MIT Water Summit

This was an event organized by the MIT Water Club (http://waterclub.mit.edu/wp/), a student group, and the first of what they hope will be an annual event.

12/12/13
Kenneth Strzepek, Univ of CO, Boulder2.4% of world's water is fresh with most in glaciers 12.5 cubic km water is available with 5.5 used annually by peopleNot where we want it or economically accessible, variable in space and time70% for irrigation, 20% for industry - mostly thermoelectric cooling, 10% domestic.  Eastern US thermoelectric cooling is not recycled as it is in Western US90 days a year the Yellow River of China goes dry
Franklin Fisher, MITWater Economics Project in the Middle EastFishelson says that water wars will not happen because water has value and the upper bound is cost of desalinization, now 60 cents per cubic cm in Middle EastDisputes over water are cost disputes not life and deathMultiple Year Water Allocation System (MYWAS) is a computer program they've developed for ME water which includes externalities ----------Cambridge water is about 1.6 cents per gallon ---------Who Owns Water?Lawrence Susskind, MITCase by case basis, in practice and water is not priced even to cover environmental uses.  No forum for a conversation on water's value.Not public versus private but a partnershipGreat rivers have national compacts but without any consultation with enviro groups or individuals
Sharmila Murthy, Suffolk UnivWho controls water might be a better questionIn 2010 UN declares a human right to water and sanitation
Leon Awerbach, IDA Desalination AcademyWater is considered free and a human right.
Food-Water NexusDennis McLaughlin, MITVirtual water trading is the water in food transported around the worldBiotech to improve efficiency of water use in plants
Timothy Griffin, TuftsSoil health and food waste are large areas of water lossIn US, ag is now the number 1 source of water pollution
Gabriela Burian, MonsantoGrow Africa program for improving smallholder ag in Africa Developing nations don't have the advantages of the numbers and data that the US has[Oddly enough, Ms Burian of Monsanto was the person who talked about "systems" the most.  Almost all the other speakers were focused on one or two specific technologies or ideas and not addressing systems issues at all.]
Water-Energy Nexus
About 50% of US water goes to power plant cooling
John Rogers, UCS
Power plants withdraw more water than any other use but put most of it back, warmer, into the environment.  Ag draws less but consumes the most.
Kenneth Kimmel, DEP MA
Clean water act, clean air water act are regulatory silos but they affect each other, one reason why MA has put energy into environment
MWRA water demand going down and state encouraging new communities to join to stop groundwater draw.  44 inches of rain per year
Billion kwh per year on waste water treatment, one million pounds of carbon per year. Transferring to renewables and state is underwriting stand alone energy efficiency, guaranteeing savings from year one.
John Lienhard, MIT
Air cooled power plants and closed loop recycling cooling systems are solutions EPRI is working on
Singapore is recycling all water, adding 10% of it to the drinking supply
Emerging Water Contaminants
GAO estimates over 700 new chemicals introduced annually
Herve Buisson, Veolia Water
Health-water nexus
In EU regulation counts oxidation by-products of herbicides and others which changes the way people treated water, moving to absorption rather than oxidation treatment.
France is using tag species (fish, frogs) that show effects after contamination for testing water quality
Absorption, oxidation, reverse osmosis. Reverse osmosis can get everything but leaves concentrates
Ruth Marfil-Vega, American Water
Carol West, DEP MA
To go from guideline to standard, state requires testing every water source in the state.
Green pharmaceuticals - webinar
Public water is tested for 84 compounds.  Bottled water is tested for sodium, not under safe water act, under FDA
Philip Gschwend, MIT
There's no chemical that's ever been made that doesn't get into the environment.  

