Recently in Green Building Category

With the 2010 Winter Olympic Games as the setting, Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson, has invited cities including Vancouver to join a public-private consortium against global climate change. The idea is to use Branson's Carbon War Room to rally cities as a vehicle for financing and capacity building, maybe a Keiretsu among Vancouver, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Chicago, London and Portland with whoever else walks down the tarmac from a corporate jet.

Sir Richard lauded Vancouver for reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels, which it accomplished while increasing population 30 percent. According to the Vancouver Sun, Jose Maria Figueres, chairman of the Carbon War Room and former president of Costa Rica, the group is trying to, "create a new blueprint for the creation of jobs, driving economies and greener cities around the world."

The Carbon War Room wants to harness the power of entrepreneurs to implement market-driven solutions to climate change. The war, according to their website, operates on "seven fields of battle": electricity, transport, built environment, industry, land use, emerging economies and carbon management.

Branson also mentioned the depletion of oil in a speech, and the need to switch to alternative fuels. A new report funded by Virgin Airlines predicted shortages of oil in the global market by 2015, a prediction made by a former Shell oil CEO and reported here previously.

It's not clear how the Carbon War Room will work with governments, whether it's cities or other government entities. An example of a project or even a potential project would make the whole thing more real.

Vancouver under Mayor Gregor Robertson vowed in October to become the world's greenest city by reducing its environmental footprint by a factor of four. Thanks to oodles of regional small-scale hydroelectric power and admirable city and transit planning, Vancouver has the lowest per-capita carbon emissions of any North American city.

South of the border Seattle, has pledged carbon neutrality by 2030, but apparently Seattle did not get the invitation, nor did sustainability focused burgs such as New York, Amsterdam or Toronto attend. Also conspicuously absent were Asian city reps. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro did attend a panel with Branson and other mayors earlier in the week.

I couldn't find an explanation about how the Carbon War Room differs from or complements such efforts as the Clinton Climate Initiative's C40 group. The C40 approach is working on all inhabited continents with some of the world's largest cities, in a very similar vein: financing a $5 billion deal in 2007 on energy retrofitting older city buildings of New York, Chicago, Mexico City, Berlin, and Tokyo, for instance.

Most recently C40 cities announced in Copenhagen the creation of a C40 electric vehicle network as part of one of the few COP-15 "wins," the Climate Summit for Mayors. 

Anyone active in the green economy is already seeing many alliances taking shape, a few which have employed savvy marketing and visible leadership. Winning green city public-private partnerships, however, will also draw upon compelling business cases and urban performance analytics while clearly putting forth their value proposition.

Richard Branson versus Bill Clinton, now there's a match that could rival the Olympics. Could a more effective approach besides individual competition be a relay or other team event, perhaps?

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.   

One of the great challenges in urban planning and green building has been material life cycle energy use--how steel, concrete and wood products are produced and transported. Add to that the decisions people make once construction is finished, and you can rightly conclude that development standards have only scratched the veneer of total energy and sustainability impacts.

In addition to material climate and resource burdens, there are myriad consequences on life-cycle energy use that arise from commuting and transit choices, food and product consumption, and building heating or cooling.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have devised a tool that may soon provide governments and urban planners ways with which to model complete material, building and residents' anticipated energy use.

After a proof of concept was applied to a Jinan, China, housing development, LBNL has integrated building life-cycle assessment (LCA) and urban form agent-based modeling tools to capture embodied, operational and behavioral aspects of urban form energy use and emissions.

With hundreds of new cities being planned or built in China, Indonesia and India, new tools such as LBNL's will be critical in managing and reducing the energy, climate and environmental impacts of this unprecedented urban growth era.

Adding 1.1 billion people to new or growing Asian cities will produce more than half of the world's increase in global climate change-causing greenhouse gases by 2027, according to the Asian Development Bank.

I met last week in the green hills of Berkeley with David Fridley, Nate Aden and Yining Qin at LBNL's China Energy Group offices. The team demoed their new urban form and behavior energy analysis tool, describing how they based its performance on a variety of existing approaches in urban form-related analysis and life-cycle materials analysis.

The innovative aspect to the group's project is that they combined these existing cutting-edge approaches with an extensive survey of 230 residental households in the Lu Jing Superblock.

The researchers examined where Lu Jing Superblock (built in 2008) residents worked and went to school, how they commuted, where they shopped, what kinds of appliances they owned and how they used them, and even how much meat and what kind of products they ate.

The result was perhaps the closest-yet attempt at modeling and thus being able to forecast the complete energy needs of a segment of urban population. This allows an integrated assessment of required energy supply and expected impacts far beyond a single structure, energy type or industry.

It's like Sim City, but for addressing real planning, energy, and environmental challenges, which is something I've always wanted to see.

