[Plants] could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

But wait, there’s more …

An Associated Press analysis of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors found that 24 are in areas experiencing the most severe levels of drought. All but two are built on the shores of lakes and rivers and rely on submerged intake pipes to draw billions of gallons of water for use in cooling and condensing steam after it has turned the plants’ turbines.

And the irony just keeps on coming …

“Currently, nuclear power costs between $5 to $7 to produce a megawatt hour,” said Daniele Seitz, an energy analyst with New York-based Dahlman Rose & Co. “It would cost 10 times that amount that if you had to buy replacement power … especially during the summer.”

Now how do we fit this kind of uncertainty into our assumptions about the benefits of nuclear power to combat climate change? Since both curbing carbon and bringing nuclear plants online will take decades, we could find ourselves building plants that can’t deliver on their promises (as if they ever have, but that’s another story).

First, there’s a piece by Professor Charles Kibert that critiques a recent report on the benefits of green schools. It is notable for a couple of reasons. First, his analysis asks some important questions about this particular report’s benefit claims. Second, through this analysis he critiques the lack of critical review and high research standards in the green building field. There’s a response after the post by one of the report’s authors. Worth checking out.

Second, the Nevada legislature may be backpedaling on its green building tax breaks:

Nevada lawmakers moved swiftly Wednesday to suspend tax breaks for “green” building projects to help shrink a projected revenue shortfall that is complicating efforts to wrap up work on a nearly $7 billion state budget … “The analysis we are doing now is, ‘Are you providing an incentive or are you providing a windfall.’ If it’s going to hurt the rest of our tax base, we need to take a closer look at it.”

Now there’s a reason these are lumped together in my mind. They both point out that green building is moving forward at a rapid pace, but we may need to slow things down a bit to think through outcomes at the community or building level.

We need more critical analysis of and research on green buildings so that the excitement of seeing individual green buildings go up doesn’t cause problems down the road with poorly thought out code changes or unsubstantiated claims of benefits. While it may seem like green building is an unstoppable tide of change, we have a long way to go before we start to see the kinds of aggregate benefits that are necessary for green building to make its contribution to mitigating climate change and other environmental impacts.

With its new members, USCAP companies now have total revenues of $1.7 trillion, a collective workforce of more than 2 million and operations in all 50 states; they also have a combine market capitalization of more than $1.9 trillion.

The big news is that General Motors has joined the list:

GM is very pleased to join USCAP to proactively address the concerns posed by climate change and applauds its members for recognizing the important role that technology can play in achieving an economy-wide solution,” said Rick Wagoner, chairman and CEO of General Motors. “A central element as we see it is energy diversity — being able to offer consumers vehicles that can be powered by many different energy sources and advanced propulsion systems to help displace petroleum and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Other new members include Alcan, Boston Scientific, ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, The Dow Chemical Company, Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, PepsiCo, Shell, and Siemens, along with The Nature Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation.

Over at Building Design and Construction they’ve got a piece on the acceptance of a “green the capitol initiative.”

On April 19, Nancy Pelosi accepted a preliminary proposal and …

… announced that operations of the Capitol Complex, which includes congressional office buildings and the 775,000-sf U.S. Capitol Building, would become carbon neutral no later than the end of the 110th Congress (in late 2008 or early 2009). [emphasis mine]

The report suggests six key strategies:

1. Operate in a carbon-neutral manner.
2. Shift to 100% renewable electric power.
3. Aggressively improve energy efficiency.
4. Adopt sustainable business practices.
5. Continue leadership on sustainability issues.
6. Purchase offsets to ensure carbon neutral operations.

All good stuff, and if undertaken would make the congressional workplace a banner for climate action. Although let’s not forget what happened to Carter’s solar panels when Reagan took office.

I’m loving the idea that some of the real dead enders may be dragged into a climate neutral showpiece. Inhofe has got to be fuming and stocking up on incandescent light bulbs this very minute.

You can look at the PDF report here.

Customer choice programs are proving to be a powerful stimulus for growth in renewable energy supply. In 2006, total utility green power sales exceeded 3.5 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), about a 30% increase over 2005. More than 500,000 customers are participating in utility programs nationwide, up more than 10% from 2005

Some highlights follow.

• Ranked by renewable energy sales, the green power program of Austin (Texas) Energy is first in the nation (580,580,401 kWh/year), followed by Portland General Electric, Florida Power & Light, PacifiCorp and Xcel Energy.
• Ranked by customer participation rates, the top utilities are City of Palo Alto (Calif.)(16.9%) Utilities, Lenox (Iowa) Municipal Utilities, Montezuma (Iowa) Municipal Light & Power, Portland General Electric, and Sacramento Municipal Utility District.

