Blog: February, 2012

February 23, 2012

Occupant Behavior: Five Keys to Meeting Building Environmental Performance Goals
Built Environment green building California Sustainability Alliance
To better engage tenants, the facility manager should use charts to display energy patterns and cost savings.

A recent article published on Property Management Software Guide claims occupant behavior – not funding or awareness – is preventing green buildings from reaching their environmental performance goals.  The article, Occupant Behavior: Five Keys to Meeting Environmental Performance Goals, identifies five ways to encourage behaviors that align with environmental performance goals:

  1. Engage occupants before they move in.  Hold an eco-charrette with the future tenants to include their ideas about the building’s design and help them understand the importance of established performance goals.
  2. Take a holistic approach.  It may not be enough to focus solely on energy and water usage. Holistic programs emphasizing sustainability and overall health and well-being have proven to be very successful.
  3. Measure energy use with new technologies.  New social energy management tools can assist in making tenants more aware of their energy use by showing the real-time environmental performance of the building.
  4. Provoke competition.  Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be leveraged to create friendly competition among occupants, floors, or even other local buildings. By setting clear goals and displaying real-time data, facility managers can capitalize on tenants’ competitive spirit in order to reduce a building’s carbon footprint.
  5. Create transparency.  It is important to make energy data available in a way that it is easily understood.  Providing tenants with easy-to-read charts or graphs showing energy usage patterns, data on actual cost savings and shrinking carbon footprints, helps facility managers better engage their tenants.

Ashley Halligan is the author of Occupant Behavior: Five Keys to Meeting Environmental Performance Goals. Ashley is a Property Management Systems Analyst at Software Advice.

Share Your Thoughts
February 16, 2012

Energy Efficiency Financing-Models and Strategies
Energy Efficiency energy efficiency California Sustainability Alliance
Models include Energy Service Agreements and Energy Savings Performance Contracting.

In October 2011, Capital E for the Energy Foundation released the “Energy Efficiency Financing – Models and Strategies” report.  This report summarizes energy efficiency financing models and strategies that are applicable to industrial, commercial and residential sectors.   In preparing this report, Capital E ran a meeting with leaders from banks, industry organizations, project developers, and regulatory agencies.  The collaboration led to the design of new mechanisms for energy efficiency financing.

As stated in the report, the most cost-effective energy efficiency investments in the United States would be around $150 billion a year.  With this amount, within a decade, American residents and businesses would save $200 billion annually and create over a million full time jobs.  Current financing, however, totals only $20 billion, leaving approximately $130 billion of cost-effective potential investments unfunded. To close this gap, energy efficiency financing must become more mainstream and there must be some sort of standardization, such as green appraisal standards and performance data, for banks and financial institutions to compare.  Capital E has included multiple models and strategies in their report that will help create pathways to scaling energy efficiency financing from $20 billion to $150 billion annually. 

Models:

The models described in this report are analyzed according to funding sources, program structures, limits to scale, repayment vehicles, and project risks.  The models considered include:

Many advantages of these models include facilitated collaboration across numerous governmental departments, job creations, reduction of project risks, and removing of split incentives.  Disadvantages of a few models include state-level authorizations, funding limitations, higher transaction costs, and longer processes and negotiations.

Strategies:

The strategies in this report consider applicable building sectors, applicable models, level of establishments, growth potential, advantages, and disadvantages.   The report includes analysis of the following financing strategies:

  • Intermediary Aggregated Scale Purchasing
  • Revolving Loan Fund
  • Preferential Loans
  • Risk Reallocation
  • E-Loan
  • Point of Purchase Interest Rate Buy-Down
  • Re-Align Incentive Structures.

Certain strategies, such as unsecured consumer loans, have advantages like easier access to capital but have disadvantages such as higher interest rates.

The full report provides an overview of energy efficiency financing models and strategies.  It is important to understand and spread this knowledge because increasing energy efficiency financing will help businesses and residents reduce their energy costs, create more jobs, and improve air quality.

View the full report here to look more closely at the models and strategies included. 

Share Your Thoughts
February 10, 2012

A look at the National Research Council Report: Water Reuse Potential for Expanding the Nation’s Water Supply
Water Energy water efficiency, water energy California Sustainability Alliance
12 billion gallons of municipal wastewater effluent is discharged into the ocean each day.

Is it possible to meet our future water supply needs through the reuse of municipal wastewater? This is a question the National Research Council (NRC) had in mind when the Assessment of Water Reuse Committee was formed by the NRC’s Water Science and Technology Board. Since wastewater is discharged into the environment in significantly large quantities—approximately 12 billion gallons of municipal wastewater is discharged to an ocean or estuary each day—the committee critically assessed the practicality of reusing water to meet future supply needs by analyzing technical, economical, institutional and social issues associated with water reuse.

This isn’t a new idea, as water reuse is a very common practice within the United States for irrigation and non-potable applications; however, as the NRC’s report states, using reclaimed water to augment potable supplies has significant potential for helping meet future needs. The EPA previously estimated the extent of water reuse in the United States; as of 2002 Florida was reusing the largest quantities followed by California, Texas and Arizona.  Over 50% of the reclaimed water in Florida and California was used for irrigation. 

So then the question is begged, how will people react to drinking recycled wastewater?  Although it sounds unsanitary, with the right wastewater reclamation technology and monitoring systems, the potable reuse of highly treated reclaimed water becomes worthy of consideration.  The committee found that the current technology is very advanced with room for improvements but no real limitations. To help address public concerns about safety of reuse and the effects on human health and the environment, the committee proposed 14 priority research areas within two categories: health, social and environmental issues; and performance and quality assurance.

Several advanced treatment facilities in California and throughout the world provide examples of successfully managed systems that are expanding local water supplies.  In Southern California, Orange County Water District’s Groundwater Replenishment System recycles wastewater using advance treatment processes.  Half of the treated wastewater (about 35 million gallons a day) is used to recharge the local groundwater basin which supplies potable water to the county.  Elsewhere, Singapore’s NEWater system recycles wastewater that subsequently meets 30% of the nation’s water demand.  Currently only a small percentage of NEWater is being used to augment potable supplies.

As the world’s water supply decreases and as population increases, the need for water reuse becomes even more vital—especially for water-limited regions.  Although reuse alone will not address the nation’s water challenges, municipal wastewater reuse has the ability to significantly increase the world’s water resources.

Find out more by reading the full report here. 

Share Your Thoughts