Simulations ran through the four seasons, showing cumulative energy use based on household and individual appliance and transportation use, showing cars or buses shuttling between supermarkets, offices, schools and the Lu Jing Superblock.

Total energy use and types of energy used were continually graphed, and the final results showed a breakdown between how much energy would be used by the buildings for power, cooling and heating,  as well as for transportation, food and other areas.

The group sees the tool being used by policymakers trying to prioritize energy and climate regulations in land use, transportation, planning and energy. Urban planners are another obvious group of potential end users.

One planning issue unresolved for future iterations of the tool would be how water use and supply could be added to the analytical capabilities. Or perhaps LBNL's energy tool can be combined with a software-based supply analysis and use forecasting tool for water. Water life-cycle analysis is an especially relevant issue when planning development in areas of India and Northern China that are facing climate-related drought and water supply shortages.

Still, the LBNL effort is significant in synthesizing existing tools and approaches on urban energy use into a single model that can help guide our world as we move into what is increasingly becoming the century of urbanization.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.  

What will the impacts be of the Dubai credit crisis on Masdar City, the famous living sustainability lab being built in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), with the goal of being a zero-net carbon city?

So far the UAE capital city-state of Abu Dhabi, backed by significant revenues from oil production and collateral from reserves, has escaped the financial panic that has gripped neighboring Dubai. This bodes well for Masdar City, to which Abu Dhabi pledged $15 billion in investments; some are predicting the Dubai domino effect will not stir up dust in Masdar.

Abu Dhabi is looking at Masdar as being an international crucible for renewable energy and other sustainability technologies so that the UAE can make the transition from relying exclusively on fossil fuels to exporting technologies for future low-carbon/ low-water global energy and resource needs.

Masdar, which will have about 55,000 residents when complete before 2020, is notable in that it is serving as a large-scale test bed for new technologies in renewable energy, passive wind cooling, advanced materials design, innovative car-free transportation, water conservation and local food production.

The project is financed by funds through partners such as Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse and is being developed with technology corporations such as General Electric, the anchor tenant in Masdar's Ecoimagination Center.

The Masdar Institute, which started classes this fall, is backed in a cooperative agreement with MIT (The MIT Technology Review is the source above that predicted things will be hunky dory in Masdar despite Dubai's situation).

In terms of financing, The Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, which is the government entity behind Masdar, announced in late September that it was seeking $600 million over seven years to fund construction of Masdar, where ground was first broken earlier this year. The government reported that it was not seeking an estimated $18 billion to finance the project, a figure that was published in other media reports.

Carbon credits and trading represents another form of project financing for Masdar. Last month Masdar was required by the United Nations to resubmit four out of six its carbon credit schemes that were part of the Clean Development Mechanism program of the Kyoto Protocol under the UN, which will become active in earning credits in June of next year.

Masdar is currently engaged in a wide assortment of R&D, including working with the nation of Spain to test large-scale concentrated PV solar power production in semi-tropical desert conditions. Masdar features some 30 manufacturers of PV and thermal solar products testing more than 40 solar related technologies alone.

With GE, the city is testing smart-grid technologies, including smart appliances, for home energy monitoring and energy conservation, among other technologies.

It seems that Masdar represents a completely different mindset than the 'build it and they will come" approach taken in Dubai.

Instead of Dubai's living-for-today mentality with giant indoor ski slopes and man-made islands built in the desert for jet-setting tourists, Masdar is more about channeling global innovation for both the future of its own nation's economy and the growing demands of the world.

Still, many interested in clean technologies and sustainable cities will be watching Masdar  closely during the next few months to look for signs of how a critical sustainability innovation ecosystem will survive the stress tests of a volatile global financial ecosystem.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. 

New Songdo City, Incheon, South Korea

Back from Incheon, South Korea, where the partially contructed New Songdo City district is rising up as an acclaimed example of the world's first ubiquitious technology city, and the first Korean "new city" planned with green features. Ground was broken for Songdo in 2004.
Completion is scheduled for 2014, when about 65,000 residents are expected to live locally and 300,000 workers are anticipated.

Having benchmarked the sustainability of the largest 50 US cities in my book How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings, I was curious to investigate Songdo's qualities.

I was representing Common Current in New Songdo by addressing the Global Environment Forum on the topic of climate change and urban sustainable development. The conference, on "Low-Carbon, Green Growth" was hosted by the city of Incheon's Free Economic Zone and the United Nations.

About 1,000 people from the UN (including Secretary General Ban Ki-moon), national governments, businesses, international non-governmental organizations and academia met in New Songdo's ConvensiA to collectively forge the path toward a low-carbon future.

Songdo is quickly taking shape as a city of the future because it will be digitally wired and controlled in terms of systems management, which includes everything from waste to energy use. In my five-star Sheraton Hotel room, for instance (opened August 1), not only did my room entry card activate and de-activate all lights and appliances when I entered or left--a feature common in European hotels and woefully absent from the antiquated US hospitality industry--it also turned on or shut off the room's cooling system.


