I once read that Thomas Edison tried to sell houses made from preformed concrete panels without success. He reportedly said, “Nobody had any imagination so I gave up and quit.” Except for some experimental units by custom...
After nearly five years of political wrangling, Congress passed and President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act (EPAct) on Aug. 8, 2005. The first comprehensive energy update since 1992, the House Committee on Energy and...
Use of the design-build delivery system for new construction in the United States is steadily increasing in nearly every sector of the building industry. The industry trade group, Design Build Institute of America (DBIA)...
There is an all-electric house in Tennessee that costs 82 cents a day to heat, cool and power. Built in November 2002 by Habitat for Humanity, it is one of four homes under the “Near-Zero-Energy House” name. These houses...
A leading architecture/engineering member of the CSI revision team (who requested anonymity) described the genesis of the change to MasterFormat 2004 this way: “Division 16 was used to describe means and methods of lighting...
Up to 2,500 megawatts (mw) of wind energy capacity are scheduled to come online in the United States this year, bringing new power to the equivalent of 700,000 homes and injecting more than $3 billion of investment into the...
When it comes to running a business, the owner or manager must pay close attention to five separate, but integrated, functions. These are the production of whatever the business does; the legal or contractual aspects of doing...
Most electrical contractors are so busy making the payroll and payables each week, they don’t pay much attention to changes coming their way until they are hit in the wallet. A perfect example is last fall’s release of the...
Coal is too dirty. Uranium is too dangerous. Gas is too expensive. Oil is too political. Solar is too sporadic. Hydro-dams upset the fish habitat. Despite pressure to find new sources of clean, renewable energy, wind power...
Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) MasterFormat is the most widely used standard for organizing specifications, catalogs and other documents for commercial and institutional building construction projects in the...
A group of students at St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore were assigned to estimate the investment needed for solar photovoltaic (PV) technology to supply 20 percent of U.S. electricity by 2100. They concluded it...
While the transmission grid physically connects great swaths of the country, governance of its many segments varies by state and utility. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is pushing Congress to unify the...
