LEED, the building standard that has lightened the footprint of tens of thousands of structures, announced a new standard yesterday that amplifies the idea to neighborhood scale.

The standard has been in the works for years and more than 200 test sites are already built or underway, including the Olympic village that opened in Vancouver this winter. Now any neighborhood or large development is eligible to apply. (more…)

A Hong Kong architect performs a magic feat of “green” design by packing 24 “rooms” into a 330 square-foot apartment. The dwelling he dubs “Domestic Transformer” glows with natural light.

Growing up with a family of five, plus tenant, Gary Chang once slept in the former tenement flat’s corridor-like living room. This helped cultivate a genius for making the most out of limited elbow room.

Modular walls slide to divide the space to serve the usual daily purposes. A wall full of shelving pulls forward, revealing a panel housing a linen closet. Behind another divider there’s a bathtub, and a guest bed can flop down over it. Rather than walking from room to room, Chang makes the living spaces shift by gliding the walls from one point to another.

“The house transforms and I’m always here,”  he says. “I don’t move. The house  moves for me.” See how it works in the video below: (more…)

The Shanghai Tower will be the tallest building in China by its completion in 2014, but that is not its biggest accomplishment. The term “vertical city” has been used to describe the cornucopia of spaces that it will offer including Class-A office space, a luxury hotel, high-end retail, and event space. This aspect still pales in comparison to the building’s biggest accomplishment, its innovation in green design.

With wind turbines, a complex rainwater collection system, two envelope layers that surround nine interior sky gardens, and an ingenious design that mitigates lateral loads from wind and reduces the necessary structural steel by over 20 percent, this building is setting the bar high for super-tall buildings. Remarkably, all of these sustainable strategies are being implemented in China.

To further explain the design process and to prove that sustainability in China is not that surprising, I asked Gensler’s Director of Architecture for the Northwest Region (who is speaking on behalf of the Shanghai based project team) a couple of questions regarding sustainable building in China and how the Shanghai Tower epitomized the emerging trend.

CleanTechies: I wanted to start off by asking you what the marketplace is like for sustainable building in China. Is it as popular or as big in China as it is in the United States? (more…)

Los Angeles has the most energy efficient buildings of any U.S. metropolitan area, and nationwide there was a 40 percent increase last year in the number of buildings that received the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Energy Star designation for efficiency, the agency said.

Ranked second on the latest EPA list is Washington, D.C., where an increasing number of federal buildings are going green.

Overall, nearly 3,900 commercial buildings in the United States earned the Energy Star, which recognizes buildings that perform in the top 25 percent among similar structures nationwide in energy efficiency.

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For those unaware, Microsoft Hohm is an online service that allows consumers to see how much electrical power and gas they use in a given month, with suggestions on how to lower their consumption.

Microsoft recently updated this application with some new features including information pages covering every zip code in the United States and two dozen behavior recommendations for those who take the time to create a Hohm energy profile. Hohm also now features an energy breakdown dashboard that provides more detailed information about where your household is using the most energy.

Microsoft is not the only company getting in on home energy efficiency. (more…)

A new 42-floor London skyscraper will be the world’s first building to incorporate wind turbines in the design, an innovation developers say will generate 8 percent of the building’s electricity needs.

The Strata Tower, a 408-unit apartment building scheduled to open in July, will be topped with three 19-kilowatt turbines — each with five 29.5-foot blades designed to suck wind from various angles and accelerate it through tubes, generating as much as 50 megawatt-hours of electricity annually.

It will also generate about £16,000 to £17,000 annually through the nation’s new feed-in tariff, the developers say. (more…)

The British government will introduce legislation that would tie new, subsidized loans for energy efficiency to a house, rather than a current owner, a move that could make energy retrofits far more affordable for most homeowners.

Energy and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband said the new legislation would enable homeowners to take out long-term loans at lower interest rates and thus encourage homeowners to make energy-efficiency improvements that they might otherwise not have made had they planned to sell their houses in a few years.

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This article has been updated.

In her forthcoming book, Prefabulous + Sustainable, author Sheri Koones sets out to show how beautiful and green a prefabricated home can be.

The book is divided into three categories –- “green, greener, greenest” –- and the homes featured vary in style, design, type of construction and size. Koones walks the reader through each of the homes, explaining the materials, strategies and systems used to create a sustainable living environment. CleanTechies had a few questions about the methodology and the pre-fab industry.

CleanTechies: Tell me how you chose the houses you profiled.

Koones: I was looking for houses that were as sustainable as possible, but also attractive, in various locations of the country using different methods of pre-fab construction, and in city, residential and suburban settings.

CleanTechies: How did you find them and ascertain which ones you wanted to look at? (more…)

The LEED green building rating system has seen unimpeded growth to this point. Will the impact of this growth, and the response of the U.S. Green Building Council, help or hurt the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program?

There have been 44,671 LEED projects registered and 6,908 certifications awarded – commercial and residential – according to a November publication by the United States Green Building Council. Interestingly, there are 133,489 LEED Accredited Professionals. Simply calculated, there are approximately three LEED APs for each currently registered project.

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Hallowell International in Bangor, Maine, is the manufacturer of the Acadia, a combined heating and cooling system that can be combined with solar or wind installations to take users off the grid. The system can be installed in new buildings or can be retrofitted when consumers are considering green upgrades.

CleanTechies has three questions for president and founder Duane Hallowell.

CleanTechies: Acadia uses something called “boosted compression” technology. Tell us about that.

Duane Hallowell: Since the 1950s, heat pumps, which operate by exchanging air for heating and cooling, have been the most popular and environmentally-friendly heating ventilation and cooling (HVAC) application. However, because they absorb heat from the outside air, they are inefficient in cold-weather climates, requiring additional, costly heating elements in order to work correctly.

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