Green Building

 

A blooming industry, green building is rising with greater public demand, legislative focus, and code and standard mandates. With programs like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) becoming more popular, contractors are finding new building processes and technologies to be more efficient and environmentally minded. The below articles dive into alternative energies, energy efficiency, the smart grid, and more and include editorial from our annual special issue on the subject.

New Year’s Day brought wind-energy developers a belated holiday gift when Congress included in its fiscal-cliff budget deal a one-year extension of the production tax credit (PTC) that helps wind farms operate profitably.

Transformative change often requires major societal shifts to reach and cross the proverbial tipping point.

In the ongoing push for a cleaner and more sustainable energy society, growing popular and political support for renewables are two strong indicators of success.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which is the coordinator of the U.S. voluntary standardization system, and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council Inc.

NSi

More on Green Building

 
Living Green: Multifamily Dwellings

Multifamily residential structures account for more than half of the buildings in the United States and 21 percent of all U.S. carbon emissions, according to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which analyzes electric power consumption nationwide.

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Lifting All Boats: Green Construction Outlook

Looking at the four years measured in billions (B) of dollars, residential numbers climbed from $7B to $10B to $14B to $25B. Nonresidential grew from $3B to $25B to $47B to $60B. In all, green construction represented 44 percent of the building market in 2012.

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New Jersey Pole Tops Tapped for Solar Power

If renewable energy is driven by innovation and creativity, then the state of New Jersey has taken these driving forces to a new extreme.

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Solar-Energy Storage Market to Reach Nearly $2 Billion in 2018, Report Projects

According to the National ­Alliance for Advanced Battery Technology, the confluence of powerful trends underway across the nation’s electrical-energy system is driving the need for a drastically different approach to managing the grid system in the 21st century.

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Hybrid Power


Conversations about renewable energy often come down to a comparison—solar versus wind, for example, or hydroelectric versus geothermal—as though one technology, alone, could provide the single answer to our need for safe, emissions-free electricity production.

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Going Back To School

A transformation is in the air as better built, greener schools become a focus of states and local communities.

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New York State Investing in Renewable Power

With all of the help and all of the hype they have enjoyed in the last few years, renewables are starting to get their proverbial legs underneath them. That is not to say they have progressed beyond the point where they could use some assistance from the public sector.

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