The provincial government announced today it will invest $5 million in a program aimed at boosting solar water heating more than sixfold to 3,000 roofs across the province by 2010.
(read full article on househunting.ca)
Energy – it is used to build, heat, power and maintain houses. The German government believes that every building should be issued with an energy certificate detailing just how many kilowatts it consumes. This would make it easier for homeowners and tenants to monitor their energy consumption and, of course, would help protect the environment.
The movie above illustrates a visualisation of N02 in London by CASA, University College London,in association with the Environmental Research Group at Kings College London.
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2): NO2 is produced in high temperature combustions processes and chemical reactions in the atmosphere. Road transport is responsible for 60 per cent of emissions of NOx (the pollutant that causes NO2) in London. It can affect the lungs and airways when exposed over long periods or at high concentrations over a short period.
Via digitalurban and vimeo
Once you have drawn a projected solar array on top of the satellite imagery from Google Maps you get a rough estimate on performance and payback of your system based on the drawn area of the array, slope of the roof, location and weather information from the National Renewable Energy Labs.
To complete the full financial analysis your project should be in California as for now utility rate information is only available there (other states will be added soon).
See a tutorial video below and check out the RoofRay site
Via earth2tech
Find a tutorial on using Demeter and SketchUp to get an energy analysis report and some interesting discussion on the Greenspace Research forum.
Climate change has emerged as the dominant environmental concern of our times, and buildings, as a sector of the economy, represent the most cost-effective opportunity for reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Estimating the carbon footprint of a building can be quite simple or enormously complex, depending on what one needs the estimate to do. The simple approach addresses only operating energy and accepts broad-brush assumptions about CO2 emissions from electricity generation. More sophisticated approaches, which are not yet well established, add other emissions into the mix, including those from transportation, construction, water, materials, and waste management. These more complicated calculations also include greenhouse gasses other than CO2.
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For an average office building in the U.S., 30% more energy is expended by workers getting to and from the building than the building itself uses. For an average office building built to modern energy codes, more than twice as much energy is used by commuters than by the building itself. This data suggests that much more focus should be put into where we locate buildings and how strongly we encourage alternatives to single-occupancy vehicles, including public transit, walking, and bicycling. This article introduces the term “transportation energy intensity” as a metric of building performance.
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LEED 2009 is currently in the Comment Process. If the process goes as planned , the final version of LEED 2009 will be presented at the GreenBuild Conference and Expo in Boston November 19-21 2008 and launched in January 2009.
Curious about the changes?
See the
LEED 2009 Vision & Executive Summary (pdf).
See and listen to a 26minutes long presentation
LEED 2009 Webcast Archives.
(from the USGBC website)
The state of Hawaii has become the first in North America to require solar water heaters in new homes. The bill, signed into law by Republican Governor Linda Lingle, prohibits issuing building permits for single-family homes that do not have solar water heaters.
All new homes will be required to have the energy-saving systems installed starting in 2010.
The world has lost almost half of its forests already, and the continued rate of deforestation contributes greatly to climate change and the loss of global biodiversity. This easy to grasp visualisation in Google Earth from the Google Earth Outreach Showcase gives us the state of the forests today. 3D extrusions of the countries boundaries represent the data to be communicated. You can switch from overall deforestation rate to relative deforestation rate and as well see the current state of the forests. Choose from different sets of information in the Places pane in Google Earth or click on the pie chart ballons for more informatin on each country.
The KML was developed by David Tryse who also was involved with the Edge of Existence collections (EDGE Mammals, EDGE Amphibians) highlighted earlier this year in an Outreach Case Study.
Find more information on disappearing forests on greenpeace.org
