Dean Kamen is best known as the inventor of the Segway, but lately he has been tinkering with an ambitious array of technologies related in some way to sustainability. His distributed power generation and water purification systems, for instance, might help developing countries leapfrog the need for conventional infrastructure. He’s also delving into small-scale combined heat and power (CHP) systems, solar technology, and carbon capture and sequestration. And he’s turned North Dumpling, his small island off the coast of Connecticut, into an off-the-grid demonstration plot for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

During his keynote address at last month’s Build Boston, Kamen talked up his firm’s portable water distiller and Stirling engine power generator, among other recent innovations. He also made a vigorous pitch for his For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) foundation, which promotes science and technology in schools and organizes an international robotics competition. After the keynote, I spoke to Kamen about renewable-energy technologies, the pros and cons of nuclear power, and the characteristics of a smart grid.

What do you make of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification system?

It’s great that there’s an organization out there that’s helping to quantitatively assess and give people guidance on how to be green, because while everybody knows it’s a good idea, nobody seems to know exactly how to assess it—there are so many intangibles and so many complex unintended consequences of doing things.

In your own experience, which design elements you have found to be key in reaching zero net-energy consumption?

There are some areas where there’s such low-hanging fruit that people just don’t go after it, like good insulation and good seals, so you’re not  trying to heat the great outdoors. I also think a relatively substantial piece of low-hanging fruit is combined heat and power. If, for example, you took one of our Stirling generators and used it in the home, it would make use of one hundred percent of the electricity, and you could expect it to make use of eighty or ninety percent of the waste heat. When people buy electricity from Boston Edison, thirty-five percent of the coal they burn is making electricity, which means that sixty-five percent is doing nothing but killing fish in a river somewhere because you can’t move the heat around. So I think any place where you can make use of waste heat, you should generate your electricity on-site with a CHP unit. Read more…

Tom “Mayor-for-Life” Menino made a name for himself as a pothole-fixing regular guy with a thing for green building. He’s a popular four-termer who’s set to become the longest serving mayor in Boston’s history, so it came as little surprise recently when he started thinking legacy, evincing SimCity–like ambition with his scheme for relocating City Hall and his support for an ally’s thousand-foot office tower in the financial district.

That these moves were debatable on functional and aesthetic grounds—and that they would entail razing a pair of Modernist icons, Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles’s City Hall and Paul Rudolph’s Blue Cross Blue Shield Building—didn’t seem to matter. Menino is firmly entrenched in a “strong mayor” system that gives him serious leverage over development.

But there’s a recession on and it’s an election year, and he now finds himself on the defensive about open construction pits and cronyism. Read more…

The 11,000 square-foot, three-level building comprises two dozen 40-foot shipping containers held together with 3,700 bolts and 15,000 screws. Photo: courtesy LOT-EK

Puma City, LOT-EK’s mobile shipping-container pavilion, has landed on Boston’s waterfront, a stone’s throw from the Institute of Contemporary Art and right next to the skeletal first phase of the massive Fan Pier mixed-use development. The red, logo-emblazoned industrial-chic building, which houses a shoe boutique, a bar and lounge, and offices, is part of the corporate sponsor’s encampment shadowing the Volvo Ocean Race, an eight-team around-the-globe sailing event.

LOT-EK’s founders, Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, were on hand Monday night for a panel discussion about shipping-container architecture organized by the Boston Society of Architects (BSA). Read more…