In fact, all but one of the predictions came true – some of the panels are in museums, some are a curiosity at Unity College, they are an example of a road not taken (we have yet to really ramp up use of solar power), yet they are still a small part of one of the greatest adventures we’ve ever undertaken (although we’ve gotten a much slower start than we should have) – but they are not still on the White House supplying cheap, efficient energy.

Unity College cafeteria with Carter solar panels (source: Scientific American)

Hopefully, a modern version of them will be soon – Author Bill McKibben and a team of students from Unity College in Maine are traveling to Washington D.C. this week to deliver one of the original Carter panels to President Obama, asking him to reinstall solar on the White House on 10/10/10, and to follow this symbolic gesture with substantial legislative action.

On this Tuesday night (Sept. 7, 2010), the Solar Road Trip will stop in Boston.  Unity College, 350.org, Second Nature, Students for a Just and Stable Future, and others are helping to promote this exciting trip.

Author Bill McKibben and a team of students from Unity College in Maine travel to Washington D.C. to deliver one of the original Carter panels to President Obama, asking him to reinstall solar on the White House, and to follow this symbolic gesture with substantial legislative action.

Second Nature President Tony Cortese will speak, along with Bill McKibben and other leaders, about the importance of taking action on climate and energy.  This should be a major press event, and a strong showing of supporters will go along way to raise the profile of these efforts – please join us on Tuesday night!

Here are the details of the event:

• Date: Tuesday, September 7
• Location: Old South Church, Copley Square, Boston
• Schedule:
  
  • 5:30pm - Bicycle pedal-powered climate rock band, Melodeego
  • 6:00pm – Guest Speakers, including Bill McKibben (ofhttp://www.350.org), Tony Cortese (ofhttp://www.secondnature.org), representatives from Students for a Just and Stable Future and Interfaith Power and Light
  • 7:00pm - Screening of “A Road Not Taken,” new documentary that tells the story of the original Carter White House solar panel installation.

Please forward to anyone in the Boston area who might be interested.

And if you didn’t catch Bill McKibben on Letterman Tuesday night, watch the clip here.

But the owners of Grouse have taken it one step further, and installed a custom-built, glassed in viewing pod at the top of the turbine – The Eye of the Wind – the world’s first elevator-accessible viewPOD.  For $25, you take an elevator to the top and take in spectacular views of the city, ocean, and surrounding mountains.

The thrill of some slight vertigo along with the chance to learn all about wind power and see the area from a really unique perspective makes it well worth the price of admission.  One section of the floor is see-through glass, and demands some courage and faith-in-engineering to step on.

Each pane of the glass wall has some fun-facts about how the turbine works and the local area.  A flatscreen provides real-time data about wind speed, electricity generation, carbon avoided, etc. (unfortunately the wind wasn’t blowing at a sustained rate of over 9 km/hr while we were there, so the blades weren’t turning, and they’re still addressing the final hurdles before they can tie in to the grid).

Grouse rents out the pod for corporate functions and the like, and have done a great job of maximizing the value of their wind turbine.   The turbine was built by Leitwind out of Italy, a division of the company that builds some of their chairlifts, and the pod was custom built using components from 10 different countries.

While the folks back home in Massachusetts, have been arguing over the impacts on tourism of the Cape Wind project, this project pushed ahead and has shown that turbines themselves can be a revenue-generating tourist attraction.  I’d sign up right away for a boat tour through the first offshore wind farm in the US – not only to see those beautiful turbines up close, but to be a part of history, experiencing the early steps of creating a safe, independent, clean energy system.

Omega Institute for Holistic Studies (source: Boston Globe)

The article references one of my favorite biomimetic examples, the termite mound:

In 1996, a landmark project was completed: the Eastgate Centre, a large office building and mall in Harare, Zimbabwe, designed by architect Mick Pearce. Modeled after termite mounds found in the region, the building has no air conditioners, yet stays cool through a ventilation system inspired by nature. Termites perpetually dig (and plug) holes to catch breezes and modulate the temperature within their mounds. Using fans, vents, and funnels, the Eastgate Centre mimics this system. It uses 10 percent of the energy of buildings of similar size, and was estimated to save $3.5 million on energy in the first five years of operation.

It’s a great example of how smart design can save lots of money and dramatically reduce energy demand.

The article also provided a nice update on the latest status of the Living Building Challenge – still no certified projects, as they need to be monitored in operation for a year, but three are expected to pass the test this summer.  Seventy have been registered – which is a great sign that momentum continues to grow and pull the leading edge of building design towards truly sustainable, restorative practices.

Another exciting bit of news from the article:

The global architecture firm HOK has established a collaborative relationship with the Biomimicry Guild, working with its biologists. Plans for a project in India, to design a city, include rooftops that imitate the “drip-tip” structure of a local fig leaf; this structure encourages the rapid runoff of water, essential during monsoon season. British architect Michael Pawlyn is working on a greenhouse in the Sahara desert that desalinates seawater, inspired by the Namib Desert beetle, which manages to survive by catching water droplets from fog on its shell and funneling them to its mouth.

This is a great development – but we’d love to see some projects in the US as well, where buildings are responsible for almost 50% of our energy use, and approximately three-quarters of our electricity use.  Biomimicry in building design is a massive and critically important component if we are to dramatically reduce demand (on the order of 90% like in the termite example) so that we can meet the remaining demand with 100% clean, renewable energy.

credit: Arising, http://wearearising.org

This approach involves imagining oneself in a sustainable future, where the four scientific principles of sustainability are not violated, and then ‘backcasting’ to the present day and asking the question “what did we do back then to get here today.”

