Anyone interested in high-performance, green buildings simply has to check out NASA’s new “sustainability base” at their Ames campus in California. The below article gives Bill McDonough all the credit because, well, he loves taking all the credit, but this facility represents a real achievement in integrated design across all trades. As Forbes correctly points out, they spared no expense and overlooked no detail. I will be very interested to see if the performance data and occupant satisfaction in the new facility live up to all the hype.

NASAs New Sensor-Driven, Ultra Green Building – Forbes.

Next Tuesday, December 13th at 3PM ET, our research team will be giving a USGBC members-only webinar on the outcomes of our research to date. You can register for the event here. And yes, unfortunately you or your organization will need to have a USGBC membership to participate. I have no control over this.

Update: you can actually watch the recorded presentation here. Thanks USGBC!

But you know, the Obama admin blew a $500 million loan to a solar company, and you really can’t forgive people for that kind of outrageous frittering away of the public’s wealth, at least according to the GOP. In reality, Solyndra faced the same risks as any other solar company and succumbed to price pressure after China flooded the market with dirt-cheap solar panels. If anything, this should be a lesson in why the US needs to be doing even more to invest in its clean energy sector, not less.

• Since 2005, the EU has been paying for carbon offsets under its Clean Development Mechanism and Emission Trading Scheme. If you are a producer of carbon, like an electric utility, your carbon emission limit is capped. Any emissions beyond this limit must be “negated” by purchasing offsets.
• The offset in question here is for HFC-23, a refrigerant and potent greenhouse gas 11,700 times more powerful than CO2 in trapping heat. Given the large GHG potential of this gas, you can imagine that the carbon offsets are extremely lucrative.
• China has been receiving the bulk of the offset money from the EU, $6 billion in total since offsets began, although other developing nations like India are also large producers of the chemical. Offsets are generated by destroying (i.e. incinerating) the chemical, which is a byproduct of the production of HCFC-22, another refrigerant.
• The EU banned industrial gas offsets in August due to concerns that firms were gaming the system through HFC-23 offsets.
• Why the concern over gaming? Turns out that offsets are 75 times more lucrative than selling the chemical itself. Refrigerant manufacturers in China were generating huge profits by simply burning the stuff, and some say that entire facilities were simply built to produce HFC-23, burn it, and collect the offsets. The emissions offset scheme created huge perverse incentives and may be paying for incineration of overproduction rather than incineration of existing stock.

In other words, the EU is paying to offset HFC-23 that wouldn’t exist in the first place if it weren’t for the CDM. The result: manufacturers in China lose a huge revenue stream and threaten to unleash tons of HFC-23 gas on the atmosphere if the EU doesn’t keep paying up. How much, no one knows. I would surely like to find out.

This is the kind of nonsense that critics of cap-and-trade love to point at. And who can blame them? The EU’s been outsmarted by conniving industrialists who have turned HFC-23 offsets into one of the world’s biggest shell games.

There’s very little about the group on the webs, but Wikipedia has this to offer on Alex Steffen’s branding of “dark green” environmentalism. These are folks that:

believe that environmental problems are an inherent part of industrialized capitalism, and seek radical political change. Dark greens believe that dominant political ideologies (sometimes referred to as industrialism) are corrupt and inevitably lead to consumerism, alienation from nature and resource depletion. Dark greens claim that this is caused by the emphasis on economic growth that exists within all existing ideologies, a tendency referred to as “growth mania”. The dark green brand of environmentalism is associated with ideas of deep ecology, post-materialism, holism, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and the work of Fritjof Capra as well as support for a reduction in human numbers and/or a relinquishment of technology to reduce humanity’s impact on the biosphere.

I’m very curious to see who from the mainstream enviro crowd emerges as an official supporter.

Climate groups like 350.org are stepping up their criticism of Obama and pushing for a large and very unique protest of the Keystone XL pipeline this weekend (November 6, 2011) at the White House. I would say the ire of green groups against the president has started to reach unprecedented levels.

If you want to make your own custom badge like the one above, you can do so here.

Check out the results of ACEEE’s 2011 Energy Efficiency Scorecard here: ACEEE | The 2011 State Energy Efficiency Scorecard.

This spring I got to assist Ecos Consulting in researching several emerging trends in plug loads that may yield continued efficiency improvements ranging from power-sipping displays to self-powered devices to ultra-efficient power supplies. The work, sponsored by the International Energy Agency’s 4E project, is presented in several short reports available here.

Some of the highlights:

• Detailed analysis of a super-efficient power supply prototype that achieves milliwatt-level standby power and 90+% efficiency in active operation
• Evaluation of the applicability of existing energy harvesting technologies to common end uses
• Tear-down analysis of high-efficiency display technologies
• An inexpensive battery charger design that could saving millions of dollars in electricity

However, it didn’t do much to alleviate one of LEED’s biggest flaws: a lack of performance monitoring. LEED has rightly come under harsh criticism for this, because you can effectively build a platinum building, achieving every point possible on the LEED scale, and then go operate your building with reckless abandon, running up enormous energy bills. In fact, several years back, a study by the New Building Institute showed that many LEED buildings were performing no differently from an energy perspective than code-built buildings (see below). The LEED building stock, on the whole, seems to have significantly lower energy intensity than our commercial building stock, but you can find plenty of cases where the energy use intensity of even LEED Gold certified buildings exceeds that of conventional buildings (again, see the figure below).

This chart, courtesy of the New Buildings Institute, shows the energy intensity of various LEED-certified buildings based on measured data. Note the wide spread in performance, with some LEED buildings even exceeding typical commercial building (CBECS) energy intensity values.

So USGBC has proposed that LEED 2012 will now include a requirement for building operators to share energy performance data with a network of other green building operators so that owners, operators and occupants can view and compare their performance in real time. Rather than just seeing the nice LEED plaque in the entryway of a LEED facility, you might see a heads up display showing how this office building compares to the one down the street. In addition, LEED will require buildings to rectify based on performance data, further emphasizing the crucial occupation/operations phase of a building’s lifecycle. A good synopsis of some of the proposed changes are provided in this article by Fast Company.

For anyone who has been following the LEED rating system at all, this is an enormous change in the way they do business. I sincerely hope that the LEED membership embraces these important additions to the system and ratifies the changes in 2012. As Fast Company correctly notes, it will give LEED much-needed teeth and added credibility, finally sheltering it from at least some of the critiques around gaming the system. It will mean that much more to earn the rating, and that’s good for the whole industry.

The impetus for all this, according to this article from Green Technology World: assertions by the Sunday Times that a single Google search uses the same amount of energy as it takes to boil a kettle of water (gotta love those British energy analogies).  Now does anyone actually believe those numbers? Does anyone actually believe that in the 0.17 seconds it took for Google to return results to me on “google energy use,” some Google data center ramped up its power use by 1.4 MW to deliver my search results (because that’s what it would take to boil a kettle of water in 0.17 seconds)? No, it’s absurd.

A quicker but much more instructive estimate. Google claimed in its new releases that it consumes about 2.3 billion kWh per year in electricity. Averaged out across the year, this means that Google data centers are sucking down about 262 MW of electricity at any given time. For a quick estimate, let’s say that at any instant, there are 1 million users executing search queries (this is a real lowball estimate I’m sure), and that the search takes about 0.17 seconds to complete. Your “cut” of that 2.3 billion kWh then turns out to be about 44 J or over 500 times less than what it would take to boil a kettle of water. How big is 44J? It’s about 10 calories, so that cookie you just ate gave you more energy than you used in your Google search. So don’t sweat your searching too much.

Data center owners have real energy issues, but don’t feel too guilty when you hit the search button.