Category Archives: Conservation

USGBC Green Building Tours – October 3-8, 2016

Greenbuild_2016_Logo

GREEN BUILDING TOURS

Green Building tours are one of Greenbuild’s most popular and exciting features, providing the opportunity to explore green buildings ranging from government facilities to zoo exhibits. This year in Los Angeles, Greenbuild tours will help attendees learn outside the convention center walls and present the best of the area’s sustainable buildings and neighborhoods.

The Greenbuild Tours Program is developed by the Greenbuild 2016 Host Committee, USGBC-LA.


Descanso Gardens

About Greenbuild International
Conference & Expo – Oct. 5-7, 2016

 Greenbuild is the world’s largest conference and expo dedicated to green building. The ideals and passion of the green building community come alive at Greenbuild. The buzz is contagious.

Greenbuild brings together industry leaders, experts and frontline professionals dedicated to sustainable building in their everyday work, and a unique energy is sparked. Participants are invigorated. Inspired. They find themselves equipped to return to their jobs with a renewed passion and purpose.

READ MORE…

Share this post:
Facebooktwittergoogle_pluspinterestlinkedinmail

LADWP SummerShift Program Increases Incentives July-September 2016

Screen Shot 2016-07-03 at 7.59.41 PM“With the current moratorium on new injections of natural gas from Aliso Canyon there is a heightened threat of outages this summer, especially during times of extreme heat when gas and electricity are in higher demand. Customer participation in SummerShift will help minimize the risk of rotating outages, which could result in serious health and safety risks, as well as create financial impacts to our customers.”  – Board President Mel Levine.

To avoid power outages this summer, LADWP has announced that the incentives for large commercial customers who decrease their summer demand for energy  has been greatly increased.  The first-of-its-kind program is effective immediately until the end of September 2016.

SummerShift (flyer) is just one of several measures being undertaken by the utility to mitigate the risk of outages caused by the moratorium on gas injections into Aliso Canyon.

SummerShift benefits include:

  1. Receive significant incentives (through a bill credit) of $10 per kW for energy saved or shifted away from the peak period
  2. Avoid cost impacts and inconveniences of electrical service interruptions
  3. Partner with LADWP in preventing power outages this summer affecting all customers

Other measures include:

  • Making operational changes to maximize flexibility of gas-fired power plants to preserve natural gas for critical periods.
  • Maximizing use of alternative fuel sources, including renewable energy.
  • Public outreach to residential customers to reduce their energy use, and participate in Flex Alerts, such as the one issued Monday.
  • Expanding Demand-Response Programs to provide discounts for participating large commercial and industrial customers to reduce and shift their energy use away from peak periods.

To participate in LADWP’s Demand Response Program, businesses must meet these criteria:

  • Have an existing Building Energy Management System
  • Be able to curtail load by 100 kilowatts (kW) for each DR event
  • Be able to adjust operations to participate during the DR season – June 15 to October 15
  • Be able to adjust operations between 1:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. PST
  • Be able to participate with day-ahead or two hour advance notification

READ MORE …

Share this post:
Facebooktwittergoogle_pluspinterestlinkedinmail

LACI Host “LaunchPad” Welcoming 25 Israeli GreenTechs

54e358_d159273a6867455b82721c369586896f
Gov. Brown & PM Netanyahu’s MOU on Israel-CA Cleantech Collaboration in Action

Two exciting collaborations are taking place starting today in Los Angeles – efforts to combat the drought and fight climate change through Israeli-California collaboration – which will build off the landmark MOU signed between Governor Jerry Brown of California and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

A delegation of field-proven Israeli companies will engage in the first-ever Israel California Water (ICWater) Conference. The list of attendees includes an impressive collection of key stakeholders, policy makers, city officials, corporate leaders, and investors.

Immediately following the conference, a select group of pioneering Israeli energy and water technologies will participate in “LaunchPad” at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), an intensive “bootcamp” program designed to help prepare the companies to launch into the California market. LACI will also be hosting a high-level event, where the companies will have the opportunity to pitch their ventures to the LACI Leadership Council.

For background on the Israel-CA Green-Tech Partnership and to sign-up for their blog.

READ MORE

Share this post:
Facebooktwittergoogle_pluspinterestlinkedinmail

USGBC Build SMART Trailer Tours Los Angeles

IMG_0005

Juliana Luz, Scott Miller, and Fernanda Zuin invite visitors to learn more about sustainable building materials, water conservation, and energy saving innovations in the Build SMART trailer.

