Directory — Technology — Blog Details for "Greenedia Green Building Group Blog"

Greenedia Green Building Group Blog

Greenedia Green Building Group Blog
Environmentally conscious people know that sustainability begins at home. The Internet's most respected bloggers devoted to Green Building Technology views and commentaries are now available in one place- the Greenedia Green Building Group Blog. Lear

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4

Articles

Green Automation
2008-02-03 07:13:00
What can go into a making a green building green is varied and complex; hence, in fact, the LEED standard, which despite its accolades, some have criticized as slanted and in need of update. Regardless, there are numerous things that can make green green--materials, techniques, energy sources, all of these can work together to reduce the carbon footprint of a home or building and make for a more sustainable structure. One of the overlooked options is that of automation. Or, rather, most folks don't think of automation beyond their programmable thermostat, if they think of it at all. Building automation tends to sound a little too much like something from The Jetsons, and largely out of reach of the average home or business owner--what with pervasive robotic assistants being still beyond the ability of the marketplace to produce and deploy. But it certainly does not have to be quite that sophisiticated to be effective, especially in terms of making the most efficient use of ...
More About: Green , Automation

The Reality of Green Building
2008-02-01 03:15:00
Last year, the UK set itself an aggressive standard for the drastic reduction of carbon emissions. Shooting for 60% reduction by 2050--a goal far ahead of most in the Western world--the government set as one of the cornerstones of this policy an equally aggressive stance on the question of green building. Recognizing that much of its residential infrastructure was very old and thus more challenging to upgrade to sustainability, they set out to regulate that every new home would be carbon neutral starting in 2016. Jo Williams at Guardian Unlimited suggests that the government is missing a plum chance to blaze the green trail in the interim. Without strong requirements now, the necessary drive for innovation will be stalled and zero carbon will be more difficult to reach as a result, a conclusion she cites from a study in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. Instead, the government has required certain sustainable improvements, but only from homes that are fun...
More About: Building , Reality , Green Building , Green

Remodeling Green Redux
2008-01-29 05:17:00
After everyone else has already been talking about it, New York Times belatedly enters the fray with a story about building green without new construction. As when I covered the question before, the reality of needing to cut emissions and energy usage is going to require a larger effort than simply going forward with green building standards on all new construction, even if that were the current reality, which it's not. Amusingly, the Times even suggests that green design is de rigeur, which it is not, and efforts to mandate are being fiercely resisted as we saw so recently in California with Schwarzenegger's veto of a measure that would upgrade building codes across the board in his state. The reality is that we're not going far enough currently, and all there is even for new construction are a series of voluntary guidelines--EnergyStar from the government side and LEED from the private US Green Building Council. Nothing mandatory, nothing standard, and nothing yet widel...
More About: Remodeling

Greenedia Weekly Blog Report: Hybrid Buses Are Go, Oregon Proposes Cap-and
2008-01-27 20:47:00
This is a selection of recent popular blog artciles aggregated on Greenedia.com, where you will find the best blogs from the world of green media, as well as video uploads, podcasts, and blog authoring. 1700 Hybrid Buses Ordered Allison Transmission, according to the Green Car Congress, has received orders totalling 1700 new hybrid bus transmissions for municipal fleets in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. The order would double the number of GM-Allison powered buses on the roads, and may create the largest fleet of hybrids in the US via Washington's order for nearly 1000. There are currently about 1000 of the hybrid buses on the roads right now, helping to make an efficient form of urban travel even cleaner. According to GCC, Allison builds the hybrid transmissions under license with General Motors, and that GM intends to release a number of new hybrid models in the near future. GM has attempted to position itself as a very green automaker at the recen...
More About: Blog , Report , Oregon

