Though my trip is comprised of a few different stops across the continent, the place where I am spending the most time is Perpignan, France. Located in the south of the country, the small city is about an hour away from Montpellier and a two hour train ride from Barcelona, Spain. At first glance the city fills most of the preconceived notions that the average American would have of a European town: blocks of aged masonry buildings 4 to 6 stories in height, small shops lining slim streets filled with small cars. Around 125,000 people call the city home as of 2009 within an area of a little more than 26 square miles, making it comparable to American cities like Syracuse, New York or Hartford, Connecticut. It seemed to be a fair choice for a random litmus test of European, or at least French, cultural norms.

As expected, the city is well connected to destinations outside of its borders. Its airport can take passengers all over Europe. A healthy network of buses provide a convenient and viable option for traversing the city without a car and the newly renovated train station brings access to not only regional trains, but the TGV as well–France’s high speed rail. As a note, I also noticed glass-integrated PVs over the atrium of the train station as well. Here, the high speed rail is not a silver bullet for travel, but a component of an ecology of alternative transit.

On one hand, the city does not scream sustainability. It is not as though every buildings produces its own power or its streets are dominated by only electric vehicles. However, a more intimate look unearths a series of basic qualities that most American cities have yet to emulate.

While there are plenty of cars on the streets, the vast majority of them are small and compact, undoubtedly making them more efficient then the average American automobile. SUVs are thankfully very difficult to find and I haven’t spotted a single Hummer while I have been here. More importantly, the presence of cars does not negate the walkability of the city. Most local destinations and errands can be accessed by a short walk, giving the streets a pedestrian life that keeps them safe and the local shops active.

Smaller cars, combined with a network of one-way traffic, also makes for smaller streets. American city planning devotes a great deal of square-footage to providing vehicular manuverability that ultimately pushes things farther apart and makes walking that much more difficult. Small streets help ingrain the pedestrian scale that Europe is famous for while allowing for a more densely packed downtown fabric. This is why an American city like Sarasota, Florida that is almost exactly the same size (with a comparable climate) has only 73% of the population density even with its tall ocean side towers of condominiums. Density lies at the core of sustainable planning.

I also noticed how frequently the small yards, either in front or in back of a home, are used for fruit-bearing plants. Citrus trees are very popular with lemons, oranges, cumquats and grapefruits seemingly popping up on every corner. Though perhaps once a more common occurrence in America when victory gardens were prevalent after the second World War, growing a portion of your food on your own land can make a meaningful difference in the health of one’s diet not to mention help displace the heavy carbon footprint that comes with the bulk of our nation’s produce.

I was fortunate enough to stay with a great family in the center of town and I found the experience at the home level to be a continuation of my time on the streets. Though not a posterchild of sustainable design, many of the easy opportunities for improvement were capitalized on. Toilets were of the dual-flush variety (as they have proved to be throughout my trip). Light fixtures were fashioned with CFLs or LEDs. Hot water impressively came from solar thermal panels on the roof. Though there may be no game-changing technology, the basic standards show more signs of evolution. Most Americans have not yet realized that there is a great deal to accomplish between where we are now and a sea of net-zero homes. a series of basic changes can amount to a significant result and our homes are rife with opportunities for improvement after 40 years of consistent energy consumption.

The Blessing and Curse of Age

One could argue that some of these planning characteristics are the result of the old building fabric that predates the majority of America’s built environment. However, in some ways, when it comes to creating a greener urban landscape the age of the city’s buildings is their Achilles Heel.

A walk through the city reveals many of the common problems that older buildings have with a transition to a modern, more efficient, existence. Things like wall and roof insulation are less common and certainly not up to today’s level of possibility. Even building materials like terra cotta blocks or concrete masonry units (CMUs) have more efficient successors coming into regular use that do a better job at negating the use of energy to temper space and better utilizing the energy once its been used.

Windows and doors are another sore spot that carry both meaningful consequences and costly remedies. The high quality in craftsmanship and materials have kept many of them still in use today. The downside is that not only are many of them ripe for air leaks but they are virtually guaranteed to have single-paned glass–something considered to be archaic in many parts of the U.S. Punctures in the exterior wall are a prime opportunity for energy loss, but windows and doors can be expensive, especially with the goal of replicating historical conditions and their custom sizes. None of these problems are unique to Europe, but a higher average age can make it more of an issue than it is for a larger, younger country across the Atlantic.

Thus far, my opinion of Europe has not changed. Evidence points to a population more willing to make easy, effortless changes to daily norms in order to arrive at a more positive outcome. When it comes to sustainability, Americans still have plenty to learn.

The Reading Viaduct originally served a slightly different role than Manhattan’s High Line. The latter was constructed in the early 20th century to elevate train traffic over street level and allow industrial transport to pierce deeper into the city without the dangers that it posed to cars and pedestrians at grade. Conversely, the Reading Viaduct was built to bring rail transit into Reading Terminal in the heart of Philadelphia. Eventually, train traffic was moved out of the center city in the second half of the 20th century and the Reading Terminal was absorbed into the city’s conference center. With trains no longer slipping into center city, the viaduct became another defunct piece of urban infrastructure.

On the left, Philadelphia's Reading Viaduct. On the right, New York City's Highline before renovation.

