It’s both holistic and practical, simple and direct. Here’s a slightly paraphrased version of their intro statement:

“It is easy and tempting to boil down green building to simply product selections [while] ignoring the challenges of green building as a process…Green building is almost always about how systems work together to reduce environmental impacts.”

This guide even addresses the “design” part of green design by asserting that beauty is part of sustainability, because if people like a building, they’ll be less likely to knock it down later on. Using less energy by itself is not enough, either. Good design means that it meets the user’s needs:

“…you cannot have a green project that is not also a quality project… For example, you can’t have just efficient lighting; it must also be effective lighting.”

Described as a “best practices” manual, it’s a method that includes structured questions and decision checklists to be addressed early on. It’s organized by remodeling project type (kitchen, bath, bedroom, living/working room, finished basement, building performance improvements, new additions, gut rehabs, energy retrofits, and outdoor living).

For each of these project type, there’s a predesign checklist, a scope section with a list of strategies to choose from, a slew of case studies to serve as templates for each type of project – and then you can refer to a complete “strategy library” with synopses of practices such as insulating your water heater or zoned heating controls. Each option is described along with potential issues – which might be the single most valuable thing in the entire guide.

There’s one other noteworthy aspect of a high-quality green building approach, and that is people skills. In a holistic design approach, you can’t just treat each system or assembly as a separate engineering task; you have to ask the clients what’s comfortable FOR THEM. Since many clients may not know exactly, the builder or designer must be skilled at eliciting this information, empathic enough to comprehend the client’s unique perspectives, and patient enough to allow sufficient time for this part of the process.

Source: Mark English

Expect to see this number a lot in energy discussions over the next few years: 2.5 cents/kWh. It is the average cost of energy efficiency, a figure pegged this week in a new report by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. http://www.aceee.org/press/u092pr.htm.

This number is big news because it is so small.  As a resource, energy efficiency beats out all conventional power sources on price.  (See chart below.) Moreover, it’s a price that has been dropping. Five years ago energy efficiency cost 3 cents/kWh.

But just because something is cheap, doesn’t mean people will buy it. How much energy efficiency will make it into the nation’s energy shopping cart?

Efficiency boomed in the early 1990s, but then busted later in the decade when deregulation allowed many utilities to shed their efficiency programs. It is resurging now, part of push by state and federal policy makers to green and ‘smarten’ energy supply.

Most utilities do not make money on efficiency, and this is part of the reason it busted in the late 1990s. Perhaps as important, efficiency’s branding was off. It was seen as an extra, a nicety to pursue out of goodwill when a utility or state had some extra money.

ACEEE and other efficiency advocates are trying to reshape the image. They refer to efficiency as a fuel – just like wind, sun, coal, natural gas, oil. And they want efficiency to be the ‘first fuel.’ This means that when a utility is planning its energy supply, it first applies as much efficiency as is cost effective and plausible, before it builds more expensive new power. Some eastern states are already using this planning concept. In addition, many states have set specific energy efficiency goals, some very aggressive.

That is why ACEEE’s 2.5 cents/kWh becomes so important. It is a kind of marker against which other resources will find themselves competing more and more in policy planning.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of states are decoupling utility profits from kilowatthour sales or instituting other financial incentives that inspire utility support for efficiency.

Of course, our economy cannot prosper on efficiency alone, but many studies indicate we still have a lot of waste in the system.  So as an energy planner, if you were confronted with increased demand – and are not dealing with policy or system issues that require generation or transmission as a solution – which of these would you pursue first?

Credit: Cost figures from ACEEE, “Saving Energy Cost Effectively: A National Review of the Cost of Energy Saved through  Utility Sector Energy Efficiency Programs,”  September 2009, http://www.aceee.org/press/u092pr.htm.

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Lisa Cohn of Energy Efficiency Markets interviews Ujjwal Bhattacharjee, a principal consultant with PA Consulting Group who specializes in renewable energy and energy efficiency. He evaluates energy efficiency in Massachusetts green buildings from 2004 – 2007.