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Tenants are also making efforts to operate within their offices more efficiently.

Going green therefore provides them a way that they can save money and the environment.

To that end, executives from the real estate, legal and energy services industries recently joined together for "The Green Symposium; Capturing Efficiencies in the Commercial Office." The event was hosted by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and panelists from Howard Ecker + Company, DLA Piper, NELSON and BlueStar Energy headed up a focused discussion on green opportunities in the commercial real estate market.

As one of the panelists, the following is my take on the key takeaways from the discussion:

•    Tenants are already sharply focused on operating costs -- regardless of whether they plan to move or stay put -- and this is increasingly the case in tough economic times. More and more tenants are looking to operate with less space and more efficiency.

•    Tenant expectations for environmentally friendly office space also are on the rise. This is because it is better understood that building and operating green is also about reducing costs and therefore profitability.

•    Many projects are achieving LEED within their budgets -- and in the same cost range as non-LEED projects. LEED buildings reduce operating costs, enhance asset value and profits, improve employee productivity and satisfaction, and optimize lifecycle economic performance.

•    Green is an opportunity in the real estate market that has a tangible ROI. In addition, green design is a positive influence on the performance and psychology of employees.

•    A green lease is a way for landlords and tenants to hold the other accountable for desired green outcomes. Green leases contain provisions on green practices, and can cover energy efficiency, water conservation, recycling, the use of green products, as well as indoor environmental quality.

•    In soft markets like this one, there is no better time to negotiate green provisions into a lease. This will deliver to the tenant not only immediate green outcomes, but also longer-term benefits and as a result future-proof a lease.

•    Locating in a green building is one thing, but it is also how you operate within that box that is important, too. Moreover, design provides the place, but operations defines the shade of green that you wish to maintain.

•    Top tips for greening office operations are monitor and measure, form a team, make a plan, focus and prioritize, and celebrate successes.

•    Greening office operations will work best if guided by the principles of small steps and continuous improvement.

Claire Woolley is a vice president of commercial tenant representation firm Howard Ecker + Company, where she heads up Ecker Green, the business unit of the firm that focuses on providing green office services to commercial office tenants.

On the expo floor of the Connectivity Week conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday, Scholten plans to show off a demo of the project’s first application built on OpenLynx: a smart meter reading service implemented in 26 commercial buildings by a company in Washington, D.C. Scholten told us after a roundtable talk on Monday that this first application will help prove the open-source building automation technology. On June 22, OpenLynx plans to launch the next version of the source code, available here.

How can open source help commercial building energy management? Scholten started the project about a year ago to help bring collaboration and innovation to the building automation industry, which he says is “limited by the small number of gateway technologies available and [has] no common development platform to the next level.” The building automation industry, controlled by large companies like Siemens, Johnson Controls and Honeywell, has created automation technologies that work well on their own but largely live in silos (each one is based on a different non-compatible platform) and for the most part, don’t rely on the common language of Internet Protocol. Scholten says the next step for the building automation industry is to take a cue from the IT industry and develop open-source projects like Asterisk (an open-source version of a standard telephone network).

Peter Michalek, who has been working on OpenLynx for a few months, pointed out in the talk on Monday that open source can bring down the costs of the energy management systems dramatically and can make them more advanced, because they will be built on already-established basics. He said the licensing agreement of OpenLynx is “liberal,” explaining that a developer can do anything s/he wants with it, but has to publish the benefits created back into the system. Karsten Wade, the self-described community gardener for Red Hat’s open-source community, who also sat on the roundtable, says the benefits of open source include reducing the total cost of ownership and enabling user-driven innovation.

Above all, the development of open-source tools for the commercial building automation industry suggests how valuable the energy information housed in these commercial buildings has suddenly become. IT companies want to manage it, using the tools they’ve spent years building (see Adura Technologies). As the panelists pointed out, the lighting, thermostat and HVAC energy information from commercial buildings used to only be seen by the building manager, but as the smart grid gets built out, energy information needs to be pulled outside of the building walls. Utilities are looking to provide rebates for commercial demand response, and companies are looking to cut energy to meet regulations and save money. As this shift happens the easiest way to release the information is through already established standard protocols.

Will building automation firms actually embrace open source OpenLynx? Not likely, at least for a very long time. There are hurdles ahead, such as just getting the word out to interested developers in a new market, as well as making sure products are high enough quality with compliance testing and certification. The incumbents won’t likely be too keen with the project, either. Scholten writes:

I expect there will be many who will dismiss open source as low quality developments not suitable for commercial deployment in mission critical facility systems. I also think that some will feel threatened by the disruptive nature of open-source developments and believe that their current technologies provide better capabilities than any first generation open source solutions. This is also what Avaya, Northern Telecom and others thought when Digium released their first generation PBX based on open source Asterisk.

