GreenBuildIndiana

Nature Conservancy Building in Indianapolis on Track for LEED Gold Certification

Video Credit, Cory Schouten, IBJ

The Indiana Business Journal has a tour of the new Nature Conservancy building in Indianapolis that's on track to achieve LEED Gold status. 

The Nature Conservancy will live its principles by employing the following green features:

• A basement cistern that collects storm water from roof; recycled water will be used to flush toilets and irrigate landscaping
• Trees and shrubs native to Indiana
• Permeable paving to avoid runoff into the city's problematic storm water system
• Geothermal heat is the principal heat source, w/electric heat only as backup
• Green roof featuring 10 varieties of cedum plants (this may conflict with cistern rain water collection; green roofs are notable for not allowing runoff; they also help keep the building cooler in summer and warmer in winter)
• Live wall in the basement, contributing to air quality and allowing natural light to conference rooms
• Abundant windows and lighting that only kicks on when daylighting is insufficient
• 8,000 square feet of brick were recycled from the original structure on this site; that building was ruled unsafe to inhabit
• Indiana Limestone was donated by Rich and Alice Johnson through the Indiana Limestone Company
• Wind turbines will be added later

The building will be completed in February 2010.  Can't wait to tour its grand opening; this is a splendid example of green building for the city and for the state to follow.

Solar-Powered Library Shows that Nothing is Impossible

Was inspired by a Bloomington Herald-Times article last week. Faced with no budget for a library, the 540 citizens of Chrisney, IN just went ahead anyway.  See fuller coverage in the Evansville Courier-Press.

"They had no money to build a library, no viable existing buildings or partnerships for a shared storefront library, and their public library district adamantly refused to support capital or operating costs for a new branch." --Bill Brown, project architect on the Chrisney library building, and now Director of the IU Office of Sustainability

The building got land and maintenance commitment donated from the town, a grant from the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs, and $66,000 in matching funds from the citizens of the town. (Remember, there are only 540 citizens in the town.) The result:

• A 9.6-kilowatt grid-tied photovoltaic system provides all the electricity needed
• A geothermal heating and cooling system heats and cools without combustion
• A passive solar design uses free sunlight to light the building and provide supplemental heat
• Transparent solar panels roof the Learning Power Pavilion and provide a classroom for the elementary school’s outdoor learning lab. 

Congratulations to the town of Chrisney, Indiana for their foresight, initiative and innovation.

Image Credit: Denny Simmons, Evansville Courier-Press

Energy Star Challenges Schools, Congregations, Businesses to Save Energy

Schools, churches, corporations, local governments and seemingly any group that owns a non-residential building can sign up to take the Energy Star Challenge which calls on them to reduce their energy use by 10%. This is a terrific program that also provides the information and tools with which to accomplish the goal, including communication materials to share information and success stories.

The Energy Star Toolkit offers energy monitoring programs and other materials tailored to each type of group;for example the Guide for Congregations provides materials to:

• get started and achieve "quick wins" with easy, proven energy savers
• analyze larger opportunities
• track energy usage and calculate resulting savings
• materials and resources to "green your congregation"

Similarly appropriate materials and resources are provided for schools k-12 and higher education institutions -- from teaching tools, info on how to finance improvements, and guidelines for energy management.  Bringing green building techniques to school settings is particularly gratifying because multiple tests have shown that better air quality and daylighting improve student test scores.

See the Energy Star Challenge Case History for Council Rock School District in Newtown, PA and other case histories on the site.

USGBC to Require 5 Years of Energy and Water Bills for Buildings to Keep LEED Status

The New York TImes reports that many LEED-certified buildings are not living up to the energy-saving potential promised by their design.  The USGBC is going to change certification to require 5 years of energy and water bills in order to keep a building's LEED status.   I am feeling pretty confident that our house, built using PassiveHaus principles, will perform outstandingly in terms of energy savings.  We'll keep the records to prove it so that, if we do get LEED certification, in five years we won't have to give it back.  The Farmer's Almanac predicts numbing cold this winter.  I say, "bring it on".

