Category Archives: Sustainable Development

Fossil Fuel Development in the Arctic is a Bad Investment

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Source: www.earth-policy.org

>”Currently, about 10 percent of the world’s oil and one-quarter of its natural gas production come from the Arctic region, which has warmed by more than 2 degrees Celsius since the mid-1960s. Countries that border the Arctic Ocean are staking claims to expand their rights beyond the traditional 200-mile exclusive economic zone in anticipation of future oil and gas prospects. According to current estimates, the United States has the largest Arctic oil resources, both on and offshore. Russia comes in second for oil, but it has the most natural gas. Norway and Greenland are virtually tied for third largest combined oil and gas resources. Canada comes in fifth, with almost equal parts oil and natural gas.

In developing these resources, Russia is leading the pack. Production has started at almost all of the 43 large oil and natural gas fields that have been discovered in the Russian Arctic, both on land and offshore. Russia drew its first oil from an offshore rig in Arctic waters in December 2013. […]

[…] operating in the Arctic brings great risks. The shrinking Arctic sea iceallows waves to become more powerful. The remaining ice can be more easily broken up into ice floes that can collide with vessels or drilling platforms. Large icebergs can scour the ocean floor, bursting pipes or other buried infrastructure. Much of the onshore infrastructure is built on permafrost—frozen ground—that can shift as the ground thaws from regional warming, threatening pipe ruptures. Already, official Russian sources estimate that there have been more than 20,000 oil spills annually from pipelines across Russia in recent years.  Arctic operations are far away from major emergency response support. The freezing conditions make it unsafe for crews to be outside for extended periods of time. Even communication systems are less reliable at the far end of the Earth. Why take such risks to pursue these dirty fuels when alternatives to oil and gas are there for the taking?

Rather than searching for new ways to get oil, we can look for better ways to move people and goods. Bus rapid transit, light rail and high-speed rail can move more people for less energy than a car can. And for the cars that remain on the road, electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles—powered by a clean energy grid—are much more efficient than those with a traditional internal combustion engine. Encouraging bicycle use through bike lanes andbike-sharing programs gets people active and out of cars.

Natural gas, which is mainly used to produce electricity, can be replaced with power generated by wind, solar, and geothermal projects. Many countries are demonstrating what is possible with renewables. Denmark already gets one-third of its electricity from wind. Australia is now dotted with 1 million rooftop solar systems. Iceland generates enough geothermal power to meet close to 30 percent of its electricity needs. These are just a few examples of looking past the old familiar solution to a better cleaner one. The risky search under every rock and iceberg for oil and gas deposits is a costly distraction from investing in a clean energy future.”<

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Methods of Improving Data Centers’ Energy Efficiency and Performance

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America’s data centers are consuming — and wasting — a surprising amount of energy.

Source: www.livescience.com

>”Our study shows that many small, mid-size, corporate and multi-tenant data centers still waste much of the energy they use. Many of the roughly 12 million U.S. servers spend most of their time doing little or no work, but still drawing significant power — up to 30 percent of servers are “comatose” and no longer needed, while many others are grossly underutilized. However, opportunities abound to reduce energy waste in the data-center industry as a whole.  Technology that will improve efficiency exists, but systemic measures are needed to remove the barriers limiting its broad adoption across the industry.

How much energy do data centers use?

The rapid growth of digital content, big data, e-commerce and Internet traffic more than offset energy-efficiency progress, making data centers one of the fastest-growing consumers of electricity in the U.S. economy, and a key driver in the construction of new power plants. If such data centers were a country, they would be the globe’s 12th-largest consumer of electricity, ranking somewhere between Spain and Italy.

In 2013, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. That’s the equivalent annual output of 34 large (500-megawatt) coal-fired power plants — enough electricity to power all the households in New York City, twice over, for a year.  […]

Fixing the problem

While current technology can improve data center efficiency, we recommend systemic measures to create conditions for best-practices across the data center industry, including:

Adoption of a simple, server-utilization metric. One of the biggest efficiency issues in data centers is underutilization of servers. Adoption of a simple metric, such as the average utilization of the server central processing units (CPUs), is a key step in resolving the energy-consumption issue.  […]

Rewarding the right behaviors. Data center operators, service providers and multi-tenant customers should review their internal organizational structures and external contractual arrangements and ensure that incentives are aligned to provide financial rewards for efficiency best practices.  […]

Disclosure of data-center energy and carbon performance.Public disclosure is a powerful mechanism for demonstrating leadership and driving behavior change across an entire sector. […]

If just half of the technical savings potential for data-center efficiency that we identify in our report is realized (taking into account market barriers), electricity consumption in U.S. data centers could be cut by as much as 40 percent.  […]”<

 

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California Real Estate Assn’ Educates Members on Building Energy Performance & Benchmarking

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In California, brokers are at the heart of every non-residential sale or lease. Can the AIR organization get them on board with benchmarking?