But the OpenLynx project will have an effect on the industry, even if it’s just in terms of ideology. And who knows, maybe it will follow in the footsteps of Firefox, which has been slow to gain market share, but held early mindshare for years. It only takes a few big supporter companies to help spread the word.

New “smart” electricity meters, beginning to be rolled out across the country, may be rife with bugs that could pose security risks. The new meters create a smart communication network between the user and the local power plant. The software that powers some of the smart meters, however, is coming under fire from security experts for its lack of adequate protections against malicious hacks. One expert, hoping to illustrate the risks involved, claims to have created a worm program that infects one of the popular meters, taking control of its functionality and propagating itself further throughout the grid.

The new meters supposedly require no authentication or encryption whenever running functions such as software updates. These vulnerabilities are what the worm, written by the security furm IOActive as a proof of concept, will exploit using peer-to-peer technology to spread. Using it, hackers could potentially control the workings of the grid, turning on and off power to users, or even reconfiguring the entire system’s settings.

Several companies have created their own smart meter products and it is as yet unclear which ones, if any, are affected by a lack of security. The worm described will only be shown at a security conference occurring next month, so we’ll have to wait to see if the claims are true and on what scale.

Meet the “greenup” team from Sustainable Spaces, a four-year-old San Francisco firm that conducts residential energy audits and energy efficiency retrofits to shrink a home’s carbon footprint while saving the owner money over the long haul.

Matt Golden of Sustainable Spaces sets up a large fan inside the home’s front door. When the fan is turned on, the house will be pressurized and the team will measure where the air is leaking out

So what has largely been an unregulated mom-and-pop business needs to scale up—big time—and homeowners need incentives to invest in insulation and other unglamorous improvements. Sustainable Spaces’ solution: Silicon Valley-style technological innovation coupled with heavy-duty politicking in Washington. More on that later.

At the 1950s ranch house in the East Bay ‘burb of Walnut Creek, energy auditor Ryan Jaramillo is explaining to homeowner Dan Schoenholz the company’s holistic home approach that treats a house as a networked energy system so that solutions can be prioritized to get the most bang for the buck. About half of greenups—Sustainable Spaces slang for energy audits—result in retrofits, Jaramillo says, and the company itself performs 90 percent of that work.

The 40-something, Prius-driving Shoenholz is a prototypical green retrofit client.  He already had replaced many of his old single-pane windows. And Shoenholz, who deals with energy efficiency programs as a special projects manager for an East Bay city, rarely runs his air conditioner, even in Walnut Creek’s sweltering summers. He even participates in a PG&E program that lets the utility remotely turn off the AC when electricity demand spikes.

And he was willing to shell out about $300 for a Sustainable Spaces greenup, which usually runs $595 for a comparably sized house.

While Jaramillo strapped on a face mask and hoisted himself into the attic to inspect the ductwork and insulation, a colleague began measuring each room in the house, noting the placement of heating vents while using a gadget to determine the energy efficiency of the windows. Jaramillo then donned a jumpsuit and crawled into the crawl space, poking a gadget into the woodwork that measures moisture content.

Back in the house, Jaramillo fed a cable containing a miniature camera into the walls to see if they were insulated. Then it was time for the blower test. The front door was sealed and a blower used to depressurize the house so the greenup team could identify air leaks. Waving around an infrared sensor device, Jaramillo could see heat leaks showing up on the screen as orange-red sunbursts.

All the data collected at Schoenholz’s home will be fed into Sustainable Space’s computer models to guide its engineers’ design of an energy efficiency plan.

“One of the things that has prevented me from doing this stuff is that there’s a huge capital investment for a relatively small return,” Schoenholz says, “though I know it’s the right thing to do.”

The relatively paltry tax incentives for energy efficiency retrofits is the reason Sustainable Spaces founder and president Matt Golden spends at least one week a month in Washington. “We really didn’t get our act together for the stimulus and we kind of missed that boat to some degree,” Golden tells me a few days later in San Francisco. “Sexiness-wise, we don’t sound byte and we don’t have a pretty picture of a solar panel.”

While many billions will be handed out to weatherize low-income housing and promote other energy efficiency measures, not much was put in the pot for the average middle-class homeowner—Sustainable Spaces’ bread and butter customers. Install a $30,000 solar array on your roof and you qualify for a 30 percent tax credit—$9,000. But spend $30,000 on maximizing your home’s energy efficiency and the credit tops out at $1,500.

