Tweet this: http://tinyurl.com/orrzeb

Podcast

Program Notes & Transcript

If you start adding up all the energy utility bills in the U.S., you quickly get into the hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Buildings consume about two thirds of that -- commercial buildings alone spend more than 90 billion dollars on energy per year. That cost ends up on the bottom line, reflected in stock prices and in the prices of the goods and services we all consume.

Unprecedented efforts are underway to control that cost. Among them is a little-known initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy to develop marketable net zero energy buildings by 2025. It's not out of concern for what we pay for dog food or legal advice. The DOE can see the day fast approaching when there might not be enough energy supply to meet our growing demand -- and that tends to make populations very unhappy.

But imagine an extremely efficient building that generates on site what little power it needs to run.

Your imagination is likely to be the only place you'll see such a thing. It's possible; it's been done. Just not very much.

There are 8 buildings in the United States that qualify as zero-energy buildings. They're all relatively small -- the largest one is the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College in Ohio. At 13 thousand square feet, it's pretty small by commercial building standards.

Oberlin College's net zero energy building, the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, opened ten years ago and is a net exporter of electricity. (Oberlin College photo)

But back when the Lewis Center was built -- it opened in 2000 -- it demonstrated some major advances in how we design really efficient buildings. And that's what Oberlin College wanted to do when it built its Environmental Studies Center -- to design the most efficient building possible, a building with no net energy demand.

The Lewis Center uses passive solar design, natural ventilation, and geothermal heat pumps for heating and cooling, all to reduce its energy demand. Then it uses rooftop solar power for its electricity.

This small-scale matching of supply to demand, of generation to loads, is what makes zero-energy buildings so fascinating. Today the Lewis Center is a net exporter of electricity. It generates more than it needs, and sells the excess power to the local utility through net metering.

It didn't start out that way. The building didn't operate quite as planned -- few buildings do -- but it was part of the design philosophy to anticipate changes, and with some tweaks, the building achieved its goal -- zero net energy.

The man behind the design and construction of this zero-energy marvel is an Oberlin College Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics named David Orr. He enlisted plenty of help from the Rocky Mountain Institute, the famous green architect William McDonough, and even NASA.

Dr. Orr didn't stop with the Lewis Center. He turned his sights to one city block adjacent to the college, in the small town of Oberlin, and started working to make that a zero-energy "green district." His plan is to renovate or construct 13 acres of buildings that will be energy self-sufficient and carbon-neutral.

In addition to teaching and doing green building, Orr has been writing -- he's the author of a half-dozen books on sustainability.

"Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse" by Dr. David Orr, Oxford University Press, 2009

Part 1 - Interview with Dr. David Orr

Dr. David Orr, Oberlin College Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics, is our guest. (Oberlin College photo)

Denis Du Bois:
The Lewis Center was an early example of your many contributions to green campus initiatives. Where do you hope the college will go from here?

David Orr:
We are one of, now, 18 or 19 projects worldwide selected by the Clinton Climate Initiative and designated climate-positive projects. So the city and the college have already made that choice. We're going to hold hands and move into the future to try to build a radically different future, and one much better than what's in prospect.

Denis:
Having the college's support to build the Lewis Center, and now the community's support to do what you're doing in the town of Oberlin, must be pretty exciting.

David:
My great passion in life has been moving things across the chasm from idea to mainstream reality, and we've gotten the opportunity here to build a model of a workable system, sustainable system. And that's exhilarating and hugely daunting. I mean, to say I'm in over my head is a huge understatement.

But I'm having fun with it. I mean, it's the idea - it's like a huge puzzle, and I've got all the pieces on the table. If we can get them in the right relationship, we'll make a beautiful picture. Because the question for society, now, is can we live well and live sustainably? And those presently operate at cross-purposes. Living well, for us, means living pretty wastefully.

And can we live at the boundaries of natural systems and current sunlight and yet still have great community? And I think frankly the answer is yes, but it's also we'll live better, if we can make this transition, than we ever thought possible.

