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Solar water heaters are one of the most commercialized renewable energy technologies in the world and yet on a per capita basis, U.S. implementation ranks 28th in the world behind relatively undeveloped countries like Albania and Slovenia. China leads the world with an installed base equivalent to 52,500 megawatts of energy, more than 30 times the installed base of the U.S., and other developed countries like Germany, Japan, Switzerland, France, Austria, and Australia all rank far ahead of the U.S. in per capita solar hot water implementation.

Why does the U.S. lag so far behind the rest of world in solar hot water implementation? The answers are many and include consumer concerns about ascetics and cost, a fragmented supplier base of relatively small companies, competing technologies that make make buying decisions confusing and difficult, and the resistance of vested interests. Perhaps the biggest reason for the U.S. lag in implementation are national and state energy policies that are both incoherent and inconsistent.

[The petroleum industry] "probably has larger tax incentives relative to its size than any other industry in the country"

Donald Lubick, U.S. Department of Treasury's former Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy

“In 1946, when the American post war housing boom started, the average house was 1100 square feet and housed 5 people. Fifty years latter, in 1996 the average house would grow to 2200 square feet and house 2.6 people and by 2007, fueled by easy credit, the average American home would would become the equivalent of a Hummer, “weighing in” at super-sized 2,400 square feet.”

In 1934, during the depths of the Depression, Congress passed the National Housing Act to strengthen a deeply troubled housing market. This act created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) which was amended in 1938 to create the Federal National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) – an entity designed to help mortgage lenders gain access to capital for mortgage loans. An important element of this legislation was to make mortgage funds available to more Americans by protecting lenders from the risk of default. In its earliest days, Fannie Mae nationalized the mortgage industry by creating the first mechanism in America for selling individual mortgages (backed the U.S. government) into a secondary market.

When the FHA and Fannie Mae were created, the housing industry was flat on its back:

• Two million construction workers had lost their jobs.?
• Housing finance was a fragmented, inefficient and illiquid. Mortgage rates varied considerably from region to region. In some economically distressed regions there were simply no funds available.
• Terms were very difficult to meet for homebuyers seeking mortgages.?
• Lending institutions would issue a mortgage, collect payments, and file the mortgage away until the principal was paid off. A lack of available, consistently priced capital put a hard ceiling on the number of new mortgages that could be issued.
• Mortgage loan terms were limited to 50 percent of the property's market value. Borrower's were faced with a 50% down payment and a repayment schedule spread over three to five years and ending with a large balloon payment.?
• America was primarily a nation of renters. Only four in 10 households owned homes.
• Homes were NOT considered as investments and refi's and equity withdrawals were rare events.

To continue go to: http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/how-our-homes-became-the-e...

“The inventions of central heating and air conditioning coupled with cheap and apparently abundant fossil fuels would free building designers from considering the external environment and allow them to use brute force heating and cooling solutions to overcome building designs totally inadequate for their local climates.”

HOME HEATING IN AMERICA

For the first 100 years home heating in a heavily forested America was dominated by biomass (wood) and it was not until 1885 that the nation would burn more coal than wood. Prior to 1885 the majority of homes in America were heated with wood burning brick fireplaces and derivatives of the cast iron Franklin Stove invented in 1742.

By the end of the 19th century the invention of low cost cast iron radiators would bring central heating to America’s homes with a coal fired boiler in the basement delivering hot water or steam to radiators in every room. At about the same time, in 1885, Dave Lennox built and marketing the industry’s first riveted-steel coal furnace. Without electricity and fans to move air, these early furnaces transported heat by natural convection (warm heated air rising) through ducts from the basement furnace to the rooms above. These two methods would dominate home central heating until 1935, when the introduction of the first forced air furnace using coal as a heat source used the power of an electric fan to distribute the heated air through ductwork within the home.

To continue go to: http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/a-brief-history-of-heating...