NSA Bulk Surveillance and the Problem of Freedom

12/4/13
Harvard
Yochai Benkler

Observation as the projection of power
Distinction between transparency and surveillance
Bull Run - intervention on standards through NIST and product design with private companies - not surveillance and not subject to legal oversight
Monitoring cloud - again without legal oversight and with voluntary cooperation or acquiescence of telcos
Classification and secrecy used to end run oversight - no staff or notes for Congresscritters or judges 
FBI has issued over 180,000 national security letters
2006 Mark Klein sues AT&T about federal switch in SF office
Section 215 surveillance can be contested but the subjects of surveillance don't about their surveillance and the companies comply voluntarily and do not contest government requests
Systemic problem but all human systems are imperfect
"Freedom of action is also freedom to threaten"
Organizational imperfections are exacerbated by secrecy
Internalized censorship
Freedom - capacity to plan and execute that life plan.  Autonomy is not yes/no but how much?  And we live within systems, imperfect human systems, and there is a continual tension between open and closed systems.
The claim of completeness is authoritarian
Q: What are the changes of this century that led to this?
Basic imperfection of systems, the solution space of voluntary action has expanded due to technology, but the same technology can increase the power of the state too.
Q:  How to describe Snowden to 8th graders?
He's a person of conscience.

An Open Conversation about Internet Communications Privacy with Ladar Levison

All mistakes are my own.

11/26/13
Harvard
Ladar Levison

Lavabit did not record metadata and stored messages in such a way that only the user, not the service provider, could access their archive.

Does a service provider have the responsibility to provide access to personal data?  According to his case, yes.  In a secret decision.

DOJ lawyers couldn't understand why he had objections to their requests.

"It's a duty of every patriot to protect the citizens from its government" - Thomas Jefferson
[“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine]

Next time they're not gonna ask but just take.  The government has abused our trust and, worse, have done it in secret.  CALEA [Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act] requires that telecoms develop tech to tap any individual - but not email.  The judge who ruled on his case served 7 years on the FISA court.

He knows that the government has collected data from other companies because they've reimbursed other companies for the expenses accrued in order to allow surveillance.

Stallman:  the level of surveillance in the US now is more than was in the USSR
http://gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html

TX has a data breach law which requires a service provider to report to users the kind of security breach the Feds were asking him to allow.

Can the random number generators in Intel chips be trusted?  However, even if the Feds have your password they are disallowed by statute to login as the user.  They went after his SSL [Secure Sockets Layer] keys to find out when a user logged in or out, as all the other information would be available over the Net.
He can only talk about the SSL key demand, nothing about FISA court or what else has happened since then

He developed server-based encryption
Working with Phil Zimmerman to make secure email system

NSA collected his data upstream at his provider
Zimmerman believes that Obama did not have the strength to stand up to the generals in a top secret briefing

"I don't think the DoJ had a clue about what the technology is "... And what the FBI was asking for

His appeal will be held in the January session of the 4th district

Net Zero and Beyond

All mistakes are mine.

Cambridge, MA has been debating a net zero energy and/or emissions standard (http://www.netzerocambridge.org) for new buildings over 25,000 square feet since the Spring of 2013, partially because of an ecodistrict plan with MIT and others on a large parcel in East Cambridge (a plan MIT refused to make net zero even though they are rumored to be building a net zero project with some of the same partners in Basel, Switzerland).

The City Manager (Cambridge has a city manager form of municipal government, along with proportional representation so city politics get weird fast) has established a "Getting to Net Zero" Task Force to study the issue.  Cambridge Community Development Department produced a fine overview of the state of the art in larger buildings for zero net emissions at (pdf alert) http://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/CDD/ZoningDevel/Amendments/2013/Connolly/zngamend_connolly_cddmemo_20130816.ash

As the national Ecodistrict Summit was in town recently, the Community Development Department and Sustainable Performance Institute (http://www.sustainable-performance.org) hosted experts from Integral Group (http://www.integralgroup.com/), a deep green engineering firm to present lessons from the more than 40 net zero buildings they've worked on.

11/14/13
Cambridge Public Library
Andrea Traber
Dave Ramslie
Ben Galuza

Community compact on sustainable future - Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, with business partners Akamai Technologies, Novartis, Institutes for BioMedical Research, Whole Foods, and others to come.
http://web.mit.edu/press/2013/city-of-cambridge-mit-harvard-launch-history-community-compact-for-a-sustainable-future.html

