Greening Buildings to Create Jobs
What comes to mind when you hear the phrase "green building?" Sleek new structures with skins of advanced glass and recycled steel that blend into the landscape, facades and roofs draped in a combination of daylight-harvesting windows, wildlife habitat, and photovoltaics? New construction affords the flexibility to build contemporary masterpieces, like the California Academy of Sciences, which will receive its LEED Platinum certification this morning in San Francisco. The museum will be the largest and most visited LEED Platinum building in the world.
The Academy of Sciences is a breathtaking example of our city and our citizens' efforts to address the fact that roughly half of all greenhouse gas emissions in San Francisco are attributable to our buildings. In August of 2008, I signed a groundbreaking green building ordinance that created the most stringent green building requirements in the nation. This was a big step in the right direction, requiring that all new buildings be subject to an unprecedented level of LEED and green building certifications. However, a comprehensive recipe for our environmental and economic sustainability requires solutions to the challenges posed by existing buildings.
New construction is essential to the vitality of a city, but it's important to note that most of the San Francisco of the future has already been built. New construction typically represents less than one percent of San Francisco's built environment in any given year. In contrast, more than half of commercial buildings in San Francisco were constructed before 1978, when the state adopted Energy Efficiency Standards - requiring far more energy than those built afterwords. By retrofitting our existing structures there is the potential to create thousands of green jobs.
Greening existing buildings is more challenging than new construction. Consider that buildings use two thirds of our state's electricity. While per capita electricity use in California has remained consistent for decades, total energy use continues to increase by 1.5 percent per year. Existing buildings are diverse in their size, vintage, use, and resources available for maintenance and improvements. In a tough economy, vacancy in commercial real estate is increasing nationwide - but the vacancy rate in LEED certified commercial office space in San Francisco is less than half that of standard office space.
To address these challenges and opportunities, I've convened an Existing Buildings Efficiency Task Force comprised of members from San Francisco's ownership, developer, financial, architectural, engineering, and construction community. With the aid of this Task Force, the city will partner with the private sector to enable, encourage, and in some cases require that cost-effective opportunities to cut energy consumption 20% to 50%, improve water efficiency, and continue to move toward the elimination of solid waste in our community.
The Task Force builds upon a great deal of work we're doing already - taking full advantage of the $7-$11 million provided in Energy Efficiency Block Grants provided by the federal stimulus, leveraging our ongoing $6.7 million a year energy efficiency partnership with PG&E, and working with private partners to create a San Francisco Clean Energy Fund. Each of these efforts creates hundreds of green jobs retrofitting our existing building stock, and in the process reduces utility costs and environmental impacts, making San Francisco a more competitive place to locate a company and raise a family.
Listen to Mayor Newsom's Green 960 radio show online or subscribe to his weekly policy discussions on iTunes. Join Mayor Newsom on Facebook. You can also follow him on Twitter.
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One problem has been finding "Green Building" experts, plenty of Green Directories out there with electric cars and compost bins. You might want to check out America's Green Pages dot com.
Mayor Newson is out in front on these issues. The environmental and economic benefits of building green often seem obvious, but there are also social benefits to our health, social capital, and over all well-being that need to be understood. The development of the Folsom/Dore affordable housing building is one great example of the triple bottom line benefits of green buildings. I urge the Task Force to consider the sociological influence of renovating green. Understanding the ways the economic, environmental and social converge in our built environments and then addressing these through city policy is exactly what will make our city more livable for the majority of our residents.
Laura Mamo
www.socialgreen.org
Gavin Newsom is right here. We must retrofit old buildings and apartments ASAP. This is a national effort and will help us innumerably.
Supporters of local renewable energy need to read this article: http://bit.ly/3PwUi, and then this one: http://bit.ly/XpH6H
How unfortunate that San Francisco is burdened with a mayor who's much more concerned with press releases and photo opportunities than he is with actually running the city. California needs solid leadership supported by a demonstrable record of achievement, not another empty suit.
The most dangerous place in California, it seems, is the space between Gavin Newsom and a camera.
Most commercial buildings designed before the widespread use of compressor-based air conditioning (circa 1950) feature high thermal mass, shallow footprint (mostly perimeter), and facades with at most 40% glass.
