Las Casas Verdes, Austin’s First Eco-Friendly Neighborhood
By Stanberry Green Team | August 25, 2008
Las Casa Verdes will be the first eco-friendly neighborhood of its kind in Texas. Designed by architect, David E Martin, this new project is located in Southwest Austin, a mile for major shopping areas, on local mass transit routes and includes one of Austin’s best high schools.
Las Casa Verdes will be comprised of twenty single family homes featuring the latest in solar, wind and water energy systems. All homes will meet the strict standards of the Austin Green Building Program, Energy Star and LEEDS certifications. Prices will fall within FHA guidelines for the area, with completion schedule for mid-2008.
Passive solar design will be used and orientated to best manage light from the sun. Overhangs, porches and shade trees will provide shielding to reduce heat load.Heat chimneys, operable awning windows and landscape features will combine with local breezes to move air throughout the home with little or no mechanical assistance during spring and fall months.
Reflective light wells and automatic light switches will be incorporated where applicable, a simple but effective energy saving feature.
Check out Las Casa Verdes if you are interested in living green and a reasonable cost.
Topics: Green Building, Green Energy | No Comments »
City may ban plastic bottles, Styrofoam at many public events
By Stanberry Green Team | August 25, 2008
City of Austin officials want to cut down on waste at festivals such as South by Southwest and Austin City Limits.
City Council Members Lee Leffingwell and Mike Martinez are drafting an ordinance that would establish recycling and other “green” requirements to obtain city permits for events with 100 or more participants that request to use city facilities. Those who don’t comply may be denied access to city facilities and requests for public street closures. The ordinance could affect marathons, rallies, film screenings — like those held at Republic Square Park during the summer — and other events.
“Use of a public venue for an event is a privilege, and there is a certain responsibility that goes with that privilege,”
Leffingwell says. “If [event organizers] comply with the [ordinance], they will be able to continue to exercise that privilege. And if they don’t, they won’t.”
As part of the ordinance, expected to be reviewed by the council in late August or early September, the city may ban plastic water bottles, Styrofoam and paper items. It may offer complimentary or discounted rates for compostable material disposal.
Violators could be subject to civil penalties, and access to city facilities could be permanently revoked.
“When most people go to community events in a public venue, there is an awful lot of waste. The ordinance will provide both the carrot and the stick [for participants] to do a better job to manage waste, clean up after themselves and be good citizens. We want to both require and reward good behavior,” Leffingwell says.
City staff say exact figures on how much waste is produced at public events are unavailable.
But “if you go out and observe roadways and see the number of paper cups, etc., you can see it’s a lot,” Leffingwell says. “You don’t have to quantify it to know there is something that has to be done about it.”
Through the ordinance, event organizers may be able to promote how “green” their events are via a rating system tagged to features like use of solar-powered lighting and biodegradable supplies.
The ordinance is among several aggressive city initiatives meant to push Austin as a municipal green leader. Last year, the city launched a zero-waste program aimed at reducing garbage sent to landfills by 20 percent per capita by 2012 and achieving zero waste — an international standard set by the United Nations Environmental Accord — by 2040.
Also last year, Mayor Will Wynn spearheaded the Austin Climate Protection Plan. It pledges to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from all city activities by 2020, dramatically increase renewable power, reduce coal burning at Austin Energy and implement the most energy-efficient building codes in the nation.
For its part, Austin Energy offers rebates for businesses that use alternative energy sources and reduce energy use. Austin Energy and the city’s water utility are part of a group of stakeholders meeting with city staff to draft an ordinance.
Brandi Clark, a green event planning and sustainability consultant who has produced Earth Day and other environmentally themed festivals, says while more events are voluntarily reducing waste and being eco-conscious, it’s not enough.
“It drives me crazy all these millions of bottles and cans are being generated over the years. The city requires you to have all these plans to get a permit but doesn’t require a trash plan to recycle,” says Clark, who is president of EcoNetworking and the founder of Austin EcoNetwork. She says most measures to reduce waste don’t cost anything, such as banning certain products, while some save money, such as ending concerts earlier to use less energy for lighting. “In most cases it’s just smart planning and tracking down resources that haven’t been used before.”
But Eve McArthur, a director at SXSW, says the city lacks recycling and reuse infrastructure. There are no high-capacity providers of full-stream recycling. Nonprofits like Ecology Action and Keep Austin Beautiful provide recycling services but aren’t capable of doing it on a mass scale. Also, there isn’t a secondary market that reuses piles of crushed glass or other reusable materials.
“If you pick this up and put it in a pile separate from your landfill, what was accomplished?” McArthur says.
She says the city needs to understand the barriers to recycling in Austin, which she doesn’t believe include a lack of willingness to recycle or the cost to do so.