Songdo's Central Park (foreground), Songdo Sheraton (center) and ConvensiA (right)

The system was so efficient it was able to quickly cool the room when I re-entered, and when I left the room for short periods of time to workout or go to breakfast, it was so well insulated that it remained comfortable without active cooling.

Integrated smart building features will save massive amounts of energy. How many unoccupied rooms in hotels or offices across the world have lights burning and air conditioners blasting at this very moment? Probably enough to supply most of the energy for the spaces that are being used. Other digital features enabling greener operations will be bicycles and electric cars available through electronic smart cards, similar to the highly successful Velib bicycle share program in Paris.

All buildings including the smoker-free Sheraton are accredited by the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environment (LEED) ratings. The New Urbanist-inspired master plan for New Songdo was designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, with some buildings designed by Daniel Lebeskind and HOK. The entire development is a LEED for Neighborhood Development pilot project, the only one in Korea, and one of 239 worldwide.

LEED-ND attempts certify that the not only are buildings green, but that their neighborhood is resource efficient in terms of offering public transportation, cycling and pedestrian options. New Songdo is served by a new subway line and will feature dozens of miles of cycling paths and pedestrian friendly urban planning, including wide sidewalks with generous landscaping, and frequent crosswalks.

New Songdo's more traditional "green" features include 30 percent open space, highlighted by a carefully planned and executed Central Park with running and biking trails, and waterway for both transportation and recreation.


Entryway to New Songdo's Central Park, Sheraton Hotel in background

When I jogged through New Songdo's car-free 100-acre Central Park (note to designers - a more direct pedestrian pathway from the hotel entrance to the park's crosswalk is needed), I was taken first by how established its many plant, grass and tree species were, despite construction still in progress. Most developments landscape as an afterthought, which means plants and trees do not get established before they are subjected to foot traffic and other human stresses.

The park's seven rain cisterns, holding 5,253,000 liters, capture rainwater for use in the park's irrigation, and they were plenty full after remnants from Typhoon Morakot deluged the area this past week.

In New Songdo, the care given to having natural systems interact with the built environment was testafied to by the noise of insects, including droning cicadas and thousands of graceful dragonflies zipping about the trees.

The New York City-based developers Gale International, have worked with fomer EPA Administrator Christine Whitman's Whitman Strategy Group in planning integrated sustainability throughout the $35 billion mixed-use (40 percent office; 35 percent residential; 10 percent retail; 10 percent civic space and 5 pecent hotel space) Songdo City.

New Songdo is in partnership with Cisco and its Connected Urban Development initiative, which is aiming at reducing greenhouse gas emissions through the use of technology in buildings, transportation and communications.

Whitman told me her four-year process on providing sustainability input is entering its final phase: the group's role now is to ensure that construction firms don't cut corners, such as making sure that pedestrian paths and bike trails aren't compromised with narrower layouts.

Gale International founder Stan Gale said a challenge for New Songdo has been in harmonizing green building standard between the USGBC's LEED and emerging Korean standards, which are set to go into effect for all private building construction by 2011. Many countries are hesitant to adopt LEED standards wholescale, as these were designed for the US developers in terms of zoning, material and operating system requirements.

New Songdo is a living example of new green cities that will be springing up throughout the world, particularly in Asia, over the next 20 years. The excitement that comes with these endeavors is palpable, in that politicians and planners at events like the Global Environment Forum are recognizing that cities produce about 80 percent of the world's greenhouse gasses, and that if we can't get cities right, we will have little chance to mitigate the most destructive impacts of global change.

And as New Songdo demonstrates, you can fight global climate change not only with more sustainable economic development, but that you can do it with natural systems, applied technology and style.

A group of the largest foundations and major corporations last week gave the nation's 40 largest cities, and the Obama administration, a plan for investing in green jobs, energy efficiency and better transportation.

The report, "Green Cities: How Urban Sustainability Efforts Can and Must Drive America's Climate Change Policies," was researched for the past year by Living Cities, which is funded by a group including foundations (Gates, Rockefeller, MacArthur) banks (B of A, Deutsche Bank) and insurance companies (MetLife, Prudential).

 

Full disclosure: I was one of dozens interviewed for the report and was delighted they  prominently cited my book How Green Is Your City? as "the first systematic report card ranking the sustainability of the largest 50 US cities" and a "survey of where clean technologies might break new ground to expand job markets and tax bases across the country."

 

Refreshingly, however, Living Cities mostly gave their attention to less sexy areas requiring lots of work if cities want to truly be more sustainable for all.

 

One focus of the study was on how to make improvements in the "un" sectors of cities: the unemployed, and underskilled paying large portions of their capital on energy for their uninsulated homes.

