From the Blog

Car companies take expertise in battery power beyond the garage

Posted on March 25, 2014 //

by TOOD WOODY, The New York Times, March 25, 2014

A home by Honda and the University of California, Davis, is expected to make more energy than it consumes. Photo: Thor Swift for The New York Times Source: www.nytimes.com

A home by Honda and the University of California, Davis, is expected to make more energy than it consumes.
Photo: Thor Swift for The New York Times
Source: www.nytimes.com

DAVIS, Calif. — As more homeowners generate their own electricity from solar panels, they still need power from a utility after the sun goes down.

Now, automakers say they may have an answer, by storing that carbon-free energy in electric car batteries for later use.

Honda on Tuesday is introducing an experimental house in this environmentally conscious community to showcase technologies that allow the dwelling to generate more electricity than it consumes.

It is one example of the way solar companies and carmakers are converging on a common goal: to create the self-sufficient home, with a car’s battery as the linchpin.

With buildings and transportation accounting for 44 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, car companies increasingly view all-electric and hydrogen fuel-cell cars as vehicles that will meet environmental mandates and lead to development of new energy services and products beyond the garage.

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Angel city brewery raising rooftop hops for special brew

Posted on January 9, 2014 //
The garden atop Angel City Brewery Photo: Ray Narkevicius Source: www.laweekly.com

The garden atop Angel City Brewery
Photo: Ray Narkevicius
Source: www.laweekly.com

by SEAN J. MILLER, LA Weekly, January 7, 2014

Angel City Brewery is taking the farm-to-table concept to new heights with a rooftop hops garden whose harvest has yielded a unique brew only available in downtown L.A.

The craft brewery’s urban garden is a work in progress, but Dieter Foerstner, Angel City’s brewmaster, expects that by next fall patrons at the Angel City’s public house will be able to enjoy its (copyrighted) “rooftop” brew.

“We’ve played around with some cask beers — beers we’ve already had brewed — and we’ll pitch fresh hops into a cask, let it condition for a week or so and then turn around and sell them traditional-style,” Foerstner says. “By using those fresh hops, you get this really beautiful, almost resinous aroma and really great hops flavor.”

Some breweries use fresh hops in “harvest style” or “wet hop” beers, but those operations are generally located in rural areas, close to the source. For an urban brewery — particularly one located in the country’s second biggest city — growing your own is unique.

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California installed more rooftop solar in 2013 than previous 30 years combined

Posted on January 3, 2014 //

by KILEY KROH, ThinkProgress, January 2, 2014

2013 was a banner year for clean energy and the U.S. solar industry was no exception. California, the nation’s solar standout, more than doubled its rooftop solar installations last year from 1,000 megawatts (MW) to 2,000 MW. To put this number in perspective, writes Bernadette Del Chiaro of the California Solar Energy Industries Association, it took California over 30 years to build the first 1,000 MW of rooftop solar.

“When utility-scale solar projects are added in, California’s total solar power picture well-exceeds 4,000 MW today — nearly twice as much installed capacity as exists at California’s last remaining nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon,” according to Del Chiaro.

And California isn’t alone in its rooftop solar surge. “About 200,000 U.S. homes and businesses added rooftop solar in the past two years alone — about 3 gigawatts of power and enough to replace four or five conventionally-sized coal plants,” Bloomberg reported.

As record numbers of homes and businesses decide to go solar, utility companies are growing increasingly uneasy about the threat it poses to their existing business model. If more customers install solar panels or adopt energy efficiency measures, a utility will sell fewer units of energy — especially during peak demand when energy costs are the highest. Therefore, utilities will increase their energy prices to cover costs such as grid maintenance and labor and as prices go up, more customers will look to energy efficiency and distributed energy resources to reduce their energy bills, perpetuating the cycle.

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‘Innovative’ housing with rooftop farms set for southside

Posted on October 19, 2013 //

by EMILIE RAGUSO, Berkeleyside, October 17, 2013

A photo simulation of what the project’s rooftop farms could look like Image: Stanley Saitowitz / Natoma Architects Source: www.berkeleyside.com

A photo simulation of what the project’s rooftop farms could look like
Image: Stanley Saitowitz / Natoma Architects
Source: www.berkeleyside.com

City zoning board members approved a 77-unit mixed-use housing development near downtown Berkeley late last week, expressing excitement about a “unique” design set to include more than a dozen working rooftop farm plots and a novel approach to parking.