Source: www.greenbiz.com

>”Commercial buildings are some of California’s largest energy- and water-guzzlers. With 58 percent of the state locked in the highest category of drought, many commercial property owners are seeing increased utility bills, and with a new building energy benchmarking and disclosure law on the books, building owners seek energy efficiency solutions as a common-sense way to ease some of the pressure. One key trade association in California, the AIR Commercial Real Estate Association, is taking the lead by educating its members on the benefits of energy efficiency.

AIR, founded in 1960, is a regional commercial real estate brokers association with more than 1,700 members across southern California, and is one of the nation’s largest organizations of its kind. It’s recognized across the U.S. for its ever-expanding library of sample lease forms, which members use to stay updated on industry and lease language trends — several of which now include sustainability. When California’s energy benchmarking law, AB 1103, went into effect in January, AIR responded by creating sample energy disclosure lease and sale addenda (PDF) and began educating its members on these new tools.

Brokers are in the thick of it

The law states that any time a non-residential building owner finances, sells or leases a whole building, the property owner is required to use Energy Star portfolio manager to benchmark the building and provide the Energy Star rating and supporting consumption information to the lender, buyer or tenant in the transaction. As brokers are central to every aspect of a commercial transaction, their participation is essential for the law to have its intended effect. AIR’s lease and sale addenda effectively address these energy disclosure requirements in one document, providing real estate professionals, building owners, tenants and attorneys with a framework template for compliance with the regulation.

Brokers hold the key to increasing stakeholder awareness, potentially boosting compliance rates, benchmarking data quality and ultimately better building performance and energy management — and educating the community about new regulations and tools is essential to unlocking this potential.”<

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CEC Delays Energy Benchmarking and Disclosure Requirements 2 Years for Smaller Buildings

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>”[…]Compliance with AB 1103 is not suspended, and will continue to be required, for the sale, lease, or financing of buildings over 10,000 square feet that are otherwise subject to the regulations based upon occupancy type.

Significant barriers to compliance with AB 1103

An Emergency Rulemaking Action requires a description of specific facts justifying the immediate action. In justifying the two-year delay, the CEC explained that several stakeholders had expressed concerns about significant barriers to compliance with AB 1103. The CEC noted the following factors in justifying the two-year delay:

  • Some utilities have required tenant consents before releasing utility usage data despite letters sent from the CEC to utilities in July 2013 prohibiting such requirement. This requirement to obtain tenant consents significantly increases compliance costs.
  • Smaller utilities have expressed concerns with their ability to comply given limited staff and resources.
  • The Portfolio Manager platform and software has experienced significant technical problems.
  • The expansion in scope to smaller buildings would increase the number of compliance requests received by utilities, impeding their ability to address barriers to compliance.
  • Smaller building owners may lack the expertise, resources, or capacity necessary to overcome current barriers to compliance without incurring undue expense.
  • Based on initial disclosure data following the January 1, 2014 implementation, it became apparent that “the required disclosures were not being made for the majority of transactions for which they were required.”
  • The development of best practices approaches is lowering compliance costs and paving the way to greater compliance. The additional two years will facilitate lower costs and higher compliance rates before further expanding the program to smaller buildings.”<

See on Scoop.it – Green Building Operations – Systems & Controls, Maintenance & Commissioning

Residential Battery Storage Nears Grid Parity in Germany

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It’s very close, according to the German government and some industry observers.

Source: www.greentechmedia.com

>”It is now generally recognized that rooftop solar has reached “socket parity” — meaning that it is comparable to or cheaper than grid prices — in many countries over the last few years. The big question for consumers and utilities is when socket parity will arrive for solar and battery storage.

[…] Electricity prices are rising and solar PV prices are falling, which means that if battery storage falls to around €0.20 per kilowatt-hour (U.S. $0.27), parity will be achieved.

Australian investment firm Morgans, in an assessment of Brisbane-based battery storage developer Redflow, suggests that that company’s zinc-bromine flow battery may already be commercially economic in Germany, the country that leads the world in terms of household adoption and government support for renewables.

Morgans notes that in Germany, the cost of household grid power is around €0.30 per kilowatt-hour (U.S. $0.40) and that the government is now subsidizing residential energy storage systems that are connected to solar systems.

