When it comes to saving money on utility bills, good data beats out fancy energy displays any day, say the founders of energy efficiency start-up Opower.
The Arlington, Va.-based company on Thursday officially launched its energy efficiency recommendation service, after months of operating in stealth mode.
Opower, previously called Positive Energy, has signed on with 18 utilities in the U.S. to provide customer usage information and recommendations on how to lower consumption of electricity and heating fuel.
After receiving a monthly bill from the utility, consumers get a utility-branded report which has an analysis of their bills, showing how they compare to people with similar-size homes in their area. Based on a customer profile, home type, and weather information, the reports can suggest steps to trim their bills.
Opower is an energy efficiency company that analyzes customer home energy bills and provides comparisons to other people in the same region to provide recommendations on how to cut energy use.
(Credit: Opower)Opower now offers that information through an online portal where people can see historical data and delve down into specific questions. Customer service representatives can also view that profile data to walk customers through efficiency steps.
The bulk of the recommendations fall into the category of "conservation," or changing behavior, said company CEO Daniel Yates. For example, a report might note that one household's energy use is higher than a neighbor and suggest relatively simple changes, such as turning off computers or adjusting the thermostat.
Many states have regulations that give utilities incentives to lower energy consumption of their customers. But in general, participation in programs, such as rebates for upgrading to an energy efficient refrigerator or hot water heater, is not very high.
With Opower's service, consumers are getting between 1.5 percent and 3.5 percent savings in their bills. The company first started with one utility in 2008 and is now used by 2 million customers online, it says.
A single-digit cut in energy use may seem small, but that's much better per capita than typical utility-sponsored energy efficiency programs, said Yates. A 2 percent cut in energy use in half the homes of the U.S. would be the equivalent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as the entire output of solar and wind power right now, he said.
There's growing interest in the country over the smart grid, which is supposed to make the electricity grid more efficient and reliable. In a home, smart-grid technologies will generally mean a meter that can communicate with a utility in regular intervals. More advanced smart-grid programs have wireless thermostats that can control heating and cooling or energy displays that help consumes get more detailed information on their usage.
Opower software engineers have updated their analytical application, which is built on statistical software from the open-source R project, so that it can take information from smart meters. But Yates thinks there is too much attention paid to the gadgetry that's involved in the smart grid, rather than the goal of reducing usage and generally getting consumers more engaged in a home's energy use.
"We have every belief that in the next 20 years there will be smarter appliances and two-way control thermostats so that at some point, you don't have to think about it and your house will switch to sleep mode when you leave," said Yates. "We want to be the nervous system to help the utility and customer control and set those devices."
In its trials, Opower found that consumers have taken actions on home energy because the reports show personalized data and provide consumers a baseline to compare themselves to others.
"Some people think that real-time data (from smart meters) will solve everything but it's not realistic for a consumer to sit in front of a display watching energy use tick up and down," said Michael Sachse, the director of government affairs and general counsel at the company. "They want a regular check-in with tips on how to fix things. Our belief is that in the long run, analysis and insight will trump real-time data."
The company raised $14 million late last year but does not need to raise more money, said Yates.
A California start-up recently announced plans to manufacture "net zero-energy homes," a term that is starting to enter the national vocabulary. But what if you don't plan on buying a new home anytime soon?
It is true that it's far easier to make new construction green than to retrofit existing homes. At the same time, residential energy use is only expected to climb, as we fill our homes with more electronic gadgets and, most likely, as energy prices trend upward.
So how do you keep your energy bills under control and lighten the environmental footprint of your home?
For most of us, it will be a mix the low tech--insulating, air sealing, changing our habits--and high tech--solar panels, smart grid appliances, and LED lighting.
To run through some of your options, we offer this photo gallery with room-by-room advice and recommendations ranging from low effort to high effort. The best place to start is to schedule an energy audit, which will help you forge a plan.
For previous green home coverage, see:
Most Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs are more comfortable talking about software algorithms and chips than bricks and concrete. But some of them are trying to reinvent the building industry with green tech.
Calstar Products later this year plans to open a factory to manufacture a brick that uses fly ash--the residue from burning coal at power plants--as an ingredient while drastically reducing the amount of energy used in production.
The company is now in the process of raising $15 million in series C funding from venture-capital firms to help finance the operation, which will be in Wisconsin near a coal-fired power plant run by We Energies, according to Calstar Products CEO Michael Kane. It plans to officially launch the product at the GreenBuild conference in November.