“Garden Village,” at 2201 Dwight Way at Fulton Street, brings with it a number of innovative features, from its composition — it’s made up of 18 distinct but connected “volumes,” or towers, that range in height from 3 to 5 stories and are connected by open-air walkways; its more than 12,000 square feet of rooftop farming plots; and its small garage, which offers just enough space for a fleet of shared vehicles that will be rentable by tenants.

Without the car-sharing idea, the project would have required room for 71 vehicles. Instead, Berkeley-based developer Nautilus Group decided it would purchase a fleet of four to 10 automobiles and contract with a car-sharing operator called Getaround to run the “car-share pod” operation. (The city required Nautilus to pay for a parking demand study to bolster the justification for that approach.)

Zoning board Commissioner Shoshana O’Keefe described the concept as potentially “genius,” adding that the notion of projects that fold effective car-sharing programs into their plans “might be the magic solution” to the hairy issue of meeting parking demand efficiently in a densely-populated community.

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Google’s new built-from-scratch Googleplex

Posted on April 18, 2013 //

by PAUL GOLDBERGER, Vanity Fair, February 22, 2013

New "Googleplex" headquarters Image: NBBJ Source: www.vanityfair.com

New “Googleplex” headquarters
Image: NBBJ
Source: www.vanityfair.com

Google occupies some of the most famous offices in the world—think cafés everywhere you look, treadmills with laptops attached to them, pool tables and bowling alleys, green buildings, and vegetable gardens—but not one of the places in which the company’s 35,000+ employees work has been built by the company. The core of the “Googleplex,” as the headquarters in Mountain View, California, is generally known, consists of a suburban office park once occupied by Silicon Graphics that Google remodeled to suit its needs; in New York, Google occupies (and owns) the enormous former Port Authority headquarters in Chelsea. The company has been similarly opportunistic around the world, taking over existing real estate and, well, Google-izing it. “We’ve been the world’s best hermit crabs: we’ve found other people’s shells, and we’ve improved them,” David Radcliffe, a civil engineer who oversees the company’s real estate, said to me. Under Radcliffe, the company’s home base in Mountain View has expanded to roughly 65 buildings.

For the last year or two, Google has been toying with taking the plunge and building something from scratch. In 2011 it went so far as to hire the German architect Christophe Ingenhoven to design a brand new, super-green structure on a site next to the Googleplex, but that was a false start: the company abandoned the project a year later, when it decided to build in another part of Mountain View, closer to San Francisco Bay, and went looking for another architect. Now Google has partnered with the Seattle-based firm NBBJ, a somewhat more conventional choice. And the renderings of the new project, which Google has made available to Vanity Fair, show something that looks, at first glance, like an updated version of one of the many suburban office parks that Google has made a practice of taking over and re-doing for its own needs.

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With help from nature, a town aims to be a solar capital

Posted on April 18, 2013 //

by FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, 8 April, 2013

Solar panels on a stadium parking lot in Lancaster Photo: Monica Almeida for The new York Times Source: www.nytimes.com

Solar panels on a stadium parking lot in Lancaster
Photo: Monica Almeida for The new York Times
Source: www.nytimes.com

LANCASTER, Calif. — There are at least two things to know about this high desert city. One, the sun just keeps on shining. Two, the city’s mayor, a class-action lawyer named R. Rex Parris, just keeps on competing.

Two years ago, the mayor, a Republican, decided to leverage the incessant Antelope Valley sun so that Lancaster could become the solar capital “of the world,” he said. Then he reconsidered. “Of the universe,” he said, the brio in his tone indicating that it would be parsimonious to confine his ambition to any one planet.

“We want to be the first city that produces more electricity from solar energy than we consume on a daily basis,” he said. This means Lancaster’s rooftops, alfalfa fields and parking lots must be covered with solar panels to generate a total of 126 megawatts of solar power above the 39 megawatts already being generated and the 50 megawatts under construction.

To that end, Lancaster just did what former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger failed to do in 2006: require that almost all new homes either come equipped with solar panels or be in subdivisions that produce one kilowatt of solar energy per house. He also was able to recruit the home building giant KB Home to implement his vision, despite the industry’s overall resistance to solar power.

“Lancaster is breaking new ground,” said Michelle Kinman, a clean energy advocate at Environment California, a research and lobbying group. Ms. Kinman, who tracks the growth of solar energy in the state, calculates that the city tripled the number of residential installations in the past 18 months. [...]

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