So on one side there's doom and gloom. Yeah, you bet. If you run the film fast-forward, there isn't much of a human future that's decent, fair, and all that. But if we can begin to move in this radically new direction, I think the future - it will take a while to get there.

And in a way the other side of this, Denis, is that climate change isn't a temporary condition. What we're being told by scientists is we've now launched into an era, no matter what we do now, where climate will continue to change dramatically because of greenhouse gasses we've already emitted, and for that there's no answer. What we can do is to head off the worst that could be ahead.

And that's kind of a somber point, but it happens to be what we're being told by science. So there's not a moment to lose on this, but there is also - we can draw on, I think, 50 years at least of intellectual and technical capital that would enable us to build climate-neutral or climate-positive cities and projects.

Denis:
So in 1995, you were finding a technology revolution, you were finding advisors, you were finding contractors to construct a zero-energy building. Why is it now, 15 years later, we only have eight relatively small non-residential buildings that are net-zero-energy buildings in the US?

David:
That's a great question. I don't think the answer is technology. I think the technology was there in 1995. We were basically off-the-shelf technology and it worked fine. It was a matter of how you integrated the parts into a coherent whole.

I don't think the answer to that question is even necessarily economics. And I'd point to Greg Kats's work in a recent book from Island Press on energy economics.

"Greening Our Built World: Costs, Benefits, and Strategies," Gregory Kats, Island Press, 2009

But Greg, who's a former student of mine, did a study of I think it was 160 green buildings, and the economics all worked out very positively for pretty obvious reasons. If you integrate a green building well enough, for every cost you add, you're subtracting some, ass Amory Lovins and people talk about "tunneling through the cost barrier."

So you get to the point where you're talking about a critical mass, and all of the sudden you can dispense with a whole lot of HVAC equipment, because you spent enough on the shell and glazing systems and efficient use, you could eliminate a whole category of building components.

Denis:
So why aren't we doing more of it?

David:
I think when you get down to the nub of it, I think the resistance is explicable or explainable by politics, the lack of leadership on the issue at the national level, a fair amount of resistance and institutional barriers, building codes, zoning requirements. Some resistance from trade groups, house builders and so forth. But that is beginning to weaken.

I think the answer is, I don't think it's technology, I don't think it's economics, I think it really is the lack of leadership and pretty soft market demand. People were still content to buy the housing or building equivalent of a 1957 Chevy Impala, when in fact, there were buildings that were comparable to a Prius or the hyper-efficient Lexus, or much better cars that are on the way.

But in the housing sector and the building sector, for way too long we were building essentially obsolete buildings. And power was cheap enough to the owners, or the owners could offload those costs on renters. They would simply speculate on a building and assume the real estate market would pick up the inefficiency.

Part 2 - Energy:Minute -- Zero Energy Terminology

Part 3 - Interview conclusion

Denis: We're obviously stuck with a lot of those buildings for quite a while. Is it even possible to take them through the kind of approach that results in them being zero-energy buildings?

David:
Well, they may not get to be zero-energy buildings, but I think they can sure be improved in terms of efficiency. And I think retrofits of existing housing, commercial, and even industrial buildings is certainly worthwhile.

The recent retrofitting of the Empire State Building, for example. Here's an old building from the 1930s, but can you improve it with more efficient elevators, windows, heating systems and so forth? And the answer has been, apparently, yes. They can eliminate - I forget what the number is, but it's a quarter, a third, or whatever the number - but it's a substantial fraction of the building's energy consumption.

And there's all that embodied energy in existing structures, so it would be foolish to tear them down and plan to build new in every case, although that may be necessary sometimes.

But there is also going to be a fraction of buildings that we probably will have to abandon and remove, hopefully deconstruct and take the materials into other buildings. But we are likely to see, I would guess, a shrinkage of our spatial footprint, as it will be more profitable, more convenient, and a lot better off for the fabric of public life to condense, consolidate, and move into closer spaces.