“Given Germany’s substantial adoption of solar PV…costs for solar power range from €0.10 to €0.15 per kilowatt-hour (half the grid price), so when energy storage costs reach €0.15 to €0.20, this will mean renewable energy costs will be at parity with grid prices,” Morgans concludes.  […]”<

 

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School to Combine Solar PV Modules with Battery Storage in Belgian Pilot Project

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“Such an energy storage and distribution system can offer a great value, certainly for schools”, says Bert Dekeyzer of npo iD, the organization behind the ‘School of the Future’.

Source: www.solarserver.com

>'”During weekends a school consumes almost no electricity. The energy produced by the solar panels is stored in the batteries. On Monday morning there is a peak consumption: then all the computers and machines are turned on, which requires quite a lot of electricity. If the solar panels supply too little at that time, the batteries can provide the remaining energy. Moreover, a study showed that the energy consumption of a school does not stop after four o’clock in the afternoon. Schools are increasingly used in the evening for sports activities and evening classes. Also in this situation, the batteries can play their part.”

PV, storage combination offers a solution for a possible power shortage

In addition to an optimal and economic usage of solar power, the system can provide a solution for a possible power shortage in Belgium. Because of problems with the Belgian nuclear power plants, various municipalities could get disconnected from the electricity grid. In case of a power disruption, a traditional solar installation does not work anymore. The inverter of a traditional system switches off automatically because of a power failure. The owners of solar modules also have no electricity at that time, and in addition they suffer losses of the power output and any feed-in tariffs from their solar panels during the outage.

The storage system provides a solution. Such an installation combines solar modules with battery storage and intelligent software: if the grid fails, the system provides uninterrupted power for the user from the solar modules and/or batteries. […]”<

 

See on Scoop.it – Green Building Design – Architecture & Engineering

Data Centers and Energy Efficiency

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New analysis suggests there’s still an opportunity to cut power consumption and save billions in 2014.

Source: www.greenbiz.com

>”A new tally by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) suggests there’s still a big opportunity to cut energy usage by 40 percent, saving more than $3.8 billion in 2014 alone.  Put another way, that’s like switching off 39 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of 14 large, coal-fired power plants.

“Most of the attention is focused on the highly visible hyperscale ‘cloud’ data centers like Google’s and Facebook’s, but they are already very efficient and represent less than 5 percent of U.S. data center electricity consumption,” said Pierre Delforge, NRDC’s director of high-tech energy efficiency. “Our small, medium, corporate and multi-tenant data centers are still squandering huge amounts of energy.”

Here’s the likely outcome: By 2020, U.S. data centers will probably require about 140 kilowatt-hours of electricity to keep online.

The biggest culprits in wasteful IT power consumption are underutilized servers using significant amounts of electricity without performing any useful purpose, according to NRDC.  […]

Figures suggest the average server operates at just 12 percent to 18 percent of its capacity, which means businesses could stand to be far more aggressive about consolidating or virtualizing them. That’s particularly true of the smallest server rooms, ones that crop up with little advance planning.

“The more work a server performs, the more energy-efficient it is—just as a bus uses much less gasoline per passenger when ferrying 50 people than when carrying just a handful,” the analysis notes.

Among the recommended fixes for this persistent problem are the adoption of metrics that provide deeper insight into average server utilization, more public disclosure of data center energy performance information, and “green” data center leases that provide incentives for energy savings.

The reason why these green data center service contracts work, according to the report, is because they create financial incentives for companies to consider their energy use. […]”<

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5 Steps to Designing a Net Zero Energy Building

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traciesimmons's avatardesignrealizedblog

Net zero energy buildings are really just becoming a reality. According to a 2012 Getting to Zero Report by the New Buildings Institute (NBI) and the Zero Energy Commercial Consortium (CBC), 99 commercial buildings have been identified from around the country that are net zero energy performing, zero-energy capable, or are in construction and on their way. And this is just what they know about.

As the industry continues to embark on net zero energy buildings, architecture firms are learning a lot about what it takes to make them reality. San Francisco-based EHDD is one such firm. For nearly a decade they have been designing with net zero in mind.

Sample breakdown of a building&#039;s energy use from EHDD. Sample breakdown of a building’s energy use from EHDD.

According to Brad Jacobson, a Senior Associate at EHDD and recognized leader in sustainable design, “Working on sustainability doesn’t have to be at all about sacrifice. It’s about finding solutions that…

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Energy Efficiency and Renewables Drives Smart Grid Technologies Market – Research & Developments

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The market for smart grid technologies is evolving rapidly as the need for a more responsive, automated power grid rises worldwide.  …

Source: www.navigantresearch.com

>”The fundamental technology for injecting intelligence into the grid has been in existence for years – more than a decade in some cases. However, the past 18 to 24 months have seen accelerating technological advancements and shifting priorities among utility industry stakeholders.

