Lampertina's Favorite Links on energy from Diigo

The House That Twitters Its Energy Use, by Katie Fehrenbach « Earth2Tech

Fri, 02 May 2008 06:16:59 -0000

Among other things: "The Twitter stream is an exercise in using the data from home automation feeds, and the hope is that, by making energy usage data transparent and easy to digest, it will change consumer behavior and reduce energy consumption." As I noted in bookmarking the related Wired Magazine piece, this relates to Wired Mag's earlier article on "Peak Water," too, where we learn that many London homes don't even have water meters. Actually, it's the same here in Victoria & Oak Bay. Not good.

Tags: twitter earth2tech andy_house energy consumption

Posted by: lampertina

Home Tweet Home: Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter | Wired Science from Wired.com

Fri, 02 May 2008 05:51:55 -0000

Wired Magazine article by Alexis Madrigal on "wired" homes, including http://twitter.com/andy_house, by IBM "master inventor" Andry Stanford-Clark who "rigged up his home to twitter its energy use." See The House That Twitters Its Energy Use by Katie Fehrenbacher (http://earth2tech.com/2008/04/30/the-house-that-twitters-its-energy-use/).

Compare to Wired Mag's recent "Peak Water" article, which pointed out that many London households aren't even on water meters, making consumption monitoring impossible.

In addition, consider too the New Scientist article, "City road networks grow like biological systems" (4/23/08).

All this relates to infrastructure -- and to how we're just beginning to understand it from new angles. (See also Doc Searls' continuing investigation of infrastructure in Linux Journal.)

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

As we've noted before, the convergence of IT and green tech is beginning as hackers turn the environment we've built and the one that naturally surrounds us into data that can be recorded, analyzed and used to reduce resource consumption.

The data becomes part of the infrastructure... posted by lampertina

This revolution is being led by infotech guys like the Google engineer we wrote about, or the creator of the Twitter system, Andy Stanford-Clark, who works for IBM's Pervasive and Advanced Messaging Technologies team. And as Katie Fehrenbacher noted over at Earth2Tech, the creators of Flash are now hard at work on an energy monitoring and automation system called Greenbox.

Tags: twitter infrastructure data architecture housing

Posted by: lampertina

Why daylight saving time is bad for the environment (Toronto Star)

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:12:22 -0000

"The annual time change has long been sold as a way to save energy, but the opposite might be true." I wouldn't mind if we stayed on one time all year round, although I admit liking daylight savings for the longer evenings. But then I don't live in an area that uses air conditioning -- the main reason why electricity use goes way up in DST and therefore there's a net increase in fuel / energy consumption (vs any sort of energy saving).

I dislike changing from standard time to daylight saving time and vice versa, the silly business of spring forward or falling back -- it feels like jet lag without any of the benefits of actual travel.

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

The practice was first introduced, temporarily, in the United States during World War I, and then again during World War II. In 1966, it was reintroduced across most of the United States and Canada, beginning the last Sunday in April and ending six months later in late October. Since then, it has been expanded twice.

While energy conservation has always been the window dressing, the true motivation was repeatedly economic, says Downing, who spent two years reading all the U.S. congressional and senate hearings on DST dating back to 1919.

"The most persistent lobby on behalf of daylight savings has long been retailers and merchants. If you give people more light when they leave work, they will stop and shop on their way home," says Downing, a writing professor at Tufts University.

"There is a reason we continue to get daylight savings under the rubric of energy conservation because as a policy, it costs individual consumers nothing and asks them to conserve nothing. So it's wildly popular," he says.

"Unfortunately, it's entirely ineffective."

Another way daylight savings might be fuelling our warming climate? Increased carbon dioxide fumes sputtering out of car tailpipes, says Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. Last March's early spring forward coincided with increased gas prices at the pumps.

But the hikes had no effect on gas sales, a result dubbed by many analysts as the "daylight savings effect," he says.