What has four wheels, 3 solar panels, a dual flush toilet, and is full of the latest sustainable innovations used in building construction?

The BuildSMART (Sustainable Materials And Resources Trailer) mobile learning exhibit, of course! On loan from the USGBC Central Coast Chapter who constructed it (with the assistance of CalPoly San Luis Obispo and sponsors) it is touring various parks and schools around Los Angeles County between April 2016 and 2017.

The trailer demonstrates sustainable living/working environments, illustrating best practices for green building. BuildSMART is outfitted with a variety of materials and systems, including sustainable flooring, recycled countertops, non-toxic insulation, anti-microbial wallboards, solar PV, tankless water heating, among other efficient energy and water conservation methods.

Screen Shot 2016-06-05 at 4.52.18 PMThe community interest has been very strong and positive serving an estimated 40,000 visitors per year! It is the first exposure many have had to the USGBC, LEED Certification, and many of new technologies  that might motivate students to pursue careers in the industry.

LEED PlaquesBuildSMART is supported by a Community Partner Grant funded by the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power. A YouTube video is available to tour the trailer online.

Contact Fernanda Zuin to schedule a visit: fernanda@usgbc-la.org or call 213-689-9707.

 

Share this post:
Facebooktwittergoogle_pluspinterestlinkedinmail

LABBC – L.A.‘s Drop 100 Campaign

Drop100Campaign

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti poses with signage for his “Save the Drop” campaign after talking about the program to connect Angelenos with water conservation tools in Van Nuys on April 9. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

How much water consumption will commercial building managers be able to drop to help the Mayor’s office meet its commitment to reduce water demand in Southern California by 100 Million gallons per year?

Building on the City’s successful residential Save The Drop initiative, the LABBC is proud to partner with the Mayor’s Office to launch the Drop100 Campaign, an expansion of the Save The Drop initiative to include large commercial buildings. LABBC hosted the following panel to provide an update on current program rebates and cautions.

Moderator:
David Hodgins — Executive Director, Los Angeles Better Buildings Challenge

Panelists:
Maureen Erbeznik — Technical Advisor: Water, Los Angeles Better Buildings Challenge

Jay Chase — Vice President / Operations, Muir-Chase Plumbing Co, Inc.

Edward Brady — Program Manager, Water Efficiency, Healthy Buildings 

Technological advances and pending code changes are opening up new opportunities to save and re-use water; and with the ongoing drought, it’s more important than ever to manage water responsibly.

In exchange for making commitments to “Drop” their water consumption, the LABBC will offer tools, resources, and expert technical support to help Drop 100 partners achieve their goals and be recognized for their accomplishments.

Future use of grey water will grow but sanitation must maintain a high standard before mass implementation of  the Mayor’s Gray Water Campaign. Pilot tests are advisable before wholesale changeout.

Residential turf removal rebates from the Department of Water and Power have ended. This is a harbinger of other rebates that may rescind before 2020 so taking advantage of existing rebates is more important than ever.

Send an email to sign up for the Drop 100 project to info@la-bbc.com. It will officially launch in November, 2015.

For more information on the LABBC – CLICK HERE to view their brochure.

READ MORE…

Share this post:
Facebooktwittergoogle_pluspinterestlinkedinmail

pLAn – Transforming Los Angeles: Environment | Economy | Equity

Local Government sustainability_bannerMayor Eric Garcetti – 4/8/2015: Our city is flourishing. We expect at least 500,000 more people to call Los Angeles home by 2035. So the question before us, like it was to those Angelenos of the past, is how can we improve our city today, and ensure future generations enjoy a place that is environmentally healthy, economically prosperous, and equitable in opportunity for all?

Soon after taking office as Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti defined the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and appointed the city’s first-ever Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO), Matt Petersen. This is not simply an “environment department” with a separate box on the organization chart – rather the office oversees the implementation of sustainability throughout the city’s 35 departments and bureaus.

“This pLAn sets the course for a cleaner environment and a stronger economy, with a commitment to equity as its foundation. These are the keys to a city that Angelenos have said they want our children to inherit — one that can continue to thrive and provide good health andopportunity for its residents. This is the way I view sustainability.” – Mayor Eric Garcetti

Within the framework of three sections – Environment, Economy, and Equity – there are 14 topic chapters. Each chapter includes a preceding Introduction, Vision, and Long-Term Outcomes summary. Then the pLAn provides details on Baseline/Source, Near-term Outcomes, Strategies, and Priority Initiatives.

