Courtesy of Kevin Manalili.

Kevin Manalili, the Director of Operations recently sent out an email to Academy staff answering some questions about the California Academy of Sciences building. He gave me permission to share the email in this post. It details some of the more interesting methods needed to operate a Green building and it will show you some of what goes on behind the scenes at the Academy.

Ever wonder how the Academy makes salt water for our cold and tropical salt water tanks?

We start with salt – lots of salt. Each of these bags contains 2,000 lbs of it. Engineers use the power chain hoist to safely lift each bag over to the salt water mixing cistern located underneath the life support system room.

In addition to the salt, there are 11 additional ingredients to the CAS salt formula. Laurie’s demonstrating her new checklist that ensures the mix is correct 100% of the time.

The Academy recently converted over from Instant Ocean (the Bisquick for salt water aquarists) to our own blend. The salt water team took months to investigate and test the new mixture that reduces our cost from $0.12 per gallon to under $0.08 per gallon. This is a big deal when you are making over 2.7 million gallons per year!

Just before making the transition, the cisterns where the water is mixed and stored needed to be cleaned. In a joint effort, the Aquarium Staff and the Engineers drained the cisterns, washed down the silt, and collected it for disposal. Arnel’s in this tank after most of the water was drained and the space certified safe for people to enter.

Ever wonder how the glass roof is cleaned?

The panes of glass that ring the living roof house thousands of solar cells and keep the perimeter of the building dry. Unlike a regular roof, the glass needs to be washed regularly to remove any debris and deposits that can permanently etch the glass. A soft brush at the end of a long pole, with filtered water that removes any chemicals and minerals that will spot the glass, are the only tools used – no chemicals.

The same technique is used on most of the building’s glass surfaces, both inside and out.

Ever wonder how we spread compost on a steep slope?

Spreading compost to improve the planting conditions on the south slope is difficult. The process used to be carrying buckets of the stuff by hand, up and down a hill, trampling plants and compacting the soil in the process. Enter jet mulching! Specialty trucks use compressed air to push to compost through a flexible tube, literally blowing the mulch onto the hillside. Three trucks made quick work of our hillside in just a few hours. They placed three times the amount of mulch in a quarter of the time, for the same cost.

Ever wonder what went into the Academy's LEED Platinum certification?

The Academy earned its LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification for New Construction (NC) with a score of 54 out of a possible 69 points. The LEED NC was designed to guide and distinguish high-performance commercial and institutional projects. Our building was graded on six categories that included sustainability, water efficiency, energy use, and indoor environmental quality, and was based on how the building was constructed. We are now nearly complete with our submission to the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) for our Existing Building Operations and Maintenance (EB-OM) certification. The EB-OM checklist has a total of 110 points and helps us measure the operations, improvements, and maintenance with the goal of maximizing efficiency and minimizing environmental impacts. The project team are in the homestretch of this nearly two year project!

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The new PC—Policy Collaboration

It started in Santa Clara County, then spread to Marin, and now its everywhere in California; builders, developers, city governments, and environmentalists, all getting along and creating green building standards together. It’s the new PC—Policy Collaboration.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG), a business development group, got things started in Santa Clara County by meeting with city mayors to discuss a coordinated building policy to replace the patchwork that existed in 2007. Once they got the mayors go ahead, SVLG got the endorsement of the Santa Clara Cities Association. Then representatives from the cities formed a group called the Green Building Collaborative (GBC), and the group began to meet with builders and to enlist the help of builders associations like the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA). With all those acronyms coming at them, the city councils in Santa Clara County, one by one, succumbed to the contagious enthusiasm and passed the green building ordinances.

Marin County decided to go ahead and do its own collaborating. San Rafael Mayor Al Boro and Planning Director Bob Brown started talking with other city officials in Marin about a coordinated green building policy. They formed a task force with representatives of all the cities, recruited some building experts, and created a really cool sounding acronym, BERST, for the Building, Energy, Retrofit, and Solar Transformation task force. The group reached out to builders, designers, and business groups to try to form a consensus. It was tough work, which for Brown became a half-time job. Cats and dogs is easy—this was bob cats and wolves. But goodwill reigned and eventually everyone agreed on a green building policy that looked a lot like the one in Santa Clara (see Table).