Indiana Weatherization Funds Have Been Released

Indiana issued a press release announcing that weatherization funds have been  released.

"The Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority announced that Hoosier Energy has been selected to receive approximately $5.1 million in stimulus funds to complete an average of $5,000 in weatherization projects at eligible residences. The U.S. Department of Energy announced approval of the Indiana weatherization program on August 21....Hoosier Energy, which will partner with Sherlock Homes’ Bloomington office for the weatherization work, will get $5,094,541 to address 8,198 homes in 13 counties — Brown, Morgan, Lawrence, Dubois, Gibson, Harrison, Jennings, Rush, Scott, Union, Martin, Pike and Spencer.  --Bloomington Herald-Times

Historic Preservationists and Green Builders and Renovators Beginning to Unite

The Bloomington (IN) Herald-Times featured an article yesterday about greening older homes.  It's great to see that the same historic preservationists that have kept so many of our treasured older buildings from being destroyed are now incorporating energy efficient practices into their work.

Since its inception in 1993 publicity around the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has largely focused on new construction, in an attempt to stop shoddy and energy-wasting building practices before they begin.  But the USGBC hasn't totally ignored the greening of existing homes.

The USGBC recently joined forces with the American Society of Interior Designers’ (ASID) Foundation to create REGREEN, which provides best practice guidelines and targeted educational resources for sustainable residential improvement projects. On the REGREEN website you'll find terrific resources and case studies to help guide renovation efforts, including a Deep Energy Retrofit Case Study.

Many older homes can be made energy-efficient and, if the house is not completely ruined, this is always preferable to tearing down an existing home and replacing it with a new one.  Preservationists might want to have a look at the deep green renovation of a 1915 Craftsman bungalow recently completed by the founder of USGBC, David Gottfried, whose home is rated LEED Platinum.

In the same spirit, LEED for Homes awards additional rating points for building a new house where another house once stood, and building it near essential services to minimize driving. 

The building of our own green home was greatly enhanced because we chose to work with a seasoned contractor with a long history of restoring older homes, the Golden Hands Construction company, owned by Chris Sturbaum. In short, preservationists and green builders/renovators are on the same team, and are beginning to work together. That's good news for all of us.

Cool Roofs Lower AC Bills by 20% or More

An article in the New York Times today reports that cool roofs (white roofs) cost only 15% more than their dark counterparts, while substantially lowering electricity bills on an ongoing basis.

"From Dubai to New Delhi to Osaka, Japan, reflective roofs have been embraced by local officials seeking to rein in energy costs. In the United States, they have been standard equipment for a decade at new Wal-Mart stores. More than 75 percent of the chain’s 4,268 outlets in the United States have them."

The Cool Roof Rating Council can help homeowners and contractors find materials that provide the radiative properties necessary to lower their energy bills and combat global warming.

Obama Administration Issues Lighting Rules to Increase Efficiency, Funding for Green Building Technologies

Reminding us that 7% of energy use is from lighting, and that 40% of all energy use is from the buildings in which we live and work, the Obama administration issued new standards for efficiency in lighting used in commercial and residential buildings.

“We believe this will be the biggest efficiency savings from any appliance standard ever,” said Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, an advocacy organization.

More good news: significant funds from the Recovery Act funds are to be allocated to key green building technologies.

• $346 million in stimulus funds for development and deployment of more energy smart buildings -- and the technology and equipment to support them.
• $50 million for R&D to bring high-performance products to market more quickly.
•  $100 million for Advanced Building Systems Research, to accelerate development of zero-net energy buildings.
• $53.5 for expanding and speeding formation of partnerships among organizations with large building portfolios.
• $72.5 million to expand Energy Star and for training on how to implement more energy efficient commercial building codes, and to adapt the DOE Appliance Standards to better address innovative technology.
• $70 million for municipalities, states and utilities to increase training and workforce handling efforts toward  retrofitting of existing homes and construction of new, energy-saving homes.