And the one that really caught my eye:

• Ranked by Price Premium Charged for New, Customer-Driven Renewable Power, the top utilities are Austin Energy (-0.13 cents/kWH), OG&E Electric Services, Edmond Electricb, Avista Utilities

That’s right. Austin power has a negative surcharge. A note states: “Premium is variable; customers in these programs are exempt or otherwise protected from changes in utility fuel charges.” I’m not clear on how the variable rate contributes to the negative surcharge, but this report (and NREL is pretty reliable) is showing a renewable power option cheaper than conventional! For the curious, Austin is listed as using a mix of wind and landfill gas. Overall the rate surcharges for the top 10 providers ranged from -0.13 – 1.0 cents/kWh.

By some conservative estimates, the building sector world-wide could deliver emission reductions of 1.8 billion tonnes of C02. A more aggressive energy efficiency policy might deliver over two billion tonnes or close to three times the amount scheduled to be reduced under the Kyoto Protocol.

The International Energy Agency estimates that a total global switch to compact fluorescent bulbs would in 2010 deliver C02 savings of 470 million tonnes or slightly over half of the Kyoto reductions. We have to ask what the hurdles are — if any — to achieving such positive low cost change and set about decisively and swiftly to overcome them, if they exist at all.

I realize Kyoto is not our final goal, but the point here is the potential for harvesting carbon reductions from buildings is immense, and most of solutions are 1) with us already and 2) relatively low-cost to deploy. The challenge is largely changing practices. But as Achim notes, the hurdles in the building sector, unlike some other sectors, may not be very substantial.

What I’ve read of the report is not that new — it synthesizes ideas and approaches already out there (and it missed some I might have liked to see). What is important is that it contextualizes the impact and opportunities of buildings as compared with other sectors. How we build and operate buildings is one of the most important tools for carbon reduction and cannot be left off the table as we pursue the utility, automotive, and manufacturing industries.

As might be expected from UNEP, the report has a refreshingly international approach. It spells out the different challenges facing developed and developing countries. In particular, developed countries above all need to address their existing stock of buildings, while developing countries need to focus on new construction practices.

The recommendations are mostly what you’d expect — policies, regulations, economic tools, technology transfer, new technologies in the public sector, and education and awareness raising. There are two I was pleased to see, though — understanding human behavior and benchmarking.

On human behavior:

No matter how well-designed a building is, its energy performance will in the end very much depend on how the people living in, working in, or otherwise using the building are behaving and to what extent they make use of energy efficiency provisions. In other words: improved energy efficiency requires conscious choices and responsible use of facilities. The better one understands the logic behind human behavior, the better chances one has to succeed with technologies.

On benchmarking:

The understanding of what constitutes a sustainable building is now fairly well developed, and in some countries certification systems have been adopted based on specific criteria related to the use of materials, water, energy, comfort etc. Not surprisingly, however, most countries lack such systems, and there is no universal definition of what constitutes a sustainable building … There is a clear need to quantify what may constitute an energy efficient building under different conditions (new/old buildings, different climate zones, etc.), and to quantify the associated benefits in economic terms, as well as in terms of greenhouse gas emission reductions.

Defense of this muddying of the green-tech profile rests on our collective worship of the profit motive (“I’m here to make the kind of green my limited partners can spend”). But what made me laugh out loud (even as my stomach was turning) was this quote by Joseph Lacob, a managing partner at Kleiner Perkins, which is investing heavily in Terralliance, an oil and gas exploration company: “If we can improve the efficiencies of the oil and gas exploration, in some ways that’s a green message as well.”

Please, please please tell me how expansion of oil and gas development is a “green message”?

So here’s the rub: it appears that green-tech is good for marketing your venture capital business, but the investment interest is really two-fold:

1. Capitalize on the volatility of the current energy markets — oil and gas are going up, profits are going up so ride that while you can.
2. Invest in the successor energy systems so you reap the really big profits when we finally switch away from fossil fuels.

In 2006, venture capitalists put $727 million into 39 alternative energy start-ups, compared with $195 million in 18 such firms for 2005, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

For investors in alternatives to oil and gas, the driving force has been the belief that whoever develops the next great energy sources will enjoy spoils that will make the gains from creating the next Amazon.com or Google seem puny in comparison.

And there is, of course, the additional benefit of helping to save the world with cleaner, renewable energy sources. Do well by doing good is the mantra.