One of the features of the code is that homes larger than 7,000 square feet of floor area have to compensate for size by being net-zero energy users. In other words, they have to produce as much energy—through solar electric PV and other renewable energies and by being extremely energy efficient—as they use over the course of a year.

San Rafael was the first city to adopt the green building ordinances. Three other cities have signed on, and more will be voting in the fall.

Leif Magnuson, Pollution Prevention Coordinator at the San Francisco office of EPA, was the prime mover in spreading the collaborative spirit to Sacramento. Magnuson gathered California stakeholders at an ACI conference. ACI is a national training organization that for 25 years has hosted regional and national training and networking conferences bringing together everyone interested in sustainable home building and renovation, from weatherization professionals, energy auditors, and small home performance contractors to policymakers, production builders, manufacturers of building materials, and representatives of big box home improvement stores. And after a while, they had to create an acronym to match their ambitions—HERCC, for the Home Energy Retrofit Coordinating Committee.

It was only a matter of time before the California Energy Commission (CEC) got involved—in fact representatives of the commission were a part of HERCC from the beginning. So it is no wonder that the HERCC recommendations greatly influenced the CEC green building regulations that became a part of the California Title 24 building codes. The investor owned utilities all throughout California support the green building policies championed by HERCC through its rebates offered to builders and homeowners.

From the beginning, HERCC wanted to put in place an infrastructure to support green building and retrofits beyond the years of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which flooded federal dollars to the states that will be running out in about a year. HERCC will outlast ARRA, thanks in part to BERST, which owes its inspiration to groups like SVLG, GBC, and BOMA. Go CA!

(Many thanks to Elise Hunter, who recently served as the government relations manager at Build It Green and who is now studying for advanced degrees in sustainable enterprises at the University of Michigan, for putting together the facts in an upcoming article about policy collaboratives for Home Energy Magazine.)

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This new house cuts cooling loads by using deep overhangs, porches, and high-performance windows, and by keeping existing trees where possible. Credit: Florida Solar Energy Center.

The eyes of the nation are once again upon California for making bold steps in the water efficiency, energy efficiency, and global climate change arenas. The California Department of Housing and Community Development has issued mandatory green building codes—the first statewide green building codes in the nation—effective beginning in 2011.

The California Green Building Standards (CALGreen) Code, a part of the Title 24 building codes, is so new that I can’t even find a copy of the code that doesn’t have “draft” next to the title. Most of us will not notice a difference right away. But builders will. Unfortunately, because of the downturn in the new housing market, new home builders will have plenty of time to bone-up on the new code.

Here are some highlights for residential builders:

If you are a builder and want some help understanding and complying with the new CALGreen code, contact your local home builders association, or contact Build It Green California, which offers training and materials that will help you comply with the new code.

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The soft color palette helps to blend the European design of Global Green USA's three homes in New Orleans' historic Holy Cross neighborhood bordering the Mississippi River. Project plans call the construction of two more single-family homes, a 17-unit multi-family apartment building and a community center with public-use space, a grocery store, and bank branch. Photo credit: Roger Hahn.

Home Energy Magazine’s man in New Orleans, Roger Hahn, a freelance journalist, feels like he is living in a Petri dish of building-science-based, affordable, efficient, healthy, and ecologically integrated home building and renovation in the new, New Orleans. "Historians will one day come to view the post-Katrina rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast as the first major example of green design and technologies playing a major role in the reconstruction of vulnerable, disaster-prone communities," says Hahn.

Money from the federal disaster relief funds has been slow in coming to the people in New Orleans who need it. "The money often winds up being not enough money to elevate above newly mandated flood levels and rebuild something similar to what was damaged in the flood at the same time," says Hahn. It is nonprofits such as Global Green, Habitat for Humanity, Enterprise Community Partners, the Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative, and actor Brad Pitt’s futuristic new homes program Make It Right that are on the ground building and renovating whole neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward and the Holy Cross neighborhood, both devastated by Katrina and her aftermath.