“It’s not that services are so costly that we can’t afford them, it’s that there are not available or reliable services out there,” McArthur says. “We are very supportive of [the ordinance], but it’s easier said than done.”
SXSW provides recycling bins, but because most concerts are at private clubs, it’s difficult to enforce their use, she says.
Austin Business Journal - by Jean Kwon ABJ Staff
jkwon@bizjournals.com | (512) 494-2528
Topics: Green Eating, Green Energy | No Comments »
Austin Energy plans $2.3 billion biomass plant
By Stanberry Green Team | July 29, 2008
Plant will push utility closer to goal of using 30 percent renewable fuels by 2020.
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Austin Energy is planning to spend $2.3 billion to build, operate and pull electricity for 20 years from a biomass power plant in East Texas.
The plant, expected to be the largest of its kind in Texas, would run on wood waste, such as sawdust from mills, tree trimmings and pallets. It could generate 100 megawatts of power for Austin Energy, or enough to supply 75,000 homes. The move is part of the city’s ongoing effort to diversify its energy sources for environmental and economic reasons, and it comes as the utility is also planning to put solar power equipment on city-owned land near Webberville.
Nacogdoches Power LLC, a private company, will own the plant, which is expected to be online by summer 2012 in the East Texas town of Sacul. The price Austin Energy pays to purchase power from the plant is also expected to cover capital and operating costs.
Money for the plant will come from Austin Energy rate payer fuel charges, but it’s too soon to say how it will affect customer utility bills, Austin Energy spokesman Ed Clark said.
The project, first reported in Friday’s edition of the Austin Business Journal, will push Austin Energy closer to its goal of using 30 percent renewable fuels by 2020.
“We’re getting both diversification of fuel and diversification of location by putting 100 megawatts out there,” Austin Energy General Manager Roger Duncan said. “It is very significant in meeting our renewable energy goal.”
He said he hopes to present the contract for the biomass plant to the City Council on August 7. Austin Energy has been discussing the plan with Nacogdoches Power for months, he said.
Duncan said Austin Energy chose to pay Nacogdoches Power to develop and operate the plant because that company, a joint venture between BayCorp Holdings LTD and Energy Management Inc., has more experience in biomass power plants, including projects under way in Florida.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates most of the electric grid in the state, draws power from 37 generating plants producing 97 megawatts of power from biomass. Most of those plants are powered by landfill gas, and the rest draw from agricultural byproducts, like the proposed Nacogdoches Power plant, said Bill Bojorquez, vice president of planning for ERCOT. A 45-megawatt plant, running on agricultural byproducts is expected to come online in Lufkin next year, but the Austin Energy partnership will be the largest planned biomass plant in the ERCOT area, Bojorquez said.
Luke Metzger, director of the nonprofit group Environment Texas, said biomass from wood waste is “widely regarded among the environmental community as a very clean alternative energy source.”
The wood waste would release carbon anyway as it decomposes, or is burned in some cases, so burning it to generate power doesn’t necessarily add more, Metzger said.
The Nacogdoches Power plant will help Austin Energy meet future demand for electricity, and customers will start paying for it, through the fuel charge, once the plant comes online.
The cost of biomass fuel, once transportation to the plant is factored in, is comparable to that of natural gas, but the price of biomass won’t change over the 20-year term of the agreement, Duncan said.
Tony Callendrello, vice president of Nacogdoches Power, said one of the other advantages of biomass is that it’s more reliable than some other renewable sources.
“It isn’t there only when the wind blows or the sun shines,” Callendrello said. “It’s there every hour of every day.”
Solar power is also expected grow as a source of electricity for Austin Energy.
The utility plans to cover about 330 acres of the city-owned “Webberville tract” with solar power equipment to generate 30 megawatts of power. The utility has not yet asked companies for proposals or determined an estimate cost for the project, but one idea is to install 30 solar panels that could each produce 1 megawatt of electricity, Duncan said.
With council approval, that project could be online by 2010.
If both the solar installation at Webberville and the biomass plant go forward, 18 percent of the utility’s fuel will come from renewable sources by 2012.
Mayor Will Wynn, whose Austin Climate Protection Plan established the utility’s goal of 30 percent renewable fuels by 2020, said the biomass and solar plans are exciting.
“We all recognize there’s going to be increasing demand for electricity with our growing population and economy, and so we’re looking first to conservation, then efficiency and then renewables,” Wynn said. “This is a really exciting opportunity to dramatically expand our renewable portfolio with state-of-the-art new concepts for renewable energy.”
Austin Energy also plans expand its renewable fuels usage by adding 165 megawatts of wind power in December to its current supply of 274 megawatts.
Austin Energy is not expanding its coal or nuclear power usage, but it is expanding natural gas at Sandhill Energy Center in Southeastern Travis County.
