In April of 2009, Toronto became the first city in North America to mandate green roofs for most types of new construction. By a City Council vote of 36-2, the legislation was to require green roofs on all residential buildings over 6 stories, schools, affordable housing developments, and commercial and industrial buildings beginning January 31, 2010 for most property types.

But last November the industrial real estate sector successfully lobbied for an exception to the Green Roof Bylaw, as the legislation is known, before it was scheduled to take effect for industrial properties at the end of this month. New industrial properties and building additions are instead permitted to install cool roofing material (i.e., “white roofs”) instead of green roofs. Now the institutional sector – which includes schools – is pushing for the same exception. A decision is expected sometime next week.

The pushback shouldn’t be surprising: the development community in Toronto opposed the initial legislation on the basis of increased costs. (On the other hand, green roof advocates believed the legislation wasn’t broad enough and actually successfully fought to increase its purview over an original iteration of the bill.)

I was a student in Canada at the time this mandate passed. I can’t understand why anywhere, let-alone a place like Toronto, would think this was a good idea. From a thermal perspective it makes no sense compared to alternative, less expensive options (as Dr. Lstiburek explains in his typical style). I don’t know much about stormwater management, maybe they really have the impact folks claim and maybe in some cities the issue is as important as some hysterical green roof advocates would lead me to believe. But I still can’t help but wonder if there aren’t less expensive (and more boring, less sexy) alternatives that would achieve the same result if not better.

I’m all for developers having a clear code-compliant pathway for installing green roofs if they so choose, but this mandate is silly. I was recently chatting with an old-timer who has been though many revisions of code update cycles. He explained the process this way:

• First, don’t don’t require stupid things.
• Second, don’t prevent smart things.
• Third, don’t encourage stupid things.
• Fourth, do encourage smart things.
• Fifth, do require smart things.

The green roof advocates bin their argument in the fifth bullet, but they are wrong. Industry bins them in the first. Most reasonable people bin them in number three – provide a pathway but don’t encourage entire cities to go down that road…. In the code-revision/sausage-making process, number three is often the best one can hope for.

Physicist: Well, we could (and do, somewhat) beam non-thermal radiation into space, like light, lasers, radio waves, etc. But the problem is that these “sources” are forms of high-grade, low-entropy energy. Instead, we’re talking about getting rid of the waste heat from all the processes by which we use energy. This energy is thermal in nature. We might be able to scoop up some of this to do useful “work,” but at very low thermodynamic efficiency. If you want to use high-grade energy in the first place, having high-entropy waste heat is pretty inescapable.

…we’re too close to an astounding point for me to leave it unspoken. At that 2.3% growth rate, we would be using energy at a rate corresponding to the total solar input striking Earth in a little over 400 years. We would consume something comparable to the entire sun in 1400 years from now. By 2500 years, we would use energy at the rate of the entire Milky Way galaxy—100 billion stars! I think you can see the absurdity of continued energy growth. 2500 years is not that long, from a historical perspective. We know what we were doing 2500 years ago. I think I know what we’re not going to be doing 2500 years hence.

Adding insulation for homes as a sound mitigation measure is nothing new. In fact, it’s a selling point. I’ve been in high performance demonstration homes next to highways and, with the windows closed, you don’t hear the buzz of the trucks rolling by. It’s quite nice, until you want to open your windows. Anyway, it’s an intangible benefit of building a quality structure that insulation and air sealing delivers enhances thermal comfort, energy efficiency and noise mitigation (of course, if done poorly, it can lead to moisture failures and costly headaches).

As I was driving home the other day I hear this story on NPR:

Sirens are decades-old air-raid technology from World War II that were designed, principally, to warn people who are outdoors of threats. Today, homes are built and insulated so well that outdoor warnings rarely make it inside. And since the killer tornadoes last year in Alabama, weather experts have ramped up educational efforts.