One only needs to look at a current picture of the viaduct next to a “before” picture of the High Line to see the similarities in opportunity to make a great public space. Having been on the High Line numerous times I can attest to the fact that moving through the city and its buildings above street level is a fantastically unique experience. Furthermore, the hopes for anticipated development around the High Line that helped convince city regulators to support the project continue to become a reality with each passing day.

Not Exactly Apples to Apples

Despite the similarities between the two projects, there are some important differences. Though widely considered a success, the High Line was not created at a trivial cost. The City of New York pegs the cost of the first two sections at $240 million with over half of that coming from either the city or the federal government. The project is not technically done yet either with the last half-mile loop between 30th and 34th street still under negotiations to secure the future of the elevated steel railway amongst its various stakeholders. As the economy has turned downward, the future of the project has needed to be supported more by private funding sources and less by municipal aid. Quite simply, were it the High Line was set to start in 2009, its future may not have been as bright. For a project that is already on its way to being the catalyst of billions of dollars of private development one could say it was a worthwhile investment for New Yorkers, but its price still fosters barriers to entry that other cities may not be able to overcome.

Architect’s Newspaper reported that Philadelphia’s president of the Center City District was apt to point out that “Philadelphia is not New York.” The High Line has raised tens of millions of dollars of private donation for its realization with the latest being a $20 million donation from the Diller-von-Furstenberg foundation back in October. The generous grant represents the largest of its kind for a park in the history of New York. Philadelphia does not have the population of celebrity icons to facilitate the same kinds of funding levels.

I am also skeptical of the viaduct’s location in relation to the downtown. Most of the mile-long track is actually outside of Center City, arguably the strong nucleus of Philadelphia. Though the viaduct bridges over it, the sunken artery of Interstate 676 and its paralleling Vine Street act a spatial border to the center city that could depress the amount of people that would utilize a new raised park leading away from the consolidated activity of the four gardened squares. In New York’s example, neighborhoods like the Meat Packing District and Chelsea were already well into their respective resurgence when the High Line was realized. On the other hand, if the park could induce more patronage then there would be that much more room to improve for the northern side of the downtown.

Utilizing our old infrastructure in new ways is a bountiful opportunity in many of our older American cities. Most of these urban-scaled interventions required years to construct, tons of material and a great deal of energy. Their reuse extends their life cycle and allows cities to maintain the authentic components of their fabric that fall prey to the growing wave of gentrification. Whether it is the High Line, Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal or Chicago’s own abandoned elevated train line,  we have numerous ways to ground a meaningful renaissance of public activity in our urban centers.

Image Credits: designphiladelphia.wordpress.com , archpaper.com

While New York may be home to some of progressive examples of green building on a large scale, many brand new projects are still hitting the streets as standard, developer specials with low cost methods aiming for fast construction and high profits. As some of us strive to integrate sustainability into the mainstream of New York development, clients are dissuaded from greener buildings if they believe that they need to sacrifice something in order to achieve a greener result. New York’s Department of City Planning has made the important first step in proposing modifications to the zoning code to encourage the construction of more efficient buildings.

Zoning can be considered one of the first broad strokes in the urban design process. Its purpose is to organize general areas of complimentary use groups while maintaining urban amenities like access to light and air. Put simply, it tells you how much you can build and where. Lead by Amanda Burden, the Department of City Planning has proposed a series of text amendments aiming at making greener buildings easier for both new and existing buildings alike. The changes target building envelopes in the form of increased insulation thicknesses as well as green infrastructure like green and blue roof systems. If approved, the modifications would also facilitate the inclusion of renewable energy production in the forms of solar panels and small scale wind turbines. Lastly, there were code points focused on the developments of rooftop greenhouses.

Solar, Wind & Green Roofs: Thumbs Up

When I heard about supposedly “green” changes to the zoning resolution, my first instinct was to search for one thing in particular: would solar panels and wind turbines be inducted into the realm of “permitted obstructions” allowing them to exceed the maximum height of zoning envelopes?

For every site, the zoning code has a series of corollaries and equations that outline a three-dimensional space of buildable area, known as the Zoning Envelope. Any proposed building, or proposed changes to an existing building, must exist within the envelope. An important aspect of this is the maximum height, used as tool to help regulate the height of the built environment in different districts. In the eyes of the code, some building components can pierce through the maximum height restriction due to their integral nature of building function. Examples are things like elevator bulkheads, mechanical equipment, parapet walls or window washing equipment. They are known as “permitted obstructions.” Anything that is not a permitted obstruction must exist below the maximum height.

For solar panels and wind turbines this often creates a problem. In order to achieve maximum efficiency both of these systems have a vertical dimension and no one is going to build a shorter building (possibly losing a floor’s worth of rentable square footage) just so they can put PVs on the roof. I was pleased to see that these systems were indeed added to the list of permitted obstructions so that owners would no longer have to feel like on site power was forcing them to compromise on allowable building height. Green roofs and blue roofs got similar concessions. (What are green roofs and blue roofs?)

Enhanced Building Envelope: Thumbs Up

The proposed changes adds provisions that allow for property owners to make thicker, more energy conscious exterior walls without sacrificing saleable square footage. The size of buildings in New York is determined by a site’s Floor-Area-Ratio, or F.A.R.–essentially a correlation of how many multiples of your plot of land you can build on top of it. Thus, an F.A.R. of (3) would mean one could build 3-times the site’s area in new building area. Given that it is measured to the outside of the building face, the thicker the walls are the less space there is to sell.