Andrea:
Integral has 41 net zero projects in process or completed
"We have to take out 80% of our footprint" in order to control greenhouse gas emissions
Fort Collins, CO - zero energy district, 2 square miles, 7000 residential and commercial customers, municipal utility, 45 MW, generate local energy from 50 mile radius, demand reduction and response, resilient design and passive survivability, district heating cooling and power, microgrids, net zero water
http://fortzed.com
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/02/how-fort-collins-created-americas-first-zero-energy-district/4773/
Walter Reed Medical Center - 2 million sq ft, 62.5 acres, 2030 zero net energy target, 2040 carbon neutral, phased infrastructure development, "future proofing"
http://www.dc.gov/DC/DMPED/Projects/Development+Projects/WRAMC+Sustainability+at+Walter+Reed:+From+Zero+to+Net+Zero+by+2030
Vancouver - district heating through underground water loop with business buildings providing waste heat for residential buildings
Vancouver Cambie Street corridor - airport to downtown, ambient water loop for district heating, hydronic heating and cooling
http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/neighbourhood-energy-utility.aspx

Dave:
Recovering bureaucrat
Vancouver's green building and energy policy
http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/green-building-and-renovating.aspx
Only one North American city met its Kyoto goal, 6% below 1990 levels by 2012, and that was Portland, OR through decommissioning a coal plant.  Vancouver was about six months later, within the year but not the month of Kyoto goals.  Vancouver has 55% of its ghg from buildings and gets most of its power from hydro (92%).  New goal is 33% below 2012 levels by 2020
Building energy disclosure - New York, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, California and Washington as well reports Institute for Market Transformation
http://www.imt.org
300% difference in how buildings are performing [two similar energy efficient buildings built in New Orleans after Katrina by the same architects as part of the same development exhibited entirely different energy expenditures, almost purely because of the habits of the different residents]
Vancouver will be carbon neutral in operations by 2020
82kbtu/sq ft now to 41kbtu/sq ft by 2020 with natural gas displaced by renewables
New buildings will show how they meet the target so that lessons learned are shared
Connect existing loads for fuel switching, creating a local carbon offset market, fund energy efficient retrofits
Passive design toolkits for commercial and residential buildings for local conditions

Ben:
Net zero is zero combustion energy with all energy used generated onsite or within area
Green or net zero can be built at or near conventional costs
Living building challenge - k-12 schools are early adopters
http://living-future.org/lbc
"Net zero buildings will be at market rate within five years" - for office buildings and even for wet labs [labs seem to be the most energy-intensive buildings]
First address building envelope, lighting, hvac and only then the plug loads which can make up the bulk of building energy use
Standard office plug load is 2.5 w/sq ft, integral's Oakland office is at .45 w/sq ft
Z-squared office is a bank retrofit to net zero - envelope, day lighting,
Packard Foundation, near Palo Alto
http://www.packard.org/about-the-foundation/our-green-headquarters/
49,000 sq ft office net zero building
Chilled water thermal storage with ambient water loop and heat pumps
Exploratorium in SF -
http://www.exploratorium.edu/media/index.php?cmd=browse&project=103&program=00001411&type=clip
all electric heat pump for all heating and cooling, will be first net zero museum, radiant heating and cooling in floors
J Craig Venter Institute
http://www.jcvi.org/cms/sustainable-lab/overview/
lab building, three stories [question about a new net zero energy building in an area where everybody has to commute miles to get there and back again - transportation policy is an unacknowledged key to sustainability and resilience]

Andrea:  Talbot Northgate, Codman Square, Boston ecodistrict charette
http://www.lisc.org/content/event/detail/21295
with over 80 people participating from the Ecodistrict Summit
http://ecodistricts.org/summit/

Slides will be available at Cambridge Community Development
http://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/

What I Do and Why I Do It

I publish a weekly listing of Energy (and Other) Events at the colleges, universities, and in the community around Cambridge, MA (http://hubevents.blogspot.com) and have been doing it consistently since the end of January, 2010 (http://hubevents.blogspot.com/2010/01/events-january-25-2010.html).  This is the second iteration of the idea as I published a similar listings service plus reviews and articles from February, 1995 to February, 1998, "A List of Environmental and Telecommunications Events and Issues" or "AList…." for short (http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AList.html) [The issues from April 1997 to February 1998 are available at http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AList.index.html but you have to click on the weekly issue heading first before you can read any of the articles.]