"When you give people more light after work, they do go to the mall or ball park and they don't walk there. They get in their cars," says Downing, adding that in the 1930s, the petroleum industry lobbied hard to reintroduce daylight savings.

Since first conceived of by Benjamin Franklin more than two centuries ago, the principle behind daylight savings has always been to save on lighting bills. But what the American inventor couldn't envision in 1784 was the rise of the power-sucking central air conditioner. In Indiana, people might not have been flipping on the lights when they returned home after work. But they were cranking their air conditioners, because that extra hour of evening sunlight meant another hour of "solar build-up on your house," says Kotchen.

Instead of saving electricity and money by adding an extra hour of sunlight to evenings most of the year, it cost Indiana homes an extra $8.6 million in electricity bills – mostly from chugging air conditioners – each year. And since 95 per cent of that extra energy was generated by coal-fired power plants, that meant much more atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide was spewed into the air.

Expanded nationally, those results would translate to at least two coal-fired electricity plants pumping power just to feed the daylight savings habit.

"In Indiana, I can tell you unambiguously now, there are social and environmental costs associated with daylight savings time because of the pollution emissions and carbon dioxide emissions contributing to climate change," Kotchen says.

Always sold as a conservation measure, the practice of daylight savings actually jacked electricity use in homes across one central U.S. state by up to four per cent, according to a new American study.

Tags: daylight_savings_time dst energy environment

Posted by: lampertina

Innovations for the Built Environment 2008 - Designing energy efficient tall buildings

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:33:33 -0000

- one of many pages on "Innovations for the Built Environment" conference coming up in London, Feb. 26-28/08. This page is from the "seminars" section, which lists many sessions over those 2 days. Other sections include links to the "exhibit," "attractions," "the arena," "conference," and more.

Tags: built_environment conference ecology energy london

Posted by: lampertina

An Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories - New York Times

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 05:31:35 -0000

NYT article on the problems around "the other oil crisis," triggered not in small measure by our (West's) desire to circumvent fossil fuel dependence by relying on biofuels.

Tags: crops energy ethanol food fuel

Posted by: lampertina

CCA - Canadian Centre for Architecture

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:01:35 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

1973: Sorry, Out of Gas is the first exhibition curated by Mirko Zardini in his role as CCA Director and Chief Curator, which he assumed in November 2005. As Visiting Curator, Mr. Zardini previously curated the CCA exhibitions Sense of the City (2005) and Out of the Box: Price, Rossi, Stirling + Matta-Clark (2004). His research, writings, exhibitions, and architectural projects engage contemporary architecture, its transformations, and its relationship with the city and landscape. A former editor of Casabella magazine and Lotus International, Mr. Zardini also served on the editorial board of omus magazine. He has taught at prestigious architectural schools, including the Swiss Federal Polytechnic University in Zurich, Harvard University, and Princeton University.

CCA Curator of Contemporary Architecture since 2005, Giovanna Borasi curated the exhibition Environment: Approaches for Tomorrow (2006) on the work of Gilles Clément and Philippe Rahm. Before joining the CCA, she co-curated House Sweet Home, Different Ways to Live, Spazio Ventisette, Milan (2000), and collaborated on several exhibitions including Asphalt, The Character of Cities at the Milan Triennale with Mirko Zardini (2003). Ms. Borasi was an editor and writer for Lotus International and Navigator. She served as Assistant Editor for the book series Quaderni di Lotus; and was member of the editorial staff of the graphic design magazine Lettera, a supplement to the architectural magazine Abitare.

The accompanying catalogue, Sorry, Out of Gas, is a unique publishing project combining the diverse materials assembled for the exhibition with a specifically commissioned children’s component by illustrator Harriet Russell. In her 32-page story entitled “An Endangered Species,” Ms. Russell introduces the exhibition’s subject to a broader audience of young readers. With her distinctive drawings and hand-lettered text, Ms. Russell uses humour to describe the role of oil in daily life and to suggest alternatives to this rapidly diminishing resource.