If approved, the new zoning code would allow for 8″ of material with a given insulating value (R-value) to be exempt from F.A.R. calculations. This would apply not only to new buildings, but allow existing buildings to add 8″ on the exterior without penalty.

Rooftop Greenhouses: Eh…

City Planning has proposed that rooftop greenhouses also not count as F.A.R., which is a good thing, allowing for the promotion of local food production in the city. The caveat is that the new rules stipulate that they would not be allowed on top of any building with residential occupancy beneath.

Now the reason they are adding said restrictions is clear–they do not want people adding a livable apartment on the roof and simply calling it a greenhouse–i.e. adding and renting illegal residential square footage. By excluding it entirely it is something that they do not need to try and police. On the other hand, this means that the measure does not help promote residents growing their own food. Even a mixed use building with commercial and residential spaces cannot foster a rooftop greenhouse. Finding some type of middle ground could eventually promote a vast expansion of what would essentially be community gardens (which are always coveted in the city) on the building level. While far better than nothing, hopefully this portion of the regulations will be a first step in a better direction.

These kinds of progressive changes to building code components can serve as a great model for other cities. When coupled with a rise in education of clients and designers it can help provide a meaningful improvement to existing and proposed building stock.

Image Credit: flickr:romap

Despite not being able to actually repeal the legislation that was signed into law by President Bush in 2007, conservatives were able to attach a rider to the budget bill that restricted the Department of Energy to no spend any money on the law’s enforcement. Very tricky. So essentially they are trying to send the message, “It’s okay small business owners. Go break the law and sell 100w incandescent bulbs because no one can come after you for it.” Despite the odd spin on the duties of our legislative branch the republicans have likely missed their window.

“Bottom line, the standards are moving forward unabated,” said Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has promoted the standards. A NY Times article touches on industry officials saying that momentum has been transforming the industry for years and turning the ship around now would cause more harm than good. The industry has spent time and money on new products to meet the upcoming regulations. Revoking the law would simply create uncertainty in the retail marketplace for suppliers and distributors. According to NPR, Jaclyn Pardini, a spokeswoman for Lowe’s home improvement stores, said the company “is committed to abiding by the [original] legislation and it does not change our plan” to stop selling 100-watt incandescent light bulbs.

Why Are We Having This Conversation Anyway?

It may be par for the course for disgruntled politicians to make something out of nothing in order to start a debate, but in this case they are making something meaningless out of something incredibly positive. The evolution of our lighting technology is a win-win situation for Americans. For a society that is loathe to become more sustainable if it impedes the normal ebb and flow of daily life this represents an opportunity to make a meaningful difference in energy consumption that carries no residual burden on consumers or their lifestyles. According to the Department of Energy, lighting makes up 6% of the energy we use in our homes and 10-15% of the electricity. Lowering that number by 28% for the country is something worth pursuing.

We are not the only ones making the move either. In fact, we are pulling up the rear of the pack. Brazil and Venezuela started their phase outs in 2005. In 2009, the E.U., Switzerland and Australia started peeling the incandescent out of circulation. In 2012, China, Russia and Canada will be joining our movement away from traditional bulbs. I’m struggling to see the logic in the preservation of a wasteful, antiquated technology while the better part of the world is stepping ahead. For all of the fingers we point at China for their lethargy in sustainability it would be unfortunate if they could make this change but we could not.

This is all in addition to the fact that manufacturers have already solved the problem of appearance and light quality for American consumers. Not up to making the jump to CFLs or LEDs yet? No problem. This is America. If there is something that people are willing to pay money for then corporations are here to make it happen. Halogen bulbs, now in full scale production, give people exactly the same light quality and color as their older brethren so that most people could never tell the difference.

Save Personal Freedoms!

Supposedly, this is being touted as an affront on personal freedoms because it restricts the choices of what light bulbs people can freely purchase. Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann had to say:

“Let me tell you, President Bachmann will allow you to buy any light bulb you want in the United States of America.”

Bold words, Congresswoman. I am curious though… would President Bachmann also allow me to buy whatever hot water heater, boiler or air conditioning unit I wanted? How about whatever car or gasoline? These are all items that carry efficiency standards by the federal government in order to promote energy savings for the country. The fact that the Department of Energy regulates these items for quality and performance is the only thing that has kept our average household energy consumption stable for the past 40 years. If having ethanol content in gasoline is not strangling American freedom, then why are light bulbs exactly? Government regulation put in place to help the free market progress from pure consumption is as old as it is necessary. Why? Because the market doesn’t take us there on our own; because we are a country of avid consumers, not informed consumers.

The free market is adept at finding ways to produce anything for as little as possible, but it’s not quite as good at finding the most responsible solution and turning it into a product. The low cost solution for anything is low cost for a reason and unless consumers want to bother to get educated about what the repercussions of low-cost solutions are then the market has to be tempered with regulation to balance out the results. Whether it is EnergyStar, CAFE or light bulb efficiency standards, their purpose is not to hinder business, but promote the evolution of the marketplace.