My original idea was to have a searchable calendar of all the public lecture information at all the colleges and universities around the Boston area, something like 54 of them, so that anyone could take the opportunity to gather in all the free learning they want.  Imagine the resource for anyone from high school kids to retired people.  I'd been availing myself of the privilege for a number of years already, meeting in small seminar rooms with distinguished experts and famous names that normally you'd only see on TV.  And I even got to ask them questions.  What a gift!  As an experienced autodidact, I took notes at the events I went to, when something of actual note occurred, and thought that the next step would be to invite others to contribute their notes from the events they went to that I couldn't attend so that all that wealth of information could be captured, a community commonplace book.

With "AList…", I began to explore the listings systems of the local colleges and universities and quickly found that, back in the 1990s, few colleges had centralized listings and even those that did, like Harvard and MIT, didn't collect all the public events occurring.  Some lectures and presentations stopped at the department level.  My grand idea was not ready for primetime then but I continued to scan the listings that I could find, published my listings on a weekly basis, and wrote up my notes with book reviews and links to interesting articles I found.  Soon I had a growing audience.  Every week I offered an invitation to participate, "'A List...' is a freeware/shareware publication. If the information is of any value to you, please contribute - money, information, encouragement, prayers and good wishes are all valid currencies for feedback and will be gratefully appreciated…" and ended each edition with a section called "The Begging Bowl" where I asked for contributions and wrote, sometimes, about a different kind of economics.  I thought I'd get notices of events, letters to the editor, pointers to interesting books or reviews of same but what I actually got was money.  The first year I got enough to cover my Internet provider costs and it doubled each year.  By the time I burned out on publishing about 25 pages every week, I had a readership of over 1000 and some serious pin money.  If I had continued "AList…", and the growth rate had remained consistent, within five years I would have been making a decent living.  But I burned out.  It got to be too much.

When I came back to the idea, I separated the writing from the listings.  Energy (and Other) Events is simply a listings service.  I spend a few hours each week scanning a series of sites, my sources are included at the bottom of each issue, and arranging them in my preferred format.  I publish on Sunday so, stupid me, work a few hours every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday when others are doing non-work things.  The website, Hubevents, has a link list that includes every central events listing at every local college or university that I could find, although I haven't updated it in a while.  The original idea of a searchable calendar for all the public events at all the local educational institutions is still alive and I've tried to interest Boston's Office of New Urban Mechanics, the Governor's innovation office, and Code for Boston in instituting it.  None of them have picked up on that idea yet.  I've also tried to talk to people at the Boston Globe and have had conversations with the Weekly Dig, a local "underground" paper, and the Boston Institute for NonProfit Journalism [BINJ] but, again, no pick up to date.

Fred Hapgood, author of a fine book on MIT, _Down the Infinite Corridor_, also dids a listings service which focuses on "Selected Lectures on Science and Engineering

in the Boston Area" (http://www.BostonScienceLectures.com).  His focus was tighter than mine but he drills down deeper with a list of sources that includes 419 entries and goes directly to different departments and programs in the various educational institutions.  Fred looks at my ambitions for a centralized and searchable system with a skeptical eye.  Recently, Fred moved on to other things but his list has been taken on by a small group which publishes it at https://sites.google.com/view/bostonsciencelectures/home

My greater vision, dare I say it, is that, if the concept can be proved in Boston, it can be replicated anywhere there is more than one educational institution offering public lectures and events.  As R Buckminster Fuller wrote, "Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous behaviors that will avoid extinction."  A system of actually letting the public know about public events at educational institutions might be useful in generating those "spontaneous behaviors that will avoid extinction."  At least, that's my hope.

Energy (and Other) Events reaches a little over a thousand people again now.  I see my readers at many of the events I go to and get a lot of thanks.  This time I don't ask for contributions and run this enterprise as an experiment in reputational economics and community networking.  I also see it as a way of leveraging political power.  Since almost everybody of note comes through Boston to speak at one of our colleges or universities, a group of people who were interested in asking hard questions to powerful people could actually exert a little influence.  I've been able to ask George Schultz, the Reagan cabinet secretary, about the ramifications of his administration's energy polices (I told him, "Reagan killed us");  Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency, what the response of the energy industry was to their 2012 Energy Outlook report that concluded about 80% of the known reserves of fossil fuel should stay in the ground ("Disappointing," he said);  and, a few weeks earlier, Carl-Henric Svanberg, Chairman of both BP and AB Volvo, about how much fossil fuel will have to be left in the ground in order to keep the atmosphere fit for our species (he responded by saying that there is no problem with fuel supply, a non-answer that left many in the audience with puzzled expressions and the distinct impression that he ducked the question).  Imagine that there were others present who had follow-up questions that wouldn't let these powerful people off the hook, that such a group could send the powerful home with the idea that "those people at Harvard/MIT/BU/BC… are really pushing back against fossil fuels and climate change."  I've been trying to convince 350MA, the climate activists, that such a tactic could be extremely useful but, again, have seen little success so far.  