An essay by curator Mirko Zardini follows the introductory children’s component, while specific themes and projects are highlighted throughout the book in short texts written by co-curator Giovanna Borasi along with Adam Bobbette, Daria Der Kaloustian, and Pierre-Edouard Latouche.

Many of the architectural projects in the exhibition are represented through the photographs of Jon Naar, who traveled extensively across North America to document buildings and their architects and engineers in remote as well as urban contexts. His work disseminated their ideas through publications of the time, and forms an essential contribution to the CCA catalogue and exhibition.

Co-published by the CCA and Corraini Edizioni, Mantua, and designed by Massimo Pitis with Bianca Baldacci, Sorry, Out of Gas reproduces over 200 colour and black-and-white images on 232 pages. The volume is available at the CCA Bookstore for $49.95 CAD.

Created by Montréal-based architect Gilles Saucier of Saucier + Perrotte Architectes, the exhibition design employs an imposing, dark structure that links the different galleries and establishes a continuous flow among the content. Visitors can choose different paths through the space, where thematic ideas are centered in certain areas but the presentation of material reflects the mixing of concepts and research of the period. The graphic design is by Zab Design & Typography of Winnipeg, Canada.

The ideas and innovations brought together in 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas culminate with the projects of several maverick groups including The New Alchemists, Montréal-based Ecol Operation, Farallones Institute, and Integrated Life Support Systems Laboratories. Their efforts focused on expanding the scale from individual housing to long-term sustainable communities. Described as “integrated systems,” their work incorporates food production, housing, and waste-management. These projects offer the most complex architectural responses to the energy crisis due to their focus on developing sustainability on an urban scale, and form a vital foundation for contemporary planning of future ecological viability.

A new typology of architectural publication evolved during this era: Do-It-Yourself books and guides described not only how to construct a home, but how to integrate the necessary energy supply. Among those featured in the exhibition are the instructive Practical Guide to Solar Homes, The Self-Sufficient House, Michael Reynolds’ influential series Earthship, and Jay Swayze’s unusual Underground Gardens and Homes.

many parallel explorations addressed the question of energy independence in urban environments. Among the most influential is a 1979 design by Oswald Mathias Ungers created in response to a government-sponsored competition for a 400-home community in West Germany. Another, more independent urban project is the 519 East 11th Street cooperative in New York City whose tenant-owners installed solar panels and a wind turbine on the rooftop to provide energy for public spaces in the building. This successful effort to gain independence from the urban power grid led to a legal battle with the local supplier and prompted a lively public debate still relevant today.

Among the exhibition highlights are individual projects by such architects as Steve Baer, Michael Jantzen, Douglas Kelbaugh, Michael Reynolds, and Malcolm Wells, who designed and built innovative homes to gain independence from existing energy distribution networks. Their little-known work broke new ground by allowing alternative concepts of energy use to guide the formal and functional design of their structures. Also featured are the contributions of key engineers George Löf, Maria Telkes, and others, whose development of active solar power technology facilitated major architectural advances.

Occupying the CCA’s main galleries, 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas is curated by Mirko Zardini, CCA Director and Chief Curator, with Giovanna Borasi, CCA Curator of Contemporary Architecture. The exhibition is organised along interrelated themes, including Austerity, which reflects the impact of the oil crisis on habits and lifestyle. Passive Solar surveys efforts to adjust building design to take advantage of solar heat, while Active Solar addresses the evolution and application of technologies to capture and convert the sun’s energy. Geopolitical Consequences examines the reactions and initiatives in the political, commercial, and cultural realms. Insulation and Underground Buildings presents attempts to conserve energy and integrate buildings within their natural surroundings; and Wind maps the evolution from earlier wind turbine designs for rural areas to new applications. Finally, Integrated Systems outlines projects that operate on scales of greater complexity involving food production and larger societal groups. Rather than providing a complete historical overview of the period’s research, the materials on view have been selected based on their relevance to contemporary architectural concerns.