Image Credit: Keesta.com

Uncovering the forces that push data centers to the periphery of society is not much of a puzzle. Companies stick a shovel in the ground out where land is flat and cheap—maybe even with the occasional local tax break. As a result, these large structures often swallow farmland or virgin wooded area instead of infilling around developed plots or, better yet, filling the floors of existing, vacant warehouses. That is the first problem.

The farther away we push points of power consumption the farther we have to reach in order to bring services to them. On average we lose 7-10% of the power we produce through its transmission, so the farther it has to go the more we need to produce just to get it there. The same goes for all of our other services like water, sewer and, in this case, telecom lines that are most likely fiber optic cables. Some estimates put the cost of fiber optic cable at $30,000 per mile, but costs vary greatly in response to site conditions. Granted, laying anything in the city is going to be more expensive per mile, but New York City averages over 27,500 people per square mile so one mile of cable is probably reaching a lot more customers.

Though many people may think of the internet as this vast, limitless, ethereal void in space where information runs free, the digital superhighway has a very real, material existence with massive energy needs. If we combined all of the world’s data centers into their own country, it would be the sixth largest power consumer on the planet. All that power gets fed through servers and switches in order to store and access data, but information is not the only byproduct of this process. We also get large amounts of heat.

Heat is a Terrible Thing to Waste

As it turns out, a huge portion of the power that data centers consume is just used to regulate temperature (which really means taking heat from one place and moving it somewhere else). Servers have to be cooled constantly with all of that hot air being pumped out into the open range of sparsely populated America. This seems a bit foolish given that we spend a large amount of energy to produce heat. Instead of throwing it away, we should be utilizing it.

Heat is often a squandered resource despite how integral it is to how our society functions. One place that is always using some is our homes. Sure, we spend some time and energy pushing it out in warmer climates, but even then we need it to heat our water for things like bathing, dishwashing and laundry. In fact most of us use around 18% of all the energy in our house to heating water alone. If you throw in space heating, it’s closer to 63% (mind you, that’s heat we’re paying to produce).

If homes were nearby then they could provide great heat sinks for data centers, but the opportunity fades the farther away they are from civilization. However, if brownstones, apartments and condos were only a block away then the rising heat could either be siphoned off to heat homes or transferred into water for use. Not for nothing either, my building manager tells me that the two sister buildings of our co-op use approximately 32,000 dekatherms (or 32 billion Btu’s) of #6 heating oil a year in order to run the boilers for hot water and heating–and that is just two buildings.  That sounds like a lot and it is a lot, being the energy equivalent of 278,260 gallons of gasoline or 9.3 million kwh of electricity (enough to power about 780 American homes). *One could ask, how does heating two apartment building use the electricity load of 780 individual homes? Well it’s because most of the energy we use is not in the form of electricity.

Urban Data

It’s true that building a tower in the middle of the downtown to be filled with floors of servers probably isn’t equitable. The higher costs of building such a structure in the city could swiftly move the project out of feasibility. In many cities, the amount of square footage you can construct above the ground is strictly regulated by zoning laws, making it a hard case to sacrifice valuable space could earn more money as residential square footage.

While zoning may draw the line at how far you can build up, most often no one cares how much you build down. It is not uncommon in New York to have two, three, four or even five “cellar” (not to be confused with “basement”) stories below grade for anything from retail space, to parking or storage. There is no reason why some of this couldn’t be carved out for server farms.

The upsides could be that buildings get rent payers for what is otherwise relatively worthless space. On the flip side, internet companies would be saved the headache, cost and liability of having more property, plant and equipment on their balance sheets. The building could spend less money producing heat while the data center could spend less getting rid of it. All around, we would only end up using energy to produce heat once. If we wanted to sweeten the deal a little more, we could begin to discourage sprawl and promote urban density by taxing greenfield development, using the proceeds to subsidize infill development.

Mixed use planning for buildings continue to become more applicable to providing more people with a wider array of services that can benefit from the others’ proximity. As the foundation of a growing digital system, data centers can play a more active role as an infrastructural component, beyond storing 1’s and 0’s.

Image Credit: datacenterknowledge.com ,

Returning home for the Thanksgiving holiday, I took the train from New York back towards Boston where my father was waiting for me at the station. As we made the short drive home I heard about how the repainting of the house—a multi-month endeavor that seemed to progress at a snail’s pace—was finally complete, finishing the exterior facelift to a home that approaches its 100^th birthday.

Upon turning into the driveway, my eyes naturally darted across the façade of the house in silent inspection. The painters did a great job. It was when I threw my bag over my shoulder and walked towards the front door that something caught my eye. The headlights from cars at the intersection in front of the house gleamed off a glossy material at the base of the roof line. In short order I found out that part of the exterior restoration included replacing the gutters on the house, and the new ones were painted aluminum rather than replacing the wood ones that were there before.

The purist in me made my stomach turn. My parent’s house was built c.1917 and stands as a unique combination of period styles including Greek Revival, Federalist, Dutch Colonial and Georgian. The entire front is wood clapboards with a pair of large ionic pilasters and a front porch with smaller ionic columns. I have to believe that the contrast between the shiny metal gutters and the rest of the house would be apparent even to someone not in the field of architecture. Their foreign nature has trouble blending in with an otherwise well-maintained façade.

