BuildingGreen Report
Blog Post
November 19, 2008
Posted live from Greenbuild.
At the Selux booth, I'm told that these will be introduced to the market shortly, intended for grid intertie.
Their standalone PV area lighting has been on the market for some time.
Blog Post
November 19, 2008
Posted live from Greenbuild.
Rock-filled channels between parking rows drain to a large detention area beside the lot.
In the background, rental cranes dance in the sky.
Blog Post
November 19, 2008
Posted live from Greenbuild.
Stream it if you aren't here. (You'll have to set up a username and password.)
About ten minutes before show time, the room (seriously, they tell me there's seating for 10,000) was about a quarter full, but people were pouring in. Ten minutes after start time, they still are. No biggie — if history is an indication,... Read more
Blog Post
November 19, 2008
Posted live from Greenbuild.
Vortex Fine Filters by Wisy, offered in the U.S. by Rainwater Management Solutions, passively filter debris in rainwater collected from drains and downspouts. An offset input on the top of the unit spins draining water around a self-cleaning stainless steel mesh filter; 90-something percent of the water is filtered... Read more
Blog Post
November 19, 2008
Posted live from Greenbuild.
Yesterday, the president of Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES), Don McLean, stopped by our booth at Greenbuild to run through the features of his company's Virtual Environment energy and carbon footprint simulation tool for SketchUp and Revit. The new version of the software already works with the new features... Read more
Blog Post
November 19, 2008
Posted live from Greenbuild.
A shot of the trade show floor. Click for bigger.
Scuttlebutt is that total registrations are expected to be on the order of 30,000.
Blog Post
November 18, 2008
We humans number about 6.5 billion. How many trees are there? NASA has been taking satellite pictures of the Earth's forests for years and sharing them with ecologists who have figured out an algorithm for calculating worldwide tree totals based on patterns of sunlight.
The result of that research is a worldwide tree census, as of 2005, of 400,... Read more
Blog Post
November 18, 2008
Posted live from Greenbuild.
Our BuildingGreen after-party starts in about a half-hour, and I'm the designated greeter/bouncer; about 300 people are expected. (It was decided to have our after-party on the first night, which I think was a darned good idea.) So probably no more posts from here tonight (from me anyway) unless I find some active... Read more
Blog Post
November 18, 2008
Posted live from Greenbuild.
We're fans of TimberSIL. We're such big fans that we named it a Top-10 product in 2004. And now, despite efforts by the chemically treated wood industry to have it classified as a pesticide (as well as a nearly disastrous situation with a licensee a while ago), they've received some news that should turn the tide.
It... Read more
Blog Post
November 17, 2008
Last Friday a few of us gathered around a phone behind the closed doors of one of the conference rooms here at BuildingGreen and had a chat with John Bacus from Google's team of SketchUp developers, and Aaron Stein, one of their PR folks. The supersecret talk was about the next release of that program — SketchUp 7 — which within the last couple... Read more
Blog Post
November 17, 2008
In honor of itself (hmm... was really the best way for me to kick off this post?), the USGBC has done a kind of a cool thing. A letter released to its membership says,
... when we reflected on how best we could mark our anniversary as a community of leaders called the U.S. Green Building Council, we decided that the story was best told in your... Read more
Blog Post
November 17, 2008
Hey, you Twitterers (there must be a few of you out there)... in addition to posting here, we'll be microblogging from Greenbuild. You don't need an account to follow along.
Additionally, there's a #greenbuild hash that people are already using — you can follow everyone's Greenbuild Tweets here.
Blog Post
November 17, 2008
The 140 acre array of photovoltaic panels at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada generates 14 megawatts of power..
Almost all of our methods for generating electricity are fundamentally the same. Coal-, nuclear-, and natural-gas-fired power plants boil water to produce high-pressure steam that spins a dynamo in a "steam turbine." The wood-chip-... Read more
Blog Post
November 14, 2008
If M. Night Shyamalan did a movie on carbon emissions, it might look something like this. The Alliance for Climate Protection has a video that helps homeowners visualize their carbon emissions. After all, they're colorless, odorless, and come with a nifty time-delay of consequences that can lull a person into thinking that it's all going to be... Read more
Blog Post
November 14, 2008
Over the last few months I have been working with a group of people from Greensburg GreenTown and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to create case studies of new buildings in Greensburg, Kansas. We recently launched the website at greensburg.buildinggreen.com with an initial offering of 6 buildings.
The Greensburg case study website is... Read more
Blog Post
November 13, 2008
Twice each month, BuildingGreen publishes an email news bulletin with current news and product information briefs. Sign up here — it's free. We will never share or sell your email address, and you may unsubscribe at any time.
Read the current bulletinBlog Post
November 12, 2008
A current article from Reason magazine (their tag line — "Free Minds and Free Markets" — might reveal a hint of a bias), "The Food Miles Mistake: Saving the planet by eating New Zealand apples" questions one of the main ecological premises of the localvore movement, saying:
...a comprehensive study done by the United Kingdom's Department of... Read more
Blog Post
November 11, 2008
We'll be at Greenbuild in force this year — I think it's more than a dozen of us — checking out your booths, staffing our own (come see us at #1728, almost smack-dab in the middle), going to sessions... and giving a bunch of sessions as well.
On Monday the 17th, during the two-day Green Affordable Housing Summit that happens before Greenbuild... Read more
Blog Post
November 10, 2008
Here comes Greenbuild again. It keeps getting bigger. For instance, last year there were 480 exhibitors in the expo hall... this year, over 800.
I've got the expo hall on the brain. Like last year, I've been mapping which of the exhibitors do and don't have products listed in GreenSpec. There's about 300 — something over a third of the hall.... Read more
Blog Post
November 10, 2008
Brattleboro, Vermont is fortunate to have a long history with solar water heating. When I moved to the area in 1980, the company Solar Applications had been installing solar hot water systems for five years, and a spin-off company, Solar Alternatives, was manufacturing quality flat-plate solar collectors--many of which are still in use in the... Read more