The impact of the crisis on Western popular culture is represented by a selection of the era’s board games, whose themes and titles capture the anxiety of a new lifestyle and reflect the profits of oil suppliers, as well as promotional materials such as advertising campaigns and brochures.

Sparked by the combination of reduced oil production and drastically increased prices, the oil crisis marked the end of a period of constant growth in Western countries following the Second World War. Along with social and economic adjustments such as energy-saving measures and reduced activity came the understanding that unlimited development based on unrestricted oil at low prices was no longer feasible. Taking its title from familiar signs at gas stations throughout North America during those years, 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas investigates how architecture and urbanism responded to this new reality. In contrast to the era’s sense of austerity it was a time of significant developments and intense experimentation in the field of architecture.

The research and innovations of thirty years ago are of particular relevance in the context of contemporary concerns about diminishing energy resources. While influential at the time, much of the innovative work of architects, engineers, and activist groups of the period was forgotten once financial markets and energy distribution systems adjusted, and political focus diminished. Today, however, a new sense of urgency is emerging, provoked by the reality of a deteriorating environment and a finite supply of fossil fuels. “It is of vital importance to consider the radical yet, in many cases, little-known work from the 1970s as architects today struggle to address similar issues,” said CCA Director and exhibition curator Mirko Zardini. “By providing insight on the forerunners of many contemporary approaches to sustainable living, the exhibition aims to increase public awareness and encourage contemporary research in the field.”

This major exhibition is the first to study the architectural innovation spurred by the 1973 oil crisis, when the value of oil increased exponentially and triggered economic, political, and social upheaval across the world. Featuring over 350 objects including architectural drawings, photographs, books and pamphlets, archival television footage, and historical artefacts, the exhibition maps the global response to the shortage and its relevance to architecture today.

Tags: 1973 architecture canadian_centre_for_architecture energy energy_crisis

Posted by: lampertina

TheStar.com | Ideas | 35 years on, why we need another gas crisis

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 05:54:49 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau is seen in a televised address to the country assuring us that voluntary measures would be enough for the Great White North. His excuses for not going further were Canada's harsh winters and great distances. Three decades later, we rank among the worst per capita polluters on the planet. But don't blame Canadians – geography made us do it.

Tags: 1973 architecture canadian_centre_for_architecture christopher_hume energy

Posted by: lampertina

Crosscut Seattle - Green is the new gold rush? Not without government R&D

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 06:23:13 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

As for the politics of possibility, Nordhaus and Shellenberger make a case for a massive governmental program in developing cheap, clean energy, as the Defense Department did with microchips or jetliners. It won't happen in the private sector alone, since they "rarely initiate technological revolutions," and there is actually very little innovation going on in the energy sector today. By contrast, when the Pentagon in the 1960s effectively guaranteed the market for microchips, it touched off a revolution that drove down the costs and spread the technology to many sectors of the economy. "An investment of roughly $200 billion would bring the price of solar energy down to that of coal," they estimate.

The authors adopt a politics of hope, rather than fear. "Cautionary tales and narratives of eco-apocalypse tend to provoke fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among voters -- not the rational embrace of environmental policies," they contend. "Young and grassroots environmentalists are more inspired by the vision of creating a new energy economy than regulating the old one." Got that Al Gore?

One big factor that this rosy scenario leaves out is the role of government. Here, the seminal thinkers are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of a new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. The authors argue against the high-regulation model for battling pollution and other environmental woes, or approaches that raise the cost of dirty energy. You can read about the controversy they have stirred up with greens in this essay.

He reframed the discussion about coping with global warming by saying it was a golden opportunity to make money. One week earlier, Seattle business leaders were hearing the same siren song at the Chamber of Commerce retreat in Vancouver. A bank president declared, "Green is the new gold."

Tags: business commentary ecology energy environment

Posted by: lampertina