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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Green Building Consultant pens book on sustainability for developers
From Jan Buchholz’ Phoenix Business Journal review of Green Building A to Z: For people who don’t know the meaning of zero-net-energy buildings, ecologic footprints or cradle-to-cradle design, a new book helps set the record straight about sustainability.
“Green build” consultant Jerry Yudelson is the author of “Green Building A to Z.” The owner of consulting firm Yudelson Associates in Tucson has become an international authority on green building, and he’s taking his message to the masses. “What’s been missing is an introductory piece for people who aren’t professional engineers and architects, but they want to know about green building,” he said.
The 222-page easy read is published by New Society Publishers. It’s available for $16.95 through most online booksellers, and will be in bookstores by November.
Although the material is presented in a simple format, Yudelson said, “It’s technical, it’s accurate, but it’s brief. It’s for people who don’t want a detailed treatise, but they don’t want a dumbed-down version, either.”
Ryc Loope, director of Arizona State University’s master’s degree program in real estate development, got an early peek at the softcover. He said the book will be an “invaluable” tool for developers and individuals who want to get into the green-build arena, but aren’t well versed yet. “Jerry is one of the more forward thinkers in this area,” Loope said. “He was a part of our sustainability discussion last year, and he’s back again this year.”
Posted by Jerry on 10/30/2007 at 06:59 PM
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Saturday, October 20, 2007
Portland Architecture blog reviews Green Building A to Z
Green Building A to Z With Jerry, from Brian Libby’s incredibly rich and diverse architecture blog, Portland Architecture:
Although he left Portland about a year ago for the more scorched pastures of Arizona, Jerry Yudelson was for many years a fixture in our city’s burgeoning green building movement, mostly for Interface Engineering. You don’t meet many people with training as an engineer and in marketing, but that is Jerry’s niche. He’s trained more than 3,000 people in the US Green Building Council’s LEED rating system and chaired the Greenbuild conference’s steering committee for four years.
Jerry seems to crank out books like other people finish the Monday crossword. His fifth and latest makes an ideal reference material for any architect, builder or green building enthusiast’s bookshelf. Published by New Society Publishers, It’s called Green Building A to Z: Understanding the Language of Green Building.
One thing that struck me as funny in the book, but in a good way, is the mixture of technical terms, philosophical ones, and the more casual. For example, there are entries for brownfields, biophilia, biodiesel, certified wood, displacement ventilation, hybrid technology, and so on. But there are also these entries: ‘cool roofs’, ‘question authority’, ‘paradigm shift’, and my personal favorite, ‘Unbridled Enthusiasm!’ I say this not to tease Jerry, but just to point out the readable nature of his book. Which is helpful, because it would be very easy for a book like this to get overly technical…and gather dust.
Posted by Jerry on 10/20/2007 at 12:37 PM
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Monday, October 15, 2007
Ecoefficiency and Ecoeffectiveness: An Excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s “Green Building A to Z”
Architect and sustainable design expert William McDonough exhorts green building designers not to be content with just “doing less-bad” designs that put off the day of reckoning for excessive energy and water use, but to design buildings and cities that are “positively good.” When our focus is primarily on “eco-efficiency,” that is, reducing our negative impacts, we are not likely to achieve design breakthroughs. For example, saving 20% of the energy of a standard building is a virtue, but energy use still creates lots of carbon dioxide emissions and pollution from electric power production. If we save 30% of the water use of a standard building, we are still using far more water than the building receives as rainfall.
Some experts tell us that our environmental impacts have to be reduced 90% or more to begin to reverse the decline in the Earth’s supportive ecosystems and to relieve the stress on energy and water resources. Such a “Factor 10” building is a long way from our current focus on “Factor 1.5” buildings that might reduce impacts of building construction and operations by 33% on average. (At this time, a good LEED-certified building reduces water use by about 30% and energy use by 30% to 50%, compared with the average of all buildings.)
Economists have long analyzed the “externalities” of modern life, wherein a factory, for example, is more profitable when it is able to unload its pollution and resource depletion on the environment, without having to pay for all the consequences. One can think of the past 30 years of pollution control regulations as an attempt to make business and government “internalize” the full external costs of their pollution, so that they would decide not to create it in the first place.
In an “eco-effective” analysis, one would “internalize the externalities,” for example, by performing a life-cycle analysis of all materials produced, including their upstream (cost of materials, cost of transportation, type of labor) and downstream (recyclability, reusability) environmental and social costs. The figure above shows how this approach might look conceptually. Sustainability implies that, together, we have to agree to live primarily on “natural capital” (renewable resources and biodiversity) for a long period of time, using non-renewable resources at a much slower rate, perhaps eventually not at all.
Click here to download the PDF version.
Posted by Sky on 10/15/2007 at 03:54 PM
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Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Commissioning: An Excerpt from Jerry Yudelson’s “Green Building A to Z”
Building commissioning is a high-value-added activity that is unknown outside the building industry. Think of a ship; when construction is finished, it’s time for sea trials. Long before a vessel sets out on a mission or voyage, all key systems are tested in calmer waters to make sure everything is working as designed. This includes propulsion, navigation and safety equipment.
Now consider a modern high-rise building, which is every bit as complex as a ship. It’s expected to perform well for decades, supporting all types of occupancy and enduring both normal and extreme weather events, including torrential rains, high winds, tornadoes, floods and hurricanes, and to be safe for its occupants in the event of fire or earthquake. Shouldn’t this building be commissioned just as a ship would be?
Posed this way, the answer is obvious. In the past decade, the practice of commissioning for larger buildings has become an accepted practice. The LEED system requires that every project be commissioned according to certain standard procedures.The goal is to test all energy-using and life safety systems in actual building operation and to work out all the kinks before occupancy. More than 120 research studies have shown that energy savings increase 10% to 15% when a building is commissioned. In energy savings alone, commissioning pays for itself in less than flve years; when other non-monetary (but real) benefits are included, the return is typically less than one year.
The cost of commissioning is relatively minor compared with the benefits. In larger projects, the cost might range from $0.40 to $1.00 per square foot, less than 1% of building costs. The key to the process is to get experienced commissioning agents on board during the design phase so that they can understand and help clarify the owner’s project requirements and the engineer’s basis of design. In this way the commissioning agent understands the project’s goals, systems and performance requirements before testing begins.
A typical commissioning activity involves creating a plan; writing commissioning requirements into the project specifications; engaging the subcontractors during construction — especially mechanical, electrical and controls contractors — to assist with testing; fixing any problems encountered with system operations; and confirming that operators have been trained to keep the building running optimally.
Click here to download the PDF version.
Posted by Sky on 10/02/2007 at 02:13 PM
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