Kent Portney's "Our Green Cities" Blog

Zero Net Energy Buildings

Last week, the New York Academy of Sciences sponsored a forum on "zero net energy buildings."  The forum was moderated by Michael Levi from the Council on Foreign Relations, and included Ron Dembo, founder of Zerofootprint, Inc. (see my earlier post about Zerofootprint), and Scott Muldavin of the Muldavin Company.  Much of the focus was on issues of valuation of green buildings, and the importance of financial incentives to such development. Much of Muldavin's comments focused on the operation of the Green Building Finance Consortium's Sustainable Property Performance Framework.

Empire State Building is Going Green

I see that the Clinton Foundation has spearheaded an effort to work with the City of New York to engage in highrise building retro-fit in order to achieve greater energy efficiency.  Older US cities face the fact that they have lots of highrise buildings, and these buildings are getting pretty old. Many were built when the materials and technologies needed to be very energy efficient really did not exist.  So the challenge now is the retro-fit these buildings to achieve these efficiencies. 

Although the Clinton Foundation description does not expressly allude to a city-based and citywide initiative, it does emphasize the need to target the largest and most egregious offenders, including the retrofit of the Empire State Building.  The Foundation engages in leveraging the funding to make the retro-fits happen.

This reminds me, to some degree, of Mayor Miller's Tower Renewal initiative in Toronto.  This is a citywide effort to retro-fit that city's highrises, although my recollection is that most of the targeted buildings are highrise residential facilities. 

NY Times Magazine on Green Building

One of my students, Jonah Kaplan, alerted me to the New York Times Magazine from Sunday May 20, 2007.  The entire issue is dedicated to green building and some related issues.  Many thanks to Jonah for this.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/

Over the last year, we have some something of an explosion in interest in green building, green architecture and green design.  Especially with regard to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to improve energy efficiency, green building is where the action is.  Wouldn't it be great if we have a national leader who made it a goal to seriously upgrade the energy efficiency of our entire stock of buildings over the next 20 years?  I don't know what would make sense in terms of an overall national goal, but just the idea of having a nationwide effort toward this end would be a terrific idea. 

What I think tends to be missing from many discussions of green buidling and related issues is the local context in which that building takes place.  Sometimes these green building efforts are embedded in the context of citywide, regional, or state government efforts to promote sustainability.  Although there is no real serious research on this, I strongly suspect that when green building is done in the context of a broader sustainability effort, it turns out to be far more effect.  I'm thinking, for example, of Grand Rapids, which has the largest number of green buildings per capita in the country.  And this fact works symbiotically with the city's sustainability initiative, spearheaded by Mayor George Heartwell, Grand Valley State University's Sustainability Director Norman Christopher, and city Sustainability Coordinator Corky Overmyer.  I'm also thinkinng of San Francisco, where all the innovative green building efforts I mentioned in previous postings are part of that city's impressive sustainability initiative.  What's your sense of this?  In what ways is it easier and/or more effective to do green building when the city government is on board?