In San Francisco's mild climate, a concrete high-rise with double low-e glass can meet thermal comfort standards without any active cooling, just ceiling fans and operable windows.
It's those modern "glass prism" skyscrapers whose thermal performance sucks so bad. The only thing you can do is throw money at the problem with exotic glazing systems and chiller plants.
My problem with LEED, having prepared the documentation for several commercial projects including two LEED Platinum buildings, is that the energy analysis is extremely complicated and nobody really knows what they're doing.
As a simulation expert developing thermal flow models, I felt kind of like a Wall Street "quant", cooking up algorithmic voodoo that could produce whatever results I wanted, and nobody would question it because the details were so arcane that only I, the creator, could readily understand it.
Most energy modelers have no idea what they're doing, and even if they did, the tools they're using are woefully inadequate. It's not uncommon for the model results to be off by an order of magnitude from the real-world performance, yet this is the state of the art in evaluating sustainable design.
Why not put photovoltaics on the roofs of schools and public buildings? These roofs sit in the sun all day every day and could be creating electricity for the building own use and to be put back into the grid when school is out for the summer!
So, let's not stop there...let's not stop at talking about efficiency of indoor lighting...
WHAT ABOUT OUTDOOR LIGHTING?
Each year, Americans spend about 2 Billion dollars lighting up the undersides of Clouds, Birds and Airplanes....
Isn't about tme we stop doing this?
Google LIGHT POLLUTION and you will see.
LEED includes credits for efficient outdoor site and facade lighting. On many projects, outdoor lighting accounts for a substantial chunk of the overall energy savings calculation.
Mr. Newsom,
I'm all in favor of what you're doing to create jobs in the green sector, but please, please, please help us regain HIGH-TECH leadership and lost and outsourced HIGH-TECH jobs in Silicon Valley. Much of the work in the green energy sector is blue collar, which is fine, but it won't retain or gain lost HIGH-TECH jobs in Silicon Valley.
As you know, if you're over 40 years old (and helped to build Silicon Valley) you are used goods, being replaced with cheap foreign labor. ReThuglican corporate interests and Democratic corporate interests both support cheap foreign labor in order to retain campaign contributions from California high-tech industries such as Cisco, Sun, IBM, Intel, HP, Google, Yahoo, Autodesk... etc....
"please help us regain HIGH-TECH leadership and lost and outsourced HIGH-TECH jobs in Silicon Valley"
Good luck, California just jacked up taxes again and have become very unfriendly to business.
I hear what you're saying and sympathize with your plea, but you must realize that Silicon Valley residents aren't Newsom's constituency. He's only mayor of San Francisco, not Palo Alto or Mountainview.
On a related note, I do believe that green jobs and high tech jobs will overlap. Google is working on smart energy grids, for example. The federal stimulus plan also includes funding for high-tech jobs. So you may have reasons for optimism.
Ahh yes, the smart grid . . . I can't wait until Government can control my energy in my house or tax me more if I use it during a "peak time"
Hugo Chavez would love to have a smart grid.
I admire the green initiatives that California has created. In Ohio, we're doing the same, but thanks for Cali in leading the way.
Kevin Lockett
www.hirejam.com
Find Green Jobs Here
Yeah, I wish we could all just follw California's lead of going right into the toilet.
There could be no better investment in America than to invest in America becoming energy independent! We need to utilize everything in out power to reduce our dependence on foreign oil including using our own natural resources. Create cheap clean energy, new badly needed green jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.The high cost of fuel this past year seriously damaged our economy and society. The cost of fuel effects every facet of consumer goods from production to shipping costs. It costs the equivalent of 60 cents per gallon to charge and drive an electric car. If all gasoline cars, trucks, and SUV's instead had plug-in electric drive trains the amount of electricity needed to replace gasoline is about equal to the estimated wind energy potential of the state of North Dakota.We have so much available to us such as wind and solar. Let's spend some of those bail out billions and get busy harnessing this energy. Create cheap clean energy, badly needed new jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. What a win-win situation that would be for our nation at large! There is a really good new book out by Jeff Wilson called The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence Now. http://www.themanhattanprojectof2009.com
"Create cheap clean energy"
This is basically the same as "clean coal" and doesn't exist. "Green energy" means more expensive energy to me and you.
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