Green buildings

BOSTON--Cynthia Loesch and Ivan Liriano built a green home as much for their community as themselves. The high-tech touches inside, though, were just for them.

The couple earlier this month hosted a ribbon cutting for the first LEED Platinum-level green building in Dorchester, the neighborhood in Boston where they both grew up. It's an example of how modern conveniences, such as home automation, fit nicely with green building gear.

When they took on the project to build in an abandoned lot, Loesch and Loriano were eager to build with energy-efficient appliances, good insulation, and solar panels. But the couple … Read more

This year's Solar Decathlon competition combines traditional architecture with cutting-edge building materials and the latest high-tech gadgetry in a village of net zero-energy homes.

The Department of Energy-sponsored Solar Decathlon is a biennial competition among 19 university student teams to build homes entirely powered by solar energy. The houses are shipped in pieces to Washington, D.C., where they are assembled and put on display for 10 days to the general public. (See coverage from 2009 and 2007.)

After a ribbon-cutting of the "solar village" yesterday, teams are showcasing the projects to the visiting public and to … Read more

Now there's an app to tell you how to make commercial buildings more energy efficient.

Startup FirstFuel announced today it has raised $2.4 million from venture capital companies Nth Power and Battery Ventures to commercialize a software system to remotely evaluate and measure commercial building efficiency.

What's unusual about the application is that it doesn't require a person to be dispatched to perform an energy audit or install meters to gather data. Instead, the company collects utility data on hourly energy consumption and combines it with weather information to create a profile of a specific building. … Read more

St. Peter's University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., announced today it's beginning construction this October to install 10,000 solar panels throughout its campus.

The 2.1-megawatt project will be the largest solar installation of any hospital in New Jersey to date, and be distributed across six different locations within the hospital's campus.

The solar system will include two rooftop installations, three parking lots with solar carports, and a solar carport on the roof of an existing parking garage.

The solar system will be constructed by Sun Farm Network, and the 10,000 solar cells will … Read more

At a ceremony attended by San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee, Greenstart showcased its first four investments in green tech.

The green-tech incubator, which has been described as a Y Combinator for green tech, had announced in June it was looking for ideas that could produce what is known as fast startups--small, nimble companies that are "capital efficient and capable of generating revenue in 12 months or less."

Yesterday afternoon, Greenstart announced its first picks.

The Picowatt from Tenrehte Technologies is a Wi-Fi-enabled plug with the ability to collect and send data over a home network. It enables electronic … Read more

General Electric is making a foray into green buildings by investing in Project Frog, which uses various technologies to speed up new building design and construction.

GE Energy Financial Services will be one of four companies to invest $22 million in Project Frog, GE said today. The other three are venture capital companies: Claremont Creek Ventures, Greener Capital Partners, and RockPort Capital Partners.

The money will be used to expand Project Frog's sales, and GE will install one of the company's prefabricated buildings at the GE Learning Center in Ossining, N.Y.

Project Frog uses software and construction … Read more

PlotWatt's software doesn't just read electricity meter information and post it online. It takes a building's energy pulse to find out what's going on inside.

Like many other building energy start-ups, the North Carolina-based company is developing a system to provide recommendations on how to improve efficiency based on meter information. To build a profile of a building's energy use, PlotWatt's cloud-based software parses a home's power signal to tell consumers where most of their energy goes.

The software detects differences in power consumption patterns to isolate large appliances, such as air conditioners … Read more

Philips recently released its Ambient LED 17/75-watt-equivalent retailing for $39.97. As it indicates, the bulb gives off roughly the equivalent light of a 75-watt incandescent bulb, but uses only 17 watts of power to do it.

Many sites have been doing head-to-head tests of various LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs coming on the market. However, I'm often asked where someone can find just a "regular person review" on how LEDs stack up against CFLs (compact fluorescent lights) and the soon-to-be-phased-out incandescents without getting too buried in stats on lumens, kelvins, wattage, and the rest of the … Read more

Could window and insulation installation specialists be the next plumbers in terms of steady work and good pay?

It's a question triggered by "Opening the Thermal Envelope: Emerging Innovation in Dynamic Windows and Advanced Insulation," a recent report from Lux Research on the green tech construction sector.

Green tech is currently the largest growth sector in the construction industry, according to Lux research.

But the research analyst's latest report focuses on the fact that the emerging technologies involving smart glass and innovative insulation materials are now expected to see the largest growth within green construction.

As … Read more