As Pogo said, "We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities" and the imagination to recognize them, the will to grab them is always in short supply.  Still, I will continue to do what I do because I enjoy what I'm doing.  I've pared my workload down to a point where burn out is nowhere near the horizon and remain hopeful that others will begin to see and act on the "insurmountable opportunities" so readily available soon.

US Oil Production and Energy Security

Rough notes from a seminar session.  All mistakes are mine.

11/4/13
Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Carl Pope, Principal at Inside Straight Strategies and Former Executive Director for the Sierra Club (’92-’10); Carol Lee Rawn, Director, Transportation Program, Ceres; and Robbie Diamond, Founder, President and CEO of Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE)

Diamond: electric vehicles are a "holy grail" of energy solutions.  After 40 years from first oil crisis, US oil production is growing at historic rates while demand for liquid fuels (oil) is declining or flattening.  We now import about 40% of our oil and do not export crude, by law, but lightly refined products.  We spend the same percentage of our economy on oil as we did 40 years ago. Bush tax cuts and Obama payroll tax holiday both equaled the higher oil prices in those periods. Extra cost of OPEC is on the order of $7 billion per year now.  Every recession since 1973 has been preceded or coincident with oil price increases.  92-93% of our transportation sector is oil.  By 2030, the projection is 91% oil for transport.

Carl Pope:  oil is future largest climate threat;  climate security requires cheaper oil; competition is key; monopoly and volatility keep competition down
Greenpeace's carbon bombs, known resources that should not be tapped, are mostly oil,  We use 90 million barrels per day, if demand were 75 million barrels, the price would fall and exotic oil (shale oil and others) would become too expensive to produce. To get on the right carbon path, world demand should be 45 million barrels per day with a price of $45 oil - the sources of which are Saudi, Middle East, and China.

In cars, hybrids, electric and CNG vehicles are all currently cheaper to operate than internal combustion gasoline cars. One reason is lack of distribution channels, locked out by oil companies.  Another is the price volatility of oil which drives biogas and others out of the market - they can't weather long periods of loss.  Cities could mandate alternative fuel distributions, index oil taxes to oil prices to even out price spikes, something like a renewable portfolio standard for transportation fuels, and build global oil substitution partnerships.  CA, OR, WA as well as the Northeast have talked about a liquid fuel portfolio standard (ring fenced market)

Carol Lee Rawn - US ghg emissions are one third from transportation.  Low carbon fuel standard (lcfs) are being developed with CA leading the way using a life cycle analysis.  These measures could result in over $4 billion in savings

Q: OPEC as a shadow tax?
Pope:  yes, but no availability of alternatives. Saudis have charged about $280 per ton carbon "tax" on oil.  Qatar has levied about $180 per ton on natural gas to Japan.  BP chief economist wrote recently that oil survives only where it has a monopoly
Diamond:  Saudis and others are not selling their cheapest to produce oil and holding vast reserves. Electricity has a diversified fuel base and the only other national distribution channel for transportation. Brazil's flex fuel vehicles saw the prices of the different fuels equalizing.

Q: ethanol?
Pope:  no distribution for e85 even though there are 9 million US flex fuel vehicles [out of 254 vehicles on the road]

Q: subsidies?
Diamond: most subsidies are general corporate subsidies.  Better idea is to use revenues to gov from oil industry to fund alternatives
Pope:  OPEC is big subsidy

Q:  lessons from Sierra Club beyond coal project?
Reduce political power by reducing market share.

Q: stranded costs, the 80% of the known reserves that should not be burned?
Pope: industry is schizophrenic.  Shell is no longer going to pursue reserves after two disappointing quarters but reneges after third disappointing quarter.  "I expect the majors to recognize the reality but it is lucrative for them to slow the future down."  In a 45 million barrel world the majors know they'll lose.

