This post was written by The Ground Floor contributor and ULI senior resident fellow, John McIlwain.
What's the goal of "green housing"? Put another way, how green should green be? There is a rule of thumb which holds that a building uses 80% of its life-cycle energy during its operational life. How much of these carbon emissions can be eliminated?
The answer: for newly built multifamily housing, virtually all of it. At the annual ULI Shaw Forum (endowed by the late Charlie Shaw) held last week, Solara, an affordable housing development in San Diego with 56 units and a 2,100 square foot community center, was showcased; its operating carbon footprint has been reduced by 95%.
It is both the first apartment complex in California fully powered by photovoltaics (PV) and the first to be a Zero Energy New Home (ZENH). (The ZENH Program was developed by the California Energy Commission to find ways to reduce the state’s peak energy demand.) It's likely that Solara is also the first zero energy multifamily building in the U.S.
Solara combines passive solar and efficient design with construction at levels at or above California's tough Title 24 standards. It uses PV panels to produce the energy needed for lighting, heating, cooling and all residential energy needs.
It is tied to the California electric grid and feeds it during the day. In the evening, Solara draws from the grid. To date, after the first few months of operation, it appears that Solara is meeting energy use projections and drawing no more electricity from the grid than it produces.
Community Housing Works, Solara's nonprofit developer, estimates that the cost to build Solara was 1-2% higher than conventional construction, setting aside the cost of the PV system. The PV added $1.1 million to the development budget, an amount which the owners expect to recover in seven years from reduced electric bills.
Solara demonstrates rather convincingly that the 2030 Challenge thrown out by Ed Mazria of Architecture 2030, can be met. The challenge calls for all new buildings, developments and major renovations to be carbon-neutral in 2030, i.e., use no fossil fuel greenhouse gas emitting energy to operate. This challenge has been adopted by the AIA and the Conference of Mayors, among many others.
In fact, Solara answers two of the biggest questions this challenge presents. One, it shows that technology is available today, at least in sunny California, to meet this standard. If today's technology won't meet this standard in cloudy Seattle or the colder regions of upstate New York or Maine, there are 22 years to develop and prove out new and better technologies to do this.
The second point Solara makes is that it is cost effective today to reduce energy use and carbon emissions to virtually zero in the residential industry. A 1% to 2% increase in cost and a seven year payback for the PV present no barrier to achieving a 95% reduction in greenhouse gasses.
The importance of this point should not be overlooked. There is much debate today over how much society should invest in reducing carbon emissions for the benefit of future generations. The Washington Post this past weekend published an op-ed piece by the controversial Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg in which he argues that it will cost more than it is worth to cut carbon emissions to the levels recommended by the best current science, an argument that seemingly appeals to many. He says,
Environmental groups say that the only way to deal with the effects of global warming is to make drastic cuts in carbon emissions [Note: to be accurate, it is the IPCC and the vast majority of the world’s climate and earth scientists who call for this reduction. JKM] -- a project that will cost the world trillions (the Kyoto Protocol alone would cost $180 billion annually [Note: this is not a large sum; the U.S. alone could easily foot this bill. JKM]. The research I've done over the last decade...has convinced me that this approach is unsound; it means spending an awful lot to achieve very little.
On the contrary, in the residential sector an awful lot can be achieved by spending very little. The U.S. Department of Energy calculates that the residential sector is responsible for 21% of all U.S. carbon emissions. Solara shows it possible to all but eliminate these emissions from newly built residential buildings by a combination of design and construction techniques that cost much the same as conventional construction today. Add to that a seven-year payback for an investment in renewable energy, a payback period most businesses would readily make, and it is possible to achieve the goals of the 2030 Challenge at little cost.
To be sure, scaling up from one multifamily project in San Diego to 1.5 million units a year of single and multifamily construction throughout the country will be full of challenges. The point is that it is affordable and doable largely with current designs and equipment. Lomberg and his allies are simply wrong.
Which leads to a final point. A better goal for green building than even that set out by the 2030 Challenge was put forth by John Knott, CEO of The Noisette Company, at the ULI Shaw Forum. The true goal of green building, Knott said, is to have each development renewably produce all its own energy plus a surplus to be sent into the grid; in other words, for each development to become a localized net producer of renewable energy. Now that's green!