Golden, who serves as president of the new home-retrofit trade group Efficiency First, has been lobbying Congress to make tax credits dependent on how much energy a retrofit saves, not on the price of the products installed. Efficiency First also wants federal loan guarantees and low-interest financing for home retrofits. Golden is also working with state and local officials on how stimulus money will be distributed and for what programs.

Pam Molsick of Sustainable Spaces inspects heating ducts insulated with asbestos, which is badly peeling in places.

“We’re building a system that gives customers access to the data the same way we access the data, accelerates the process and also deploys systems on handhelds out in the field,” says Golden. “Very rapidly we need to deliver the tools that enable scale in this industry—through whatever means necessary because that’s how we get to our climate goals.”

And Efficiency First is pushing government to regulate the retrofit industry to avoid a backlash if unscrupulous operators flood the field in search of quick cash. “There’s more stringent standards in California for cutting hair than doing an energy audit,” Golden says.

Which is why I wasn’t surprised the other day when I was walking to the Berkeley farmers market to find a person handing out flyers for—you guessed it—home energy audits.

Telecom giant Orange unveiled a concept solar tent in conjunction with the opening of this year's Glastonbury music festival in the U.K.

Inspired by the new flexible photovoltaics in development, the tent--if produced for consumers--would be covered in a semi-photovoltaic fabric woven with both coated solar threads and conventional threads to form a solar shell that could be adjusted to face optimum sun throughout the day.

The solar energy would then be channeled into four main power uses: heating, lighting, communications, and recharging.

The goal of Kaleidoscope, the design firm working in conjunction with Orange, was to create a tent that would help attendees of Glastonbury, the U.K.'s famous open-field music festival, which is sponsored in part by Orange, to keep their bearings and to keep in touch with friends while on site.

Most interesting is the idea of a wireless charging pouch. Instead of plugging in, people would drop their phone or other portable device into a pouch inside the tent. A coil in the pouch would carry an electric current that generates a magnetic field to produce a charge, which would then serve to power the device's battery.

In addition, some of the captured solar energy would be channeled toward radiant floor heating--something that would be much appreciated by anyone sleeping on the commonly damp British ground.

Artist's rendering of solar tent emitting glow at night.

(Credit: Orange)

And how many times have you been to a field festival only to spend an eternity trying to find your way back to your camp? The development team for the tent noticed that this wandering was a common problem at Glastonbury each year.

For that reason, the tent would be equipped with "Glo-cation" technology that would allow users to find their tents by sending an SMS message or using an automatic RFID tag similar to the ones used in London's Underground Oyster subway cards. The tent would then glow in response.

The tent would also serve to broadcast a Wi-Fi signal, though it's unclear whether it would have a Wi-Fi booster for a central area hub or act as an independent Wi-Fi router.

While this week England happens to be pretty bright and sunny, I'm not so sure a solar tent is the way to go in the land of perpetual, mild drizzling. But I could certainly see this being a favorite at Burning Man.

This is the front of the greenhouse at the home of Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins. (Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Here, out in the country not far from the ritz and glamour of Aspen, you're more likely to find ranchers and wide-open farmland than movie stars. But what you will find, at the original headquarters of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit sustainability think tank, is a house that could teach us all a few lessons in energy efficiency and comfort.

It is the home of RMI founder Amory Lovins and also serves as office space--though RMI's official headquarters is now nearby in Snowmass on a ranch property formerly owned by the late John Denver. The house has a series of systems built into it that are designed to provide all the power it needs, maintain a steady, comfortable temperature, keep it well lit, and even grow bananas at 8,000 feet.

As part of Road Trip 2009, my trek through the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains regions in search of the most interesting destinations, I got a tour of the facility Monday from RMI public relations manager Cory Lowe (see video below, which may require high volume). Lowe explained that the house is a manifestation of one of the nonprofit's three main focus areas. RMI consults worldwide on energy, transportation, and building issues. The house serves as a kind of physical portfolio piece for the latter.

Indeed, it is a prime example of one of RMI's chief directives: efficiency first, and then renewables. In other words, do everything you can to cut power usage and then supply what's still needed with renewable energy sources.

Among RMI's other projects are a $500 million retrofit and efficiency upgrade for New York City's Empire State Building and a long-term plan to help cities prepare for what many expect to be a future filled with electric cars.

But here in the wide-open spaces of Snowmass, the focus is on sustainable living. And from the moment you walk onto the property, you get a sense of what RMI is all about.

On the roof, which was built in 1982 but recently went through a significant renovation, is a "hodge-podge" of photo-voltaic panels. In the past, they provided a great deal of the building's electric power. But since the renovation and the addition of a new, large-scale set of solar panels, the house is now thought to be capable of producing 9.8 kilowatt hours, which is more power than it uses.