(Credit:
Calstar Products)
Calstar Products is one of many green-tech start-ups designing different materials and processes to make builders greener. Along with energy storage and smart grid, it's a busy area of investment. Another company, Serious Materials, which makes a drywall that requires less energy to produce, said on Tuesday it raised an additional $60 million.
With Calstar's bricks, the company says it can reduce the "embedded energy" by 85 percent compared to existing brick-making techniques. Building materials are very energy-intensive: to make bricks, clay is melted at more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for more than a day. Brick production creates 13 billion pounds of carbon dioxide per year and the cement industry is said to be the second largest emitter of pollutants after utilities.
Calstar's process replaces the clay and concrete used in bricks with fly ash so that 40 percent of the product is recycled material, Kane explained. It uses a small percentage of its own additive, which it can adjust for the different chemical properties of the coal that generated the fly ash. The process "captures" the fly ash within the brick so there's no leaching, Kane said.
The business plan is to sell the bricks, which are identical in look to traditional bricks, as replacements for buildings, pavers, and retaining walls at the same price as traditional bricks. Initially, it will be targeting architects and builders seeking out materials for green buildings.
In the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED rating, there aren't points for embedded energy, but Kane thinks that architects can get four points for using innovative and recycled building material.
Kane, who joined the company from the buildings material industry earlier this year to commercialize the product, said that incumbent companies would never have developed this sort of brick.
"Conventional companies can't get their heads around why they should do it. That's why we needed a technology disruptor from the outside the change the rules of the game," he said.
The company plans start manufacturing at full scale early next year and, to try to compete with those incumbents, Calstar Products is establishing a distribution channel in some Midwest states.
The venture may not deliver the giant-size returns that tech-oriented venture capitalists typically expect. But once the company starts selling products, its cash flow should be able to finance additional plants, Kane forecasts.
"When this company was started, it was a highly speculative concept. If it weren't for Silicon Valley, this concept probably wouldn't have happened," he said.
Project managers, architects, NASA officials, and Lt. Governor John Garamendi break ground Tuesday on Sustainability Base, a new building at NASA Ames Research Center, which will showcase sustainable technologies.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)After decades of developing technology to explore space, NASA is bringing its expertise in self-sustaining systems back to Earth.
The NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for Sustainability Base, a research center that will be a net zero energy building.
A dedication plaque, written on a solar panel, at the site of Tuesday's Sustainability Base groundbreaking.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)The project aims to be a proof-of-concept for sustainable design and a number of green technologies developed at NASA.
The building will be powered by ground-source heat pumps from 72 geothermal wells, considered the most efficient way to heat and cool buildings.
There will be solar hot water collectors and a network of sensors to react to changing conditions, such as sunlight, temperature, wind, and energy usage. Data on the building's mechanical systems can be monitored via a Web-based console.
NASA expects that the "high-performance building" will cut water usage by 90 percent compared to an equivalent-size building. NASA also hopes to significantly reduce maintenance costs. The structure itself will be built on top of steel frames and use natural daylighting extensively.
NASA had contracted the architecture firms of famed "cradle to cradle" William McDonough and Swinerton Builders was hired to complete construction on the project.
The $20.6 million building is expected to be completed by the end of 2011. NASA expects to get the Platinum level LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, the highest level.
Three of the people who spoke at Tuesday's event: June Grant, architect at AECOM Design, left; Simon P. "Pete" Worden, NASA Ames Center director, center; and Lt. Governor John Garamendi, right.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)Updated at 4:00 a.m. PT to clarify roles of architecture firms.
BOSTON--For all the complex solutions proposed to lower building energy use, Simon Hare has a project to demonstrate the power of simplicity in green buildings.
The design-builder earlier this year began reconstructing an 1850 cottage in Boston's historic Roxbury Crossing neighborhood to be so energy efficient that it wouldn't need any mechanical heating.
His work is inspired by the Passive House standard, which is based on a set of principles for building energy-efficient homes that took root in Germany in the late 1980s. But Hare has another goal: to show that net-zero, or very low, energy homes are within reach of everyday building professionals.
A green home grows in Boston.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)"The Passive House approach is very techie, which I think is its Achilles Heel--it appeals to geeks but not the layman, the lay builder," Hare said standing in the half-finished home last month. "We can prove we can do this without hiring consultants and using software to do the energy modeling. We'll just use precedent and established rules of thumb."