Particularly exciting to me is the funding provided for research into solid-state lighting. Solid-state, or LED lighting, has shown the greatest promise in cutting energy use, but its adoption has been very slow due to the cost of LED bulbs. This will really help accelarate adoption of the technology.

Image from Inhabitat.com

Our "Radically Energy Efficient" Home Gets Nice Local Press

Thanks to Mike Leonard and Jeremy Hogan -- and to the Bloomington Herald-Times, for the great feature story on our energy-efficient house today in the Sunday paper.

"The home that David and Carol Gulyas are building is based on many of the cutting-edge concepts in green construction and energy conservation, and while it most closely approximates concepts employed in the German passive home, there are differences.

'The German model really emphasizes being airtight, and while that’s a fundamental concept in this house, too, we have a different attitude about quality of life,' Gulyas said. 'In Bloomington, we like to open the windows and let the air in. Feel a breeze. So we’ve incorporated systems to accommodate that as well.'" --Mike Leonard, Bloomington Herald-Times, May 17, 2009.

Systems and features that will make the house so radical include:

• Energy modeling and design by Marko Spiegel and CTI
• Cool, heat reflecting metal roof finish
• 12-inch thick SIP walls and roof from Porter SIPS in Michigan
• Triple-pane Loewen windows
• Ten inches of insulation under the floor slab
• Energy Recovery Ventilator

Plus some not-so-radical features such as excellent construction quality provided by Chris Sturbaum's Golden Hands Construction crew, and outstanding interior design and construction management provided by David Gulyas (full disclosure, the latter is my husband).

Why Isn't the Human Brain "Green"?

This may seem a departure from Green Building, but work with me, people.  "Why Are Our Brains not 'Green'?"  is the headline of an article in the New York Times Magazine today, and it goes to the heart of a question I often ponder: why is the human race so blind to the fact that its collective actions are so harmful to its own survival?  (Put another way, why do humans, unlike no other animal, persist in sh___ing in their own nest. This is such an important question for me that I'm going to break the "short blog posting" rule to give it more space.)

The article centers on the work of CRED (The Center for Environmental Decisions) at Columbia University, where social scientists are studying how humans make decisions regarding the environment.  Some of the findings agree with those in the economic arena, for example:

• Phrasing can affect a decision: People will decline surgery with a 20% mortality rate, but will accept surgery with an 80% survival rate.
• Our analytical brain (left brain) makes short-term benefit decisions, while our emotional decisions can be more group-centered and long-term focused. (Watch Jill Bolte Taylor's "My Stroke of Insight" at TED. 
• Humans have a "finite pool of worry" so that when a financial crisis comes along (like now) it displaces our worry over the planet.
• Humans have "single action bias" which leads them to quit working toward solving global warming after they buy their Prius or build their green home.

One finding of CRED's lab experiments with human groups is particularly striking:

"...when subjects made decisions as a group first, their conversations were marked far more often by subtle markers of inclusion like 'us' and 'we'...groups can be more patient than individuals when considering delayed benefits. What if the information for decisions, especially environmental ones, is first considered in a group setting before members take it up individually, rather than the other way around?"

Since often the most important environmental decisions are made by groups, such as corporations, boards, and communities, activating collaboration can be instrumental in achieving action.  For example,

"The lab experiment designed by Weber and Handgraaf actually took a cue from research done by another CRED member...who studied farmers in southern Uganda. In 2005 and 2006, Orlove observed how the behavior of the region’s poor farmers could be influenced by whether they listened to crucial rainy-season radio broadcasts in groups or as individuals."

I wasn't surprised to learn that humans' typical decision-making process often does NOT help them make the best choice.  (Time to read Collapse by Jared Diamond.) That is why humans need a Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. (Nudges help humans overcome their natural tendency to be stupid.)  Some examples of nudges that help us save energy are SmartMeters and the Wattson -- instruments that turn off energy so we don't have to think about it, or provide visual feedback loops and spur us to compete to save energy.  Now that I've brought the discussion back to Green Building, it's time to end this post.

Image Credit: Illustration by Christoph Niemann