The move also seemed out of place for my parents who had already done a considerable amount of restoration work such as new decorative capitals for the pilasters, restored leaded glass sidelites around the front door and new clapboard work that required a custom size to match the house (clapboards have gotten smaller and thinner than their predecessors). Why switch now to the glossy modern upgrade? The answer was as quick as it was simple: cost. For the gutters in the front and back of the house (not an amazing amount of linear footage) the estimate for new wood gutters was $25,000. Even as an architect I was a bit blown away by the number. No matter how much of an enthusiast I was, it is difficult for me to lobby for $25K on gutter work, knowing that even after installation the insides need to be oiled and even then would not last as long as their aluminum counterparts.

Quite simply, the market has priced out this kind of work for the vast majority of Americans. The house also has an asphalt roof, which has always bothered my mother. It was clearly not the original roof of the house. She took the time to inquire about the prospect of returning it to a slate roof more in keeping with the rest of the building. The results were even worse: $75,000-$100,000. While slate roofs outlast asphalt shingles by a long shot, the price booted the prospective upgrade out of feasibility.

Hardest to Help the Ones that Need it the Most

So what does any of this have to do with sustainability? The worst that happens is beautiful homes suffer some scars of time, right? The attention given to old homes goes beyond just their appearance. Maintaining and upgrading older residences is the pivot point for their energy performance. According to the Department of Energy’s Building Energy Data Book, as of 2005 20% of the homes in the U.S. were built before 1950. Another 23% were built between 1950 and 1969. Despite the fact that older homes tend to be smaller than new ones, on a per square foot basis the ones built before 1950 use 66% more energy per square foot than ones built after 2000. These houses leak like a sieve, bleeding energy.

The lagging performance is undoubtedly largely attributed to insulation (or lack thereof) and windows—essentially the envelope of the house. At the same time, these things are not always easy to fix. For my parents house, the roughly 35 windows would all constitute custom attention given their sizes and irregular lite configurations. Though they would make a notable difference over the single pane & storm windows they have now, the cost would likely be prohibitive. My parents did re-insulated their roof, but the walls are a more complicated venture. The most likely option would be coring into the cavity of the walls and blowing insulation in from the outside, careful enough not to damage the historic detailing and materials.

Ironically, the better the condition of the home the harder it is to work on them affordably. I am currently working on a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights that was in a terrible state of repair, prompting a get renovation of virtually the entire interior. Naturally, this made it easy for us to put new insulation inside all of the building’s exterior walls.

This type of market evolution is unavoidable, but it casts a shadow of uncertainty over the older homes of our country. While energy upgrades can make sense for newer homes with more stock components, the cost of replicating materials and configurations may not justify the possible energy savings of similar modernizations for older homes. The holistic preservation of older homes may become a responsibility that only the country’s wealthy can afford to uphold. While deconstructing older houses to make way for newer replacements could make for a more efficient building stock, what cultural value would we be sacrificing in the process?

Image Credit: apartmenttherapy.com

In 2006, the New York Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a competition called the New Housing New York Legacy Project with the goal to create a low-cost solution for sustainable, affordable housing. The site that they had chosen was far from the standard, inner-city block. Originally part of an old rail yard, the parcel was a long triangle that sloped down from the street on two sides to the abandoned track bed. It was far from the ideal development site, with those constraints added to an already challenging program of affordable housing. Each team was required to have a chosen contractor paired with designers. *As a note,  I happened to be part of Cook+Fox’s competition team.

The scheme that ultimately won, Via Verde, was designed in partnership between Britain-based Grimshaw and New York’s Dattner Architects, paired with affordable housing mogul Jonathan Rose. The building hosts a public plaza in its center with a mass that starts low and wraps around the perimeter of the site, climbing higher to finish 20 stories off the ground in the northern corner. Like the Highline, I have to applaud the success of the design and construction team in the likeness between the finished product and the competition-winning scheme. All too often, design competitions promote a series of flashy renderings to woo the support of jury members, but then fall short of feasibility when the time comes to sign checks. No such fate befell Via Verde.

New York Times architectural critic Michael Kimmelman points to sustainability being more than just the pro-environment design components, but the creation of a “healthy building.” Like any of the characteristic buzz words—green, ecological, environmental and even sustainability itself—“healthy” is one more that is open to a certain degree of interpretation. The architects and developers of Via Verde started to address this self-imposed criteria with programmatic components like a health clinic and a fitness center to compliment day-lit stairs that encourage walking over elevator use.

Of course, building a greener building inherently contributes to a healthier lifestyle. Measures that target indoor air quality (like the building’s Low-VOC materials) and greater access to natural light offer direct benefits to the quality of life inside the building. Designed to exceed LEED Gold standards, the project boasts a series of active and passive measures for a greener result, hitting all of the benchmarks for raising the standard of new construction.

Undoubtedly, the boldest design element of the project is the one that contributed to its namesake and arguably won them the original competition. The building has 40,000 square feet of occupiable green roofs for the residents beneath. Even without rooftop access green roofs bring numerous environmental and energy benefits to the building sitting below it. Their natural medium acts an insulator throughout the year to lower the buildings energy costs while the flora provides mitigation for stormwater and promotes the life of micro-climates in urban settings. In this case, it does much more than that.