The full plan can be downloaded from the L.A. Mayor’s website at plan.lamayor.org.

Share this post:
Facebooktwittergoogle_pluspinterestlinkedinmail

USGBC: Paid-From-Savings Guide to Green Existing Buidlings

Paid from Savings Guide

The best candidates for the paid-from-savings approach are buildings with inefficient or outdated building systems in which upgrades will generate significant cost savings. To achieve LEED for Existing Buildings: O&M certification, these systems must also meet energy-efficiency and performance-period requirements designated in the rating system. LEED for Existing Buildings: O&M certified buildings also implement O&M best practices and sustainable policies.

Executive Summary PDF

The paid-from-savings approach is a financing strategy to green existing buildings. It leverages the savings generated from building system upgrades to pay for a comprehensive greening project within a defined pay-back period. Paid-from-savings projects can use a variety of financing methods including:

• Self-financing,

• tax-exempt lease-purchase agreements for qualifying entities,

• power purchase agreements for renewable energy projects,

• performance contracts for larger projects,

• equipment finance agreements, and

commercial loans or bond financing for qualifying entities.

In many cases, successful projects employ a combination of these options, along with supplemental funding, such as revolving loan funds, utility rebates, and renewable energy grants, as well as funds from the organization’s capital and operating budgets.

They include such items as:

• replacing the boiler,

• replacing the chiller,

• upgrading lighting systems,

• installing a building automation system (BAS), and

• replacing water fixtures.

Owners can achieve their desired return on investment (ROI) and lessen the overall project pay-back period by “bundling” the longer pay-back measures with the quicker pay-back measures to create a project with a shorter overall pay-back period and a higher ROI.

Under a performance contract, an energy services company (ESCO) acts as the project developer and assumes the technical and performance risk associated with the project, including guaranteeing the cost savings generated from the system upgrades for a specified period of time. If the savings guarantee is not met, the ESCO pays the owner the difference. The guarantee is unique to performance contracting and not typical of other paid-from-savings approaches.

To determine the savings that can be guaranteed, the ESCO will conduct an investment-grade energy audit, which provides the basis for calculating the guarantee and creating the project development plan. The audit also serves as the foundation for developing the measurement and verification (M&V) plan, which outlines the specific methods and calculations to ensure the expected savings are realized.

Share this post:
Facebooktwittergoogle_pluspinterestlinkedinmail

Top Ten Green Building Megatrends for 2012

BldgMegatrendsCountries with Established Green Building Rating Systems

Yudelson Associates’ Top Ten Green Building MegaTrends include:

  1. Green building in North America will rebound in 2012, using new LEED project registrations as a proxy for this growth. The reduction in commercial real estate construction has not been offset by other sectors such as government construction, which continued to falter, and so the growth rate of new green building projects fell dramatically in 2010 and 2011. Even so, in 2011, LEED in new construction accounted for about 20% of all put-in-place space, with domestic LEED project registrations up almost 40% vs. depressed 2010 levels. However, Yudelson Associates sees faster growth in green retrofits, and notices that ongoing college and university projects and NGO activity are serving to backstop the fall in commercial and governmental construction. In addition, LEED growth has been and will be rapid in China and other fast-growing economies.
  2. Green building will continue to benefit from the Obama Administration’s strengthened focus on greening the executive branch, with its commitment to a minimum of LEED Gold for all federal projects and focus on major energy-efficiency renovations.
  3. The focus of the green building industry will continue its switch from new building design and construction to greening existing buildings. One fast-growing LEED rating system the past two years has been LEED for Existing Buildings Operations and Maintenance (LEED-EBOM), with cumulative floor area in certified projects now greater than in new construction, and I expect this trend to pick up in 2012. Yudelson says, “My book, “Greening Existing Buildings” documents the strategic and tactical components of this trend.” One driver of this MegaTrend is that “‘green’ buildings have rents and asset prices that are significantly higher than those documented for conventional office space,” according to a recent major academic research study on commercial buildings in the U.S. and Europe.
  4. Awareness of the coming global crisis in fresh water supply will increase, leading building designers, owners and managers to take further steps to reduce water consumption in buildings by using more conserving fixtures, rainwater recovery systems and innovative new onsite water technologies. Yudelson says, “My recent book, “Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis”  shows how this is being done in green buildings all over the world.
  5. The global green building movement will continue to accelerate, as more countries begin to create their own green building incentives and developing their own Green Building Councils. More than 90 countries with incipient or established green building organizations, on all continents, will drive considerable green building growth in 2012. Yudelson comments, “We’re seeing strong growth in China, other places in Asia (e.g., Singapore), Brazil, Eastern Europe, South Africa and the Arabian Peninsula countries. In 2011, for the first time, nearly as many LEED-registered projects were in progress outside the U.S. as in the U.S., up more than 50% compared to 2010 levels and representing 44% of all new LEED project certifications.” In fact, as one expert noted in a recent report, LEED has registered or certified projects in 131 of the world’s 196 countries, with a total floor area of almost 3-billion sq.ft. When combined with the nearly 1.5-billion sq.ft. registered under LEED India and LEED Canada, it is clear that LEED is the dominant global green building certification brand. See the GreenBiz.com “Green Building Market and Impact Report 2011.”
  6. Zero-net-energy buildings will become increasingly commonplace, in both residential and commercial sectors, as LEED and ENERGY STAR certifications and labels have become too commonplace to confer competitive advantage among building owners. Developers of speculative commercial buildings will also begin to showcase Zero Net Energy designs.
  7. Performance Disclosure will be the fastest emerging trend, highlighted by new requirements in California, Seattle and other locations. Commercial building owners will have to disclose actual building performance to all new tenants and buyers and in some places, to the public at large. This trend is already established in Australia, for example, and will spread rapidly as the easiest way to monitor reductions in carbon emissions from commercial and governmental buildings.
  8. Green Buildings will increasingly be managed in the “Cloud”, as witnessed by the large number of new entrants and new products in fields of building automation, facility management, wireless controls and information management in 2011.
  9. Local and state governments will step up their mandates for green buildings for both themselves and the private sector. We’ll see at least 20 new cities with commercial sector green building mandates, mostly in the “Blue” states. The desire to reduce carbon emissions by going green will lead more government agencies, universities, hospitals and corporate owners to require green buildings from design and construction teams.
  10. Solar power use in buildings will continue to grow with the prospect of increasing utility focus on aggressive state-level renewable power standards (RPS) for 2020. As before, third-party financing partnerships will continue to grow and provide capital for large rooftop systems such as on warehouses and big box retail stores. However, we will see fewer very large solar and wind systems, as federal grant and loan guarantee support begins to be phased out.
Share this post:
Facebooktwittergoogle_pluspinterestlinkedinmail

Los Angeles Commercial Building Performance Partnership (LACBPP)

LACBPP

Los Angeles has the most energy efficient buildings in the country, with over 106 million square feet of Energy Star™ certified space. But there is still much more that can be done.

To demonstrate its continued national leadership in building energy efficiency, the City of Los Angeles has become a partner of the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Challenge, committing to support over 20 million square feet of buildings in reducing energy consumption by at least 20% by 2020.

In order to support property owners in achieving this goal, the City of Los Angeles has developed the LA Commercial Building Performance Partnership (LACBPP) – an ARRA-funded initiative that offers a suite of FREE resources to help you upgrade your buildings while saving energy, saving money, preserving the environment, and making your buildings healthier more comfortable places to live and work.

  1. Up to $250,000 in FREE engineering services from top-tier independent firms

  2. FREE facilitated access to LADWP and SoCal Gas rebates and incentives, as well as state and federal tax incentives such as EPAct 179D

  3. FREE introductions to innovative project financing options

California will soon begin enforcing AB 1103, a law that will require commercial property owners to disclose a property’s Energy Star™ score as part of any transaction. Stay ahead of the curve, and benchmark your building to see how it is performing relative to other similar buildings. Try out this BENCHMARKING TOOL.

If you provide some additional information about your building, the Partnership will develop a more detailed benchmarking report for you at NO COST.

Property owners are eligible to receive up to $250,000 in engineering services from one of the Partnership’s qualified independent engineering firms.

The final Savings Opportunity Assessment (SOA) report will include detailed transparent analysis of:

  1. How your building is performing relative to other similar properties

  2. All opportunities to save energy and water

  3. Savings and costs associated with each opportunity

  4. Utility rebates and Tax incentives

  5. Potential for on-site power generation, demand response, and electric vehicle charging (for qualifying properties)

  6. Off Balance Sheet Financing options

For more information visit the L.A. Better Building Challenge website.

Share this post:
Facebooktwittergoogle_pluspinterestlinkedinmail

Digital Media Strategists for SoCal electrical contractors…. dba IPLUG MEDIA