Alex Wilson is the Executive Editor of Environmental Building News. For more than 25 years Alex has written about energy-efficient and environmentally responsible design and construction. Prior to starting his own company in 1985 (now BuildingGreen, Inc.), he was executive director of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association for five years; before that he taught workshops on the construction of solar greenhouses in New Mexico in the late '70s. Alex is author of Your Green Home (New Society Publishers, 2006) and coauthor of the Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings (ACEEE, 8th edition, 2003) and the Rocky Mountain Institute's comprehensive textbook Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate (John Wiley & Sons, 1998). He has also written hundreds of articles for other publications, including Fine Homebuilding, Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture, the Journal of Light Construction, and Popular Science. Along with writing about design and construction, Alex has written four guidebooks on quiet-water paddling published by the Appalachian Mountain Club—covering all of New England and New York State. (You can order Alex's books online.) Alex served on the board of directors of the U.S. Green Building Council for five years and he is currently a trustee of The Nature Conservancy - Vermont Chapter.

Calmac IceBank tanks at One Bryant Park, one of the nation's greenest high-rise buildings. Photo: © Gunther Intelmann for Cook+Fox Architects

A number of very well-known green buildings rely on ice-based TES cooling. One of the newest such buildings is the 2.1-million square-foot (195,000 m2) Bank of America building in New York City at One Bryant Park. I visited the sub-basement (three floors down) to see the 44 eight-foot-diameter, insulated CALMAC tanks in the building that collectively provide about a quarter of the building's cooling. Each of these tanks holds about 1,600 gallons of water that is alternately frozen and thawed by circulating a glycol solution through about three miles of plastic tubing. It's high-tech, but the result is surprisingly simple.

Benefits of ice-based TES include the following:

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For the EBN feature article this month I spent weeks learning about building-integrated wind. I'm a huge fan of wind energy in general, and the idea of putting wind turbines on top of buildings — or actually integrating them into the architecture of buildings — was really appealing. Why not generate the energy right where it's needed, and by putting turbines on top of buildings wouldn't you be getting them up higher where it's windier? What a cool idea.

Unfortunately, as I point out in this month's feature article, "The Folly of Building-Integrated Wind," it's actually pretty hard to get wind turbines to perform well on buildings and, even if you can, the economics are not very good. A huge challenge is noise and vibration. Spinning things tend to generate noise and vibration, and that can be a big problem when people are occupying the building those turbines are mounted on. I went from being open-minded about the practicality of building-integrated wind to believing that it's usually a pretty dumb idea.

Another big drawback to building-integrated wind is that even though it's often windy on top of buildings, that wind tends to be quite turbulent. It's twisting around and not nearly as effective for wind turbines as laminar flow.

But a lot of rooftop wind turbines are being installed — how are they working?

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At the 2008 "Summer Camp" in the Adirondacks. Photo: Mike Cox

Gail has been a key part of the green building movement since its earliest formative days. She was one of EBN's most enthusiastic supporters since joining our advisory board at the beginning of 1994, and was always willing to share wisdom and encouragement whenever asked. For architects, Gail was perhaps best known as chair of the National AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) during a particularly formative period when the annual Top-10 awards were launched.

For thousands of architects, builders, developers, and facilities managers, Gail is remembered as an enthusiastic and inspirational teacher. She led more than 200 workshops and charrettes on green building, and never failed to brighten and inspire those participants.

I remember sitting in one of those charrettes — I can't remember where or when. After each of the 30 or 40 of us sitting in a circle introduced ourselves, I was astounded to hear Gail repeat each of our names. It was one of Gail's many gifts, and it helped each of those participants feel listened to and important. It was all about them, the students, not about her, the instructor.

Among the many charrettes Gail was involved with were the Greening of the White House, the Greening of the Pentagon, the Sustainable Design Initiatives for the National Park Service, and the Sustainable Design Training Program for the Department of Defense. I remember her describing the bizarre ending of a charrette at a military base on September 11, 2001. President Bush was diverted to this base on his return from Florida to Washington after the terrorist attacks. The military personnel didn't know what to do with these civilian instructors in their midst so, in the panic, locked them up in a room.

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Over 18 years and more than 160 issues of Environmental Building News, I've written quite a few articles — I hesitate to think about how many — but out of all of those, I think I had more fun and learned more in writing my most recent than ever before. "Growing Food Locally: Integrating Agriculture into our Built Environment" examines opportunities for producing food around, and on, our buildings that few architects, builders, or developers have yet considered.

I think I had my first vegetable garden when I was five or six — back in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. There were a few years during college and perhaps some of my time in New Mexico when gardening didn't fit into my life. But other than that, growing some of my food has always been important to me. Thus, I surprised myself to realize a few months ago that I had yet to write — or even consider — an article for EBN addressing the potential for integrating food production into our built environment. I had nibbled (sorry!) around the edges with articles about green roofs and passive survivability, but for some reason it never occurred to me to tackle this topic of food production directly.

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I spent three days in Las Vegas recently. I was there for the first annual WaterSmart Innovations Conference, sponsored by the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the recently formed Alliance for Water Efficiency, EPA WaterSense, and several other sponsoring and partnering organizations and agencies.

