See you over at the new place. 

Oh, also, there's an interesting presentation of the Discovery Tech on facebook (one thing that makes it better than the webpage: you can see who the Discovery Tech fans are, and where they come from...Argentina, Greece, India, Poland).

Chris

A scenario that has always intrigued me is places like Cracker Barrel providing free charging stations (like the free wi-fi you get at a coffee shop). It's cold and rainy and you're hungry, so you stop at a Cracker Barrel to get a warm meal by their fireplace. You plug your car into their electric hitching post, in front of the rocking chairs there on the porch. Part of the draw to choose Cracker Barrel is that they're going to provide you with a free fill up.

But the scenario is busted by conundrum. Cracker Barrel isn't going to pay for charging stations unless people are going to pay for electric vehicles. The price tag for the electric vehicle (a Chevy Volt at $40K, for example) would appear to be prohibitively expensive.

So here's a run at the math that would make this all make sense, were it possible to break out of the vicious conundrum.

• Chevy Volt costs $40K
• Less <$7,500> Federal tax credit
• Amended Chevy Volt cost: $33K
• Avoided gas cost is <$15K> if a car got 20 mpg over 120,000 mile life cycle and gas cost $2.50/gallon

If you could stay within the Volt's 40 mile all-electric range, and if you could get your charging for free (from your employer, from the Cracker Barrel), you're now talking about life cycle adjusted equivalent Volt price tag of $18K. People are buying Volts on this math.

From the Cracker Barrel side, using the annual net costs calculation from Page 13 Project Get Ready's report, after a couple of years of initial net costs of several thousand dollars annually, Cracker Barrel would be paying less than $1,000 per year, or less than $3 a day, for the charging infrastructure. Maybe with the electricity costs, it is $5 a day (assume the cost to fully charge an EV is a buck a day, and Cracker Barrel doesn't fully charge each vehicle that docks). Cracker Barrels are installing charging stations on this math.

The trick then, is getting the one math to not wait on the other math.

Photo: yummyinthetummyblog on flickr

For more info on the conference, see here. For more info on SMU's geothermal efforts, seehere. 

All this ZEB focus is at once impressive and insufficient. Impressive in that so many projects are breaking ground in the few years since the ZEB concept debuted, insufficient if real headway is to be made in reducing building energy use (buildings, which use over two thirds of our electrical power). The ZEB, or more specifically a world blanketed with ZEBs, would be a breathtaking goal requiring significant focus and commitment. But it also could be just a mere stepping stone to the ulterior goal: the building as power plant, as producer of energy to power things like, uhm, cars. (What do we call this? Building based power plant? Net plus? Energy Plus?).

Crafting the dream-ZEB:

Strip down the building's need for power:

• Optimum orientation of building to sun
• Thermal massing
• Insulated Concrete Form Walls
• Chilled concrete beams
• Underfloor air distribution
• Green Roof
• Solar Chimney
• High efficiency windows
• High efficiency lighting
• Smart building (sophisticated building automation controls)
• Smart grid
• Geothermal

Make power:

• Wind turbines integrated into the building structure
• Photovoltaic
• Solar Thermal
• Geothermal
• Enhanced Geothermal
• Wave/Tidal (assume this building's next to big water)

Export the surplus power:

• to the grid 
• to the electric vehicles parked in the building's parking garage.

Rendering: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP

Well, okay, they didn't really commandeer it, and it's really more about smart metering than smart grid, but, this is an interesting, inexpensive offering that helps you see how you're using electricity. The EnergyDetective (TED) provides instant feedback on your electricity consumption, which can help you trim electric bills by ten to twenty percent. To put a TED in my house would be about $240, so a ten percent utility bill savings would mean the TED pays for itself within a year.

Wouldn't it provide quick payback, at a societal level anyway, to install more intelligent traffic lights to better move traffic through stoplights?

Better yet, wonder if there's a technology brewing out there (maybe based on GPS equipped cars) where traffic signals look out at incoming traffic to analyze how to get traffic efficiently through their intersection. Benefits: better throughput on existing roads (maybe deferring the need to build more roads), saved time for motorists, road rage reductions, saved fuel. A light googling didn't turn up anything.

Photo: Fredrik73 on flickr

John Peterson, an energy sector lawyer focused on "guiding small growth-oriented companies through the corporate finance process" offers a sensible, constructive critique that the electric vehicle actually derails our quest to end our oil dependency. 

Since the battery is the bottleneck, Mr. Peterson analyzes the plug-in quest by putting the required battery capacity for the EV Leaf against the conventional hybrid Prius. For every 48 kwH of battery capacity, you get two Leafs saving 872 gallons of gas a year, or 32 Prius saving 5,568 gallons. If we're stuffing our constrained battery resources into a limited number of all-electric vehicles, we suffer the opportunity cost of not putting them in lots of hybrids saving lots of gas. 