The Pratt House project is an example of a burgeoning movement in the building industry. With the growing concern over the environment and energy, builders and architects are devising ways to dramatically cut the energy use in people's homes, for both new construction and retrofits. In the U.S., all buildings represent about half of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Green Building Council.
A more high-tech approach to super-efficient homes could be control systems that optimize a home's mechanical systems, such as heating and lighting, or demand-response appliances that can take advantage of off-peak electricity prices.
By contrast, many builders like Hare are starting from the ground up by taking steps to lower the energy load that a home needs to operate. In practice, that boils down to constructing an air-tight building with lots of insulation and energy-efficient appliances.
When you add distributed energy, such as solar panels for hot water and electricity, to a well-sealed and insulated home, homeowners can dramatically cut utility bills and potentially get to net-zero energy use. Following the Passive House guidelines, for example, can lower energy use by 60 percent to 70 percent and drop the heating load by 90 percent.
Trickier than it looks
Hare's project in Roxbury, which happens to be his family's house, started out as a retrofit. The building, which once was a workshop for a 19th-century gunsmith, had been abandoned for 20 years before he acquired it. After construction began, the crew at his firm, Placetailor, discovered serious structural problems and the cottage was torn down and rebuilt with the exact same dimensions.
Since it's a new construction, they were able to take particular care with the air sealing. The frame of the home is built using structural insulated panels, which are 12-inch layers of foam insulation sandwiched between two sheets of plywood.
A layer of one-inch rigid insulating foam on the exterior walls brings the r-value (a measure of insulation) to 50, many times more than a typical home. The joints between the wall building blocks and the floor were taped or sprayed with foam to make the building more air tight.
Hare borrowed a fog machine from a local DJ during two blower door tests to see where air was escaping from the building, viewing it both from the outside and from the basement. Many tweaks made the house very tight with 0.6 air changes an hour, which for a building that size translates to 60 cubic feet per minute.
In an unusual twist, the floor is made of concrete and the interior walls, too, will be made of similar material. That material acts as a "thermal mass," able to retain heat in the winter or absorb heat from the air in the summer to maintain a comfortable climate, Hare explained. By adding solar panels, the Pratt House could easily be a net zero-energy home, he said.
Although it's rarely done, builders have been converting existing homes into these sorts of superinsulated buildings for decades. One way is to put foam board insulation on a home's exterior walls and roof while another option is to spray insulating foam onto the exterior and add shingles on top of that layer.
Adding that exterior layer of insulation is expensive upfront and, in practice, tricky when dealing with windows, doors, and drainage considerations. But a bigger barrier to better-sealed homes is simply inertia given that most contractors don't pay attention to how air flows in buildings.
"The basics are simple--a lot of insulation, a very tight building, and efficient appliance," said Hare. "But a regular construction crew would just put up a wall quickly and never stop to think about sealing cracks and leaving places where you want air to go through."
Homes that are extremely air tight need a heat-recovery ventilator which brings in outside air mechanically, while heating the air as it enters.
Miles per gallon for homes
In parallel to the push for more efficient homes, there are more calls for benchmarks and performance standards. Right now, builders and homeowners are largely "flying blind" when it comes to making efficiency improvements, according to Paul Eldrenkamp, of design and build firm Byggmeister, who is the first Passive House-certified consultant in New England.
The original structure, an 1850 gunsmith's workshop that had been abandoned.
(Credit: Placetailor)At the Pratt House, the approach is to build first and analyze later. Hare went that route because he's concerned that exhaustive up-front analysis, which might involve modeling software and complex spreadsheets, is too intimidating to most builders.
"People in this whole movement say that there needs to be standards but they are so far removed from established building practices--it's just another barrier in adopting these things," he said. "Passive House is a very strict standard. You could fall short by some fraction but still have an excellent building."
The target is to have the Pratt House nearly complete by October, which is when the big test for his experiment begins. In the winter, the goal is to maintain a temperature between 63 and 65 during the winter without supplemental heat. So far, in the summer, the home has stayed cooler than the outdoors, thanks in part to the concrete floor which absorbs heat and makes it feel cooler.
This sort of home is clearly not for everyone. It's very small at 750 square feet and the people inside will need to manage the temperature more actively than simply setting the thermostat. For example, to gain heat in the winter, they will need to open the south-facing shades during the day and close them at night to retain heat. In the summer, too, they open the windows at night to cool off the thermal mass of the building.
On the other hand, the materials involved are cheap or recycled. "You don't need fancy expensive windows from Germany," said Hare. And many of the construction techniques can be applied elsewhere. Placetailor, in fact, is involved in another local project called the JP Green House which aims to convert a 100-year-old home to be carbon neutral.