Pope:  France is one place where you would expect electric vehicles to take off but it hasn't.  French pay the Poles to take night time electricity but the national utility is not interested in small customers like electric vehicles even though gasoline is $8 per gallon

Projection is that global oil transportation demand grows at 1 million barrels per year. 

An international collaboration of oil consumers has a lot of opportunities to counter OPEC cartel and build alternatives. 

Energizing Sustainable Cities: Slouching Towards Net Zero in Two Degree C Hotter World

Here are my rough notes (slightly polished) from three recent events I attended at Tufts, MIT, and online

Energizing Sustainable Cities: Findings from the Global Energy Assessment
with Arnulf Grubler, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Yale University

Thursday, October 24, 2013
12:30-1:45 PM
(a light lunch will be served – no RSVP, first-come first-served)
Tufts, Cabot 703, The Fletcher School, 160 Packard Avenue, Medford, MA

Energizing Sustainable Cities:  Assessing Urban Energy
Arnulf Grubler
arnulf.grubler@yale.edu

Book of the same title as the talk, Energizing Sustainable Cities
New report includes a chapter on urban energy assessments, chapter 18 (http://www.globalenergyassessment.org).  No business as usual scenario.
3/4 of all final energy is urban
World rural population likely to peak at 3.5 billion and decline after 2020
Cities are 0.2- 2.7% of world landmass
96% Internet routers are urban
Small cities, less than 100,000 population, are where most people live and are not studied enough (neighborhood and village scale)
City dwellers have lower energy and carbon footprints
Lack urban energy and carbon accounting for embodied energy, import/export balance
Annex 1 [industrialized] cities are generally lower than average per capita energy use but cities in Annex 2 countries approach Annex 1 levels of consumption while paying a higher relative price.
Most of the urban energy flow is in embodied energy, goods and services
City density enables demand/supply management and calls for low waste/zero impact systems - density demands zero emissions or zero impact - high levels of pollution happening in high population density areas is not good
Vienna which has had municipal utilities and services for a hundred years.  In first law analysis, it is 50% efficient and with second law analysis it is 83% exegetic, has the ability to do useful work.  You can increase energy efficiency by a factor of five without violating physical laws. [Raiffeisen Bank building in Vienna, 21 stories, 20,000-square-metre building or 65,000 sq ft, PassivHaus standard]
Vast improvement possibilities but they require integration and management of the urban form and systemic change
The largest leverage from systemic change but requires overcoming fragmentation (zero emissions as an approachable goal, statistical quality control)
Focus on the midpoints:  efficiency of end use in buildings, processes, vehicles, appliances;  land use;  urban form (transportation, housing)
Syncity simulations work on these midpoints [Synthetic city simulations scaling up to world (peace) games as MOOs]

Q:  Cambridge and zero net emissions
Partner with similar scale cities in becoming a zero emissions city to discover useful commonalities

1 Bryant Place in NYC claims to be the most efficient building of 51 story [http://www.durst.org/properties/one-bryant-park]
Biggest district heating grid in the world is ConEd in Manhattan

Zero emissions at point of consumption - electricity and hydrogen.  Hydrogen introduced on the model of town gas or natural gas infrastructure [natural gas/methane is not going away]
Exergy as optionality, the higher the exergy the more possibilities
Switzerland as a model of microgrids based on civil defense [CT's microgrid program: 
http://greenmatters.csgeast.org/2013/10/11/multimedia-connecticuts-microgrid-pilot-a-conversation-with-department-of-energy-and-environmental-protection-commissioner-daniel-c-esty/]

In developing world, concentrate first on squatter settlements [bare minimum to bare maximum, solar swadeshi:  
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/11/10/919251/-Personal-Power-Production-160-Solar-from-Civil-Defense-to-Swadeshi]

Slouching Towards Net Zero
10/24/13
webinar
Z Smith, Tulane
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UClRyyT7oWab37ylqH1EwIcQ 

