You can sign up for the newsletter here, and more information about SIPA can be found on their website at www.sips.org

Bookmark It

The full text pdf copy of the paper can be found here.

Bookmark It

In mid-November, Joe Hagerman and I traveled to China to speak at the US China Green Energy Conference in Beijing, and to meet with officials from Sichuan University and the town of Mianzhu regarding rebuilding housing after the Sichuan Earthquake.

The first leg of the trip was to Beijing to attend the US China Green Energy Conference, a meeting of business, technology, academic, and government leaders from both China and the United States to discuss energy issues of mutual interest, including innovative energy technologies, energy efficiency, and models for China/US business ventures. The conference itself was full of compelling speakers and interesting sessions, including a keynote from FAS Board Member and Dean of the College of Engineering/ Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley Shankar Sastry.

Our turn to present came during the final session of the conference, titled “Rebuilding After the Sichuan Earthquake.”  The session was moderated by Mark Levine, Group Leader of China Energy Group, Former Director of Environment Energy Technology Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and included presentations by:

·         Wu Yong, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Construction, Beijing

·         Li Bixion, Professor, Sichuan University

·         Joe Hagerman, Federation of American Scientists

The session was very well attended, and sparked a very interested, intense discussion. Wu Yong presented about the current state of rebuilding efforts by the government in the Sichuan area, and Professor Bixion presented her research into the structural reasons for, and the extent of the earthquake damage. Joe’s presentation concluded the session, focusing on FAS’s past work with CSIPs (including demonstration homes and seismic research), as well as its experience with emergency relief housing work, with the idea that CSIPs are an ideal candidate for rebuilding in Sichuan. The group fielded questions well past the scheduled end of the session, with a clear air of concern and optimistic enthusiasm from the audience.

Joe’s presentation from the conference can be found here.

Following the conference, Joe and I traveled to Chengdu, a city of 11 million in the Sichuan Province and one of the economic hubs of Southwest China. We were met by members of Sichuan University’s International Office, who took us back to the university to meet with with officials from the Engineering School and the International Office of Sichuan University. After settling in, the university led a tour of earthquake damaged areas and temporary relief housing in Dujiangyan, an town roughly 20 kilometers from the earthquake’s epicenter and a center of extensive destruction. The majority of our tour focused on a set of buildings that were in the varied stages of construction during the earthquake – providing a snapshot timeline of how typical Chinese construction reacted. The results were discouraging – most buildings suffered massive failure, with several toppled over entirely. However, it did offer a good learning opportunity, and we were able to pick up many of the shortcomings of Chinese building, ranging from techniques and typical construction approaches, to lacking measures in the Chinese seismic code.

We departed the building site and, on our way back to Chengdu, stopped at a temporary housing village. The village was large, full of small white buildings with blue roofs. We had the opportunity to speak with an older couple whose home had been destroyed and was relocated there. While the living arrangements were small and bare, they were very happy – they felt that the Chinese government had acted very quickly, and that they were being well taken care of in their time of need. They will be living in the village for at least two more years.

The following day, Joe and I traveled to Mianzhu, another town near the earthquake’s epicenter, for our final stop before flying back to the States – a meeting with the Director of Reconstruction for the town. The damage there was extensive, with roughly 100,000 households in Mianzhu needing homes. The meeting was an exploratory one, where we presented our past research on CSIPs to the Director. We believe that CSIPs are an ideal candidate for rebuilding – they are energy efficient, easy to construct, and seismically robust. The meeting has resulted in preliminary approaches to a demonstration home between Mianzhu and FAS. This would involve design and engineering, quality assurance and control inspections of Chinese CSIP manufacturing, and working with builders in Mianzhu to construct the home. We believe a successful demonstration project could mean significantly safer and more comfortable housing in the region, as well as a significant reduction in energy use. FAS also sees this as the first step towards the broader creation of a CSIP industry in China. FAS is currently seeking funding for this initiative.

Bookmark It

I’ll be making several posts in the coming weeks to catch things back up to speed, and you can expect more regular updates in the near year.

Bookmark It

I’m back from my trip out to Denver for the ASCE AEI Conference, so I’ll be putting up a few posts to catch up on a few things. The first I’d like to update on is the “30 Percent Solution” – an attempt to increase the performance of the model energy code by 30 percent – that I referenced a few posts back.

The final hearings were held in Minneapolis last week, and unfortunately the overall package of energy improvements narrowly failed (receiving over 60% of votes in favor, but not enough to reach the required two thirds majority).

Still, energy efficiency will substantially improve in the nation’s 2009 model energy code governing new home construction, as several individual measures were passed. The 2009 IECC will have several significant new provisions to boost energy efficiency, including:

• Increased insulation in basements, floors and walls;
• Improved window efficiency;
• Reductions in wasted energy from leaky heating & cooling ducts;
• Reductions in tradeoffs that fail to capture energy savings from efficient heating & cooling equipment;
• High-efficiency lighting; and
• Improved air sealing within the building envelope.

While FAS is disappointed the measures were not fully passed, these incremental improvements are encouraging. It is also heartening that over 60 percent of attendees voted in its favor, a clear demonstration of its growing support. We hope (and fully expect) that these efforts will continue, and model energy codes will continue to improve.