"We had this feeling that if (efficient homes) are going to be widespread, you should be able to do it with common sense," Hare said. "Otherwise, it's just a geeky pursuit or it's rocket science when most people just want a house."
Michelle Kaufmann Designs, a company formed to sell pre-built green homes, is shutting down, a victim of deflated housing prices and the credit industry meltdown.
The Oakland, California-based company installed about 40 energy-efficient single-family homes that were prefabricated in a factory near Seattle. The company had hundreds more that were in the planning stages but it was unable to deliver them, in part because of the difficulty of financing new construction.
"We have always known that to pull off our mission, it requires scale. We always believed it would be our company to do the scaling. We were well on our way to do so. However, in this current economic climate, scaling for a small company has proven to be difficult," wrote Kaufmann on the company blog on Wednesday.
A prefab green building with integrated solar panels from Michelle Kaufmann Designs.
(Credit: James Watts)In response to a query, Kaufmann said the company is closing but the timing has not yet been settled.
She said she was hopeful that she will be able to continue working on sustainable home designs. "The underlying concept works. Healthy, efficient and well-designed homes need to be accessible for all," she wrote.
There are a number of green businesses founded in the past five years that are struggling in the economic downturn. Energy related investments have gone down sharply, while companies in the housing sector, like Michelle Kaufmann Designs, are vulnerable to the real estate crash.
Solar company Konarka has developed a transparent solar cell that it hopes will be built onto electricity-generating windows.
The Lowell, Mass.-based company on Tuesday said it has reached an agreement with Arch Aluminum & Glass to use Konarka's plastic solar cells in building materials, including windows.
A transparent solar cell Konarka hopes will be fitted into power-generating windows.
(Credit: Konarka)Under its Arch Active Solar Glass development, the company has built prototypes of windows with the solar cells between two panes of glass. The photovoltaic cells can be tinted different colors.
"It is energy-efficient and transparent with superior vertical performance and a subtle red, blue or green aesthetic. With these features, BIPV (building-integrated photovoltaics) will no longer need to be confined to spandrel or overhead applications," Arch CEO Leon Silverstein said in a statement.
Konarka makes organic solar cells made from flexible plastic. Last fall, it opened a factory in Massachusetts to manufacture the cells which come off assembly lines as spools fitted with wires to carry electricity.
The advantage of these flexible cells is that they can be used for a wide range of applications, such as power-generating military tents, portable chargers for electronics, and sensors.
But these organic photovoltaics aren't very efficient at converting sunlight to electricity and won't last as long as a rooftop solar panel, which is typically under warranty for 25 years. Konarka said late last year that it achieved 6 percent efficiency in its labs but that's not yet available in its products. A high-efficiency silicon solar cell, the most common cell material, can be over 20 percent.
Konarka's factory is turning out red solar cells but has started making the transparent cells in limited runs for prototypes and development, according to a representative.
Although Konarka has raised over $100 million and has signed a number of partnerships, there are many people who are skeptical that the company can be profitable.
"The real key will be to see if they can make building-integrated products that can stand the weather for 20-plus years," clean-tech venture capitalist Rob Day from @Ventures told Greentech Media in December last year.
Konarka also faces growing competition in the building-integrated photovoltaics field. Thin-film solar manufacturers, including Heliovot, also make flexible cells that can be fitted onto glass or building structures such as awnings but are more efficient. Nanosolar's cells made from CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide), for example, are in the 9 percent to 10 percent range.
What was once the world's tallest skyscraper now aims to be the greenest.
(Credit:
Rocky Mountain Institute)
New York's iconic Empire State Building, which played a starring role in the movie "King Kong," is set to undergo a retrofit that could cut the 102-story building's energy consumption by up to 38 percent. The energy-saving measures will initially cost approximately $20 million and will take an estimated two years to implement, according to press materials.
The program includes upgrades of the 1931 Art Deco building's 6,500 windows, radiator insulation, a new air-conditioning and heating system, air handler replacements, energy-efficient lighting, upgraded ventilation control, and an Internet-based system for tenants to monitor their energy use (that also teaches them how to conserve energy.)
"By pursuing these strategies, owners can save millions of dollars and enhance asset values while significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions," said Raymond Quartararo, a director at Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate consultancy that's helping manage the retrofit. "That's a win-win for owners, tenants and the global environment," he added, according to a press release.