Transmission system upgrades are driven by the need to interconnect offshore or remote wind and solar farms, as well as ongoing electrification across Asia Pacific and developing regions. Falling costs for devices and communications networking, combined with the increasing emphasis on reliability and energy efficiency, will lead to robust growth in the substation and distribution automation (SA and DA) markets. Meanwhile, government mandates, especially in Europe, will drive strong smart meter penetration gains over the next decade. At the same time, utilities are facing more competition than ever and squeezed margins. These issues, along with the proliferation of smart devices in the grid, will drive impressive growth in demand for more powerful utility IT solutions and analytics. Navigant Research forecasts that global smart grid technology revenue will grow from $44.1 billion in 2014 to $70.2 billion in 2023.

This Navigant Research report analyzes the global market for smart grid technologies, with a focus on transmission upgrades, SA, DA, information and operations technology (IT/OT) software and services, and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). The study provides a detailed analysis of the market drivers, challenges, and trends, as well as regional and country factors, for each smart grid technology segment. Global market forecasts for revenue, broken out by technology, application, component, and region, extend through 2023. The report also provides profiles of key grid infrastructure vendors and includes information on 150-plus other types of companies, major global utilities, and smart grid-related industry associations.

Key Questions Addressed:

Which smart grid technology segments are the largest and how quickly are they expected to grow?

What are the key market drivers and challenges for each smart grid technology segment?

What are the most important new trends affecting the pace of investment in smart grid technologies?

What regional factors are affecting the pace of investment in smart grid technology?

Who are the key vendors in each category of smart grid technology?   […] “<

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Sustainability and Development – Defining Relationships between Humanity, Energy and the Natural World

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A new ‘Zeitgeist’ is increasingly taking hold in growing pockets of society, politics and the business world. All indications point to one direction – towards the concept of ‘sustainability’ dominating human behavior and thinking in the twenty-first century.

Source: breakingenergy.com

>”As the urbanization wave around the globe rolls on, megacities are increasingly becoming the epicenter of human life and economic activity for billions of people. Inevitably, this trend will bring about new challenges and exacerbate looming, well-known challenges such as climate change. As the World Economic Forum notes in a newly-released report on “The Competitiveness of Cities”: “Cities are especially intensive users of energy, food and water, given their concentrations of people and economic activity, and are responsible for over half of global greenhouse gas emissions. Their challenge, particularly in the developing world, is to fuse technology and markets to become much more efficient in using available resources.” Climate Actions and Economic Significance of Cities Source: Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP); data in overview from various sources Thus, global needs for clean water, sanitation and food as well as demand for energy, mobility (transportation) and for an improved standard of living will increase and put tremendous strain on existing natural resources.

The growing awareness of environmental problems – especially that without a timely, coordinated, and ‘corrective’ intervention by governments the problem of climate change will eventually become irreversible – in addition to the perception of natural resources’ finite supply brings any debate back to the fundamental question of how to sustain life on earth. What is Sustainable Development about?  The first association that comes to mind has to do with energy needs in general – and the finite fossil fuel supply amid projected future demand growth – and carbon-emissions-free energy in particular.

Renewable energy sources (solar, wind, hydro) have the potential to pick up the slack and supply a larger percentage of projected future energy demand globally. In this context, technological innovation represents one suitable solution to problems related to sustainability. However, a different angle to tackle these problems is a change in human behavior based on better information and awareness leading to energy savings by implementing simple energy efficiency measures. This point emphasizes the importance of public awareness and/or education, which can serve as a catalyst for action – i.e. a change of course. Apart from concerns about energy, the concept of sustainability includes all aspects of political, economic, and social life in so far as present actions may constrict future actions.

The so-called UN ‘Brundtland Report’ from 1987 is very instructive on this topic and defines sustainable development as follows: “Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept of sustainable development does imply limits – not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities. But technology and social organization can be both managed and improved to make way for a new era of economic growth. […]

To date, many companies have realized the merits of modifying their products and processes to become more sustainable. (…) But, these [incremental] innovations will only get us so far. What we need are not just better products and processes, but fundamentally different business models. We need companies and industries whose underlying structures are, at worst, zero negative impact, and at best, contributing to the regeneration and restoration of natural, human and social capital.” The US utility industry will have no other choice than taking steps along the path towards more ‘value creation from sustainability’ in order to remain a viable business model for future generations.”<

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