Whether your company is looking to be more environmentally friendly or simply more focused on saving green than actually going green (or perhaps a combination of both!), you are destined to get up close and personal with LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).
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green design
Energy Monitoring: A Critical Piece of Going and Saving Green
written by CleanTechies.com Contributor
Let’s say you have a million dollars. Of course, you want to make it grow, right? You ask around…find the right financial advisor…discuss your options. When you are absolutely sure you are comfortable with your new portfolio, you make your investments and never think about that million ever again. Right? Of course not!
LEED, the building standard that has lightened the footprint of tens of thousands of structures, announced a new standard yesterday that amplifies the idea to neighborhood scale.
The standard has been in the works for years and more than 200 test sites are already built or underway, including the Olympic village that opened in Vancouver this winter. Now any neighborhood or large development is eligible to apply.
A new 42-floor London skyscraper will be the world’s first building to incorporate wind turbines in the design, an innovation developers say will generate 8 percent of the building’s electricity needs.
The Strata Tower, a 408-unit apartment building scheduled to open in July, will be topped with three 19-kilowatt turbines — each with five 29.5-foot blades designed to suck wind from various angles and accelerate it through tubes, generating as much as 50 megawatt-hours of electricity annually.
It will also generate about £16,000 to £17,000 annually through the nation’s new feed-in tariff, the developers say.
Article by Amy Hengst appearing courtesy of Matter Network.
Termite mounds may look like ugly piles of dirt, but they provide important clues for architects designing energy-efficient buildings.
Termite mounds are built six to 30 feet high off the ground in hot ecosystems and are riddled with tunnels at their peaks that provide passive ventilation, allowing cool air to flow through. Architects in Zimbabwe have used the termites’ model in building a large, beautiful building with a similar ventilation system.
By imitating nature’s model, they were able to save 90 percent in energy costs because they didn’t need to install any air conditioning, according to designer Jeremy Faludi.
This process of emulating nature is called biomimicry. Speaking at the West Coast Green conference last week in San Francisco, Faludi said biomimicry could help us create products and buildings that are more material and energy-efficient, robust, flexible, and long-lasting.