Well, burst my bubble. If John is right, the plug-in is not the way forward, and the whole Holy Trinity thing collapses. 

But if John is right, it may just be that he is right...for the time being. It may be that we have to arc to the solution, not beeline to the solution. It may make sense, for the time being, for broad scale production, to focus on the conventional hybrid, as we continue to research and develop storage solutions that let cars draw, store and return power to the grid. The beautiful synergies that come from plugging cars into the grid should not be forsaken, yet, because of an intermediate technical challenge.

Continuing to think critically, though, is necessary to properly shape the path of the arc if we want to get from here to there.

Photo: Katherine Sanderson on flickr

(Thanks to Knowledge Problem for helping me get great thinking like John Peterson's on my Google reader).

To found a construction project in trust is to save money (and energy, more on this later). This I know in my bones from having lived on projects founded in trust, that go on to be successful by all the usual measures: budget, function, grand opening dates, reputation of the facility, reputation and profitability of the organizations that put it up. On the other hand are projects shaped by people who are niggardly in advancing trust to the undertaking, where collapse and failure is the inevitable, miserable result.

Rex Miller et. al. just published The Commercial Real Estate Revolution, which I've just begun, but can already tell is on target about much of what ails the construction industry, described by the book as "broken." On the first page Revolution claims there is a 50 percent waste factor in the $1.3 trillion U.S. construction market (need more proof though to swallow that 50 percent number). And that a good portion of the waste results from lack of trust.

In the typical design-bid-build process, the contractor is brought on after the most important discussions have already taken place, and the course is set (to fathom, see this graph by HOK). The very act of bidding results from a lack of trust in contractors to develop a fair price, and usually sets the stage for further erosion of trust as the project progresses, so that precious time is spent researching and validating and justifying trust (instead of planning and coordinating and executing the project).

So as project participants bog down in the time-consuming task of developing trust, the clock ticks. It is hard sometimes to understand how critical time is in a construction project (even for many owners and architects who have lived their working lives in this industry). A project is like a freight train that has left the station, a lot of mass, a lot of velocity. If you dally on the tracks over some decision because you don't trust those you're working with, little messes get made. Concrete gets poured that, had a timely decision been made, would not have been poured. Imagine the money and energy that is wasted in these instances: extracting the materials to make the concrete, bringing the materials together to make the concrete, mixing the concrete, delivering the concrete, placing the concrete, demolishing the concrete, hauling off the concrete. A lot of money. A lot of embodied energy. Wasted. For lack of trust.

This is just one example among many of the waste wrought by a system built on mistrust.  The Commercial Real Estate Revolution gives voice to the leaders of the various players in the industry (owners, designers, builders, subcontractors, vendors) who are dissatisfied with the way we are doing business and want to move on to a proven, trust-based way: collaborative contracts, BIM, lean construction, sustainable construction. 

If we do, we will save money and energy. Trust me.

Photo: spajjs on flickr

On the construction project just completed, we used a paperless submittal process. For those not familiar with how a commercial construction project is managed, the submittal process is a last check before materials are ordered and building components fabricated. Subcontractors provide shop drawings, cut sheets, and samples to ensure the right things are procured, and to coordinate the work before a dozen guys with tools are standing around ready to install them.

The submittal usually involves lots of big paper (think of the blue lines you see architects rolling out in TV ads or movies) in multiple copies, and the byzantine, time consuming practice of transcribing notes (by hand!) to each of those copies. 

Photo: ღĴęNňζ™(OFF) on flickr

Because the clock is ticking, submittals are generally couriered or FedEx'd from subcontractor to general contractor, general contractor to design consultants and owner, architect to general contractor, general contractor to subcontractor. Lots of paper, lots of gas to lug the paper around, lots of time.

So Jason Mayes (our sharp twenty-something office engineer) pushed paperless, driven by the possibility of bagging a LEED innovation point (which might take the project from Certified to Silver certification). Subs agreed to email submittals in .pdf format; the architect to set up an ftp site as a landing spot for the e-submittals. Using Adobe Acrobat, notes could be attached, and digital stamps and signatures used to authenticate the review. 

While the experiment was a resounding success, two things will make it better. First: doing better at getting hard copies to the field. We were sloppy on this point, which made for a frustrated and sometimes out-of-the-loop superintendent (the one guy who must be in the loop). Second: reviewing submittals requires cross-referencing to contract documents and other reference sources. Two big, side-by-side computer screens should make this cross-referencing exercise easier and thus more effective.

Otherwise, paperless is quicker, easier to involve everyone that needs to see the submittal, saves on paper, transportation, storage, and disposal costs, and is better for retrieving those documents once the project is complete and the construction trailers are gone.

