Environment Forum

Is this the greenest office on Earth?

Every workstation has a view. Much of the lighting comes from reflected sunshine. It’s so naturally quiet that unobtrusive speakers pipe in “white noise” to preserve a level of privacy. The windows open, and they’re shaded in such a way that there’s no glare. Even with the windows closed, fresh air circulates through vents in the floor. Extreme recycling prevails, not just of bottles, cans and kitchen refuse but beetle-blighted wood.

Welcome to the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which contains some of the greenest office space on the planet.

NREL’s headquarters in Golden, Colorado, is also the home to cutting-edge research on biofuels, photo-voltaics for solar power and other renewable energy technology, but the physical plant is a living lab for green building. At $63 million, or $259 per square foot for its construction cost, including interiors and furniture, the Research Support Facility as it is called, was hardly cheap to build. But with 220,000 square feet of space, it is the biggest energy efficient building in the United States.

The recycling is evident at the entrance, which is decorated with angled wall panels made of golden-colored pine. Look more closely and you see a bluish tinge on the wood, from fungus that grew after the pine tree that formed the lumber was attacked by pine beetles. A warming climate in the Western U.S. has enabled pine beetles to survive winters and reproduce to assault pine forests.

This building is highly energy efficient, but it still is responsible for some climate-warming carbon emissions because of some of the construction materials and emissions from vehicles and equipment used to put the building together. It offsets most of the energy it uses by drawing on electricity generated by rooftop solar panels.

The building uses 35,000 BTU per square foot per year, or about 65 watts per person, about one-third to one-fourth the amount of energy used by a conventional office building constructed in the last 30 years.

One key to making it energy efficient is old technology, according to Shanti Pless, a senior engineer at NREL. Really old. Like the thick outer walls you might see in a medieval cathedral. Exposed concrete helps keep the internal temperature of the building comfortable.

A flying HIPPO, with ICE-T on the side

A HIPPO took off from a windswept airfield in Colorado today, as  ICE-T waited in a nearby hangar, getting ready for a summer trip to the Caribbean.

OK, OK, enough fun with acronyms. HIPPO and ICE-T are flying climate laboratories, one in a Gulfstream V jet, the other in a refurbished C-130 military cargo plane.

Unlike its animal namesake, HIPPO is actually a rather sleek aircraft, fitted with equipment and a crew of 10, that makes flights of  eight hours or more at a go, sampling the atmosphere around the Pacific Basin, from near the North Pole to just off the coast of Antarctica. HIPPO is actually a combination of two acronyms: HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations. HIAPER itself stands for High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research. Quite a mouthful.

Unlike most Gulfstream V’s — usually used as corporate jets — this one has no in-flight bar. (Roger Wakimoto, the director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which manages the program along with the National Science Foundation, said the bar was one of the first things to go after the plane was delivered.)

HIPPO takes off steeply and then flies in a sawtooth pattern, rising to 28,000 feet and then dipping to just 1,000 feet above the water or land. The point of this roller-coaster flight is to figure out how climate-warming carbon dioxide and other trace gases is distributed, not just at Earth’s surface but up to the edge of the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where most weather occurs. Learn more about this project here.

By contrast, ICE-T is being equipped for summer in St. Croix, where it will be based for a series of flights out over the open Atlantic Ocean. Its mission is to examine the ice that forms in clouds, because more than half of all precipitation begins in the ice phase.

How ice forms and multiplies in clouds is poorly understood and ICE-T — Ice in Clouds Experiment – Tropics — is meant to help scientists learn more about it. That could in turn help with accurately modeling precipitation and predicting climate changes. Take a look here for more information.

Which U.S. states make the grade on net-metering?

Advocates for renewable energy hail net-metering as a key policy so that electricity from solar and wind is generated at the same place where it is consumed.

Supporters refer to it as the policy that lets the electric meter spin backwards. It allows people who own solar power systems, for example, export electricity to the grid and earn credits — at retail prices — on their utility bill.

In a new report called “Freeing the Grid,” advocates with several groups grade each state on their net-metering policies.

Environmental trendsetter California tied for fifth, but Colorado got the top spot.

Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey followed Colorado in the ranking, while California, Oregon and Pennsylvania tied for fifth.

Seven states flunked by default. Those states  — Alabama, Alaska, Mississippi, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas — have no statewide net-metering policy.

The report also looked at how states fare on another key policy: interconnection standards, which determine how a generator on a customer’s site plugs into the electricity grid.

Group wants oil, gas drillers to follow rules in U.S. West

An environmental group this week issued a report saying oil and gas companies have enjoyed exemptions to common sense anti-pollution federal rules that govern companies in other industries. This has led, the Environmental Working Group claims, to fouled groundwater, creeks and acres and acres of formerly pristine land in the U.S. West.

The report, “Free Pass for Oil and Gas in the American West,” contains county-by-county maps of what it says are examples of mismanagement of the oil and gas industry.

“Drilling companies regularly complain that environmental standards deny them access to sites where they’d like to drill,” the EWG said. “But the cratered landscape tells a different story.”

The report claims that 270,000 oil and natural gas wells have been drilled since 1980, and 120,000 of them since 2000.  Most of those wells are for natural gas.

The EWG says that these well have been drilled with waivers to federal environmental laws including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.