The conference and trade show were great. They really were. I saw more than a dozen new products­ — some really cool — that you'll be hearing about in EBN and GreenSpec over the coming months. It was one of the best conferences — from a learning standpoint — that I've attended in recent years. PDFs of all the PowerPoint presentations given at the sessions are available.

But, I've gotta say, I'm still trying to recover from Las Vegas.

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Creating a superinsulated building envelope is one of the key requirements with passive survivability. I saw this superinsulated home feature when I was in Sweden last year. Photo: Alex Wilson. Click for bigger. (More below.)

By way of background for those who haven't tracked this issue, here's the thumbnail sketch: In an age with more intense storms, terrorist actions against our energy infrastructure, potential petroleum shortages, and drought, we should be designing homes, apartment buildings, schools, and certain other public-use buildings so that they maintain livable conditions in the event of extended power outages or interruptions in heating fuel or water.

I had initially been proposing passive survivability as a smart design criterion. More recently I've been advocating that we mandate passive survivability through building codes. There are a number of developments along these lines:

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I was down in Orlando last week — land of asphalt, ChemLawns, and Mickey Mouse. As is typical in that part of the world, it was too hot outside and too cold inside. In one of the mammoth Disney hotels, I was participating for two days in the Tenth Anniversary Annual Meeting of an organization called FLASH. FLASH is the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes — it used to be the Florida Alliance for Safe Homes, which explains the "L."

FLASH is all about disaster resistance, so the sessions were about communicating fire-resistant construction practices, hurricane codes, 2x4 projectile penetration of wall systems, safe rooms in houses — cool stuff like that. In one session, two different speakers addressed pandemic flu — not because that's in the purview of FLASH, but because the challenges of educating the general public to those concerns are very similar to the challenges FLASH faces in communicating disaster resistance.

Organizations involved with FLASH include insurance companies, manufacturers of building products that relate to disaster resistance (Simpson Strong-Tie, G-P Dens-Shield, etc.), product retailers like Home Depot, state agencies, the National Weather Service, FEMA, a few builders of disaster-resistant homes, such as Mercedes Homes, and the Salvation Army. As the conference progressed, participants at the conference were keeping a wary eye on Hurricane Gustav, which was heading for the Gulf Coast, and a few had to leave early.

I was there to talk about how to get green building priorities more in line with disaster-resistance priorities. I did this by talking about passive survivability — the idea that we should be designing and building houses that will maintain livable conditions in the event of extended power outages, loss or heating fuel, or shortages of water. That presentation was really well received — something new to worry about for a group that lives and breathes disasters and emergencies.

But what I wanted to tell you about isn't passive survivability or even the FLASH conference per se — but rather, an evening event we attended at Disney's Epcot Center. Conference attendees were invited to a special evening reception at Epcot's new exhibit: Stormstruck: A Tale of Two Houses, which is sponsored by FLASH and a number of its commercial partners.

As someone who rebels against everything Disney, I gotta say: Stormstruck is awesome!

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[Clicking an image in this post will load a larger version of the image. A slideshow of the images in this post, and more, is also available. Previous posts in the "Notes from Sweden" series include #1: How They Get Around, #2: Western Harbor in Malmo, and #3: The Scandinavian Green Roof Institute in Malmo.]

In Brattleboro, Vermont, I'm involved in an effort to establish a wood-chip-fired combined-heat-and-power (CHP) plant that will — if we can pull it off — generate power and provide district heating through a network of buried, insulated pipes. It's pretty exciting, really. While district heat is used in many large cities, university campuses, and medical complexes, there are no systems I am aware of that serve smaller towns. Brattleboro could be the first!

Brattleboro could have the first small-town district heating system in the United States, that is. In Europe — especially Northern Europe — district heating is very common. Half of all buildings in countries like Sweden and Denmark are heated in this way. I've been learning a lot about this on my travels here.

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[Clicking an image in this post will load a larger version of the image. A slideshow of the images in this post, and more, is also available. Previous posts in the "Notes from Sweden" series include #1: How They Get Around, and #2: Western Harbor in Malmo.]

On a wide-ranging tour of interesting projects, programs, and companies in the Skåne region of Sweden this past Monday, we visited the Scandinavian Green Roof Institute in Malmo. It's a fascinating project in an equally fascinating neighborhood in this very green city.

At Augustenborg's Botanical Roof Garden, there are wonderful displays of different roof planting options

A small vertical panel showing a variety of sedums

The institute is a centerpoint of the Augustenborg neighborhood. This neighborhood of affordable housing was created in the late 1940s in a depressed part of Malmo with an unemployment rate of about 65%. The multifamily housing units were quite modern in their day, but deteriorated over the years. Efforts to retrofit them for energy conservation in the 1970s and '80s caused moisture damage, and flooding has been a frequent problem in the low-lying area.

In the 1990s, two local political and business leaders in Malmo began an effort to rejuvenate the neighborhood, and they centered the effort around the emerging concept of green (vegetated) roofs. Augustenborg's Botanical Roof Garden project was launched in 1998, and the roof garden construction began in May, 1999. This is the world's first demonstration roof garden, according to superintendent Louise Lundberg, whom we met with.

Louise Lundberg shows off the mat of an extensive green roof; in the background is a decorative green roof pattern

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