Paperless showcases the best of the green building movement: using the sustainability paradigm to ferret out changes that improve construction processes, save money, improve the working experience, and use resources wisely.

Photo: ღĴęNňζ™(OFF) on flickr

Hmm? What? No one told me about a new, carbon negative way of sequestering carbon. The last time I paid attention to carbon sequestration, it was all about deep sixing CO₂ in the Marianas Trench or the Norwegian North Sea, which came with big price tags and fretting about the CO₂ leaking from its sequestered places. Now it appears we can just burn up some agrichar and throw it in the dirt, where it remains, inert and sequestered.

Here's the process. Put organic waste (corn stalks or chicken manure, say) in a vacuum sealed tube, heat from the outside. The gases produced can be made to be as clean as natural gas using conventional air pollution control devices. This gas powers an engine to make electricity (and, the exhaust heat it makes is looped back to heat the corn stalks).

The other byproduct, the burned remains, is agrichar: a solid, inert, high carbon char. It is not bio-available and so its CO₂ will not be taken up by plants or organisms. It is sequestered. CO₂ is sequestered an inch or so below your toes. Just right there underneath your feet. Agrichar improves low quality soils, reducing the need for fertilizers and the amount of water needed by the soil. 

So how would this process pay for itself? 

• Selling off (or using for your own other purposes) the energy excess to that used by the process itself
• Selling the agrichar
• Earned carbon credits
• Avoided cost of transporting biomass waste to landfill; avoided landfill tipping fees

Of course, a chief value would be agrichar's ability to address CO₂ issues, which may not be valued, or properly valued, right now by the marketplace.

This sounds to good to be true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe its marketplace hurdles are surmountable, maybe they aren't.  Maybe somebody like stomv needs to jump all over this and try to poke holes in it.

For starters, go here for a couple of videos on biochar efforts in Australia. Let me know what you find out, because this is powerful stuff, if true.

Photo: Ellie Van Houtte on flickr

Well.

It averaged something like 50 miles to the gallon over the life of the vehicle. Maintenance costs besides preventative stuff and tires? A changed belt, and a lamp for the driver side tail light. Never even changed the brake pads. After 120,000 miles! 

I don't know what price it will fetch, but blue book is $10,195 (the equalized blue book for the Crown Vic it replaced is $6,090).

The analysis that lead to the trial incorporation of the Prius into the fleet was a life cycle cost of $35K for the Crown Vic and $20K for the Prius, based on gas at $2.15 a gallon and trade in values of $4,500 for the Vic and $7K for the Prius (current resale values are a grand or so better than initially assumed).

The hybrid done good.

Photo: TailspinT on flickr

Meanwhile, corporations everywhere are setting up green storefronts, then scrambling to put product behind their "we are sustainable" storefront. As they do, urban wind struggles on in the "garages" of so many start-ups. 

You two ought to get together. 

If the big guys would acquire the start-ups, or otherwise partner with or support  them, big guys might be providing access to much needed capital and other resources (legal, lobbying, brand recognition, deep r&d benches) that will get urban wind going, even as they create their own legitimate sustainability credentials. The two were made for each other: each has something the other needs.

While urban wind has an exciting and possibly vital role to play in developing buildings as sources of (versus consumers of) power, it's got serious hurdles to clear, and right now we're asking the start-ups (the guys with the short, stubby legs) to clear them on their own. Some of the issues:

• exponentially bigger yields come from bigger blades, urban blades are little
• legal and code issues connecting to the grid
• low public awareness
• physical and aesthetic integration with buildings and urban landscapes

Smart big companies will realize the double business opportunity of creating legitimate green credentials and tapping potentially profitable revenue streams from an emerging product in a green energy sector that itself has serious growth potential, given the many forces pushing it to grow.

Go Broadstar and Skydrill.

Photo: happier landings on flickr

In a recent blog, Energy Collisions and Autonomous Appliances, he points out that appliance makers, "are starved for information," particularly when it comes to pricing energy in applicances that work in a smart grid. As Toby sees it, the appliance makers are the good guys and the energy suppliers the curmudgeon defenders of old world, fixed-price electricity. The energy suppliers need to give it up, and provide the price signal information the appliance makers crave.

Imagine these scenarios conjured by Toby and the Appliance Makers:

• Do you want that shirt clean and ready in 30 minutes [high energy mode]? Is it OK if it takes 90 minutes [low energy mode]? Is it OK to wait for 10 minutes until the energy price drops? How about 45 minutes? How about seven hours to get the overnight energy prices—or the wind-sourced energy?
• [The] washing machine may use no energy while filling, and then plenty while agitating the clothes. If an appliance understands its own energy profile, it may start filling its tank five minutes before the price drops—and time its final spin to complete before energy prices step up.
• [Appliances] comparing energy profiles [to] avoid the [washing machine] spin cycle and the refrigerator’s compressor cycle from running at the same time. With almost no degradation of performance, these autonomous systems can begin to shape the overall load profile of a building.
• Systems working together to avoid energy spikes.