In September, Austin Energy plans to ask people about their preferences for future power generation.
khumphrey@statesman.com; 445-3658
From Austin American-Statesman
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DIY - Green Window Cleaner
By Stanberry Green Team | July 21, 2008
Sparklingly clear windows can be yours with a simple and inexpensive home recipe.
Using a funnel, pour three tablespoons of ammonia and one tablespoon of vinegar into a one-quart screw-top or spray bottle, then fill with cool water. For safety, remember to label the bottle. If your windows have a low-e coating on the exterior surface of the glass, leave out the ammonia and increase the vinegar content from one to two tablespoons.
From Country Living
Topics: Green Housekeeping | No Comments »
Spotlight On Mueller: A Model for Sustainable Community Design
By Stanberry Green Team | July 7, 2008
Mueller Austin is quickly becoming an energetic community hub within Austin city limits. It’s been almost a year since the first residents moved into one of the diverse neighborhoods, Located just three miles from downtown and two miles from the University of Texas.
Robert Mueller who first envisioned the redevelopment of Municipal Airport into a mixed-use urban village. The result is an award-winning sustainable community being developed by Catellus Development Group.
Read Also: Mueller Austin among best green real estate in the U.S.
New homes and jobs
Mueller’s 711-acre site, when complete, will become home to approximately 10,000 people, 10,000 permanent employees, more than 1,100 affordable homes and approximately 140 acres of public open space, including:
- Nearly 4,600 single-family, condo or apartment homes (at least 25 percent reserved for families who qualify for affordable housing)
- More than 140 acres of parks and perimeter greenways
- A town center with cafes, shops, plazas and live/work spaces planned to include at least 30 percent locally-owned businesses
- 5 miles of new hike and bike paths
- Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas (open)
- The University of Texas Medical Research Campus
- Austin Film Studios (open)
- Connections to public transportation
- Regional retail (open)
- State-of-the-art rental apartments
- A broad variety of new home opportunities–both for rent and for sale
- Class A office space
A great place to live in a great city
Mueller neighborhoods are inspired by Austin itself. They are traditional, yet eclectic—consistent and harmonious, yet with high character. Like the neighborhoods themselves, the homes at Mueller offer something for everyone…single-family homes with welcoming front porches, charming cottages circling a central garden, and classic urban-style row houses with private open areas. There are European-style live-work homes with residential above retail space, as well as, centrally located condominiums and rental apartments, and more. Options are varied, but the innovation, comfort and quality are a reassuring constant.
Read also: Multifamily project breaks ground at Mueller.
Thinking green
Mueller is a model for sustainable community design with homes that are resource efficient, use non-toxic and recyclable materials, and help maintain and improve air and water quality. The community’s extensive green spaces and utility systems also go a long way to keep Mueller clean, green and sustainable. Austin Energy has built a groundbreaking on-site power plant that provides substantial environmental benefits. Mueller, with its mixed use concept, offers residents a lifestyle full of choices that don’t involve getting in their cars.
Recreation, transit, shopping, entertainment, employment—it’s all right there. Mueller’s parks, trails and open space weave through the community, establishing a native, local ecosystem and bringing outdoor recreation and education options to Mueller residents, employees and neighbors. With 20 percent of the neighborhood dedicated to parkland and open space, every resident will live less than 600 feet away from a community green space.
Parks and open space
Mueller is fulfilling its vision as a walkable and sustainable community with approximately 140 acres of parks, trails and open space; 5 miles of new hike and bike paths and at least 15,000 new trees.
The Mueller Greenway surrounds the neighborhood and connects to existing Austin parks including Bartholomew Park, Patterson Park and the public Morris Williams Golf Course.
Additional parks include:
- Lake Park – a large, centrally located park with a 6.5-acre lake and an outdoor performance venue;
- Northwest Greenway with a 10’ wide hike and bike trail, accessible playscape and picnic area;
- Southwest Greenway with educational amenities about the ecosystem and prairies of Central Texas and a hike and bike trail; and Southwest neighborhood Park with a Junior Olympic sized pool, 5-lane lap pool, wading pool and pool house, along with a basketball court and picnic areas.
Commercial
Mueller will have up to 4,200,000 nonresidential square feet, including office, retail, medical and film production. All commercial development, including multi-family units, will meet a two-star rating in Austin Energy’s program or will be LEED-certified. We hope this sets the standard for other projects, like Villa Muse.
Retail. The first 225,000 square feet of retail in Phase I is open, with another 150,000 square feet under construction. A future Town Center will include a mix of retail, dining and entertainment options as well as work places and residences. If you haven’t visited Mueller lately, you might want to catch up on all the progress being made in this remarkable community.
Topics: Green Building, Green Energy | No Comments »