Other organizations involved in the greening of the Empire State Building include the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Clinton Climate Initiative, which has been working with cities on projects to save energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions in buildings.
In both the U.S. and EU, buildings--both commercial and residential--are the largest consumers of energy, accounting for 40 percent of the total energy consumption in both locations, according to sources including the Energy Information Administration. And in big cities, buildings are dominating the environmental footprint. For instance, buildings are responsible for 79 percent of all carbon emissions in New York City.
Project leaders hope the Empire State Building retrofit will result in an estimated annual energy savings of $4.4 million and could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 105,000 metric tons over the next 15 years. That's equivalent to the annual emissions of 17,500 cars.
"If we can show that in a building like this that it makes money for the owner, and it makes money for the tenants, its pretty hard for anybody to ignore it," said James Russell, of the Clinton Climate Initiative, in anYouTube video. "It is a fantastic global flagship example for others to copy."
BOSTON--The cutting edge of building science these days seems to be more about expanding foam than solar power research.
Last Wednesday, I stopped by the Building Energy Conference put on by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA). If there was one theme that jumped out, it was energy efficiency.
Insulating and air sealing a building, with stuff like expanding foam, has always been a sensible way to lower utility bills. But weatherizing homes is increasingly seen as the first and vital step to perhaps more exciting technologies like solar and wind.
Needed: more green-tech gear like solar hot water tubes to make existing homes energy-efficient.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)At the morning keynote discussion, Mark Rosenbaum of building firm Energysmiths, which specializes in energy-efficiency retrofits, argued that "fixing" the millions of existing homes through efficiency will have a far bigger impact on lowering greenhouse gas emissions than any new constructions.
"The majority of the potential is in retrofits," he said. "If you're increasing the building stock one percent a year, it's not going to get you anywhere. You have to fix the existing building stock."
Installing solar panels on an efficient home will have a bigger impact than on a home that isn't well insulated or doesn't use efficient appliances, he noted.
Rosenbaum pointed to several examples of retrofit homes in the New England area that were able to reduce their energy consumption significantly--some over 50 percent. Many steps are relatively easy, such as reducing the parasitic load from appliances, while others require bigger investments and changes to behavior.
Realistically, a 70 percent improvement--a goal set in an initiative called the Thousand Home Challenge--is challenging but doable in many cases. Some super-insulated homes--well-sealed homes with insulation on the outside of the structure--with renewable energy systems like solar panels have shown that they can be net producers of energy.
At this point, there isn't a standardized way in the U.S. of reporting a building's energy performance. In Germany, the Passivhaus standard for air-tight homes that use efficient energy technologies such as ground-source heat pumps have set the benchmark around the world.
Because of the wide variety of climates, there need to be different techniques for making homes efficient, said Rosenbaum. He sees a very high demand for green technology home products and much more skilled labor in this field.
"Where are we going to find enough people who know what they're doing?" Rosenbaum said. "We need a lot of people to get trained. Otherwise, we're going to create a lot of disasters."
The Acqua Liana's marbled oversize garage overlooks the swimming pool above.
(Credit: Frank McKinney )
The artistic foyer features a water floor.
(Credit: Frank McKinney )Many real estate sellers are facing tough times in today's economic climate. What to do? One alternative: hope for environmentally conscious green dollars. That's what luxury real estate developer Frank McKinney did. He is pursuing a green strategy with his latest creation, the elaborate Acqua Liana, set on about 1.6 acres on the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach County, Florida.
Acqua Liana (Tahitian and Fijian for "water flower") features a glass "water floor" with "hand-painted tiles in a Lotus garden motif, brilliantly illuminated below the shimmering surface," according to McKinney's Web site. The three-story mansion claims to be the first built and certified according to the rigorous standards defined and mandated by the U.S. Green Building Council, the Florida Green Building Council, and Energy Star for Homes.
While we can't help but wonder if the words "green" and "mansion" inherently represent a contradiction, the 15,071-square-foot mansion does incorporate plenty of eco features.
Solar panels meet most of the house's energy needs. Environmentally conscious lighting reduces electricity consumption by 70 percent. If the homeowner wants to know how much electricity is being consumed, the automated feedback system displays energy efficiency in real time.
A water system collects enough runoff water from the entire cedar roof to fill an average swimming pool every 14 days. The water is then used to fill the water garden and irrigate the landscape. Ultra-efficient air conditioning and purification systems ensure air quality that's supposedly twice as clean as a hospital's operating room.
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