Posts filed under ‘News’
Electric News
It looks like those treasured HOV lane stickers for EV’ and Hybrids are going the way of the Dodo. Californian is looking to phase them out and only allow new purchasers to have only three years of access. The article on Clean Technica (https://cleantechnica.com/2018/05/05/boooh-california-bows-to-industry-pressure-reduces-hov-lane-access-for-evs-fight-back/) goes in the details. One more disincentive for me to purchase a new EV to replace my long in the tooth 2012 Fusion Hybrid.
On a better note it looks like the good news might be surrounding the requirement in 2020 of all new homes, apartments and condo developments to have solar PV. It looks like the California Energy Commission is likely to approve this soon. Article from the Independant (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/california-solar-power-panels-homes-renewable-green-energy-climate-change-a8337626.html)
Cities Taking The Lead On Climate Change
With the incoming Trump Administration signaling a change away from climate change research and green projects and improvements it is falling to the cities across our country to take up the banner. In an article from Sustainable Business it is clear that many cities including locally, Los Angeles are ready. It is quite an interesting group and I can’t wait to see what they bring to the table.
Especially in the face of publicly traded companies not having to disclose as much of the potential downside of climate change on their operations and profits (Green Building Law Update 12/11/2016) it is heartening to see the broad support for a new ordinance in the City of Los Angeles (My News LA 12/20/2016). The ordinance is in response to an analysis by the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA and the City Energy Project suggest that 4% of the city’s buildings are responsible for possibly 50% of the energy and water use. Talk about a defined target for efficiency improvement!
The ordinance basically requires annual reporting for all buildings larger than 20,000 square feet to the Department of Building and Safety and for buildings over 15,000 square feet that every five years that the building will be required to take steps to reduce its total resource footprint.It will be very interesting to see what incentives and penalties are attached to this program eventually to aid building owners to comply.
As always I thank you for your time and interest. Please take the time to Digg, Stumble Upon or add to the other social network of your choice to help me spread the word about these issues. Please forward any questions or suggestions to: askthefm@gmail.com
Energy Efficient Windows – Retrofit Opportunity?
I am an energy efficiency consultant out here in California and there has been a great deal of emphasis on replacing older single pane windows with dual pane, usually vinyl models. I many cases where a building is being remodeled the building owner has no choice but to install them in order to comply with the 2013 energy related code sections. This is especially problematic if the building has some historic value to the city. Now the Federal government in the form of Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) is sponsoring research into methods to retrofit these older windows through its SHIELD program.
The full story is here on Green Building Elements (http://greenbuildingelements.com/2015/10/09/doe-announces-shield-program-for-energy-efficient-windows/). The DOE website with detail on the program can be found here: https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/Default.aspx#FoaId038dc107-a7de-407a-8253-86e3bc99ae00
As always I thank you for your time and interest. Please take the time to Stumble Upon or add to the other social network of your choice to help me spread the word about these issues. Please forward any questions or suggestions to: askthefm@gmail.com
Solar Power A Requirement For New Construction
It is looking like the wave of the future is increasing requirements to include renewable energy for newly constructed homes and commercial buildings.
The most interesting new story is somewhat local to me here in Southern California where the City of Lancaster now requires 1 kilowatt of solar power for all newly constructed single family homes. The ordinance that passed last March went into effect in Jan. 1, 2014. Here is the link to an article that covers it more in depth. (http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/04/lancaster-home-solar-mandate-1st-us-world-leads-city-2014/).
This is a significant escalation on the Californian mandate of net zero homes by 2020. The City of Los Angeles has been requiring that the conduit and wiring be put in place in all new home construction to make adding solar panels easier in the future for the homeowner.
I certainly hope that more cities follow Lancaster’s lead and make similar requirements as it can only help the environment and speed the transition to the renewable energy economy.
As always I thank you for your time and interest. Please take the time to Stumble Upon or add to the other social network of your choice to help me spread the word about these issues. Please forward any questions or suggestions to: askthefm@gmail.com
Can Concrete do Everything?
It seems that concrete remains a wonder material that has no end to its uses. Who would have imagined that the material we walk on could be transformed into a substance that may one day be part of our portable electronics.
It seems that folks at the Argonne National Laboratory have come up with a method to give concrete a metal configuration that makes it conductive for electricity. The full article is here: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-cement-metal.html
The link to the Argonne National Lab is here: http://www.aps.anl.gov/
As always I thank you for your time and interest. Please take the time to Stumble Upon or add to the other social network of your choice to help me spread the word about these issues. Please forward any questions or suggestions to: askthefm@gmail.com
Walkable Neighborhoods Prefered?