This is not an insoluble problem by any means, but one that shouldn’t be ignored. It’s just one example of how the built environment interacts with all the complex systems around us, be they energy related, social, civic, etc… Worth thinking about.

America should have a diversified energy portfolio. You’ll sometimes hear people say that the natural-gas boom obviates the need for offshore wind or something like that. But it’s very rare to hear anyone say anything other than that the energy portfolio should be well-diversified—including hydrocarbons, renewables, efficiency, and allowing for the possibility of a nuclear revival or the development of new technologies.

Cheap energy is a public good. This is where environmentalists often go awry. They may have a sense that if cheap energy is cheap, it’s because we haven’t adequately priced in the externalities. It’s also true, however, that cheap energy has positive externalities. In America, it reduces the cost of living and the cost of doing business; in poor countries if energy isn’t cheap, people aren’t going to have it—some 2 billion people don’t have electricity. So when environmentalists talk about the need for a carbon tax, they should be aware of the fact that everything has trade-offs.

Environmental costs, including water and emissions, must be weighed. And this is where business interests often go awry. They may have a sense that because climate change is a polarising issue, environmental protection is too. But there are reasons to protect the environment, particularly air and water, that have nothing to do with climate change. The EPA’s new standard for mercury emissions, for example, seems to have grassroots support, which is why business has taken its case to the courts.

Regulatory uncertainty should be minimised. This is a common complaint in most industries and it’s debatable whether we should be sympathetic in general. In America, some degree of uncertainty is an entirely predictable consequence of the political system, and some analyses find no evidence that regulatory uncertainty is actually a drag on business. Energy, however, has a more solid complaint than industry in general: most forms of energy production require massive capital projects, and no one is keen to spend a few billion on a LNG export terminal if there’s a good chance the regulatory context will have changed significantly by the time construction is completed.

The shale gas boom is real. It’s not a silver bullet, but horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have opened up vast reserves of cheap, plentiful, domestic natural gas. While greater attention to the industry is surely warranted, the evidence currently available suggests that natural gas probably has more virtues than flaws. For me, the tipping point is that any way you look at it (as in MIT’s Future of Natural Gas study, which sketches out several scenarios) natural gas is knocking out coal. There are people who see it differently; see Bill McKibben, for example, for a critical look at fracking. Either way, however, the techniques at hand aren’t going to be un-invented. So while the effects of the shale boom are indeterminate over the long term—it could be a bridge to a low-carbon economy, or a barrier to developing alternative infrastructure—gas has changed America’s short- and medium-term energy outlook.

Renewable energy is part of the portfolio, but it’s still small. Among the hydrocarbons crowd there is some frustration with renewables—the lofty promises, the high costs, the hat-in-hand approach to public funding. Their point, however, is that renewables aren’t competitive yet; they will almost always allow that wind and solar have a role to play, albeit perhaps in the future. And renewables advocates themselves would also say that the industry is still developing; companies are developing better storage systems, for example, and amassing more data about whether consumers will make good use of distributed photovoltaic systems.

All reasonable and discussion points to build, perhaps, consensus on. But our politicians, left or right, still can’t seem to discuss the issue constructively in the public realm. “The Republican rhetoric on energy tends to ignore externalities and Democratic analyses often seem like they don’t understand the economy.” What a shame.

… shhh, don’t tell ! I recently ran across this functionality on Accuweather, after doing a google search for something or other:

http://www.accuweather.com/en/us/new-york-ny/10007/home-energy-effi…

If you click on the about button, you essentially get a zero explanation. Monitoring it for several days, it seems to prioritize sunniness, then temperature, then who knows? Prioritizing sunniness would mean they assume that most homes have a great solar orientation, especially for the rooms used the most in daylight hours, for which as far as I know there is no data:

http://oikos.com/esb/42/solar.html

Perhaps this breakthrough in weather forecasting(certainly more important to saving energy and the climate than ‘golf weather’) can be useful to building designers and smart thermostat designers?

