Hippy Green

It seems a lot of companies want to go green in the working world. There are many ways to easily accomplish this. One of the first ways to go green is to teach your employees/customers. You can teach this by doing something green yourself and promoting it. This is a big of a greenwashing, but sometimes thats good!

Its one thing to talk to the talk but another to walk the walk! By taking action on your next project you maybe able to incorporate green technology as a part of it. I know many business build buildings and remodel. When your (re)building why not try and get familiar with federate and state regulations on reducing energy usage as well as possibly becoming LEED. By using LED lights you can cut down on the cost of light bulbs as well as the electricity. This promotes green within your company and the CFO should be happy because you have a better ROI. LED last longer then standard light bulbs even though they cost a bit more.

Depending on your products you can also intense customers by offering them rebates or money saving coupons by going green. You could even offer X amount goes towards carbon offset for each product sold. Customers who are buying a product might think twice and buy yours because the revenue goes towards offsetting carbon. Sometimes your product waste can be turned into something usable. For example Intel took their semiconductor wafters that never turned into a final product and sold them to other companies to reuse them in solar cell production. Transforming vegetable oil into biodiesel also creates some interesting byproducts. One use of the byproduct after washing is wax for snowboards!

During my time at the University of Vermont I had a chance to tour NRG Systems a 46,000 square foot build that is gold LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. NRG Systems sells data loggers for wind turbines. The goal of building green should always be a highly efficient building using the latest in energy efficiency technology. One way NRG Systems is effective in going green is by using wood pellet-fired boilers provide heat throughout the building, wood pellets are half the cost of propane while being 30% cheaper than oil! The use of a “energy recovery wheel” is also in place, which recovers 75% of the heat in the winter and about the same 75% for the cool air in the summer. The use of air tight roofs and walls also help with the efficient of keeping the building at a set temperature. They use two layers of foam insulation on the roof as well as a air barrier to lower the amount of leaking air. As for lighting, must of the lights are through windows that bring in sunlight, but when need they use highly efficient fluorescent lights in the offices. There are many other great ideas that NRG Systems has deploy, I suggest you read over their plans as well as contact any of the companies involved with the building.

Yesterday Kohls a large department store announced that they were going green by converting more then 75 percent of its California department stores to solar power starting Next month. Kohl’s plans to covert 24 of its 80 stores immediately while waiting for permits and approval for the others. Kohl’s plan to generate more then 35 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy by going solar. SunEdison will be doing the solar construction that should take about 12 weeks for each store. They predict the first 2 stores to be completed by August and all the solar power conversion to be done by end of 2008.

Add solar panels is not a new thing for large companies in fact Google Announced this past fall that they would be adding 1.6 megawatts of solar photovoltaic to their Mountain View Campus.

There are plenty of reasons to go with alternative energy in the business world, even the Harvard MBAs are going green.

Seeing how fast people are moving into cities and how much the price of a square foot costs, it only makes sense that we look at building up. We need to look at utilizing all the space we have in our large cities. While I was visiting Japan I saw many unique structures that saved on space by building on top of one another. For example, some of the highways the buses drove on were actually double decker. Building a farm as a skyscraper makes sense and provides food without traveling outside the cite. We could also attach wind turbines and solar panels on this skyscraper to gather energy.

Skyscraper Farms are just the next step, they provide harvesting for both food and energy. We need to start thinking urban planning in cities like New York where 1000sft Condo, 1 bedroom 1 bath in Chelsea costs 1 million dollars! We need to build solar panels and wind turbines on top of these skyscraper Farms as well as produce.

Wired Magazine had a great article about Skyscraper farms

The demand for solar engery has been growning expotentialy in recent studies. The solar equipment industry will grown from $20 billion last year to a predicted $90 billion in 2010. The falling cost of solar panels have also raised the demand and help the average houseown setup and install his own source of “free energy”.

I know this summer I was thinking of building a solar panel array and start selling power back to the grid. I did some research and tax credits and time and found The Solar Center posted some great figures and seem to be on the ball with going green. For example , in Connecticut you can get $5/watt of solar power. So if you build and buy a 5000 Watt System for $45,000 you can write off $25,000 come tax time and only spend $20,000. Yes I know that sounds like a lot, but there is additional $2,000 in federal credit and you should be saving about $1,077 a year on electricity. Thats a 6% Rate of Return. So if your living in the tri-state area and want to install solar panels, give them a call at 888-SOLAR-05. Some of you must be saying but its a tax credit. Well yes, the idea of going green does appeal to rich folks and is nice minus on what you own the state.

If solar energy is not your thing or you live in Seattle, you should also look at wind power. Depending on your state there are also tax credit available for the about of energy the wind turbine produces. Unfortunally this tax credit does not apply to DIY like antics over at tearsoffire.org who has built a wind turbine with his brother and a nice windmeter project with our Avroincs Board. I know we should start selling this as kits but time, life, and job are and have been getting in the way. Anyway, wind turbines are great and in some cities if the turbine is below 30ft you don’t even need a permit! This comes in hand when you happen to place it outside your neighbors window.

The final idea for my little talk about alternative energy is thinking about investing in a coop. In Europe its common to invest money into alternative energy and have the energy your coop produces subtracted from your currently electricity bill. It blows my mind when I go out to Arizona and see that no one has any solar panels on their roof. Scottsdale alone has almost 300 days without rain. The last time I was out their they were hopping it rained due to the fact they had not gotten any in 180 DAYS! I will be going back down to Scottsdale the end of April and hope to see or get at least 1 person to install some solar panels on their roof.