 

Poorer neighborhoods without access to public transit were also highlighted as a vexing problem, with limited economic choices, not to mention being subject to greater amounts of air pollution from cars and trucks.

 

Small and medium-sized businesses were nominated as prime candidates for leading the green revolution: "The green jobs sector is more likely to rely on dozens of smaller companies, such as contractors..."

There was a conclusion, too, that the past emphasis of city economic development must be transformed away from attracting businesses through traditional incentive packages. Business as ususal has been to favor large-scale corporations, enticing them to come (or stay) with promises of lower taxes, reduced utilities and developed infrastructure.

 

Living Cities intends to walk the talk.

Like the Stimulus effort, they will be investing directly in several local efforts, particularly in large-scale energy retrofitting--insulating homes, plugging the energy leaks--and designing transportation projects in pilot city markets (SF Bay Area, Minneapolis-St. Paul). Look for new partnerships among financial institutions, philanthropy and business as a result.

 

Some of the city or issue-specific findings:

• Chicago has the early lead in creating Green Jobs programs through its $2.5 million GreenCorps Chicago effort, though it and most city efforts are officially reporting small numbers
  
• Chi Town also has the lead in large-scale building rehabs with its Chicago Energy Efficiency Retrofitting Program
• San Jose has set a goal of creating 25,000 clean technology related jobs and is working implementing job-training programs on a city-wide basis at community colleges and universities
  
• Houston has about 80 percent of its new Downtown construction meeting LEED standards
  

I went to a release in San Francisco the other night celebrating NEXT 10's new 2009 California Innovation Index, which is the premier report tracking the emergence of the Green Economy in the Golden State.

The report, authored by Mountain View, CA-based Collaborative Economics, has found that green sector job growth has outpaced other job growth by a 10 to 1 factor in California. Venture capital for clean tech in California reached $3.3 billion, accounting for 57% of the nation's total.

California is the leader in solar, wind and battery patents, and has been 68% more productive than the rest of the nation per unit of energy in producing Gross Domestic Product.

San Francisco city solar installation, Moscone Center

What does all this mean? More jobs nationally will be the bottom line result of the carbon reductions the nation is trying to achieve: The Obama Administration has said it will use the California model of climate change regulations--from alternative fuel vehicle standards to more efficient electricity use--in order to reduce greenhouse gases by 80% in 2050 from 1990 levels.

Which makes sense, as the precedent-setting California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 set the national stage (and Obama's 80% 2050 reduction target) for a large-scale effort to reduce carbon through the greening of industry, transportation, land use and planning, and energy use.

After wondering for so many years why architects ignored local climate and energy efficiency in service of trendy design, I was schooled last night in how at least one global design firm is making green super sexy.

I gave a talk on green city trends at the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the commercial design, urban planning and building engineering firm, and was given a tour by Design Director Michael Duncan.


SOM-designed Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, China. When complete later this year it is intended to be China's first zero-net energy skyscraper in terms of operating energy. (Left shows air baffle detail, where wind turbines are located.)

Duncan took me around to look at the models and schematics of dozens of projects, many of them in China. The exquisite craftsmanship of some of the miniature-scale building and neighborhood models was mesmerizing enough (a future version of the Chicago Art Institute's Thorne Miniature Rooms), but most impressive was that in terms of energy efficiency, building design science is now also a high art.

We looked at computer-generated 3-D plastic San Francisco models (proprietary to SOM), showing every single bulding orientation, down to Tenderloin District message parlors (no, you can't peer into windows), so designers can understand planned new building solar and wind impacts.

Individual buildings were modeled with solar orientation on their exteriors, so that windows can be designed to block hot sun in summer and to allow warming light in winter. Interiors used parametric modeling to heighten passive solar access for maximum office productivity. Thermal imaging software is used on every project to create energy efficient performance.



Parametric modeling of window glazing, (courtesy SOM)

Green building science now tracks the sun's movement across and interaction with a building at all times of day. Just think if this kind of technology could be integrated into the residential market. We would each save hundreds or thousands of dollars on heating and cooling energy, and would have more comfortable lives overall, while hacking away at global-warming-causing greenhouse gases.

Green materials were less evident in the models and schematics I saw, so in terms of true sustainability, the life cycle impacts of materials and other areas (particularly water supply and use) need to be better understood. Then there is the issue of how people get to these office buildings. Is there transit nearby? How easy is it for them to walk or bike to stores, entertainment and errands?

SOM is also developing geothermal heating and cooling designs along with integrating active PV solar skins into its buildings. Such advances are critically needed, considering that China is firing up one or two new coal-burning power plants each week to meet its growing electricity demand.

But in terms of one key element of green building, passive energy design, I've seen the future and hopefully it's coming to your neighborhood soon.