Accelerating Sustainability: New Super-Green Research Lab
January 24, 2006 09:41 AM - Collin Dunn, Durham, North Carolina
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The greenest building in North America is coming to Vancouver, B.C. The University of British Columbia in Vancouver has begun developing the Centre for Interactive Research for Sustainability (CIRS), a "living laboratory" where both sustainable research and studies on the building's effectiveness as a sustainable working environment will be conducted.

The project is being hailed as the highest-performing, most environmentally innovative building ever to be conceived and built in North America, with many sustainable accoutrements on its credentials. It will surpass the esoteric Platinum LEED certification, and its design goals [PDF] include greenhouse gas-neutrality and net energy generation using a 250-kilowatt fuel cell. Rainwater collection will provide all drinking water, and all waste, both liquid and solid, will be treated and managed on-site. All workspace will be 100 percent day-lit, and the building will make extensive use of photovoltaic cells and solar hot water collectors.

Architects Busby Perkins Will are leading the project, and have some impressive sustainability credentials themselves, including Canada's first new construction to be awarded LEED Gold. Preliminary plans have the building ready for occupancy early in 2008.

   

Tha sounds good, but is it economical? There is dimminishing resopnce to consider after all.

   

Sounds pretty cool. But is probably extremely expensive.

   

I can guarantee you that the first one of anything is the most expensive. We hope that we will learn quite a bit about how to build net energy generation buildings so that we can eventually build them to be more practical and less expensive than current buildings. Can you imagine a whole city of net energy generation buildings at some future date? What a great solution to water, energy, and food shortages! That spare electrical power could be used to power autos, buses, subways, short-haul trucking in a clean manner; a really clean, quiet, modern city!

   

It's hard to say, i certainly think that net energy generation is importaint in rural areas but i think a city should be able to maintain energy systems, hard to say though, see my concern is that people become so concerned with making buildings so energy efficient that the cost of the building will outwiegh the energy savings.

   

Hopefully, this stuff can happen nationwide. Then other countries might hop on the train and do the same thing. But how much will this project cost...

Millions?

Billions?

It will be great for Canada and will get some environmental issues out to the public.

   

paying for that crap.

   

It is true that we are going to have to switch from a fossil-fuel economy to a renewable-energy economy over the next fifty years. This seems like a good way to do it. Any way we do it is going to be expensive.

   

I also like how biomass energy sounds. As far as I know we could probably use existing fossil fuel power plants and just change what we put in them. For example, coal can be switched with biomass fuel and there will still be ash, but less of it and its organic ash, not waste.


Biomass Energy...