Quite a few people have commented on the recent proposal by Apple to build a kind of suburban spaceship headquarters (pictured above) in Cupertino, CA.  Alexandra Lange at Design Observer has noted that suburban HQ’s are decidedly retro, and Lloyd Alter at Treehugger is reminded of the passage from Lord of the Rings, “One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them” and predicts the end of the creative giant (Apple, not Sauron.)

There is something kind of creepy about the uber-slick aesthetic Apple has successfully applied to their gadgets and retail stores being applied to such a massive structure. With a diameter similar to the Pentagon, the pop cultural reference it brought to mind for me was Revenge of the Sith. But that’s all totally subjective. What struck me most forcefully was the difference between this particular design solution and the solution proposed by another global tech company trying to house a rapidly growing workforce: Google.

First, let’s review the Apple proposal. The building, though only 4 stories in height is massive and is designed to provide space for 12,000 employees. Presenting the project to Cupertino City Council (see the video here),  Steve Jobs points out that the current site is only 20% green space and that their proposal will increase this to 80% landscape, achieved by placing “most” of the parking underground. I put “most” in quotes because in addition to underground parking below the main building there is a huge above-ground parking structure proposed alongside I-280. Jobs says this parking structure is 4 stories because they want everything on the site to be “human scaled,” but one wonders how a parking structure that appears to be 2,000 feet long can be considered in any way approachable. To give you a sense of the scale of parking required in places like Cupertino (where everyone drives everywhere, for everything)- Apple will reduce the surface parking by 90%. It’s a laudable achievement, but still leaves 1,200 surface parking spaces on the site. Another scale adjustment for you, the “café” in the new building serves 3,000 people at a sitting.

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Bill Clinton is on the cover of Newsweek and he can’t stop talking about green building.

The former President offers Newsweek 14 ideas to get the economy moving forward, and he doesn’t get past #4 before he places green building front and center.  In this item he proposes the country use the Empire State Building retrofit project as a model.  The Clinton Climate Initiative was heavily involved in the project, which provided a 38% reduction in energy use and provided Newsweek with their cover quote:

“We could put a million people to work retrofitting buildings all over America.” – Bill Clinton

In subsequent items he advocates for energy efficiency retrofits of single family homes financed by the utilities, financing of government and institutional building retrofits guaranteed by left-over TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) funds, and mobilizing the un- and under-employed to paint roofs white all across the country.  All in all, more than a quarter of his recommendations revolve directly around green building, and at least another quarter deal with the directly related issue of clean energy investment.  Read the whole piece here.

Our June 15th panel discussion, Oppositions: Pennies from Heaven?, was one of the best we have organized here at Urban Green Council.  The moderator and panel had just the right mix of background and perspective to foster a really engaged discussion.  Not everyone agreed about everything, which forced both the panelists and the audience to consider the subject of photovoltaic systems from positions outside their comfort zone.

Laurie Kerr, Senior Policy Advisor at the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, took the role of moderator and started things off with a challenge to the other panelists to justify the expense of PV systems when myriad other technologies could provide similar benefits at a fraction of the cost.  Her prime example was a calculation showing that swapping your incandescent lamps for compact fluorescents was 457 times more cost-effective at reducing your electricity use than installing solar PV. This framed the conversation and placed the onus on solar advocates to justify the expense of these systems while other measures languish.

Each panelist was given five minutes to present; Bill Guiney from Johnson Controls was first.  Bill is a kind of solar thermal hot water guru, having worked on and advocated for these systems for roughly 20 years.  He pointed out that solar thermal is a simple and effective system that for most projects can eliminate the use of electricity, natural gas or other fuel to heat water.  He recognized that many early solar thermal systems lacked rigorous engineering and, as a result, there were many early failures and horror stories.  Today, the solar thermal industry is highly regulated, the systems are extensively engineered, and applications are as reliable and failure-free as any other mechanical system. The systems are not expensive, don’t require particularly specialized labor, and take up so little space that they are applicable even in very dense locations.

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Like the relentless drumbeat of the Energizer Bunny, the Green Codes Task Force just keeps going and going and going….

Last week, five new bills were introduced in City Council based on GCTF proposals. This was after extensive review by City Council staff and legislators, and each is very close to the original Task Force recommendation in substance.  Russell Unger and I got many questions about these bills from City Council staff.  Some of them we could answer, but many times we went back to the committee members and got clear and helpful advice on what was meant, how it could be reformulated to meet some concern without compromising intent, and in many cases, data on how much the proposal would or would not cost, if implemented.  A big “thank you” to all those Task Force members!

Two of the “Intros” (proposed legislation) will improve the indoor environment.  HT 1 (“Limit Harmful Emissions From Carpets”) and HT 2 (“Limit Harmful Emissions From Paints & Glues”), combined into Intro 0585-2011, will limit the VOC emissions of carpets and carpet adhesives and the actual amount of VOCs in paints, finishes, and other adhesives. This is a very big deal, as our carpets and finishes have been filled with materials that are very bad for us, in the sense of contributing to our chances of getting cancer. The intro makes it unlawful both to install and also simply to buy or sell materials that do not meet the standards.  (Yes, a small market smuggling in high VOC material from New Jersey may operate for a while, but it will be inconvenient, illegal, and will only last until NJ codes catch up.)

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As noted in our newsletter today, Curtis Ravenel, Global Head of Bloomberg’s Sustainability Group, will deliver the Keynote at our upcoming conference, Speak Green.

We invited Curtis to speak both because of his strong background on these issues and because Bloomberg has just released their first ever annual sustainability report.  Corporations release sustainability reports all the time, so what makes this one special?  In our minds there are three strong reasons: scale, exposure and ambition.

