (as well as ecologically) worthwhile investments. More background available at Pace Now.
Etech International and Crude
Etech International is a non-profit geotechnical company that works with various NGOs on environmental defense projects, mostly in Latin America. They’ve been doing analysis for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against ChevronTexaco in Ecuador that was partially chronicled in the documentary Crude.
Undercover anti-protest cop in UK goes native?
The Guardian is reporting that an undercover police officer who infiltrated the group of protesters that conspired to shut down the Ratcliffe on Soar coal fired power plant may have “gone native” after seven years with the group, taking part in, providing logistical support for, partially financing, and eventually playing a central role in planning their actions. The prospect of the officer aiding the legal defense of protesters who remain to be tried, or at the least, having the role he played in the organization exposed, has apparently led to the collapse of the case. The only really surprising part about all this is his apparent remorse.
Toward a Zero Energy Home by David Johnston and Scott Gibson
I’ve been looking, apparently in vain, for a good book (that’s not in German!) detailing Passive House building and modeling techniques. The best I’ve been able to do so far is Toward a Zero Energy Home, and it must have been pretty good, since I read it cover-to-cover in less than 24 hours. It’s not particularly dense or detailed, but it was a nice quick overview of low energy building systems, with lots of pretty pictures, and a dozen case studies from all over North America, including a couple right here in Boulder.
The goal that the authors have chosen to highlight — “Net Zero” — means that the buildings in question produce as much energy as they consume on an annually averaged basis. This necessarily means that they all have some on-site production, wind, PV, solar-thermal hot water, etc. However, to keep such projects reasonably cost effective, it’s necessary to focus first on energy efficiency measures. Most important among these is a very tight building envelope, much more insulation than code requires, and appropriate glazing for passive solar gain. Then the internal power loads need to be minimized, by using energy efficient appliances and LED or CFL lighting. Only after doing all that is it financially worthwhile to start adding on-site renewable generation, capable of meeting the overall annual energy demands of the dwelling. Financially worthwhile, that is, if you have already decided that you want to create a Net Zero building.
Continue reading Toward a Zero Energy Home by David Johnston and Scott Gibson
German Passive House building robots
A short video from German home fabricator Hanse House. They do both stock and custom homes, but both are fabricated off-site. The video shows their production facility, and some of the techniques for putting together a building in pieces. It’s pretty awesome. Half robotic assembly line, and half humans, building to what’s essentially a CAD specification, with pipes and wires already laid in place within the structural elements before it gets loaded on the truck that takes it off to the building — or rather assembly — site, where the foundation awaits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joNGqfLMZxY
And here’s a time-lapse of one of their Passive Houses being assembled on-site:
I wonder if they do multi-family buildings too. What it would take to get a facility like this operating in Boulder County? Other than a rebound in the housing industry of course.
A life cycle analysis of incandescent, CFL and LED light bulbs
Life cycle analysis of incandescent, CFL, and LED light bulbs – It’s important to make sure when you’re using a new technology that supposedly saves energy, that you haven’t just shifted the energy consumption from the operational to the manufacturing portion of the product’s life cycle. This study compares three different lighting technologies: incandescent, compact fluorescent, and LED bulbs, and asks what the total energy input is to get ~400 lumens of light for 25,000 hours. Both CFLs and LEDs save about 80% of the energy over incandescent bulbs. For all bulb types, the embodied energy of manufacturing is only about 2% of the total energy consumed over the bulb’s life. CFLs and LEDs were roughly equivalent energetically at the time of this study, but the LEDs produced less in the way of toxic byproducts. The general expectation is that the efficiency of LED lighting will continue to improve, while CFLs are a pretty mature technology. The two best LED bulbs on the market today, with warm yellow light, compatible with dimmer switches, and giving about 800 lumens of light output (equivalent to a 60W incandescent bulb), seem to be this 13W one from Lighting Science ($30) and the 12W Philips A19 EnduraLED ($40). The prices seem high, but as with gas furnaces and boilers, electric motors and pumps, the cost of the electricity or fuel you run through the device ends up dwarfing the capital cost over its lifetime, so paying top dollar for efficiency is worthwhile.
Nationalist accounting tricks
Nationalist accounting tricks – from The Economist:
The only reason to make the within-borders population of a nation-state our analytical touchstone is a prior commitment to the idea that the nation-state is the correct unit of normative evaluation.
You can make your national income distribution whatever you like if you’re willing to ship all your poor people overseas, which is in no small part what the western world has done since the 1970s — not by moving actual people, but rather by relocating those portions of our economies which tend to be occupied by the poor. Nation state boundaries become more and more irrelevant every year, economically, informationally, environmentally. What kind jurisdictional authority will replace them?
The Finite World
The Finite World – Krugman at the NY Times talking about the resurgence in global commodity prices over the last year. Economic recovery in developing economies driving the markets, with the US, and indeed the entire West, largely irrelevant. Not only are we a smaller than ever slice of the pie, we’re not the ones building cities for hundreds of millions of people from scratch. I’m not sure I really understand his conception of inflation though. If rising commodity prices don’t constitute the most basic, raw form of inflation (you get less physical stuff in exchange for the same amount of labor performed), then I’m not sure what does. Historically we’ve made the economic approximation that natural resources are infinite, and all you have to do is pay the cost of going out and getting them. If that changes, then things will get weird. Maybe even weird to the point of sensible!
Boulder’s Passive Aggressive Building Standards
Usually when people say that “better is the enemy of good enough”, they’re pointing out that striving for perfection can be a distraction from just getting the job at hand done. There are other dynamics that involve these concepts too. As social animals, we tend to judge ourselves against those around us. Once our basic needs have been satisfied, our relative wealth or deprivation often becomes more important to us than our absolute level of well being. We have little concept of how much is enough. This can lead to the familiar runaway acquisitiveness (keeping up with the Joneses) when there is a well established (or constructed…) social norm favoring consumption. Less obviously, it can also lead to an inappropriate lack of ambition when faced with an objective task that is not supported by widespread social norms.
Over the last couple of years Boulder has upped its building energy efficiency standards. The new permitting regime requires buildings to perform better — net of on-site generation like photovoltaics — than the 2006 international building codes (IBC). Smaller dwellings (< 3000 square feet) have to use 30% less energy than the baseline. Medium homes (3000-5000 sq ft) need to do 50% better, and large ones (> 5000 sq ft) have to beat it by 75%. Obviously this is an improvement over the previous situation, but in comparison to what is possible, and what is necessary to combat climate change, it’s actually pretty unimpressive. Homes of all sizes built to the Passive House standard use 80-90% less energy than the baseline code, and they do it without counting any on-site power generation against the building’s energy consumption, whereas the HERS index that is used in the Boulder code does count on-site generation. This is an important distinction, because the atmosphere doesn’t cancel out your nighttime coal-fired emissions with the solar electricity that you sell onto the grid during the day. All it cares about is the total amount of CO2 released.
Continue reading Boulder’s Passive Aggressive Building Standards