These rooftops will be home to community garden plots and fruit trees to be used by Via Verde residents. I would argue that health is an integral part of sustainability. Just as sustainability is not simply a series of technological creations to supplement a wasteful lifestyle, being healthy is more than just paying attention to the food pyramid. Subscribing to either (or both) of these mantras brings with it a lifestyle in and of itself, which is why Via Verde’s inclusion of growing space is so pertinent. Healthy living includes the activity of going out and picking a tomato from your roof—which is exactly the image that the competition team chose to portray. Growing your own food holds direct influence to the kinds of meals you eat and how much a family needs to spend on them. The broader benefits of health are cast far beyond the property lines of the building. More locally grown food (in this case very local) offsets the amount that has to be shipped in from outside of the city as one more small step to counter our somewhat misguided agricultural industry.

Interestingly enough, one aspect that none of the other reviews touched on is the project’s deviation from city zoning. Blogger Stephen Smith (of Market Urbanism and now Forbes fame) would be pleased to know that the project managed to blow past the 6-story limit that zoning had originally been dictated for the site. I know because a number of the competition teams abided by this height restriction—apparently to their own disappointment—while others disregarded the code in order to pursue the concepts of their designs more holistically.

Any competition-going designer will tell you that a key part of competing is knowing when and how much to break the rules. In this case though, the city’s waving of zoning restrictions raises the question of whether trading additional height and square footage for greener homes and a better constructed building should not be more commonplace—especially when the projects in question have affordable housing components.

Of Kimmelman’s review (which I agree with completely) the part that stuck out the most to me was:

“The greenest and most economical architecture is ultimately the architecture that is preserved because it’s cherished. Bad designs, demolished after 20 years, as so many ill-conceived housing projects have been, are the costliest propositions in the end.”

This couldn’t be more true. The passage struck a chord with NRDC blogger Kaid Benfield as well. Creating a building that resonates with the lives of its inhabitants is what helps grant a degree of importance to people’s surroundings. Were the new building to fall into disrepair within two decades it would most likely undo every sustainable measure that the design team intended for the project.

Image Credits: viaverdenyc.com

Though the embargo was lifted in 1974, it would mark the first time when the steady increase in residential energy use across the country ceased its upward movement. While energy would be an issue viewed with greater scrutiny from this point forward, the Energy Information Administration revealed that the per capita residential energy consumption has remained nominally flat over the past 40 years, lingering at the 1973 levels of around 70 million Btu’s per person.

The U.S. population was roughly 214 million in 1973 and has since increased 46% to 313 million according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The analysis of the EIA points to several factors that have balanced an increasing population with the stabilization of energy usage per person. Part of the explanation revolves around the migration of the mean center of the population. Since the country’s inception Americans have expanded their habitation away from the Northeast, moving westward and southward to warmer and drier climates requiring less energy to heat and cool homes. This trend continued over the past four decades.

Though the size of the average home increased in the latter part of the 20^th century, the study notes that the creation of federal or state requirements for energy usage on numerous household appliances such as furnaces, air conditioners, heat pumps, water heaters, refrigerators, and freezers played a significant role in tempering our tendency for increased consumption. Though a national building code does not exist, energy standards have been written into numerous state building codes that prescribe stricter levels of efficiency in anything from the building envelope to lighting fixtures.

Personally, I find it disheartening that despite all of our innovation in one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, the average American consumes the same amount of energy at home today that he did 40 years ago.

Don’t be Wooed by the Free Market

Aversions to government implement of energy mandates or technology efficiency standards are often met with the justification that the free market will cause an evolution of efficiency over time, negating the need to circumvent it with regulation. This data set seems to disprove such a theory. Over the past forty years our net progress in efficiency has been more or less zero and that is with a significant amount of direction from both state and federal governments in setting new requirements for different components of the American home. The likelihood that we would have matched these results with only free market innovation to guide us seems slim.

Another effect of the oil embargo was the ultimate creation of the U.S. Department of Energy in 1977 along with the creation of a cabinet level position on the President’s staff. Today the DOE manages the EnergyStar program that sets milestones for a full spectrum of household electronics from appliances to televisions. The EnergyStar home rating system is also now a component of the LEED for Homes, setting an efficiency standard above that of most, if not all, state governments. We have no reason to be pointing fingers at agencies like the DOE or the EPA. Thanks to them, 40 years later we still have a fighting chance.

The Silver Lining

Source: U.S. Department of Energy

One redeeming side of all of this is that we have managed to stay flat without really trying. It is unsurprising that sustainability advocates like Amory Lovins claim that we could accomplish a 20-30% reduction in national energy use through conservation or improved efficiency. He’s right. Rising government standards has kept us at a baseline for 40 years, but a greater commitment from building owners could break our plateau to the downside and we have a plethora of tools at our disposal.

According to the Department of Energy, the three largest sources of energy use in the home are for heating, air conditioning and heating water. Together these components total 72% of our consumption. These numbers immediately point to geothermal heating and cooling which not only cuts the amount of energy we use to temper our homes, but the sources cut are usually fossil fuels like heating oil or natural gas. Evacuated solar thermal tubes, used in the 2011 Solar Decathlon winning house, lower the energy needed for heating water to nearly zero. These two measures alone could slash residential energy consumption and are options that are open to buildings of any scale.