". . . to be considered sustainable by any rigorous definition, buildings must become energy neutral and either be built or converted to a “zero energy” building standard”

If we accept that “sustainable” takes its meaning from “sustainable agriculture“, or “the ability … to produce food indefinitely, without causing irreversible damage to ecosystem health”, then the definition of sustainable building must take on a more precise meaning. A more rigorous meaning that is quite different than what typically passes for a “green” building. (See Difference between Green and Sustainable)

What exactly might that mean? To answer that question it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of “carrying capacity”. Generally speaking, “carrying capacity” is the supportable population (animals, plants, trees, people, etc.) in a closed system, given the resources (food, water, energy, etc.) available within that system.

...to continue go to:

http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2007/09/11/more-musings-on-sustainabl...

The idea of energy efficient, healthy buildings has been around for a long time, so why is just now that the concept of "green" or "sustainable" building is entering the mainstream and catching the attention of fortune 500 companies like Wall Mart, Dupont, and Home Depot? There are probably several reasons; Global Warming, rising energy costs, the growing awareness and liability costs associated with "Sick Building Syndrome”, declining oil reserves, and concerns about our limited water supply. The list goes on, but whatever the reason or reasons, sustainable building is a concept whose time has come.

Which begs the question, what is IT? The ultimate definition depends on how one defines "green" as opposed to how one defines "sustainable".

My personal definition of "green" is relatively simple. A home's design is “green” if its serves to reduce many of the harmful impacts buildings have on our environment and our home's inhabitants. So "green" home design revolves around four key issues:

1. Designing for energy efficiency including the use of renewal energy sources such as wind, geothermal, and solar.

2. Creating a healthy indoor air environment with adequate ventilation and making material choices that minimize volatile organic compound (VOC's) outgassing within the home.

3. Specifying building materials and resources that are sustainable, have low embodied energy, and produce a minimal amount of upstream environmental impact.

4. Providing for the efficient use of water via appliance, faucet, and shower head choices and in arid climates by zeroscaping and recycling grey water and capturing rain water for landscaping and other non-potable uses.

However, the words "green" and "sustainable" are often used interchangeably, and sustainable has a more precise meaning that is often obscured, distorted, and dilluted by the commercialization and marketing of the green "movement". In the context of our built environment sustainable takes its meaning from "sustainable agriculture", or "the ability ... to produce food indefinitely, without causing irreversible damage to ecosystem health".

If we accept this as the basis for the definition of sustainable building everything changes. For example, a 5,000 SF home with a HERS index of 70, bamboo floors, and Energy Star appliances may be "green", but it is NOT sustainable. In the context of Global Warming and even the most optimistic projections of Peak Oil and Gas, only a home that meets zero energy standards can be considered sustainable.

Borrowing from A. A. Bartlett's Laws of Sustainability, here are my own Laws of Sustainable Housing.

1st Law - U.S. urban sprawl and the growth in home sizes and the associated energy and resource consumption is not sustainable.

2nd Law - Retrofitting over 100 million (energy inefficient) homes in American to a condition of sustainability will be a monumental task.

3rd Law - In the context of Global Warming and even the most optimistic projections of Peak Oil & Natural Gas, new and retrofitted homes should only be built to net zero energy standards.

4th Law - The size of population that can be sustained (the carrying capacity) and the sustainable average size and resource consumption of our homes are inversely related to one another. In other words, if the population increases the size and resource consumption of our homes must decrease to achieve a sustainable balance.

5th Law - The U.S. cannot sustain average home sizes that are more than twice the average size of other developed countries.

6th Law - All countries cannot simultaneously be net importers of carrying capacity(fossil fuels, etc.).

7th Law - The importation of such a large percentage of our energy carrying capacity makes the current U.S. standard and pattern of building extremely vulnerable.

8th Law - The benefits of suburban sprawl accrue to the developer and auto companies; the benefits of poor energy efficiency and standards accrue to energy companies and utilities; but the costs are borne by us all.

9th Law - Inadequate U.S. building energy standards are contributing to a rapid depletion of our natural gas and other fossil fuel resources. This is true not only within our borders but via our high level of imports, it is true worldwide.

10th Law - Net zero building energy standards will be necessary to slow the depletion of fossil fuels in a pre and post Peak Oil and Gas world.

11th Law - Converting our existing housing stock to a much higher energy standard will be completed negated by even a modest growth rate in new homes, however energy efficient those new homes may be.

12th Law - Smart residental growth is an oxymoron.