I just wrote a post for Greenopolis.com about how the University of Illinois, and hundreds of other colleges and universities are essentially taking this approach to move their campuses, communities, and all of society towards a climate neutral, sustainable future.  (To browse hundreds of other climate action plans from colleges and universities across the country aiming to achieve climate neutrality, check out the online Reporting System of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC).)

In some of their planning documents, the folks at Illinois do a good job of articulate two important components of sustainability – the first that has to do with all future generations (human and otherwise) and the second that involves the billions of people today who are already suffering dearly from our global, unsustainable systems.  They write:

“The first societal challenge focuses on the need to maintain natural ecosystem function and adapt human-dominated ecosystems to restore critical functions of natural ecosystems. Such ecosystems: (1) have closed loops (waste from any process is re-used or becomes input to another process), (2) re-use non-renewable resources (e.g., minerals), (3) use renewable resources (e.g., water and forestry supplies) at a rate less than their renewal rate, and (4) provide habitats to healthy populations of native species. Such an approach will be achieved through creative, system-level design of essential human services (e.g., food, water, shelter, energy, transportation, information, social interactions, security, and health care) that emphasize environmental as well as social and economic criteria.

“The second societal challenge focuses on impoverished communities, where a lack of essential human services, often accompanied by rapid population growth, threaten both local and global sustainability and create serious challenges to success on the first grand challenge. Better understanding of the economic, political, and social policy drivers of poverty is needed to develop creative solutions that enable citizens of these countries to sustainably develop needed capabilities, such as food and shelter, having good health and a life of normal length, and fulfilling social needs. To be sustainable, such capabilities must be supported within a diverse and equitable interdependence with economic markets, social security, government services, and political processes. This interdependence provides critical safety nets when environmental, economic, or social changes stress livelihoods.”

The structure of Aedi Group, through the co-profit model, is designed to address both of these simultaneously.  First, our for-profit companies are all set-up to work towards sustainability.  Second, our non-profit, Village Corps, aims to empower the world’s poor to generate sustainable prosperity and resilient communities for themselves.  In this way we aim to ensure that not only does our work support others around the world, but also the economic-engine for that work is not acting against those efforts by reinforcing unsustainable systems that result in symptoms that threaten the very people we would like to help.

It is this approach of imaging the future we want and working together to create it that will help us break free from the habits and systems of the past which are now (largely inadvertently) creating results that threaten billions of people and natural systems of all kinds the world over.

At the same time, we’re reducing the planet’s biocapacity, and thus it’s ability to generate resources and assimilate waste.  It’s scary stuff.  But hats off to the UAE for engaging with WWF and the Global Footprint Network to educate its population and look for ways to create better, and ultimately sustainable, systems:

Building Green is a TV series on healthy, energy-efficient, and environmentally-friendly building (free & on-demand on hulu!).  The first episode, “Breaking Ground,” introduces the strawbale home project in Santa Barbara that the series will follow through to completion.  It also features Aedi Group Advisory Board member, Bill Browning.  Have a look:

Our construction team has had the great pleasure over the past few months to work on an exciting project in Concord, MA.  The owner has a real passion for healthy, green building without sacrificing classic design.  And she has done an unbelievable job documenting the entire process on her blog – Concord Green.

Her latest post highlights a recent talk by site supervisor Patrick Hughes on living with what we need, using the dilemma of the long-distance transport of delicious avocados to demonstrate the point that sometimes we can live more fulfilling lives by not trying have it all.  (This example struck a cord with me personally because I love avocados, but hate shipping them in from afar, so I’ve got five avocado trees started from pits in my dining room – maybe in 10 years they’ll bear fruit, maybe… patience is a virtue).

Lisa (the owner/blogger) has brought passion and patience to the project throughout – diligently researching and testing materials to ensure we’re using the safest, healthiest, most environmentally-friendly products we can find.  It has been a great learning experience and an excellent partnership between owner, contractor and two design firms – Zero Energy Design and Connor Homes.

In addition to document each step of the process – from choosing the right bathtub to choosing the right lender, floor paint, and tile materials – the blog also looks at the broader issues of building healthy environments and why that matters.For example, this post highlights the Health House Institute’s evaluation of chemical sensitivities.  This one takes a look at passive solar design.

Keep following the project’s progress at the Concord Green.

]]> http://www.aediconstruction.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=651 0 http://www.aediconstruction.com/blog/?p=594 http://www.aediconstruction.com/blog/?p=594#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:29:47 +0000 aedi team http://www.aediconstruction.com/blog/?p=594 by Georges Dyer, Partner, Aedi Group

The portable GreenMachine makes regular, structural blocks from local subsoil with very little cement and water.

Green buildings come in all shapes and sizes and can be made out of all kinds of materials.  One technology that facilitates the use of low-cost, local, natural materials is the GreenMachine.

Developed and refined by TerraBuilt over the last ten years or so, the GreenMachine uses local subsoil (not topsoil) as the basis for uniform, structural blocks that can be easily stacked (doesn’t require skilled labor) to build homes and other structures.

The earthen blocks provide good insulation that keep heating and cooling requirements down and limits energy demand.

The tongue and groove allows for no-mortar construction, and the blocks can cure in the wall so you can start stacking them right off the machine.

In addition to the subsoil, each block is about 8% cement and requires some water.  But all in all, the system is relatively self-sufficient, cutting down on extraction, processing and shipping – and all of the social and ecological costs associated at every step of the way. All of this makes it great for remote sites (although it’s an interesting solution anywhere).  The machine itself can be towed by a jeep or pick-up truck and is easily moved around the site and between sites.

One cubic yard of subsoil and 1.5 bags of cement makes 84 “TerraBricks” – each about the size of your standard cinderblock.  The GreenMachine can crank out 4-5 per minute.

You can download and check out a video of the GreenMacine in action here.