However, from what I gather, Tom’s suspicion that the algorith is primarily driven by solar conditions doesn’t seem to hold much water, as this forecast for Denver makes no sense whatsoever.

Note the daytime temperatures and cloud conditions. Hard to imagine 36 F and snowy is more efficient than 70 and sunny!

Yellowstone National Park officials have proposed a new option for managing motorized winter use based on limiting noise in the park, instead of limiting the number of snowmobiles or snowcoaches.

Yellowstone is one of my favorite places in the world (at least places I’ve been lucky enough to live near). The debates surrounding park policies are at least as complex as any the building performance world faces (e.g., wolves, wildlife management, human use and conservations vs. embedded capital costs of utility business and regulatory structures, market barriers, uncosted externalities). This proposal caught my eye, and made me think that maybe the energy world operates too frequently within boxes we’ve constructed around our current practice. All too often those who operate in the business and policy space constrain their thinking to what they know.  It’s the obvious way to approach problems we understand given the constraints that have emerged as a result of our current knowledge base. At times, it is useful to take a step back and try and think about them in different ways…to see the issues we think are important in different ways.

What options do we in the building performance world overlook because of the walls built up around our world view?

Tendril is purchasing Recurve, an energy audit and retrofit company, to integrate its software into the Tendril platform.

Recurve has gone through a few retrofits of its own during its eight-year history. Last year, the company shifted its construction group to Advanced Home Energy, a retrofitter in the East Bay. At that time, Recurve focused solely on software development.

The downturn in construction, lack of capital for improvements coupled with politically hog-tied PACE programs has made the business of home retrofits tough in the past few years, not to mention the inherently fragmented market across 50 states. The picture looking forward isn’t much rosier. And even just the software turned out to be tough to sell on its own, even though it streamlined the retrofit process.

“The contractor space is very fragmented,” said Andy Leventhal, CEO of Recurve who will become the head of business development with product service providers for Tendril.

Tendril will use the home auditing software to add more depth and precision to its home energy management offerings. “The piece we were really excited was they’ll enable us to improve the modeling of homes in a much more substantial way,” said Ivo Steklac, chief operating officer for Tendril.

The company will acquire Recurve for an undisclosed amount. Recurve had raised $16 million in two rounds of financing. This is Tendril’s second acquisition. It bought GroundedPower in 2010.

For the software, Recurve took all of the tools, including building simulation, solution optimization, and photo management, and put them in one place with a basic user interface for contractors. Recurve fine-tuned the software in-house to account for all of the variables that go into building efficiency to create a program that even less-experienced auditors could learn quickly.

“Nobody wants to admit something doesn’t work so we can learn from mistakes and move on,” said Spielvogel. “At ASHRAE, we used to share our war stories and publish them. That stopped about 20 years ago because of fears of getting sued.”

Maybe we need a Journal of Engineering Errology similar to what the bio-world has….

The Blood and Gore manifesto also wants firms to have to account for assets that might become “stranded” —worth much less—in the event of policy changes such as the imposition of a price on carbon emissions or higher charges for the use of water. This, the pair contend, would reveal many companies to be in much worse shape than they now appear, given plausible scenarios for how policy in these areas might one day develop.

This scenario-planning might seem like a lot of extra work about stuff that is only hypothetical, and thus a burdensome extra cost. But Mr Blood points out that many firms already apply a price of carbon internally, for example when evaluating significant investments, as they increasingly think it likely that governments will impose one. So perhaps it isn’t that much more work.

Emphasis mine. This is wildly speculative and the suggestions made by Blood and Gore are highly uncertain, but one can’t help but wonder how broadly these assertions apply? What types of firms are being referenced? Certainly some firms apply these sorts of internal costs, but how much does it impact decisions? On what assumptions (in terms of future legislation) are these analyses calculated? How broadly does this commentary apply to the industrial economy? Do these considerations have any positive effect relative to the counter-factual?