Keep score - kbtu's/sq ft/yr 
2030 challenge - 2003 as baseline (laboratories have the highest energy use per sq ft yr, average is 343 kBtu/sf/yr) with reduction down to zero by 2030
Today's PV ~30k Wh/sf/yr or 100 kBtu/sf/yr a 4 story building can be offset 25k Btu/sf/yr and a 6 story building is 16 kBtu/sf/yr
PV modules dropped at 7% per year over the last 30 years
Installed systems have fallen by 45% over the last 12 years
Panasonic has a 4-8 kW home energy storage system
Regenerative
Center for Interactive Research on Sustainability, Univ of British Columbia - carbon negative, net zero water use, net zero energy, cost no more than typical university construction, 60,000 sq ft building, 4 stories, including a 500 seat auditorium and laboratories
Entirely wood-framed with glue-lam
Active shade green wall
Uses PV as exterior solar control device, blocking summer sun and allowing winter sun
Ground source heat pump and uses heat recovery from waste heat of adjoining building
After a year of occupancy, lighting systems not providing individual control as designed, energy consumption good but at 40 kBtu/sf/yr instead of 30, waste energy harvesting below design values, water systems still waiting approval
Energy modeling of buildings do not match actual energy performance and most of that is because of what the occupants do
Goal is best comfort at least energy
Getting to net zero requires long term relationships



Two Degrees:  Climate Change and the Built Environment
10/28/13
MIT
Fiona Cousins, Arup NYC

Two Degrees is also the title of her book co-authored with Alisdair McGregor and Cole Roberts 
Making a plan for climate change probably means you will make changes [planning for climate change is planning for emergency, disaster, and regenerative processes, integrated systems solutions]
Generally, half mitigation and half adaptation, with 450 ppm of CO2 or 2 degrees C hotter the scenario 
56.6% emissions CO2 from fossil fuel, 17.3% deforestation, 14.3% methane.  Half of all emissions from built environment.  "Energy reduction in existing buildings is really key" 85% of the buildings today will exist in 2050
CA's stronger energy codes have made a difference, they use about half the energy of the US average
Energy standard is now ASHRAE 90.1
Arup's objectives - operational carbon neutrality, self sufficient for water, ability to cope with future climate change, sustainable materials, benefit to the community....
Net zero definitions:  everything on building, on site, buy offsets
Reduce loads, passive systems, active systems, energy recovery, renewables generation, offsets
Where you put your building is probably the biggest energy effect due to transportation
As buildings become more energy efficient the amount of energy materials and construction become a higher percentage of overall energy
Net zero energy Yang and Yamazaki environment and energy building at Stanford (http://lbre.stanford.edu/dpm/y2e2) - combined payback for measures was about 5 years - 80,000 sq ft
US Embassy, London (http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/footprint/kieran-timberlakes-us-embassy-nothing-is-ornamental-everything-is-performative/8633669.article) - net zero planned, ground source heat pumps and chp plant (natural gas) - half a million sq ft [secure?]
Syracuse Center for Excellence - LEED platinum (http://www.syracusecoe.org/coe/sub1.html?skuvar=16)
Yale Univ Kroon Hall, New Haven (http://environment.yale.edu/kroon/index.php)
Franklin Transit Center in Greenfield, MA - net zero (http://www.frta.org/JWO-Transit-Center.html)
At community scale:  right building, right movement, renewable supply, offset, sequestration - try to have continuous loads
Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island in SF - mixed use development (http://www.sftreasureisland.org/index.aspx?page=394)
BedZed in Beddington, UK - housing development designed for net zero (http://www.zedfactory.com/zed/)
Smart grid can provide 15-25% energy reduction through well-designed feedback loops [local microgrids plus storage, seasonal, and annual]
Integrated resource management - energy, water and carbon [zero emissions all down the line]
Resilience - during which timeframe: before, during, after, and long after;  back to normal or back to a new normal?
Resilient design is redundant, safe failure, rapid rebound, constantly learning (adapting), and extra capacity (not always operating at full capacity) - redundant capacity safe failure rapid rebound constant learning cycle
Q: heat islands are already 2 degrees hotter, a test bed for climate change mitigation?
A:  yes and the UK already has guidelines for higher temperature design in built environment
Q:  transportation - connected buildings and walk ability - and internal loads?
A:  for data planning now at quarter watt/sq ft but not yet going into cloud.
Doing a full city account for Toronto around transportation
Q:  NYC 90 by 50 (90% reduction by 2050) (http://www.urbangreencouncil.org/90by50) and SF