The size of the homes we build is another easy target for lowering energy consumption. Though American living has changed, the basic model of our homes has remained the same for decades including outmoded rooms like a formal living and dining room–components of an antiquated lifestyle. These two spaces could easily account for 12-15% of an average 2,500 square foot home which means less to build, maintain and temper throughout the year.

The next advance in home efficiency is in the hands of the American people. Builders and architects need to make the options better known to their prospective clients and clients need to know enough about the options to ask for them. With a little bit of effort a 40 year stalemate could be a thing of the past.

Image Credit: mcmanus-remodel.blogspot.com

Federal support for renewable energy comes in a variety of flavors with each providing funding for different parts of the construction and production process. When it comes to corporate level incentives, the comfortable years of expansion are already beginning to unravel. At the beginning of the process are the now-somewhat-contentious federal loan guarantees courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy—or should I say “were”. While research oriented technology grants are still available, loan program “1705″ for commercial scale renewable energy production or transmission products has already expired. The 550MW Topaz Solar Farm to be built by First Solar proved to be the first casualty of the a dried up funding spigot when it failed to break ground in California before the key September 30^th, 2011 deadline required by the DOE, throwing its future into question.

Next come Investment Tax Credits (ITC) that provide federal tax credits for 30% of the expenses for new renewable energy installations with no dollar ceiling for solar, wind and fuel cells. This money source has an in-service deadline of December 31^st 2012 for new wind installations. The last piece is Production Tax Credits (PTC). Similar to a feed-in tariff, PTC gives per kilowatt hour rates for green power produced by renewable sources (though not solar) taken as a tax credit. To qualify, new projects must also be in-service by the end of December 2012. These are especially coveted given that not only do they last for 10 years of power production so the  deadline is only the starting the clock on a decade-long commitment from the government.

How much are we talking about?  Shepard’s Flat will be the world’s largest land-based wind farm currently under construction in Oregon. Using it as an example, this farm utilizes 2.5 MW GE turbines. With a capacity factor of 25%, that is about 5,475,000 kwh a year per turbine. With 338 of these beasts at 2.2¢ per kwh, that yields a check for $40.7 million a year for 10 years.

Solar power facilities do enjoy ITC support through 2016, but the solar industry has different problems of its own, mainly the undercutting of solar wafer pricing from Chinese producers that reportedly stems from drastic underwriting by the Chinese government. The demise of Evergreen Solar or the greatly publicized Solyndra fiasco are just the tip of the iceberg for the U.S. solar industry’s fight to stay competitive. Barring an extension of subsidies or new technological advances in efficiency, all of this could point to future renewable energy installations being more expensive, resulting in higher electricity rates for Americans.

Our Appetite for Cost

Like gasoline and food, how much Americans should expect to pay for electricity is a debate onto itself. I recently suggested that every American should only be allowed to purchase a given amount of inexpensive, dirty power, above which we should be required to purchase cleaner electricity at the appropriate rate. Nevertheless, in the absence of understanding why power should be more expensive there is a limit to what the general public will tolerate in terms of price increased of a monthly expense. We saw it here in gasoline surmounting $4 a gallon. England is seeing something similar now when it comes to electricity.

Britain’s support for renewable energy has been more holistic than our own but it has certainly come at a cost. In addition to subsidies for new renewable energy installations, England supports feed-in tariffs that require power to be purchased at a set premium rate. However, last week the Guardian reported that the government released plans for successively cutting subsidies in response to climbing energy rates. While the larger markets of wind and solar seemed less immediately affected, there is also talk circling about new cuts made to feed-in-tariffs that could stunt the 18 month growth spurt of solar installations.

Time Left for U.S. Renewables

Renewable energy has had a string of banner years, helping to lift its total energy production past the contributions of nuclear energy in the U.S. Though the current economic climate has not turned out to be as forgiving as we may have hoped it would back in 2008, renewable energy production could have gained enough traction to justify resilience in the eyes of lawmakers.

First of all, whether or not the tax incentives are allowed to expire, renewable energy has gained commitments on the state level in the form of Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS). A renewable portfolio standard is a state policy that requires electricity providers to obtain a minimum percentage of their power from renewable energy resources by a certain date. The DOE’s website listing RPS targets by date actually appears to be a bit dated. According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) there are 29 states and the District of Columbia with and active RPS with another 9 states and 3 power authorities that have non-binding goals. In order to meet these targets, more renewable energy systems will need to come online.

Secondly, the question may not be how many jobs are these industries adding every month, but more how many have they amassed in total. Politicians certainly want to be spending money where more new jobs will be created, but they also do not want to axe an industry to result in further substantial job loss. A new study by the solar industry pegs their U.S. employment at 100,000 jobs. Last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated the wind industry at another 85,000. No politician wants to be responsible for calling nearly 200,000 American jobs into question.

Lastly, despite the fact that the conservative contingent is taking aim at everything they can in attempts of trimming the fat out of the federal government (an exercise I am not fundamentally opposed to in concept in moderation) wind energy has proven to be better situated than most of what sits under the environmental umbrella—especially in the sights of Republican presidential candidates. Between Texas and Iowa, wind energy becomes an unlikely target up through 2012. Rick Perry’s lonestar state boasts more wind energy than any other state in the country despite the governor’s anti-position on climate change (and conveniently all other forms of renewable energy). Iowa holds the second highest amount of wind power generation that reportedly accounts for almost 20% of the states power. Avoiding the fallacy of displeasing the Iowa Caucus has so far culminated to all of the GOP hopefuls putting their John Hancock on a giant wind turbine blade in the image of support.