Arcologies For The Future
2008-01-24 22:22:00
There may be nothing that stimulates my imagination more than truly enormous structures--the very idea of so many people living and working in close proximity seems romantic and interesting to me, which is why I'm fascinated by the concept of these massive arcologies. The engineering would be... incredible is the only word that really works. Every other single human construction project would be absolutely dwarfed by some of these concepts--the pyramidal structure in Japan, for instance, would be easily visible from space, covering a greater area than most small towns, and able to fit a city's worth of population inside in comfort. And, really, maybe they're a pipe dream, but in concept they are the ultimate green building solution. One of the beautiful things about the arcologies is how completely they integrate green space--these aren't super-tenements, with block after block of apartments stacked upon each other. They're intended to bring much of what people need into ...
More About: Future , The Future

Low Tech Green
2008-01-17 04:03:00
One of the really exciting aspects of the green building revolution has been the way low tech solutions have literally sprouted out of the earth, coming back from ages of disdain and rejection to provide cheap and elegant solutions to energy and emissions questions. One of the most popular now is the green roof, which is being resurrected from its humble origins on the American Prairie (and elsewhere) to help cool modern high-rises and better manage rainwater collection. And previously, in talking about Steve Wozniak, I mentioned his effort to bring rammed-earth construction methods to the market. The rammed earth would not only provide energy savings and insulation improvements over other materials, it could be manufactured on site from excavated fill and thus save much of the so-called embedded energy which represents what it takes to manufacture and transport building materials. While Woz still seems to be working to get his concept off the ground, the reality of earthern f...
More About: Tech , Green

Remodeling Green
2008-01-15 15:30:00
Something set off a spate of remodeling themed articles today, a trend that should begin to grow this year and may be one of the big stories of green building for 2008. Remodeling is another critical component of the growing green building revolution, of course, and one of the most important; it would take many decades, perhaps centuries, of building green only in new structures to replace our non-green homes and commercial buildings as they naturally age and are replaced. First of all the talk is word that the National Trust for Historic Preservation has begun to outline processes for the green upgrading and remodeling of historic buildings [via Green Tech Pastures], while keeping their historic character. And this is probably one of those areas where solar panels, say, or wind turbine fixtures are not going to fly, if only because of the desire to preserve history. As a student of history, I wholeheartedly agree, but also know something needs to be done comprehensively in ord...

State of the World
2008-01-13 05:56:00
Earlier this week, The World watch Institute--a sustainability thinktank--released its annual State of the World report, a 270 page description of how the world is faring in terms of environment and sustainability, and where it can expect to be headed. The report, available from their site, goes in depth on the question of the world's approach to sustainability, with special focus on economic impact. The question of impact is, of course, crucial. One of the biggest concerns about global climate change is how it will affect not only animal and plant life around the world as habitats change and species fail to adapt, but also the impact on human societies and lifestyles that depend upon that animal and plant life. Likewise, the rising of oceans could make unlivable some cities, and more than just pushing people from their homes it could also crimp economic production as traditional centers of such could be displaced or destroyed. That's the bad news; climate scientists witnesse...
More About: The World

Green Building's Bright Future
2008-01-11 01:39:00
As green building garners more recognition, especially is its role as a major factor to be considered in reducing the impact of global climate change, it seems more and more progress gets made on bringing the West into the 21st century. For example, more and more communities and localities are coming on-line with green building standards in order to minimize environmental impact as well as energy usage and utility costs. As the US Federal Government contineus to drag its heels on necessary reform in the construction industry--and building codes to be precise--states and local communities continue to be the standard-bearers for this revolution in how the very structures we live, work, and play in impact energy usage and the environment. The biggest question is whether the state and local movements will achieve some kind of critical mass and force the federal government to bring the rest along, or whether the benefits of green building will become too great to ignore and the lagg...
More About: Future , Green , Bright