13th Law - Building should restricted on prime agricultural land. The highest and best use of land is for agriculture, especially to local food supplies.

14th Law - Energy shortages due to peak oil and gas will slow and then eventually stop housing growth and force the transformation of our existing housing stock.

15th Law - People living in slums don't care about sustainable housing.

16th Law - The addition of the phrase “sustainable housing” or “sustainable development” or “green building” to our vocabulary is not sufficient to ensure that our built environment becomes sustainable.

17th Law - The current state of our green, sustainable building “movement” may amount to nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The growth of civilization has been intimately linked to our ability to harness energy since man's discovery of fire. Our reliance on biomass (wood) and eventually, the wind and hydro power of mills would limit our growth until the use of coal and the invention of the steam engine would launch the industrial revolution. However, it was the discovery of energy dense, crude oil in 1865 that would catapult us into a whole new age of growth, mobility, and abundance. What is “sustainable” is based on carrying capacity, and every human advance in the use and amount of available energy would serve to increase both the population and economic carrying capacity of the earth.

The shear abundance of cheap oil over the last 150 years would change the face of architecture and built environment. Architects and building designers no longer had to consider local climate conditions, they could let their imaginations and ego's run wild and rely on brute force heating and cooling to save the day. Architects like Phillip Johnson would build their design fame and fortune with glass homes in Connecticut and glass skyscrapers in Houston. Buildings that reply for their very existence on cheap and abundant energy.

more>>> http://sunhomedesign.wordpress.com/2007/08/

“People cannot stand too much reality” - Carl Jung

I’ve been musing lately about exactly what it means to be sustainable in the context of residential building. Since words are the symbols we blogger’s use to communicate, I checked my American Heritage dictionary and found that “sustainable” in today’s lexicon means “capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment” as in “sustainable agriculture”. That didn’t quite do it for me. It’s the kind of feel good definition that allows people to build 10,000 SF homes with bamboo floors, dual flush toilets, and a HERS index of 85 and call themselves “green”. So I continued looking and found that one of the definitions for “sustain” is “to support from below; keep from falling or sinking; or to prop.” Since our built environment has been “propped” up and shaped by cheap oil for about a 100 years, I found that definition more on the mark.

Getting back to our friend Dr. Jung, our not so sustainable residential lives are about to be turned upside down by three major reality checks. At the risk of being labeled as a “crazed and raving doomsdayer”, let just say, it is going to be painful.

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We now know that energy use by housing in the U.S. accounts for about 21% of green house gas emissions and that global warming has probably already reached a tipping point. A point from which we can now only mitigate worldwide effects that will eventually be catastrophic. That problem with global warming however is that politically we don't act on “eventually” very well. Politically we're much better at reacting to collapsing skyscrapers, market crashes, and other “Pearl Harbor” kinds of events. So policy changes in reaction to the slow moving Chinese water torture of global warming are likely to be a series of tepid half measures until our grandchildren are face-to-face with the sea water lapping up against the second story buildings in Brooklyn.

However, long before that happens, Peak Oil will kick our not so green or sustainable butts into action in a very Pearl Harbor kind of way.

The growing consensus is that Peak Oil (the point at which worldwide production begins an irreversible decline) will happen within the next ten years. Some (T. Boone Pickens, Matthew R. Simmons) believe that we peaked in 2005, but that we had enough headroom so that demand has not yet exceeded supply. Lending credence to Pickens and Simmons, the International Energy Agency has just warned of a supply “crunch” after 2010 due to rapidly rising demand and slower-than-expected production gains.

Once this “crunch” creates obvious and persistent shortages we can expect inflation, unemployment, more oil related military adventures, and a world wide recession. If that weren't enough, N. American natural gas production is expected to peak this year or next! Either event will put us in crisis/action mode, and combined they will easily supplant “Terrorism” as the number one social, financial, and political issue. The only good news, is that this coming “energy Pearl Harbor” will be the political tipping point that gets us on the road to true sustainability.

The following commentary by James Howard Kunstler gives us an entertaining look at what's to come.