Yet money has also flowed into start-ups built to serve the oil and gas industries. In 2006, venture capitalists put $163 million into 18 such companies, up from $56 million in 14 oil and gas ventures in 2005. This is an investment category that has ebbed and flowed and that was as high as $586 million in 1999, the height of the dot-com bubble.

Anyone see a problem with this strategy? Anyone remember the Dr. Seuss story about the star bellied sneetches? Anyone know why the gun industry loves a good war?

By playing both sides, venture capitalists are likely to benefit from the turmoil, but they also delay change. By funding oil and gas development and green-tech, these venture capitalists are prolonging the state of flux we find ourselves in. This dual investment helps keep oil and gas profitable and diverts investment from green-tech, both of which keep us teetering between fossil and alternative energy systems at a time when we need to be resolutely moving in one direction.

It’s not as if there won’t be investment opportunities galore in green-tech. But as long as you can extract obscene profits from fossil fuel, and you are positioning yourself to profit from the transition, it is in your best interest to maintain the status quo — the environment be damned.

Green building will reach its tipping point — the point where the building community turns from “less involved” to “more involved” in the 2006 to 2007 time frame, depending on how conservative the estimate. … more than 2/3 of builders will be building green homes (more than 15% of their projects) … Looking beyond 2007, the sheer number of participants in the homebuilding market will pull the rest of the market up to their standards to remain competitive.

There’s nothing I’d like to see more than a real tipping point in green building practices. But trying to spot green tipping points often seems like the environmental community’s favorite hobby. We’re like compulsive birdwatchers looking for exotic species of environmental progress. Too often it turns out to be a wee bit more complicated than it appears at first glance.

The folks over at E: The environmental magazine dissect this tipping point a bit (sorry, sub. req.), noting that while “there’s no doubt that 2006 was a great year for green building — at least in terms of PR,” the McGraw Hill Projections may not be as “impressive as they sound.”

Early 2007, the report projects, will be a “tipping point,” in which more than 50 percent of American home builders will participate in green building. … Fifty percent of builders is not equivalent to 50 percent of houses. In 2005, only two percent of homes were built green, according to the report; by 2010, it anticipates that figure will rise between five and 10 percent. And there is still no standard for “green” building. Most such construction is self-reported. Only three percent out of those two percent of homes reported to be built green were certified green by a third party, says John Ritterpusch, director of the NAHB’s green building program. That works out to 0.06 percent of the 2005 market.

At the same time E was throwing water on these projections, several publications picked up an AP story on the sluggish rate of green building activity among large homebuilders. (USA Today ran it as “Big homebuilders say most consumers won’t pay for green homes” and Businessweek ran the more mellow headline “Big homebuilders lag on green building.”)

Green building has united disparate parties from environmental groups to big business to policymakers, but one key industry has struggled to react to the change in public sentiment. The major home builders, who account for 80% of homebuilding activity in the nation, face a unique challenge in implementing green building on a widespread scale. Many have added energy-saving features and experimented with environmentally friendly materials, but they have not yet been able to sign on a critical mass of buyers willing to pay more for them … Ara Hovnanian, CEO and president of Hovnanian Enterprises, one of the nation’s biggest home builders, says all things being equal, consumers would choose green. But all is not equal.

“Consumers have not been willing to make the investment,” he says.

So there you have it — a tipping point tips back, or perhaps wasn’t tipping as much as the tipsters said. 2007 does look like a big year for green building, but it also looks like a year in which green building’s steamroller momentum might catch a snag or two — not least increasing concern that green building deliver environmentally, and that claims of greenness by builders become more comparable.

Has LEED done its job too well? In part, the goal of LEED is to transform building practices, and LEED does appear to be the 800 lb. gorilla of green building systems, but it also has a reputation for being expensive. The checklists are widely available, and there are increasingly large numbers of people who have experience with green building and LEED specifically. I’m seeing more and more articles where someone is saying, “Green building is good, LEED is good, but certification is unnecessary.”

For example, Boston — the first city to require green practices for both private and commercial development — is requiring that new buildings be “certifiable” (no pun intended), without actually requiring certification. A recent headline read “County board rejects spending $600,000 for green ‘status symbol’.” The board likes green building, but didn’t want to go for LEED certification.

ReadyMade magazine introduced LEED to readers and in the next sentence recommended using it but not certifying (sorry, only available in print version).