Swaths of interconnected appliances working all the little pockets of time, on their own, together, to smooth demand on the electrical supply system. Continuous autonomous load shaping.

Photo: panduh on flickr

The mileage fee is a sensible plank that belongs in any platform developed to remake the way we use energy. Among its other virtues, the mileage fee creates a way to incentivize efficient use of a constrained resource: the road.

In Bern Grush's dedicated to exploring the mileage fee (where he responds to this "PowrTalk") he identifies a complex of purposes that would try to shape road policy, then argues that the mileage fee is the one tool capable of addressing them all:

The Complex of Purposes

[1] The move to improved or alternate power plants makes the gas-tax less useful every day. Mary Peters put it best: “Relying on the gas tax is like relying on cardboard to keep the rain out – the longer you use it the less it works.”

Two things worth noting:

• Government support creates a welcome landing spot for Better Place, that could foster opportunities for the hosting country to produce and enjoy the technology Better Place deploys.

• Using a taxi company makes sense because it subjects the battery swap testing to the rigors, to the discipline, of an operational business enterprise. There's an implicit litimus test of being at least as quick as a gas station fill-up, and a taxi operation will demand that the swap meet this test.

Photo: Better Place on flickr

The mileage fee is a sensible plank that belongs in any platform developed to remake the way we use energy. Among its other virtues, the mileage fee creates a way to incentivize efficient use of a constrained resource: the road.

In Bern Grush's blog dedicated to exploring the mileage fee (where he responds to this old PowrTalk post) he identifies a complex of purposes that would try to shape road policy, then argues that the mileage fee is the one tool capable of addressing them all:

The Complex of Purposes

[1] The move to improved or alternate power plants makes the gas-tax less useful every day. Mary Peters put it best: “Relying on the gas tax is like relying on cardboard to keep the rain out – the longer you use it the less it works.” 

[2] Taxing the resource (oil) we want people to use less of in order to fund our roads is plainly shooting ourselves in the foot as is funding hospitals solely on cigarette taxes. 

[3] Are we trying to fund roads? Then we can tax anything you’d like such as property tax or sales tax as is now done in some jurisdictions (a great congestion-builder, by the way). 

[4] Are we trying to manage congestion? Then tax by time of use, distance driven and place of use (TDP). 

[5] Are we trying to reduce emissions? Then tax road use by vehicle type/size. 

[6] Are we trying to move people to electric cars? Then tax gas AND roads. 

[7] Are we trying to balance the damage from trucks? Then charge trucks more (to be reflected at retail anyway; sorry, Virginia, no free lunch). 

[8] Are we trying to open highways for more effective commerce? Then charge cars more. 

[9] Are we trying to get people to use transit or walk or bike or telework or move closer to work? Then charge by time of use, place of use, and distance driven.

Solution: the Mileage Fee

Mr. Grush concludes: "If you want to do all of these things in some reasonable measure, then Time, Distance and Place (TDP) charging is your ticket – your only one. The technology now available to do this can be made private (even anonymous), and can handle parking, insurance, driver rewards and credits and a dozen other user-attractive features, so that the cost of metering for road-use charging can be reduced to the current cost of collecting gas tax."

Photo: Indian Pana on flickr

Now survival depends on extracting those resources wisely, and using those resources wisely.

The day of the car that does what you want is coming. The iCar if you will. Ford is developing 21 Escapes that do vehicle-to-grid communication, where the driver gets to program "when to recharge the vehicle, for how long and at what utility rate" when it is connected and recharging from the grid. 

Good.

Cars that give you the option to get there fast or get there efficiently, to charge quickly or cost effectively, to secure a parking spot in a crowded central business district? 

Better.

And then, to top it off: "Dr. Jasna Tomic with CALSTART estimates that the national grid would only need 7 percent additional capacity to off-peak charge 100 million electric vehicles.Those same vehicles could provide 70 percent of the national grid’s needed peak power."

Best.

Make driving better. Tackle big energy issues.

Photo: Georg Hoermann on flickr

When neighbors replace their roofs on account of hail damage, he doesn't. 

He expected a five year payback, but got it much sooner (granted, he might of gotten a deal on his concrete supply). He said his utility bills are thirty percent of his neighbors, who have equivalently sized houses.

I'm interested.

His big, fat concrete walls were made with concrete insulating forms. The drawback? It's hard to move walls if you didn't think things through.

The upside, though, is pretty tantalizing.

And, consider this: you'd probably be more comfortable in a big fat wall house if you were Alyssa Danigelis trying to live without AC for the summer.

Photo: ramon2002 on flickr