It seems that we have finally gotten to the place where downtown is preferred to suburbia and I for one think it is about time. The only thing keeping me from doing more walking and biking is this weekend’s heatwave in Southern California. I live in a portion of suburbia where I am actually close enough to walk to the market or drop my car off at a local shop and walk home and I consider myself very fortunate.
In a great report on BuildingGreen.com (http://www.buildinggreen.com/auth/article.cfm/2012/9/11/Walkable-Neighborhoods-Replace-Suburbs-as-Preferred-Real-Estate/) you can read the report.
There is a disappointing report on a main feature of our current downtown’s not keeping up with their neighbors on the green front. New hotels are actually worse power guzzlers than some built 50 years ago. In the story on Ecogeek.org via Metropolitan Magazine (http://www.ecogeek.org/architecture/3807-hotels-not-getting-greener-even-the-green-ones?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EcoGeek+%28EcoGeek%29) it seems it is time top rethink the whole process.
But there is always hope and the next story for tonight re-purposes something we see a lot of in Southern California since we host one of the world’s largest port, shipping containers! From the pages of Inhabitat .com (http://inhabitat.com/koma-modulars-live-work-store-in-luneburg-germany-is-made-from-recycled-shipping-containers/) we have a cool looking and very functional live/work space.
Lastly we have a couple of articles concerning one of the most enjoyable parts of a walkable community, creative landscape. We have a great article on the other not so obvious benefits of community gardens from Sustainablog.org (http://sustainablog.org/2012/09/community-gardens-provide-more-than-food-in-dc/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IM-sustainablog+%28Sustainablog%29). Also a fun thought about fitting our mass transit buses with green roofs from Ecogeek.org (http://www.ecogeek.org/ecogeeks/3809-green-roofs-for-buses?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EcoGeek+%28EcoGeek%29)
As always I thank you for your time and interest. Please take the time to Digg, Stumble Upon or add to the other social network of your choice to help me spread the word about these issues. Please forward any questions or suggestions to: askthefm@gmail.com
Bedbugs, now officially an epidemic!
I have written on this topic before and I was hopeful that science would have come up with a fairly simple answer to this age old problem. However these pests seem to have joined drug resistant staph infections as things that have stumped science.
Now we are having Bed Bug Summits! Actually the EPA had one last year (http://www.epa.gov/oppfead1/cb/csb_page/updates/2009/bed-bug-summit.html) that completely slipped my notice. This year Bed Bug University, wait there is a whole university dedicated to eradicating these pests? Anyway they held a summit in Chicago this year and it attracted a whole lot of attention.
The official Site: http://www.nabedbugsummit2010.com/
Chicago Tribune: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-09-21/news/ct-talk-bed-bug-summit-20100921_1_bedbugs-dini-miller-tiny-pests
MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30208436/
CBS News: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/21/earlyshow/contributors/susankoeppen/main6887137.shtml
Okay you get the idea. These pests have been on the march for a couple of years now and it seems that we aren’t going to get a chemical savior anytime soon. Unless of course we make DDT legal again. So we are in for a long frustrating battle that may only be in the end a holding action. No one is really sure why the infestation is growing so rapidly but there are certainly those searching for solutions.
Let’s just hope they find some good ones soon….
As always I thank you for your time and interest. Please take the time to Digg, Stumble Upon or add to the other social network of your choice to help me spread the word about these issues. Please forward any questions or suggestions to: askthefm@gmail.com
Gimme Shelter?
There is a series of recent news reports about a group of folks selling slots in an underground shelter city or at least village somewhere in the desert. While I think that this is just another scam based around the 2012 end of the world theory I thought that I might write a post on what is available out there for the do it your selfer.
What I found in large numbers are site purporting to have plans you can build or have built that will protect you in the event of a nuclear war. I guess they assume you won’t be suffering any direct hits…
The first site is: http://www.undergroundbombshelter.com/ is a fairly calm site compared to some and does take the time to give you some basic understanding of the issues that need to be addressed.
There are many examples of both this type of site and of the other more sensational kind. An example of this type is: http://www.alpinesurvival.com/nuclear_bomb_shelters.html
This site is much more scary and really tries to get you convinced that you need to spend serious money to protect yourself and your family from what they see as impending disaster. They so have a nice set of 3D mock up of shelters. However these examples seem a little unrealistic due to lack of storage for what I would think of as needed supplies.