If this trend continues, it could have a lot of unforeseen consequences, such as:

• Brand alienation: Owners of LEED-certified buildings, municipalities, and others who use LEED may feel burned if they feel that the brand is losing meaning.
• Accountability: People may end up using outdated versions of LEED. If the buildings aren’t registered, the owners, the public, or others may not know what they are getting. Could a municipality with a LEED requirement face a lawsuit on the grounds that the certification is an unnecessary taxpayer expense?

Are we thinking through the implications of code changes? I’ve written before about the greening of building codes. Generally, I see this as a good thing, and we may be poised to see a lot more code changes in the coming year. But code changes don’t make everyone happy, and there are some complications to be considered. National Association of Home Builders president David Pressly recently said in a press release that green building needs to “stay voluntary to continue to allow for market innovation” (subscription required). Robert Cassidy, editor in chief of Environmental Design and Construction has spoken out against problems from “LEED creep,” wherein cities adopt LEED for public buildings, but then creep over to private requirements. Over at the blog greenbuildingsnyc.com, Stephen notes another concern with codes being tied to green building standards:

[There is] the possibility that compliance with the Optimize Energy Performance credit will become mandatory in municipalities that have incorporated LEED into their building codes … [This is] perhaps demonstrative of how municipalities are not considering all the ramifications of incorporating LEED into building codes. Babylon, New York’s LEED legislation, for example, ‘automatically adopt[s] any future versions [of LEED] promulgated by [the U.S. Green Building Council].’

Some possible outcomes of code tensions:

• Undercutting the value of green: If conventional buildings are inferior for health and the environment, there is a strong argument for using building codes to regulate them. Industry groups who are antagonistic to mandatory codes for business reasons undermine the credibility of green building as a whole, despite the many valuable health and environmental reasons for improving our building practices.
• Variability in outcomes: There are many more code jurisdictions than there are climatic or environmental regions; regulating green building at the local level has merits, but should be coordinated across the country to ensure the gains we want are realized.
• Public control over codes: Most green building programs are committed to ongoing improvements as technologies and environmental conditions change. If local governments commit to one standard or another, they may have a hard time (logistically or fiscally) responding to changes in the standard, or breaking free if the standard doesn’t work for them down the line.

How green is my building? With the rise in green building practices, more and more questions are being raised about what green buildings are actually delivering. The Cascadia Green Building Council is promoting their “living building challenge” that is intended to deliver truly sustainable buildings.

It’s of critical importance that builders are educated and held accountable to meaningful, achievable standards — so that sustainable buildings doesn’t become another undefined slogan … The ‘Living Building Challenge’ is attempting to raise the bar and define a true measure of sustainability in the built environment … Projects that achieve this level of performance can claim to be the most sustainable in North America, and not merely less bad.

Part of Cassidy’s concerns with “LEED creep” are about achieving specific environmental goals. “If Albuquerque wants to conserve energy usage in buildings, for example, it shouldn’t rely on LEED to hold down energy usage in buildings, especially since you can attain LEED silver and not do a very good job of energy conservation.” At the same time, there’s jockeying for authority and credibility among green programs. While the USGBC is applauding the NAHB’s ANSI certification, NAHB is criticizing the effectiveness of LEED for homes. “LEED-H would have a drastic effect on the affordability of housing … [LEED-H] is costly, requires many unnecessary mandatory provisions, offers little flexibility.” Here, the outcomes are also important:

• The sustainability question: Individual green buildings mean very little on their own. The real goal is to reduce the overall impact of buildings on the environment. If that is not happening, whether through poor program development or other factors, something needs to change. For example, if some form of carbon regulation is coming down the pike, it suddenly becomes much more important exactly what you are getting with your green building. Right now, green building is very much focused on delivering individual buildings, rather than looking at the overall impact. With something like a carbon tax, this could change quickly, and how programs can accommodate this will matter a great deal.
• Infighting doesn’t help anyone: Brand positioning may be OK when it comes to soaps, but in the case of buildings, we’re still trying to help people understand the value of green building. If the public perceives that green building programs are more interested in market share than delivering environmental benefits, they may be turned off.

The purpose of the Challenge is to change how people think about, design, and construct and deconstruct buildings. By contributing to a library of strategies that maximize materials recovery and reduce environmental and economic costs, contestants can advance building industry lifecycle planning, inspiring the green building movement to look beyond a single iteration of a building. Because buildings take a major toll on the environment, the Challenge calls upon its contestants to address real world issues.

The contest has a professional and student tier with 3 categories for entries:

• Building: an entire building from foundation to roof
• Component: a single building assembly, system, or connector
• Service: a tool, method, or other idea

Entries are due April 15, so put on your thinking caps.