BuildingGreen.com – EBN: 17:10 – Free Energy Modeling in Google SketchUp

As part of my ongoing studies in planning we have been talking a lot about sustainability, environmental impacts and the like. This plug in was sent to my by way of a couple friends of mine months ago but I haven’t posted it yet as I have been trying to try it out first. However I still have not actually been able to find the plug in itself, let alone install it. So I am going to go ahead and post it anyway and hope that one of our intrepid readers will be able to figure it out and give us an update on how to use and install this plug in.

“Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) has launched a plug-in for Google SketchUp that delivers energy and carbon footprint simulations to inform early-stage design decisions. The free plug-in provides results without any additional software, although owners of IES’s Virtual Environment package or its VE-Toolkits can perform additional analyses, such as daylight or airflow modeling. The plug-in provides functionality from SketchUp that IES previously offered only from Autodesk’s Revit Architecture and Revit MEP, including documentation for the LEED daylighting credit.”

via BuildingGreen.com – EBN: 17:10 – Free Energy Modeling in Google SketchUp

Don’t Worry, Versace says refrigerated beaches are sustainable.

People have been claiming that sustainability and green are being thrown around so much that they are losing their meaning, at this point I am inclined to agree; Versace is building a luxury hotel that will have a refrigerated beach so that the uber wealthy won’t have to get their feet hot when they come to visit.  The hotel chain and by extension Ms Versace who has sold them the name, then has the gall to claim that refrigerating the outdoors can some how be sustainable;

Versace says the beach will be environmentally sustainable. Soheil Abedian, president of Palazzo Versace, said: ‘We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on. This is the kind of luxury that top people want.’ A source added: ‘The super rich want pure luxury. They don’t want to walk on scalding sand.’ S

In terms of reasons why I have been trying to avoid the Dubai Hype this could count as a big one. I mean if I had told my mother that it was ok to leave the door open in the summer because cooling the planet with our air-conditioner was somehow ’sustainable’ she would have smacked me across the head. Someone needs to do the same for Donatella and Santo.

Big Brother Environmentalism

Are you living up to your environmental potential? Residents in a number of British eco towns could see government monitoring to make sure that they are keeping their carbon footprint to the right size. One of the most interesting things about this push is that it isn’t coming from the British Government directly, I suppose it would be a bit of a political hot potato. The  Bioregional firm, which initiated the low energy BedZed housing estate in south London is asking the government to ensure that the carbon footprint of residents in the proposed  eco towns (ten of which are in the works) are no larger then allowed under the principals of “one planet” living.

Some of the ways that it wants residents monitored are tracking of the number of trips residents take by car, Thermographic cameras to check which homes are losing too much heat, and measurement of the types of waste produced, and how much they produce by both residences and businesses.

“If eco towns are to have a fundamental purpose, it must be to show us how we can all achieve one-planet living,” said Richard Simmons, chief executive of Cabe. “Eco towns should show us, in a real and measured way, what our sustainable future will look like.”

Some critics of the towns themselves are against the regulations saying that the government has no business taking this sort of a heavy handed oversight on residents. Suggesting that the eco towns will be giant ‘gulags.’

Of course a simple way to avoid the monitoring would be to not buy a home in an eco town, but it does beg the question of just how much of an active role should the government take in enforcing the low carbon footprint ideal behind these plans?

What do you think?

via Eco town dwellers may be monitored for green habits | Environment | The Guardian

Video Tour of the BedZed Development

Edit,

We received a comment from Tom Chance of Bioregional who had some great things to say about the monitoring. Since he is speaking directly from the company we are going to include them up here with the post.

“It’s worth noting that the reporting in The Guardian was a bit mischeivous. We haven’t been calling for monitoring of individuals as a means of enforcing particular lifestyles. Rather, our report (if you read it) lays out a number of ways in which eco-towns developers should monitor the success of their plans so that we can better learn from then. Any monitoring would have to be completely voluntary.

We have taken this approach at BedZED, where 75% of residents voluntarily had their meter readings recorded, waste weighed and answered questionnaires. All the results are anonymised, and used to help us learn how to better design sustainable communities.

The alternative – not monitoring at all – would be a complete nonsense, it would mean we’d have no evidence to improve the way we design communities!”