Part of that is due to two smaller solar panels that are installed on the far left side of the building's roof and which are designed to track the sun throughout the day. Most solar panels are south-facing and stationary, but thanks to a small tracking antenna mounted on their top-right corners, these two panels are able to stay in sync with the sun all day, meaning they provide 40 percent more power than traditional panels, Lowe said. They are also able to point to the brightest spot in the sky on cloudy days, meaning that even when it's overcast, they can still maximize their power production.

Of course, energy efficiency doesn't come just from generating electricity. It also comes from the reduction in the use of energy. As a result, the house was designed so that it has no furnace and no traditional heating systems.

I said that the house reminded me of Earthships, a style of off-the-grid sustainable housing that are popular in places like New Mexico and that I wrote about during Road Trip 2007.

Lowe explained that, in fact, many of the design elements of the RMI house were "stolen" from Earthships. But after walking through the Snowmass house, I think that it's clear RMI took the concepts much further.

Both, however, are based on the idea of thermal mass, or the collection of heat in things like dirt, clay, concrete, water and plants. That's why both Earthships and the RMI house have large greenhouses as central features. But where the Earthships I visited near Taos, N.M., tended to have a very narrow greenhouse in front of south-facing windows, the RMI house had a very large, deep greenhouse that, in fact, is the building's central space.

An Earthship, as seen near Taos, N.M., is an off-the-grid type of housing that relies, like the RMI house, on thermal mass for heating.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

In addition, the greenhouse here is filled with gorgeous landscaping that includes a brook, a tiny pond filled with fish, a lot of cement in the floor and walkways, a fair amount of dirt and several banana trees.

The idea, explained Lowe, is that all these elements together form the thermal mass, which is designed to absorb heat for about six warm months, and then slowly release it during the colder months. This means that when the temperatures outside begin to drop--or get downright frosty in the high Rockies winter--the house stays comfortable without a furnace.

That, of course, is very similar to an Earthship. But Earthships require two main elements that the RMI house doesn't have and doesn't need: a back wall made mainly out of tires packed tight with dirt, and a hillside on the north side of the building that the house is built up against. By contrast, the RMI house was built out in the open.

The RMI house also requires no traditional water heater. Instead, it has a large, south-facing panel on the roof that is lined with pipes filled with an anti-freeze. As the sun warms the pipes, they warm the building's water supply through a heat exchange process. Like everything else here, this means that hot water is on demand at any time without the use of any externally provided power. If the water temperature isn't high enough, it can be boosted with a small, supplemental, solar-powered heater.

Another component of the house's use of efficient systems is a pair of what are known as Solatubes. On the roof, the house has mounted what look like very small chimneys, but which are actually a form of skylight. Underneath, two large, well-insulated tubes snake down inside the building, inside of which are a series of reflective mirrors. Finally, the tubes open up into the house's main hallway, providing a bath of sunlight that is filtered with a long screen. The upshot is that sunlight is directed into what would otherwise be a dark section of the house, without the need for a huge skylight.

Solatubes are not innovations unique to RMI, of course. Rather, they are popular all around the world. But they are yet another example of something that can be added to the average house to improve conditions without requiring additional power.

The light here is provided by two Solatubes mounted on the roof of the house.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

All told, RMI's house is designed to keep energy use low, provide what power it does need--and hopefully, feed some back to the grid. Lovins also directed that the house be outfitted with technology to help analyze every bit of power usage so that the RMI folks there can see, at any time, how it's performing. Part of that, Lowe explained, had to do with a desire to be as transparent as possible. He didn't say so explicitly, but my sense was that because the house is a showpiece for RMI's work, Lovins wanted to be able to show the world how the systems are performing.

And all around the house, the systems are on display. In the bathroom, there is a low-flow toilet, and a high-efficiency hand dryer. In the kitchen, the refrigerator and freezer have thick doors and walls for better insulation. And while the house used to use natural gas, allowing for a gas stove, it now features an electric stove.

There's also several rooms with rounded walls, which, Lowe said, are stronger than straight walls, and which help with sound aesthetics.

Ultimately, the idea is both for RMI's team to live and work in one of the most efficient and comfortable houses in the world, and for the think tank to be able to show to potential clients what is possible.

But it's not just about making the world better, Lowe explained. For RMI to convince its corporate clients to get on board, the firm has to make the case that the kinds of innovations featured in the house are also economically viable--that efficiency and sustainability can offer significant cost savings over legacy systems.

Still, when you're the one living, or working, in such a building, you want to know that your investment is worth the trouble.

"In order to live efficiently, you don't have to suffer," Lowe said. "Amory's old saying is, 'Hot showers and cold beer. You don't want to give them up just to live more efficiently.'"