Now what I think would be really able to make this type of a solution work is a planned town with a small sealed nuclear reactor that would allow the installation to be able to heat, light, cook, reprocess water and all of the other things an underground living space needs. There are small reactors coming to a neighborhood near you within five years say England’s Guardian newspaper: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos
In any event I am not planning on building or buying in to one of these anytime soon. Not because I believe that the world is not at risk for any of the disasters mentioned but rather because I don’t think that any of these actually represents a reasonable solution or presents more than a very temporary solution to our survival problem.
As always I thank you for your time and interest. Please take the time to Digg, Stumble Upon or add to the other social network of your choice to help me spread the word about these issues. Please forward any questions or suggestions to: askthefm@gmail.com
Building Technology Update for 5/23/2010
Hello Everyone,
Real life got in the way of regular posts, which for now is solved. I will be posting again every week on Sunday evenings for the foreseeable future.
Tonight we have one update and several interesting technologies. The update is on the Chinese drywall problem where the product was off gassing dangerous level of toxic chemicals. On Building Green (http://www.buildinggreen.com/auth/article.cfm/2010/5/17/Chinese-Drywall-Manufacturers-Liable-for-Millions-in-Damages/) we have an update where cases have come to court and the plaintiffs have started getting big awards. I am glad that this has finally started and I hope that it will cause importers to more carefully screen where they are getting their products.
Here is Southern California we are finally starting to attack the air conditioning monster we need for living in a desert! In Glendale the first of I hope many projects is getting underway where they will be using ice created overnight with cheap wind energy to provide the cooling that was previous provided be the energy hungry conventional HVAC units. The complete story is on Clean Technica (http://cleantechnica.com/2010/05/22/53-megawatt-ice-energy-storage-trial-begins-in-california/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cleantechnica%2Fcom+%28CleanTechnica%29)
Prices and availability on LED bulbs is about to improve radically! The article on Ecogeek (http://ecogeek.org/efficiency/3167-affordable-high-performance-led-bulbs-finally-hitt?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EcoGeek+%28EcoGeek%29) gives me great hope that this much needed technology is finally going to become affordable!
Lastly tonight we have two stories about growing your outside wall covering. Both from Treehugger, one is about growing the map of Europe on your wall (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/living-map-europe-grows-copenhagen-wall.php?campaign=th_rss_design) and the other is about simply growing plants on your wall to improve your local environment. (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/lifewall-modular-vertical-garden-tiles-eat-pollution-feed-plants.php?campaign=th_rss_design)
As always I thank you for your time and interest. Please take the time to Digg, Stumble Upon or add to the other social network of your choice to help me spread the word about these issues. Please forward any questions or suggestions to: askthefm@gmail.com
Formaldehyde in your Home
It is amazing to me the number of items that can emit this “organic” gas into your living space. Being a life long serious asthmatic this chemical is a considerable threat to my health and well being. To quote from the EPA web site :
“Formaldehyde, a colorless, pungent-smelling gas, can cause watery eyes, burning sensations in the eyes and throat, nausea, and difficulty in breathing in some humans exposed at elevated levels (above 0.1 parts per million). High concentrations may trigger attacks in people with asthma. There is evidence that some people can develop a sensitivity to formaldehyde. It has also been shown to cause cancer in animals and may cause cancer in humans. Health effects include eye, nose, and throat irritation; wheezing and coughing; fatigue; skin rash; severe allergic reactions. May cause cancer. May also cause other effects listed under “organic gases.”
This stuff is not only naturally occurring due to combustion of certain products but is also present in items as varied as the furniture (pressed board variety, think IKEA and other flat pack stuff) to your permanent press clothing! The main EPA site on the subject is here: http://www.epa.gov/iaq/formalde.html
A few days ago the California Air Resources Board (CARB) released the first ever study covering concentration levels of this wonderful chemical in the home ( http://www.arb.ca.gov/research/apr/past/04-310.pdf). What they found is that in large number of homes, especially newer ones that the concentrations of formaldehyde are at levels that can cause illness. A large part of the problem is that modern homes are often too tight, that is not receiving enough ventilation and exchanges of outside air and this allow dangerous levels of chemicals and other contaminants to build up.
This is especially concerning during the winter months where most folks really work on minimizing the intrusion of that outside cold air. The release of formaldehyde is accelerated by higher temperatures so it is also a good idea to not crank that heater up into the 80’s if you can stand to keep it lower. You should also check with manufacturers of products you plan on purchasing to determine if they are produced using formaldehyde and consider other brands with different manufacturing processes. Or at least let the item sit out in the garage for a week to let the majority of the off-gassing occur outside of your living space.
As always I thank you for your time and interest. Please take the time to Digg, Stumble Upon or add to the other social network of your choice to help me spread the word about these issues. Please forward any questions or suggestions to: askthefm@gmail.com
Askthefm's Weblog 