More information can be found at the EECC’s website.

Bookmark It

Eric Tompos, the Vice President of NTA Inc., followed John with a presentation on the sources of design information for engineering SIPs, as well as the ways SIPs typically perform. Eric’s discussion taught me quite a few things I hadn’t realized about panel performance, and was huge for any designer planning to use panels. His powerpoint can be found here (with a supplementary, more comprehensive presentation that describe the methods for developing an engineered design method for SIPs in detail found here).

Khalid Mosalam, a professor Civil and Environmental Engineering out at UC Berkeley followed Eric. Professor Mosalam’s presentation explained much of the work he’s been doing in conjunction with FAS. He explained the current approach to seismic evaluation, the development of a pseudo-dynamic approach that is cheaper than large scale shake table tests, and then how that applies to SIPs and CSIPs. A copy of his presentation can be found here. That said, Professor Mosalam’s research deserves a much more in depth look - I’ll write something more significant about it soon.

I concluded the presentation with a discussion of our Pankow research - how to apply CSIPs to multi-story buildings. My presentation can be found here. The followup discussion to the presentations was good - some very interested people from all different segments of the building industry, from engineers to construction managers.

Bookmark It

I’m off to Denver later this week for the American Society of Civil Engineers Architectural Engineering Institute’s Annual Conference. FAS has been asked by Dr. Mohammed Ettouney, the conference’s chair, to present our research on applying cementitious structural insulated panels to multi-story buildings at the event.

I will be chairing the presentation, presenting along with John Millhone, Dr. Khalid Mosalem, and Eric Tompos. John is a senior advisor at FAS, and will be speaking about the role of buildings in the carbon economy, and how advanced building technologies offer one of the most important solutions to our national energy problems. Eric, the Executive Vice President of NTA Inc., is a very well respected engineer in the SIP community, and has provided instrumental advice and guidance to FAS throughout the research project. Eric will be presenting generally about SIPs, focusing on the panel mechanics and basic engineering. Dr. Mosalem, a civil engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, will present his research on seismic testing of CSIP panels. I will wrap up our session with a talk about the specifics of our research – the multi-story applications of CSIPs, future areas of research, and the overall potential for CSIPs in the architectural and engineering worlds.

I think the conference will be a great opportunity for FAS, and I’m looking forward to a positive dialogue about the research. I’ll be out of touch while at the conference, but I’ll be sure to post a recap afterwards with some thoughts and insights.

Bookmark It

Today Google and GE announced a new partnership, teaming to develop smart grid technologies and clean energy. The concept of the smart grid is essentially bringing electricity transmission, distribution, and use into the 21^st century through the use of two-way communications, advanced sensors, and distributed computers to improve the efficiency, reliability and safety of power delivery and use. The system has not been integrated into America’s energy distribution system, but the concept offers increased reliability, efficiency and safety of the power grid, enables decentralized power generation so homes can be both an energy client AND supplier (allowing individual loads to tailor their generation directly to their load, making them independent from grid power failures), and enabling flexibility of the power consumption on the clients side.

Developing and implementing this concept will be crucial if plug-in vehicles (getting closer and closer over the horizon) are going to be a benefit instead of a detriment to the electric system. Smart power grids would allow people to conduct tasks such as recharging electric cars at times of day when demand is not high, and enable them to sell solar or other renewable energy back to utility companies.

Surprisingly, it is political and regulatory hurdles, not technological ones, that block the path to revamping the US power grid, and it is this side of the puzzle that this new partnership will investigate. FAS hasn’t done much research into smart grids, but we see it as an important upgrade in the bigger picture of improving our national energy use, and we’re very interested to see where this partnership will go.

A fact sheet on the partnership can be found here.

Bookmark It

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed the Comprehensive American Energy Security and Consumer Protection Act (HR 6899). While the bill itself is very wide-reaching, unfortunately the majority of it its focus (and debate) has gotten caught up in the issue of off-shore drilling, an issue that has been shown to have little impact (immediate or long term) on our national energy use and needs.[i] While the bill did pass the house, and now moves to the Senate to be voted on, President Bush has threatened to veto the bill.

Regardless of its unfortunate focus on drilling and its apparent doom by the hand of a presidential veto, the bill does include many positive provisions for efficiency in buildings. The bill also includes the GREEN Act of 2008, a bill sponsored by Rep. Perlmuttter (D-CO), a bill that FAS helped develop. Some of the many important measures included in the bill, along with some thoughts:

• Title IV, Section 401 and 304 focus on improving energy efficiency provisions in building codes, which FAS has long advocated for. The measure directs the Energy Department to support updating national model building energy codes and standards for residential buildings (2006 IECC) and commercial buildings (ASHRAE 90.1-2004) at least once every three years (each runs on a 3 year revision cycle), in order to provide energy savings of 30% by 2010, and 50% by 2020 over . Targets for specific years shall be set by the Secretary at least 3 years in advance of each target year, coordinated with the IECC and ASHRAE Standard 90.1 cycles, at the maximum level of energy efficiency that is technologically feasible and life-cycle cost effective.

  This is a great step, but I’m uncertain how it will play out (if it doesn’t meet the death of a veto). There are a few problems. Fi