The industries may not be able to avoid the growing level of trepidation for the next year that brings professionals to the edge of their seats, but barring a grimmer economic picture than what we have now we may see at least one more round of fiscal support for renewable energy from the feds before they take the training wheels off. The financial crisis offered us a time for pause and reassessment of our business as usual. We should seize the opportunity to emerge from this recession as a more sustainable society and renewable energy is an important component of that.

Image Credit: solarpanels.bz , nationalwind.com

Coal power, and its slew of resulting externalities, should be a burden that all Americans begin to shoulder equally and directly in order for us to collectively address the problem. Virtually all Americans contribute to the country’s net power consumption and measures are available to all of us that allow for using less energy and getting more out of what we draw from the grid. An intervention to change our energy infrastructure should encourage energy savings, provide financial benefits for efficiency and spread the onus of power-related pollution amongst all Americans.

Fossil fuel companies routinely position themselves as a “necessity” to today’s power grid—that despite the short comings of their use, they provides a portion of our electricity that cannot be quickly and easily replaced. For the moment, if we agreed that is true then the 115 million American households all share some of the requirement for this dirty energy source as well as the responsibility for the environmental transgressions that it creates. Why not divvy it up?

Electricity generated from coal power plants is a finite, quantifiable commodity currently accounting for roughly 48% of our electricity generation. Taking the annual consumption of the average American home, a benchmark could be created that sets a level for how much dirty energy one household should be allowed to consume—a level that could be applied to everyone. Up to that level, ratepayers would owe the normal power rate charged by utilities. Above this point, any “excess” energy needed to be purchased would have to be clean and paid for at the relevant premium. The extra revenue would be directed specifically towards the research and expansion of new clean energy sources.  Adding a warning label to power bills could also help spur the transition over the cleaner energy sources.

The brunt of this could be fostered by those who are able to weather the change in rates. According to the Department of Energy, households with an income over $100,000 a year use anywhere from 73% to 86% more power than households below the poverty line for a family of four. Given that low-income households tend to use below-average amounts of electricity, their monthly expenditures would not likely change.

Change the Playing Field to Change the Marketplace

A standardized level of allowable dirty energy consumption heightens the financial benefit of conservation, home efficiency upgrades and on site renewable generation, bringing them all directly to the consumer. Not only would this encourage the renovation of our utility grid, but raise the energy standard of our residential building stock as well. Retooling our construction industry into a renovation and de-construction industry is one of the best ways we can address energy consumption in the country. Looking at homes, those built before 1950 use an average of 74,500 Btu’s per square foot and comprise 24% of our residential energy consumption according to the Department of Energy. Conversely, those built today average 58,700 Btu’s per square foot—an improvement of 21%.

Making power more expensive for those that draw the most could help tip the scales for energy saving technologies in more homes. The D.O.E. claims that the 45% of the energy consumption in the average American household is for space heating. While many people use heating oil or propane for heating, electric heat is not rare and often used as a supplement. Getting below the bar for fossil fuel energy could make geothermal heating and cooling more worthwhile. A net zero home, like this year’s Solar Decathlon winner, could carry even more net savings to homeowners.

Setting Government Environmental Standards

The Cap-and-Trade system was proposed as a method of rebalancing the value proposition of the country’s power generation industry in the direction of waning us from our dependence of fossil fuels and lowering our production of carbon dioxide. However, cap and trade had its day on the hill and failed to win the hearts and minds of enough of Congress while the country was knee deep in a recession. Part of what contributed to the coarse reception to cap-and-trade was that it was viewed by many as a tax levied on carbon. Conversely, this proposal is not a tax, but an pollution standard set on our nation’s power consumption.

Feed-in Tariff? Not exactly.  These are used in some countries as a stable premium given to renewable power producers that covers the added cost of power that is more expensive than fossil fuel sources. The difference here is that the power premium is a blanket measure added at the distribution level to all power that leaves the facility and is applied to all ratepayers equally. While affixing premiums to the consumers that use the most power may result in the same amounts of money going to the same places, it turns paying for green power into a user fee rather than a blanket tax. Like tolls for roads and bridges, the people that pay the most are those that use the infrastructure the most.

CAFE standards for cars represent a government pegged limit for emissions that new automobiles must successively meet in order to be sold in the U.S. The result is a mandated progress in societal efficiency that pushes innovation beyond the speed of market forces alone. CAFE standards, however, are imposed at the producer level and are not retroactive which means they only affect a portion of overall cars on the road.

A per capita allocation of electricity from a given source is much closer to pay-as-you go trash removal. There are numerous municipalities in the country that weigh their own ability to pick up and dispose of a certain amount of trash relative to their residents. As a result, each household is allowed a given number of bags of trash per week (trash can only be picked up in bags from the town). Exceeding this amount is certainly allowed, but it means the owners need to go buy more bags. The practice encourages recycling, composting and conservation while trying to ensure that the available infrastructure is responding to all its residents with a certain degree of equality.

Photo Credit: webecoist.com