Did you know that New Orleans was the center of a Silicon Valley-like tech boom in the early 1800s and again in the early 1900s? Early on, the city nurtured inventors and inventions such as the steam engine, the cotton gin, and methods of refining sugar cane. Later, a New Orleans engineer invented a water pump powerful enough to drain marshlands. We have recent memories of the Superdome in New Orleans as a place where people were warehoused after the storm and floods destroyed their homes, with dead bodies covered in sheets on the sidewalks out front, and people begging for food and water in front of the TV cameras. But the Superdome was built as the largest fixed-dome structure in the world.

Hahn has lived in the city for more than 15 years, and was a frequent visitor before that. After going through the citywide depression that fell on the city after the disaster, he’s ready with his adopted city for the Phoenix to rise from the wet ashes. "It’s possible to imagine New Orleans emerging as a leader in three related areas: coastal flood management; advanced construction techniques that address storm- and flood-prone communities; and as a central hub in a growing worldwide network of manufacturers, developers, and architects pushing for residential and commercial solutions emphasizing affordability as a central element in energy-efficient design and construction," says Hahn.

I think it’s more than possible. I think it’s already started.

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Don’t forget to turn off the lights next time you leave a room. You’ll make an 83-year-old physicist, with a passion for saving kilowatts, very happy

Do you know what the biggest energy drain is on your house? Well, if you don’t have a hot tub, it’s heating and cooling your house. My head is swimming with energy efficiency facts after producing this week’s QUEST radio piece on efficiency guru Art Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld is retiring, stepping down after two terms on the California Energy Commission. The guy has spent the past thirty five years fighting for us, California’s energy consumers. While electricity consumption has risen, sharply, in the rest of the country, California’s electricity use, per capita, has remained nearly flat since the early 1970’s. It is not that we are any less addicted to our flat screen TVs and personal computers, it’s that the state, thanks in large part to Rosenfeld’s dogged persistence, has put in place some of the strictest energy standards in the world. His passion for saving killowatts has saved billions on utility bills and improved air quality.

As it goes with people who are driven by a cause, the 83-year-old physicist is not really retiring. Rosenfeld will be returning to Lawrence Berkeley National Labs a few days a week to continue his research on low reflective white roof tops. His work has shown white roofs can cut electricity use by 15-percent by reducing the need for air conditioning and they combat climate change at the same time. White roofs are now mandatory on commercial buildings in California, thanks, in part, to Rosenfeld. Check out our radio story on cool roofs.

And by the way, don’t forget to turn off the lights next time you leave a room. You’ll make an 83-year-old physicist, with a passion for saving kilowatts, very happy.

Listen to The Godfather of Green radio report online.

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How much air is your house leaking? Are you unknowingly slurping in dirty air from your garage and attic? Perhaps a blower door test can help you find out.

"I went to the ServiceMagic Web site that I learned about editing a Home Energy article," says Tom. "Within less than a minute after I entered some basic information about my house and what I was looking for in the way of an energy audit, the phone rang." It was Sustainable Spaces, a home performance contractor located in San Francisco. Tom made an appointment for his audit for the next week. "They were offering a 'Stimulus Special' for $395."

The house Tom shares with his partner Dmitri was built in 1907. "The home has never been remodeled," says Tom. "We recently had the furnace replaced with a hot water radiant system. We have been careful to keep to the original features of the home, so we got our radiators from buildings built around the same time that used to be part of the heating systems in buildings at Fort Baker." They also installed a renewable energy source. "We installed photovoltaic (PV) panels on our roof, but we should have had the audit first to show us how to use less energy and save on the PV.  Our annual true-up statement says we owe $75 for electricity, but I want to get that down to $0!"

Rob Mitchell, an experienced contractor who knows a lot about Bay Area houses, came with two younger men for an audit of Tom and Dmitri's 102-year-old home. The crew closed all the exterior doors and windows, installed a "blower door" in the main doorframe, and depressurized the house. Immediately, dust and insulation particles began to pour through the "pocket doors" from the attic. After taking some measurements to get a general sense of how leaky the house is, and blocking some of the major air leaks, the crew from Sustainable Spaces then pressurized the house. "We walked around the house with a liquid pencil, which showed there is airflow around switch plates, gaps in the baseboard where the home is connected to the outside, and the cabinet in our kitchen where there used to be 'torpedo tubes,' which used to hold hot water heated by the wood stove, and other places" says Tom.