Hot Ideas
2008-01-03 02:44:00
I remember one time I decided to walk home from a friend's house, rather than accept a ride and make him go out again so late. Not a big deal for me, as I used to walk a lot, but it was a late night and I worried about it getting cold. Well, on the big, six-lane avenue that his apartment was just off of, I needn't have worried. But once I turned off that onto the rural lane that led to my apartment, it felt like the temperature dropped five or ten degrees. And in the last year or two, I've been thinking there should be a way to harness that. Sounds like the Dutch have figured out how. As The Economists' article says, sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. And the reality is, as of right now, there are a ton of simple ideas just laying around waiting to be picked up, just like this one. Green roofs was one such idea, and harnessing the motion of dancers in a dance club another. The reality is there's a lot of energy out there that's otherwise wasted or, in the c...
More About: Ideas

Green Building Innovation
2007-12-23 02:01:00
One of the most exciting parts of the green building revolution is the variety of ways in which the aims of green building are being achieved. I've been pretty confident from the start that the only way to make green building as widespread as it needs to be was to approach the question from every possible direction, not just reflexively looking to our past to see what we could conceivably do without; it's a fine way to go for the enthusiast, or someone looking to dramatically simplify their lives, but hard to convince most of the rest to follow along. In that way, though, we have seen some pretty exciting developments. Improvement in solar cell technology, for instance, advancements in smart grid technology, and natural building materials that maintain a building's internal temperature within a few degrees of 70F. Or the recent embrace of green roofing, harkening back to pioneer days on the prairie. But cool technology is one of the things that grabs headlines and gets geek...
More About: Building , Green Building , Green , Innovation

The Reach of Cleantech and Clean Energy
2007-12-01 23:20:00
To me one of the remarkable things about the very recent and very rapid developments in the adoption of clean energy and cleantech is how widespread it has become. And not only widespread, but cutting across what one might call traditional political and ideological lines. Inherently, cleantech has a sort of appeal that the alternative does not--no one is really that in favor of pouring toxic smoke into the atmosphere for everyone to breather, for instance. No one is in favor of smog, or a return to the bad old days of Pittsburgh's unreformed steel mills when the city hung under a cloud of smoke and nastiness. No one wants miners to die in more coal mine cave-ins, or get blacklung, or what-have-you. So it's not surprising, and yet it is, in that the environmental debate has long been framed in polarized political terms--liberals in favor of increased restrictions and regulations, conservatives against. But that's the critical thing, on a social level, of the pending cleant...
More About: Energy , Clean , Reach , Cleantech

Greening Datacenters
2007-11-11 23:47:00
The datacenter has become as much a necessity to modern corporate life as plumbing, electricity, and HVAC. Both the on-site sort that runs local and distributed networks and the colocated variety that support hundreds or even thousands of businesses, datacenters tend to be massive carbon emitters and a serious thorn in the side of any carbon neutrality effort. Yet, for the 21st century, they're absolutely crucial to business. Back in June, I mentioned the Google/Intel effort to dramatically reduce power consumption in information technology devices, but that's only the tip of the iceberg, and in many ways reliant entirely on manufacturers to produce greener hardware. That's going to be critical, no mistake, and the swell of interest in cleantech is going to make it a no-brainer for these companies. But first they have to overcome significant engineeering challenges, and it's incumbent on datacenter operators to begin reducing impact and energy costs. Jeremy Faludi covers...
More About: Greening

Sustainable and Affordable
2007-11-03 05:59:00
The biggest force opposing green building is not government intransigence or corporate apathy, but the very simple matter of up-front cost. The traditional equation in green building has always been simple, if a bit prohibitive: construction costs may be higher, in some cases much higher, but they'll be paid for over the life of the structure in energy savings. Sometimes recouped in a relatively short period of time, sometimes very long-term. Other savings are simply seen in greater durability, meaning product such as light bulbs or windows will not have to be replaced in a term similar with their less-efficient counterparts. But the upfront costs can still be quite considerable, and beyond the reach of many, even when amoritized over thirty years. So the key is going to be reducing the up-front costs without sacrificing the energy savings and general sustainability of the structure. Back in August, CNet News did a photo tour of a pre-fab green-built house under constructi...
More About: Sustainable

More articles from this author:
1, 2, 3, 4