With more than 12,000 employees and annual revenues of nearly $7 billion,  any initiatives  Bloomberg LP adopts are poised to have a dramatic impact.  As one of the highest profile media organizations in the world, their initiatives are likely to draw far more attention than those of a typical corporation, and if successful will serve as a beacon for many other organizations.  Bloomberg’s position within the financial industry is critically important.  The business cases for sustainability and green building are being built step by step, project by project.  But with a relatively limited number of green building projects available as examples, Wall Street has largely been reluctant to recognize their financial benefits.

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On June 15th we will hold the next session of our exciting “Oppositions” series: Pennies from Heaven?

Photovoltaics have always been one of the holy grails of the green building movement, and the appeal is easy to understand. Solar power has the allure of something that we might simply plug into our existing system in lieu of dirty fossil fuels. Every aspect of our society is so totally dependent on fossil fuels that we struggle to imagine life without them, and there is a very real desire in our culture to find a technological solution that will simply replace them- some new energy source that we can swap in at the supply end of the equation. But fossil fuels are a one time gift of the planet and it’s entirely possible that we will never find any substitute that has their ease of extraction, portability and use. Fossil fuels are an almost perfect material vehicle for energy- you can pipe or truck them unlimited distances at air temperature and extract their energy with machines as varied as small clay ovens or multi-megawatt cogeneration plants. Replacing them will almost certainly require radical changes to how we think about, and interface with, energy.

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The Emerging Professionals (EP), a committee of Urban Green Council, is a coalition of young professionals in the New York City area involved in the green building movement through hosting educational seminars, networking and other social events. Jessica Cooper (LB Architects) and Nicole McGlinn (KPF), in conjunction with UGC Board Member Molly Zinzi (Google) and Caitlin McCusker (Urban Green Council), are the leaders of EP.

On April 28th, twenty-eight young professionals joined us for a rapid-fire charrette challenge that asked them to direct their creative energy towards the Active Design Guidelines. The national Natural Talent Design Competition is taking a year hiatus to build the 2010 winning projects in New Orleans, of which one of the top four winners is our group’s submission: RAMPed UP.  Undeterred, we decided to offer an alternative: a local charrette competition.

To prepare for the upcoming challenge a week prior, the seven teams met us at one of the premier examples of Active Design in NYC: the High Line.  Scavenger hunt style, they navigated the city and recorded three examples of ‘good’ Active Design and three examples of ‘bad’ Active Design. Aside from informing them that they would need to ‘get creative’ on the 29th, no other information was disclosed.

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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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Credit: 925 Bergen St, Brooklyn | © Big Sue LLC

Last week, the City Council passed three laws that will make New York City rooftops greener places. This brings the total number of NYC Green Codes Task Force recommendations that have been implemented by the Council to 16. Until the Mayor signs the legislation, they won’t be assigned a Local Law number so I’ll refer to them by their “Introduction” or bill number.

Two of these laws are about old regulations getting out of the way of green building. Introduction 341 implements Task Force recommendation Energy Fundamentals 14, Allow Large Solar Rooftop Installations. And Introduction 358 applies the approach to combined heat and power. Currently, the Building Code exempts a range of mechanical equipment on rooftops, including HVAC equipment and water tanks from building height restrictions. However, until these two laws were passed, solar and CHP equipment were not included in these exemptions – they are now.

Introduction 341 goes one step further for solar equipment. These same Building Code provisions limit the amount of rooftop that can be covered with mechanical equipment to 1/3 of the roof; otherwise it is counted as another floor of the building. Under the new law, solar equipment is not counted towards these limitations and can cover as much of the roof as permitted by other codes (such as the Fire Code).

The third law, Introduction 347, implements Task Force Proposal Energy Fundamentals 11, Reduce Summer Heat With Cool Roofs. This law updates existing Building Code requirements for reflective roof coatings to better align with LEED and clarifies exceptions to the standard. Under the changes, cool roof coatings will be required for reroofing of existing rooftops, and also for buildings constructed under the 1968 building code and normally exempted from many newer requirements. The law also clarifies that exemptions for green roofs apply to agricultural plantings and adds exemptions for:

*ballasted roofs;
*roofs used as playgrounds;
*areas under mechanical equipment or other rooftop structures;
*portions of roofs covered with decking materials.

You can read a far more detailed explanation of Introductions 347 (cool roofs) and 341 (solar), as well as all implemented NYC Green Codes Task Force recommendations on our web site.

Thanks to the City Council and their staff and the Mayor’s Office for makes these laws happen. Congratulations also to the Energy & Ventilation Committee of NYC Green Codes Task Force, whose recommendations formed the basis for these new laws.

This past Friday, the NYC Department of Buildings posted its 15-page rule implementing Local Law 84. Most of the rule (a good seven pages) is about how to collect and estimate energy consumption and what to do about incomplete data.  And if it takes that long to explain, it surely means compliance will require a substantial effort.

For those who would like step-by-step compliance instructions, check out our Benchmarking Compliance Checklist & User’s Guide.  It should help you determine which steps are required for your building, and which can be ignored.

Long term, there could be another way. The benchmarking law is about energy and water consumption. Yet of the 15-page rule, it takes only two sentences to explain how to input water data. How’s that? It’s that easy because those sentences explain that the Department of Environmental Protection will automatically upload the water consumption information to Portfolio Manager.

Because we don’t have a similar process for utility energy data, 24,592 private-sector buildings are or will be running around to get this information themselves. This is by far the biggest compliance burden for Local Law 84.

For many owners, benchmarking is part of “green stuff” and the easier we can make compliance, the greater their willingness to accept future regulations. Local Law 84 could be much easier to comply with if we had automatic uploading of utility data. So working with the city, Con Edison, National Grid, and the real estate industry to make this happen is at the top of our policy agenda.