So the old house has some problems with air leakage, which means heating energy being lost to the outside. The crew also found out that the humidity in the kitchen was 20% higher than that on the outside of the house. "We both took showers that morning, and I had a cup of hot tea," says Tom. That was enough to keep the humidity high a few hours later.

Since the home has no mechanical ventilation, moisture build up could lead to mold growth on surfaces in the living spaces, or-even worse because it is hidden-within the walls. Mold can degrade building materials and create poor indoor air quality. Tom has allergies and a moldy house could make it difficult for him to breathe. Since Tom is living in the mild climate of the Bay Area, where we can open windows and get fresh air other ways in our leaky houses, the moisture may not hang around long enough to be a problem. If he lived in a cold climate such as Minnesota's, or a hot-humid climate such as Atlanta's, fixing the air leaks in his house without adding mechanical ventilation could create a "sick house", meaning one with poor indoor air quality due to mold.

"We won't get the report until next week," says Tom. The report will include specific numbers for air leakage from the house to the outside-or in this case between the living spaces and the attic and basement. Too much air flow means lost energy and too little means a sick house. The report will also give a range of measures that will make Tom and Dmitri's house healthier and more energy efficient. "We'll decide what measures we want done when we get the report. We made our heating system more efficient with the radiant system that heats the living spaces and provides us with hot water. We use half the gas now to heat water than we did before. So spending a lot more on fixing the building envelope doesn't make so much sense to us right now. We'll probably fix the big leaks by air sealing around the attic. And we may insulate under the floor between the living spaces and the basement."

"I wanted to have our house audited mostly because I'm curious," says Tom. "And we want to save energy." But from now on when Tom talks about home performance, and the importance of healthy and efficient homes, it will take on a whole new dimension-the homeowner's perspective.

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This is a LEED-certified building on Columbus Circle
in New York City. Anything wrong with this picture?

But there is some question as to whether LEED buildings actually save energy. Henry Gifford, an engineer and mechanical system designer in New York City, "…the best data available shows that on average, they (LEED-certified buildings) use more energy than comparable buildings." His view is controversial, but I have seen the data he used and have studied his analysis and it seems reasonable to me, though I am not a statistician and have done a limited amount of number crunching in my short career as an engineer before becoming a writer.

I have heard the arguments from the other side and haven't been convinced. Even from a common sense perspective, it seams unrealistic that LEED buildings are built to save energy. I've seen too many LEED certified buildings with a large percentage of windows as exterior walls–that is like trying to build an energy efficient building without walls. Also, LEED certification does not require performance testing of buildings. A building can achieve points for energy efficiency from modeling alone. In my role as editor of Home Energy Magazine, I have wanted to publish in-depth articles about LEED-certified homes, but I have been unable to find a LEED-certified building owner or designer who is willing to publish a full year of performance data, post-occupancy.

The LEED program has made green building a common term and a sought after designation among architects, builders, and developers across the nation. LEED buildings may use more environmentally friendly materials and be healthier for their occupants. But it is not yet clear to me that they save energy compared to business as usual. If we want to achieve energy independence, combat the worst effects of global warming, and grow a green economy, we can't afford to build–and celebrate–buildings built as usual.

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By reporter Marjorie Sun.

I got interested in this story after hearing Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla speak at a conference this fall in Sausalito. He explained how he decides where to invest in green tech and it was fascinating. He and other top venture capitalists think they can help stop global warming and make a ton of money at the same time. You can listen to Khosla's talk on a webcast and listen to all sorts of entrepreneurs and v.c.'s talk about the latest renewable energy projects.

Khosla says to achieve a huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions fast, we have to think about solutions that make big cuts in emissions and will be widely adopted. Buying a Prius is fine, he says, but it's really just "fashion." We need solutions that people in India and China will buy, Khosla says. To him, the key issues that guide his investments are cost, scale, and adoption. If a renewable solution isn't cheaper than coal, forget it, he says. Geothermal "is nice, but it doesn't scale."

Same with wind. It's "a great technology, but it's a toy." As for hydrogen fuel, the adoption risk is too high. Again, forget it, he says. The focus should be a war on coal, oil, and the manufacturing of cement and steel, which are huge emitters of carbon dioxide. (He's a major investor in Calera, an alternative cement maker in Silicon Valley.)

