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What I’ve been reading about:
- US to revise green assessment system - Building - The battle between BREEAM and LEED continues, with LEED expected to introduce minimum standards for water and energy in the November revisions
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What I’ve been reading about:
- Design Builder - (Relatively) new kids on the DSM software block, 30 day free trial, uses the DOE Energy Plus engine. Anyone got any experience - good or bad?
- Task force gives housing the green light - "This is not about dumbing down or abandoning the concept of zero carbon. This is about ensuring the same high level of carbon savings, but allowing developers more flexibility" Paul King
- Definition of Zero Carbon Report - UKGBC pdf report (41 pp.) on more flexible definition of zero carbon. More on this when I get a chance to read it and others reactions…
- Feedity - Looks like Feedity has a revamp - turn any page into an RSS feed. Now have to go through the ones I did on on the old version and update. So not backwards compatible - bah!
- Smart opportunity missed - Smart metering threshold raised from 73,200 kWh per annum to 732,000 kWh reducing the number of potential businesses covered from 400,000 to 40,000.
Virtual Book Group
Just a quick note to let readers know I am proposing a virtual book group on the Building Sustainability Forum in a few weeks time. As of yesterday lunchtime, 60 people have had a look, but only one responded to the post - anyone else up for it?
Wondering if anyone would like to try out a virtual book group on this forum? The idea is simple. Suggest a non-fiction book with a sustainability theme and a date for discussion. Go away and read the book. A couple of days before the date of discussion, the proposer outlines some questions for discussion. On the day of the discussion, everyone weighs in to answer the questions and throw in any other opinions.
To kick things off, I propose “cradle to cradle
” by William McDonough & Michael Braungart.
If anyone expresses an interest (please reply below) I’ll post some discussion points on Tuesday 27th May, and have the discussion on Thursday 29th May. Then whoever wants can pick the next book.
Any takers?
I chose Cradle to Cradle as I know a few people might have it on their bookshelves already. If not, try the local library or Bookmooch (none currently listed for mooching) for cheap/free ways to get your hands on it. Or feel free to click through on the amazon link in the text above and then I’ll get some pennies to feed my book addiction…
BTW, apologies to anyone trying to read this in IE6 - the formatting is completely skew whiff. Has been added to my list of things to look into…
Thoughts thunk at Think08
Enjoyed very much meeting fellow bloggers Casey, Paul, Martin, Rob and Phil at last week’s Think08 in the Excel centre out in Docklands. Prior to a couple of glasses of vino, I managed to make it to a few sessions on the floor of the exhibition, as well as catching up with a few other faces on the stands.
The first session I wandered into (by accident, rather than design) was Nigel Adcock from Gleeds Energy making the case for nuclear energy as a bridge towards a wholly renewable world. Despite the controversial topic, his audience was muted and no debate ensued. I’m somewhat agnostic when it comes to the nuclear debate, but I’m afraid Nigel didn’t manage to persuade me to jump one way or another. I’m still more likely to defer to the opinion of the SDC who concludes that there is no justification for bringing forward a new nuclear programme at present (follow the debate online here), but I remain open to the debate*.
I then managed to catch the Plenary session “Zero carbon: mapping a future and overcoming road blocks?” with Keith Clark of Atkins, Mike Peasland of Balfour Beatty (who I thought missed the mark entirely and banged on about his own company rather than the issue at hand), Murray Coleman from Bovis Lend Lease and Paul King of UKGBC.
Keith made some good points about the need to give ourselves permission to make stupid mistakes and to iterate knowledge, something I was actually chatting to several others about, both earlier and later in the week. The tendency towards analysis paralysis when we don’t know all the answers is a real danger to moving forward.
Paul was his usual articulate self - he’s a great spokeman for the industry. The exciting news is that the definition of zero carbon will be announced by the UKGBC this week.
The final session I sat in on was the BD debate - Are engineers the new architects? And, it turns out, we are. So there.
I’m still awaiting broadband, so making good use of my local library and their free internet. Postings may be few and far between until I am sorted…
*BTW, this is not an open invitation to spam me with pro- and anti- nuclear links (please don’t)
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What I’ve been reading about:
- Wayne Hemingway on eco-towns: Ready to rumble - Building - Wayne and Myles end up blaming the youth of today's binge drinking being the cause of their not gettiing on the housing ladder. Which has nothing to do with eco-towns.
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What I’ve been reading about:
- Personal carbon trading evaluation published - study indicates personal carbon trading is essentially ahead of its time and expected costs for implementation are high. Govt. may introduce personal carbon trading if the value of carbon savings and cost implications change.
Think 08
I’m back in the UK and gradually acclimatising to the shock. Trying not to translate prices into US$ and shaking my head at the price of petrol (£1.09 in Leeds!). Just as well I no longer have a car…
I am currently without landline, broadband and laptop, so blogging opportunities are low. Bear with me (and BT) - things should return to normal soon.
I’ll be twittering from Think 08 tomorrow and hopefully meeting quite a few bloggers in the flesh. If you see me, come and say hi.
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What I’ve been reading about:
- The Game Plan : A solution framework for climate change and energy. - Great Creative Commons slideshow on climate change (via Dave Pollard).
- The Greenwash Guide - Futerra's pdf (44 pp) on Greenwash is a guide on how to spot, prevent and avoid greenwash for consumers, companies and agencies. Bonus points for having RSS on their news and a blog too!
Acronym spaghetti
As an industry, we love acronyms. For newcomers this may be confusing.
I toyed with the idea of a seperate glossary page with links to sites, but that seemed quite a heavy workload. So I compromised and added a Wordpress plug-in which automatically displays acronyms (if I have defined them) when you hover your mouse over the text.
Try it: BREEAM, EPC, WRAP, CIBSE, DSM et al. You don’t get a link to a website, but I credit you all with the intelligence to stick the phrase in a search engine and then I don’t need to maintain broken links.
If you use Wordpress and want to try it out, the plug-in can be found here.
Hope someone finds this of use…
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What I’ve been reading about:
- The Code is not enough - sustainability thinking part one - Building Design - Great article from Jon Goodburn at WAG on sustainability definitions - extended to include institutions - and covering a broad range of sub-topics. Zero-carbon is so last year…