“The final blowout of cheap oil is now ending, and the suburban juggernaut is entering its death throes. It wasn't slain by the New Urbanists, but they will be the last ones standing - just as the little warm-blooded mammals were the last creatures standing when the dinosaurs expired in the warm Cretaceous mud. The focus of their work will certainly have to change. There will be no more suburban subdivisions (or the accessories and furnishings of them - the strip malls, Big Box pods, and fried-food out-parcels), and the TND (Traditional Neighborhood Development) will emerge not as a counterpoint to all that crap, but as the template for a redefined type of village or town scaled to the new realities of available energy.

We will be inhabiting the terrain differently from now on. Whatever intact farmland remains will have to be reserved for feeding ourselves, and the "countryside" that has been regarded as having only scenic or recreational value for so many decades, will have to be both productive and carefully tended by human hands. Our big cities will certainly shrink, contract, and the fortunate ones will redevelop and re-densify at their old cores and around their waterfronts. The part of Philadelphia that we were in last weekend may be about as big as a sustainable city can get - minus the skyscrapers, which, alas, will be obsolete.

The demographic shift to come will be a shocking reversal of what has been going on since the start of the industrial revolution. The small towns and small cities of America -the places that have moldered in desolation and squalor for decades - will be coming back to life, surrounded by an agricultural landscape shaped by human attention.”

“Green or environmental accounting describes an effort to incorporate environmental benefits and costs into economic decision making.” - Gernot Wagner

If you didn’t think economic and accounting theory were important in our lives, consider this.

Much of what enters our national model energy codes is a some point filtered through a cost benefit analysis (CBA). CBA’s are subject to the principle of “lies, damn lies, and statistics”, in that much like statistics their end product is subject to underlying assumptions like the future cost of energy and discount rates. For example, the requirements for insulation levels in our codes is decided by cost benefit analysis which mysteriously always results in requirements that correspond to the exact thickness fiberglass batt that can fit into a 2×4 or 2×6 wall cavity or a 2×10 ceiling cavity.

Green, environmental, or social accounting would add in other factors to a CBA such as:

* the cost of air pollution
* the cost of climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions
* the benefit of insuring energy supply security

This would give us a “sustainable” Green CBA methodology that would transform our code requirements.

The EU and even China has already started moving in this direction, but the politics of vested interests have blocked progress in the U.S. Back in 1993 the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the official bookkeeper of the U.S. economy, did began working on a green accounting system called Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounts. However, the initial results released in 1994 showed that GDP numbers were overstating the impact of mining companies to our nation’s economic wealth. Mining companies didn’t like those results, and it didn’t take long for Capitol Hill to react. Alan Mollohan, a Democratic House Representative from West Virginia’s coal country, sponsored an amendment to the 1995 Appropriations Bill that stopped the Bureau of Economic Analysis from working on revising the GDP and that’s where things stand today.

You can imagine Owen Corning’s response to the application of a Green CBA approach to our current insulation requirements. Consider for a moment the effect a carbon tax would have on the our national requirements for insulation. I’ll use Sweden as a model. In an effort to account for the environmental costs of fossils fuels, in 1991 Sweden enacted a carbon tax of $100 per ton (raised to $150 in 1997) CO2 emitted. If the U.S. were to enact a $100/tCO2 carbon tax it would increase the current cost of natural gas by about 75% and the current cost of coal fired electricity by about 70%.

Since the basis for code requirements for insulation are primarily driven by current and projected energy costs, if the social and environmental costs of energy were included in a “green” CBA analysis, model energy code insulation requirements would increase by the order of 70%.

… more on Sustainable Economics

“To understand what sustainable economics is, and why it would be superior to conventional economics, we need to start with a brief recap of conventional economics. I’ll need to go through a number of definitions and distinctions, but this is far more than an academic exercise. The conventional economics concepts I’ll be describing provide the basis on which those in power all over the world (which to some degree includes most of us in the rich industrialized countries) justify the destruction of the Earth. It would be hard to find a more pervasive, pernicious and powerful evil than the seemingly innocent concepts that currently rule our economic lives. Let me be more precise, it is not so much the concepts on their own - they have served an historically useful role. The real evil is the continued dominant use of these concepts long after they have become seriously outdated and destructive. This is indeed the belly of the beast, and until we can replace these concepts with a more Earth-friendly approach, our prospects are grim.” - Robert Gilman