One more area for potentially huge gains is to improve energy efficiency, such as lighting. Another legendary venture capital company, Kleiner Perkins, is also racing to develop renewable energy solutions and make a fortune. (Khosla is a former partner there.) Kleiner's efforts were profiled in a cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine recently

With the Obama administration, it will be interesting to see what new federal policies– tax, economic and regulatory– will be adopted to accelerate solutions and spur more investment during a double whammy of crises: the economic meltdown and climate change.

Listen to the Building Blocks Go Green radio report online.

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Watts in your kitchen?

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which develops product testing for the Energy Star program, recently reached an agreement with LG, one of the world's largest manufacturer's of appliances and consumer electronics, over some LG refrigerators that failed to live up to the Energy Star label.

DOE allows manufacturers to test their own products. Some LG refrigerators were tested with their icemakers turned off and earned the Energy Star label, meaning that they are among the most energy efficient refrigerators on the market. But consumers don't generally turn their icemakers off. The LG refrigerators in question, with French doors and through-the-wall ice and water dispensers, can use up to twice as much energy than is reported on the refrigerator labels.

If you own one of the notorious refrigerators–go to the LG special web site to find out–then LG will send someone out to make some modifications, and hand you a check to cover all the hidden energy charges for the life of the refrigerator. Home Energy's Senior Executive Editor Alan Meier estimates that LG will be spending around $150 million on home visits and energy rebates.

Is LG the only manufacturer to circumvent performance standards? Probably not, so we are watching the news for more DOE settlements.

Do you know how to spot hidden energy guzzlers in your house? If you get your gas and/or electricity from PG&E, you can compare your home energy use over time and spot those peaks and valleys that indicate something is wrong, or something is right. If your electric bills shoot up soon after buying a new refrigerator, TV, or other appliance, and it isn't due to a change in the weather, you can easily spot the culprit.

If you have an online account, login, click on the "Billing" link, and then click on "Usage History". What's really cool, at least for energy geeks like me, is that you can pull up graphs showing two years of electricity use, gas use, and electricity and gas charges. And you can pull up a graph that superimposes your gas and electricity use with a graph of "heating degree-days" and "cooling degree-days". The degree-days give you a snapshot of the load on your heating and air conditioning systems–more on that later.

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Multi-trunk Magnolia sucks carbon.
Photo: Jim Gunshinan

I feel good that those new trees are sucking carbon out of the air as we speak. But a recent talk at Berkeley Labs, where Home Energy's offices are located, made me think much bigger. Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures and earned his chops as the founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems. Khosla Ventures exists to “assist great entrepreneurs determined to build companies with lasting significance."

Khosla, a tall, thin, 60-ish, short-grey-haired man who looks like he runs marathons, threw out some questions on a big screen to get us all interested. “What if more coal plants meant cleaner air? What if more driving meant less carbon? What if a million year crude oil production cycle were reduced to hours? What if engines were twice as efficient, cutting world oil consumption in half?" There are companies supported by Khosla Ventures that are making progress on those “what-ifs." For example, a company called Pax Streamline is working on turbine designs inspired by natural forms that will significantly increase the efficiency of wind turbines, power plants, and HVAC systems.

Living Homes is creating cheap, prefabricated, highly resource efficient and really swell looking homes. Khosla talked about making flue gases from coal-fired power plants into cement or fertilizer (that's how coal plants will someday clean the air).

The title of Khosla's talk was “Extrapolating the past or Inventing the Future." He thinks we need quantum leap changes in the way we design car engines, the fuel we use; how we manufacture cement, steel, and glass; and the way we build buildings. He spiced his talked with phrases such as “80% more efficient," “3- or 4-fold increase in storage capacity," and “100 miles per gallon diesel."

This radical way of thinking and imagining is more possible given 1) the Obama administration coming to Washington, 2) the cost in treasure and lives for our fossil fuel dependency, and 3) the crash in the financial sector and the stock market. The same old way of doings things (think incremental steps and short-term gain) isn't working anymore. Except for tree planting. That's always good, even if having a small effect on planetary atmosphere. And I like figs.

(Go here for a video of Khosla's talk. Then go plant a tree and invent the future.)

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