For years, New York City’s electricity grid has strained under the stress caused by peak demand, the times (like midday or, in a seasonal cycle, the summer) when residents are most apt to use electrical appliances and max out the municipal power network. Stress on the aging system will likely only increase in coming years, with some experts predicting a 30 percent uptick in the city’s peak demand by 2030. One strategy to deal with the problem, addressed by a panel on “Smart Grid for Smart Cities” yesterday morning at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, is the creation of a more flexible energy system—one that allows customers to know exactly how much energy they’re using and lets them reduce their load (by, for instance, shutting off their water heaters when they’re not home). For city residents, that will mean smaller energy bills at the end of the month. Other features of the smart grid—like the storage of electricity, harvested during lulls and used during times of peak demand—also increase the reliability and cost-effectiveness of the system, while reducing its environmental impact. Read more…

Click the play button to view the beginning of last week’s “Show Snapshots” event. (Watch parts two and three of the video on our Multimedia page.)

Last Wednesday, news was made at the Davis & Warshow bath products showroom. Hilary Beber, a policy analyst in Mayor Bloomberg’s office of long-term planning and sustainability and a panelist that evening, came to the event directly from a City Council meeting where legislators unanimously passed New York City’s new Energy Conservation Code. It was an exciting and hopeful moment for the 200 or so NYC interior designers and architects in attendance, especially since, earlier that week, reports that the new code had been emasculated circulated in our local media.

Hilary Beber and Rick Cook at last week’s event

And, so, the designers present got much more than they expected when they signed up to be part the showroom’s annual “Show Snapshots from Greenbuild,” organized by Metropolis. Beber kicked off her presentation of the finer points from our new energy code (effective July 1, 2010), which pushes the city’s building owners to reach new levels of efficiency in the coming years. The ruling will also help create nearly 18,000 new jobs—a modest number, to be sure, since the city has reported a loss of around 200,000 jobs in 2009, with the architecture, interior design,  and construction segments having been hit especially hard. Rick Cook, a panelist, gave a personal scale to these local hardships when he remarked that last year his firm, Cook + Fox, sent 22 people to Greenbuild; this year only the two principals attended. Read more…

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…

Photo: Stefano Paltera/courtesy the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon

Keeping tabs on the Solar Decathlon is a bit like watching a slow-moving golf tournament. Over two weeks, 20 college and university teams from around the world compete to see who has created the best residential prototype for a solar-powered home. The houses—installed in a Solar Village on the National Mall in D.C.—are judged on ten criteria ranging from architecture and lighting design to communications and net metering. The daily tallies are kept on a giant leaderboard as well as on the Decathlon Web site.

Last Thursday, as the competition was nearing a close, the house from Team California held the top slot after coming in first in the architecture competition. But by the end of the day, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had bumped California from first place with just one final contest to go: net metering. Each home is equipped with a meter to gauge how much energy it produces and consumes; a team gets 100 points for producing at least as much energy as their home needs and they get up to 50 points for generating a surplus that could go back to an energy grid. Read more…

With forest fires threatening thousands of homes outside Los Angeles last week, and California in its third straight year of drought, alternative models for housing are starting to look better and better.

Professors Don and Ann Cottrell might be able to teach us a thing or two. For thirty years, they’ve lived in the earth-integrated, zero-energy house that they designed and built into a hillside near San Diego State University. Inspired by the nascent environmental movement in the late 1970s, but without many precedents to guide them, they had set out to join the vanguard of the alternative housing movement. Although they hired an architect to advise them on their design and ensure it conformed to building codes, they did much of the actual construction themselves, from the waterproofing to the electrical wiring. “We were just going in blind,” Ann Cottrell told me. “Nobody knew what they were doing back then— it was just so seat of the pants.” Read more…

Click for a larger image.

Every Thursday we’re posting excerpts from notable 2009 Next Generation proposals that didn’t quite make the final selection featured in the May issue of the magazine. (OK, so this week we’re a day behind.)  Today’s proposal: Subverting Suburbia, a holistic approach to decreasing Americans’ resource consumption through smarter, community-oriented subdivisions. How would it work? Read more…

Every Thursday we’re posting excerpts from notable 2009 Next Generation proposals that didn’t quite make the final selection featured in the May issue of the magazine. (Click here to check out previous selections.) This week: Docking Stations, a system of modular floating docks that would harness clean energy produced by the tidal action of New York City rivers. How would it work? Read more…

Metropolis’s 2009 Next Generation competition received scores of entries, from which this year’s jury chose one winner and eight runners-up to be recognized in the May issue of the magazine. But there were far more than just nine good ideas in the bunch. The judges also selected 12 “notables”—entries that, for various reasons, fell short of the final selection, but that the jurors felt still deserved recognition. To that end, we’re posting one notable Next Generation proposal every Thursday for the next few months. (Click here to check out previous weeks’ selections.) In doing so, we hope to foster discussion that will help the teams refine their ideas, connect with like-minded readers, and perhaps even implement their projects in the real world.

This week: Luciform, a bioluminescent coating for concrete proposed by Erin Hayne and Nuno Ferreira, of NunoErin. How would it work? Read more…

Even at NeoCon, the ground zero of wire management, the wires resist management.

Imagine a time when you don’t need to carry around your bulky, tangled chargers for your laptop and various PDAs, a day when there are no wires snaking across your living room floor as your computer powers up. Now, imagine no wires in sight. You simply put your laptop or phone on a flat surface and voilá, you’re charging and ready to communicate. This is not a far-fetched idea; it can start happening as soon as 2010. Read more…

Metropolis’s 2009 Next Generation competition received scores of entries, from which this year’s jury chose one winner and eight runners-up to be recognized in the May issue of the magazine. But there were far more than just nine good ideas in the bunch. The judges also selected 12 “notables”—entries that, for various reasons, fell short of the final selection, but that the jurors felt still deserved recognition. To that end, we will be posting one notable Next Generation proposal every Thursday for the next three months. In doing so, we hope to foster discussion that will help the teams refine their ideas, connect with like-minded readers, and perhaps even implement their projects in the real world.

This week: Emilio Ramirez’s proposal, Feeding the Addiction: The Emergence of the Single Family Power Plant, which envisions a low-cost, renewable energy production and delivery system that could turn homes and businesses into self-sustaining energy producers. How would it work? Read more…