$20.5 million from DOE helps communities turn trash into cash

The Department of Energy has just announced funding $20.5 million for several community-scale renewable energy projects.

UC Davis & West Village

One of the recipients is West Village, next to UC Davis, which generated a bit of criticism among Green Journey readers the last time we covered them. In partnership with UC Davis, they’ve now received $2.5 million in funding for a waste-to-renewable energy (WTRE) system. The DOE provides an explanation of how the new system should work:

The system would generate power from a renewable biogas-fed fuel cell.  The organic waste will enter a digester to produce biogas from organic wastes. The biogas will power a 300-kW fuel cell, which will work in combination with an advanced battery system to provide power to the campus’

Montpelier, VT

A second community level energy system of interest is the funding of $8 million to the City of Montpelier, Vermont, for a combined heat and power district heating system that will burn sustainably-sourced wood chips and provide 1.8 million KWh to the grid.

The CHP system will be sized to provide heating to the Vermont Capitol Complex, city owned schools, the City Hall Complex, and up to 156 buildings in the community’s designated downtown district for a total of 176 buildings and 1.8 million square feet served.

We follow these announcements with lots of interest, since we work with partners to identify the best combination of financing streams for achieving community-level sustainability.

As we continue to study eco-districts and similar low-carbon neighborhoods in various stages of design and planning around the world, district-level renewable energy infrastructure  — particularly waste-to-renewable-energy comes up time and time again within the case studies of the more successful communities.

A more in depth discussion of the ’success factors’ within green communities will definitely make for an exciting post in the near future as we consolidate our findings.

Video explains value of district energy

Some of these technical terms might be outside of the typical real estate finance and investment discussion, so I found a 40 second video that explains how district energy saves buildings money. Email subscribers should click on this link to go to the video.

Why ASHRAE Standard 189.1 matters for green finance and investment

The long awaited ASHRAE Standard 189.1 is finally here.

Why should anyone in real estate finance and investment cheer about that?

Architecture 2030 reports the building sector as being responsible for 50.1% of total annual U.S. energy consumption, 49% of GHG emissions, and 74.5% of annual US electricity consumption.

To combat that, ASHRAE came up with:

the first code-intended commercial green building standard in the United States. It covers key topic areas similar to green building rating systems: site sustainability, water use efficiency, energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality, and the building’s impact on the atmosphere, materials and resources.

Because Standard 189.1 provides the basis for new building codes, which can be adopted to define green buildings, it makes it easier for cities and counties to adopt codes which will a) result in real green buildings(!) and b) help the adopting government to achieve the 2030 Challenge target of 50% reduction in 2005 CO2 emissions by 2050 within its jurisdiction.

This standard, when adopted into code, does a huge service for the finance and investment community as well, because it finally defines a minimal standard of commercial green building quality. By being able to rely on Standard 189.1 within green building codes, a developer or contractor, could have an easier time of constructing green buildings across different markets, because the baseline would be transparent and similar. This assures greater efficiencies during construction, better execution and higher quality assets.

Moreover, when an investor steps up to buy buildings constructed with this standard as the baseline across multiple markets, it will be much easier for them to figure out if they are really buying a green building — mitigating those kinds of worries is something that can give markets momentum.

Add to that the fact that the adopting government entity would be demonstrating clear leadership and accountability for driving energy and GHG emissions reductions from its building sector.

In any event,  it will be interesting to see how cities move to adopt green building codes using Standard 189.1 and the real estate and building community’s actual response.

Check out the site that ASHRAE setup with all the nitty gritty on Standard 189.1. Or just skip ahead and download the factsheet here.

Exciting stuff!