And I think the art of doing that is well within the designer's repertoire now, to build really livable, walkable great cities that will be more dense but, if done right, will include rooftop gardens and parks and lots of amenities that people, I think, really do want.

Denis:
Looking beyond the United States are there any really exemplary zero energy buildings in the world?

David:
No. And I'd be reluctant to say that any building -- if you look at the fabric around it, the structures may be hyper-efficient and may, as in the case of our building, get to be a net energy exporter, but buildings require lots of other energy that typically is not on the accounting page to transport people and goods to and from, to maintain, repaint, reappoint exteriors and so forth.

I mean, there are lots of ways that, having built something, you've got to maintain it, because the laws of entropy tell you it's going to fall down or collapse if you don't do it.

So every building is a claim on future assets and resources. So in that sense, there may be no such thing as a zero-energy building. But the question is, can we make them a lot smarter than we have made them up to this point? I think the answer is quite clearly yes.

Denis:
What would you like to see happen from here? Should we continue investing in more zero-energy individual buildings, or should we just beyond that to the green neighborhood and green city concepts?

David:
I think both. Yeah, I think that what we've got underway here is a downtown block. We're planning and have begun renovation on one major component of that, what's called the Allen Art Museum, one of the great art museums of higher education in the United States.

We are at a decision point whether we build a new hotel or renovate an existing hotel, but all of the decisions we're trying to organize and we'll eventually have to make have to do with how this comes together at the scale of a block and a larger corridor of four or five blocks in the downtown of a small American city located right in the middle of the Rust Belt.

And so the questions have to do with can we integrate, now, as designers - can we do what, clearly, we're going to have to do? Can we begin to create models of the integration of green buildings, advanced energy systems, of ecological landscaping, economic renewal, green jobs, education, arts and amenities, zero-discharge, climate neutrality? And then also in our case we're adding a 20,000-acre green belt around the city for farms, forestry carbon sequestration, and growing biofuels.

Denis:
You're packing a lot of sustainability measures into a single model...

David:
And then if you ask, "What are some of the benefits of doing this?" You start with, well, you've built a robust economy that is a lot less likely to suffer as markets go up or down. You've created a lot of jobs and local employment. You've created an interesting, accessible downtown corridor, again, right in the middle of the Rust Belt. We're 70 miles from Detroit, 35 from Cleveland. And this is an area that does need lots of rejuvenation.

And then one of the nice features, too, is this becomes a model of carbon neutrality. One of the big problems is, how do you make a carbon-neutral society? Well, I don't know what for sure, but I believe that we can make a carbon-neutral city and reduce the problem to the scale that we can get our mind around.

Part 4 - Taking larger steps toward a NZEB standard

The goal of the DOE and other organizations is to make net-zero energy the standard for building design in the next 2 decades. A lot has to happen to turn that vision into reality, and it is happening.

On the technology front, various parts of the DOE are working on proving out and getting to market an assortment of components, like energy-efficient lighting and heating systems.

It takes more than technology to make "zero" the new standard. It will take changes in the way building happens in America. Changes in building codes, zoning regulations, and urban density -- and changes in attitudes about space, energy -- and the risk of doing things differently.

When it opens in the summer of 2010, NREL's Research Support Facilities will be the largest ZEB in the U.S. at 200,000 square feet. (RNL computer rendering)

That's why examples like the Lewis Center are so important. Opening in the summer of 2010 is the Research Support Facilities building on the DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory campus in Golden, Colorado.

RSF is a 200-thousand-square-foot facility that will be the largest net-zero energy building in the U.S. Even larger examples are rising out of the ground elsewhere in the world, including a 71-story skyscraper in China.

Each one brings us a step closer, as another zero energy building, or block, or city, makes it from the cool comfort of the architect's office to the harsh light of day, where we can examine it, debate it, and learn from it.