Looking out my window, I see a classic pre-war lower Manhattan office building, twenty-one stories of reproductions of Greek details.  Lots of double-hung windows provide good natural light.  At least one-third of them have a window air conditioner sticking out, and did all winter. Because of the ACs, those windows are never really shut.  I look around in other directions and see several late 20^th century residential high-rise buildings.  They are almost all energy abominations, with exposed slab edges efficiently conducting building heat out all winter long, and with large cutouts for PTACs (package terminal air conditioners) under the largest windows.

Even though those PTAC openings were designed for their job, a study (There Are Holes In Our Walls) recently completed for Urban Green Council by Steven Winter Associates shows that in real life they leak as much as the window AC units, and that both leak as much as a hole of six square inches. That’s about as big as the hole Rutger Hauer’s character Roy made in the wall he punched through to grab Deckard near the end of Blade Runner.  In post-air-conditioning Los Angeles six square inches may not amount to much; here in New York City SWA found it can add $32-$45 annually to a heating bill, and two to three times that cost if the heat is electric.  That puts the total annual citywide tab at $130 to $180 million.

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Check out this great video of U.S. Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu, discussing energy efficiency, both as a basic building block to tackling climate change but also as a simple measure you can take at home. He’s got some great quotes, including telling us that insulation is:

. . . like blocking and tackling, the most important thing.

An interesting proposal to increase funding for clean energy research in the absence of a cap-and-trade bill from Congress.  From David Leonhardt at the NYT, here.

A friend of mine, Rich Rosen of the Tellus Institute in Boston, has been involved in a very interesting exchange on Andrew Revkin’s New York Times blog. I strongly recommend checking it out, but the gist of it (for those in a real hurry) is that although research is good, we understand the basic physics of energy technology well enough to know that we are not going to find renewable technologies that will be cheaper than coal. We have to make the transition to more sustainable energy sources, but we should start now, with the technologies at hand, laying out actual money, and not expect solar energy, fusion power, or the hydrogen economy to come rolling in and rescue us with painless, or even relatively painless, sustainable sources of energy.

Rich and Andrew Revkin are discussing large scale power sources, but the same physics and economics constrain the future of buildings. After we have picked up the “free” 20-30% savings that come from correcting today’s really bad practices, we get to energy savings measures that have 20 year payback periods or more. But we have to lower energy consumption much more than 20-30% – we must get carbon emissions down by 80-90% by 2050. We already know how to make buildings that use very little energy, and to some extent how to convert existing buildings: lots of insulation, not much glazing, carefully controlled ventilation, and smart controls. Research may give us more options – aerogel windows could make glazing much less lossy – but these improvements will arrive incrementally and they will cost money.

As a society, we will just have to start spending more on energy use reduction and on sustainable sources – if they were cheaper we would be using them already. Not pleasant news, but the alternative isn’t a silver bullet, it’s a nuclear weapon scale problem: the rapid or gradual collapse of the ecosystems that sustain our civilization.

Check out Andrew Revkin’s blog.

Post Occupancy Evaluations are gaining traction here in the States but, like a lot of things, are significantly more advanced in Europe.  NYAS brings together a panel that includes local luminaries Adam Hinge of Sustainable Energy Partnerships and Brian Schwagerl of the Hearst Corporation as well as Stephan Plesser from Braunschweig Technical University in Germany.  Should be an excellent dialogue on an important emerging subject.

UN-Habitat has released a new biannual review, State of the World Cities, at the World Urban Forum in Rio. The report finds that by 2050 nearly 70% of our global population will live in cities- a stunningly rapid shift.  However, if this transition is not planned for appropriately most of these people will be living in megaslums- perhaps an even more pointed reminder of the need for sustainable development than CO2 reductions.

A host of other sustainable cities initiatives were announced at WUF, outlined by the folks at DIRT.

A study by the EPA provides further evidence of our perceived shift from a nation fleeing cities to a nation returning to our urban cores.  According the the New York Times:

In 26 of the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, the share of residential construction taking place in central cities more than doubled since 2000.

The full study is available here.

They note that LED have not yet surpassed induction lights in efficiency or cost but appear poised to do so in the near future with expected technical advances.

University of Pittsburgh researchers have conducted the first cradle-to-grave assessment of light-emitting diode (LED) streetlights and determined that the increasingly popular lamps strike the best balance between brightness, affordability, and energy and environmental conservation when their life span-from production to disposal-is considered.

Here.

ED+C surveys the current state of blue roofs and their surprising applicability to retrofits.

Turns out that not all ski runs are created equal.  A UC Davis study documents the deleterious effects of bulldozing slopes to create ski runs (as opposed to clearing by cutting back shrubs and trees) and notes the rather minuscule benefits accorded the resort in question.