Promoting sustainable shelter in Alaska
From the Washington Post on Tuesday, March 10, 2009:
One gizmo allows you to run the dishwasher when electricity is cheapest. Another decides when to fire up the water heater if you plan on a 6 a.m. shower. Another routes solar energy from a rooftop panel to a battery in your garage and the wiring in your house.
From the U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy office, posted on 2/18/09, retrieved on Friday, March 6, 2009:
President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 on February 17, and the tax section of the act provides greater tax credits for clean energy projects at homes and businesses and for the manufacturers of clean energy technologies. For homeowners, the act increases a 10% tax credit for energy efficiency improvements to a 30% tax credit, eliminates caps for specific improvements (such as windows and furnaces), and instead establishes an aggregate cap of $1,500 for all improvements placed in service in 2009 and 2010 (except biomass systems, which must be placed in service after the act is enacted). The act also tightens the energy efficiency requirements to meet current standards. For residential renewable energy systems, the act removes all caps on the tax credits, which equal 30% of the cost of qualified solar energy systems, geothermal heat pumps, small wind turbines, and fuel cell systems. The act also eliminates a reduction in credits for installations with subsidized financing.
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From the New York Times on Wednesday, February 25, 2009:
The money in the bill is enough to pay for a tremendous expansion of efficiency efforts across the country. But as with other parts of the stimulus package, the efficiency plan is creating tension between spending the money quickly, to get rapid economic stimulus, and spending it well, to do the most good over the long run.
“There’s enormous opportunity here for expansion of energy efficiency in this country,” said Lowell Ungar, the policy director for the Alliance to Save Energy, an advocacy group. “But there is certainly the potential for waste.”
President Obama signed the stimulus package into law on Feb. 17, hailing it as a shot of money big enough to help shake the economy from its lethargy while advancing many of his campaign priorities. Accelerating the country’s energy transition is at the top of his list. Many experts in the field agree with him that carefully chosen investments in efficiency will ultimately save more than they cost, by cutting energy bills.
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Click here to read what CCHRC has to offer for homebuilders and homeowners who want to make a home more energy efficient.
From the New York Times on Friday, February 26, 2009:
. . . ‘Cow poop is cow poop,’ admits Ms. Slupecki, who was feeling some frustration at the paucity of workable suggestions by the time they reached dessert and coffee. Half in jest, she blurted, ‘Can’t you guys do something with this stuff — make a flowerpot or something?’
Those were fateful words for brothers Ben and Matthew Freund, second-generation dairy farmers who at the time maintained a herd of 225 Holsteins in East Canaan. Each cow produces 120 pounds of manure daily. Why not grow flowers and tomatoes from cow flops? It took eight years’ development, a $72,000 federal grant secured through Connecticut’s Agricultural Businesses Cluster, and countless grim experiments. Now their manure-based CowPots — biodegradable seed-starting containers — are being made on the farm and sold to commercial and backyard growers who prefer their advantages over plastic pots.
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From the New York Times on Wednesday, February 11, 2009:
The modular housing industry likes to say that it has always had a few characteristics that today might be considered eco-friendly — from reduced waste to a smaller construction footprint.
“In a modular plant, recycling is huge,” says Chad Harvey, the deputy director of the Modular Building Systems Association. “Everything is used and reused.”
But it’s only recently — and increasingly amid the flagging housing market — that manufacturers of factory-built homes have realized that concepts like efficiency and sustainability can make for good business strategy.
High-end modular housing companies like Michelle Kaufmann Designs and LivingHomes — both based in California — are taking the green concept to new levels, catering to the luxury market with amenities like built-in rainwater harvesting, grey water reuse, tankless water heaters and bamboo flooring.
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From the Los Angeles Times on Friday, January 6, 2009:
When clothes dryers account for at least 6% of the electricity used by U.S. households, is it any wonder that line-drying is coming back? In places where the practice is banned as an unsightly nuisance to neighbors, right-to-dry activists and blogging eco-moms are forming an alliance. Their cause: to reduce energy consumption and to call upon sunlight rather than bleach to get those whites even whiter.
The movement also includes homeowners pinched by rising electric bills as well as some celebrity converts. Yes, there’s even a blog dedicated to tracking who’s who in L.A. line-drying. (For the curious, it’s blog.linedryit.com/eco_facts/, which lists the likes of “The O.C.” actress Rachel Bilson and singer Olivia Newton-John.)
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From the New York Times on Wednesday, February 4, 2009:
FOR the last two years, Rachel Muston, a 32-year-old information-technology worker for the Canadian government in Ottawa, has been taking steps to reduce her carbon footprint — composting, line-drying clothes, installing an efficient furnace in her three-story house downtown.
About a year ago, though, she decided to “go big” in her effort to be more environmentally responsible, she said. After mulling the idea over for several weeks, she and her husband, Scott Young, did something many would find unthinkable: they unplugged their refrigerator. For good.
“It’s been a while, and we’re pretty happy,” Ms. Muston said recently. “We’re surprised at how easy it’s been.”
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From the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner on Monday, February 2, 2009:
Businessman Bernie Karl said he’s ready to move ahead with a prototype power system: A small-scale energy plant he’d link to indoor food production and biofuel cultivation.
The project — which he said he started eyeing a few years ago — has drawn recent interest from public officials and researchers looking to ride Karl’s coattails.
The original plan — for a 400 kilowatt, carbon-neutral, co-generation, vegetation and waste-paper-fed energy plant between Fairbanks and North Pole — carries the prospect of benefitting from a proposed agriculture project on 600 acres nearby.
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From the Anchorage Daily News on Sunday, February 1, 2009:
An effort to find new sources of renewable “small hydro” power for the Railbelt is running into opposition from advocates of another, equally noble environmental cause: protection of the mountain headwaters of the fish-rich Kenai River.
Electric Association, working with a private consortium, is studying “low impact” small-hydro projects for four mountain lakes and streams around Moose Pass and Cooper Landing.But the state-funded studies ran into loud opposition in the last two weeks from local residents, who foresee plenty of possible impacts from the proposed diversion pipelines and access roads, including threats to the scenic area’s salmon spawning and its tourist-based economy.
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From the Chicago Tribune on Friday, January 23, 2009:
Even before home designers and builders headed to Las Vegas for this week’s International Builders Show, they had a pretty clear idea of where residential construction was headed.
Yes, the home-building industry is in the dumps, but there are still visionary designers coming up with a better mousetrap, so to speak, and product manufacturers creating a wide variety of accoutrements to make it a more livable space. Also, regardless of how tight consumers are feeling with their wallets, there’s still a fair share of them paging through the shelter magazines at their kitchen tables, tearing out pages as they dream about the perfect next home for them.
What they’re finding is that technological advancements are changing what it takes to build a better house and what to install in each of its rooms. “Innovation is changing the face of everything we do now,” said Michael Menn, of Design Construction Concepts Ltd.,Northbrook.
Here’s a rundown of some of the “ins,” the trends taking hold, and the “outs,” those ideas whose days are numbered.
Click here to read the rundown.