Imagine living in a house so efficient that the builder guarantees you’ll have no energy bills for the first 10 years of ownership.
Such is the promise of Houze Advanced Building Science, a real-estate company in Houston, Texas. The company is building net zero-energy homes, equipped with walls that insulate like a thermos, appliances that sip little electricity and one-of-a-kind power cells.
The houses are some of the first affordable, net energy-producing homes in the United States. And, in Houston, they’re moving in to support an otherwise underserved neighbourhood, Independence Heights.
David Goswick, founder and chief executive of Houze, came up with the idea behind the company in 2008, when the US housing market slowed to a standstill. He gathered a team to assess the needs of homebuyers of the future.
“We pushed the pause button and re-evaluated for two years. We realised that the best home investment is in efficiency first,” Goswick says. In fact, the “ze” in the company’s name refers to “zero energy”, he says, because he guarantees the homeowner won’t have to make any electricity or gas payments.
The smart thing about Houze is its proprietary residential co-generation power cell, which is about size of an exterior air-conditioning unit. The power cell uses seven different energy sources to power homes – and an entire block. It’s fuelled by natural gas and solar, and also captures heat generated onsite for heating and cooling needs.
Because the power cell produces much more energy than each house consumes, it sells excess power back to the grid. Insurance discounts of 40% further cut the costs of ownership.
The first commercial, significantly islandable (the hurdle for “microgrid” designation), solar PV and battery hybrid project in Maryland came online this October in Laurel, demonstrating the reality these post-Sandy conversations are aiming to create. While at an elevation of 200 feet and not in danger of storm surge effects, Laurel and many inland communities on the East Coast can none the less be heavily impacted by broader grid shutdowns from hurricanes and other natural or man-made disruptions.
Konterra, a real-estate developer of mixed-use, sustainable communities, recently installed 402 kilowatts of solar generation, two EV charging stations, LED parking lot lighting, and notably, battery storage capacity. The project was inaugurated with much fanfare by the likes of Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) Chairman Jon Wellinghoff.
Konterra’s project brings the developer closer to its vision of sustainable, fully integrated communities. The solar installation, which supplies 20 percent of the site’s annual power, doubles as a parking canopy. Its battery banks can power a critical load of 50 kilowatts for just over four hours should grid power should go down completely, and are set to recharge during the day while the solar panels power the site. It also brings Maryland closer to its goal of reaching 20 percent in-state renewable generation by 2022. But perhaps most interestingly, the site will be using its integrated grid-connected storage to generate revenue by participating in the ancillary services market (primarily through the provision of frequency regulation, synchronized reserve, and volt-ampere reactive [VAR] compensation acquired on a cost-basis).
One of the most misunderstood aspects of Germany’s energy transition is the assumption that this is top-down mandate to adopt green energy. Nothing could be further from the truth, and one key statistic underlines this point: the major electricity generators account for just 7 per cent of the renewable energy that now makes up nearly one quarter of the county’s electricity production. The rest has come from farmers, households, communities and small business.
There is a bunch of reasons why this is so. For many, it is their dislike of nuclear. For others, it’s the opportunity of maintaining a lifestyle, finding independence, or retaining ownership of a family farm. For many it is an environmental issue, for others it is an economic one.
When the price of livestock plunged after the outbreak of “mad cow” disease, the Reinbold family in the village of Freiamt, just north of Freiburg, were worried about losing their farm which had been in the family for generations.
So they turned to biogas to generate electricity and waste heat: They now grow crops of inedible corn, grass and rye and have two small turbines that have a combined capacity of 360kW. Waste heat is fed to the school and nearby homes, the liquid waste from the biomass goes to neighbouring farms. Another turbine will provide heat for the village pool and the hostels, which are popular with hikers.
“It’s more work in summer outside in the field,” says Inge Reinbold, of the need to tend crops rather than cattle. But less work in winter. And despite the large investment, she feels she has risk-proofed the family farm. “Now we have a fixed price for 10 years,” she says. They get 10c/kWh for their biogas electricity – and three solar arrays owned by her three sons gives them a further income.
Higher up the valley, we visit the Schneider family, which has gone even further, installing a heater that uses wood chips instead of oil, and hosting two community-owned wind turbines on their property (pictured below), which features 80 dairy cows and a much admired Schnapps production facility in the basement. (You can see a video here).
Now Freiamt, a collection of five small hamlets in the foothills of the Black Forest with a total population of 4,200, provides more than 200 per cent of its electricity needs, the locals claim. Five turbines, including the two on the Schneider property, account for ¾ of this, with the rest made up from two biogas plants, 251 solar rooftops, about 150 solar thermal collectors, wood-chip heaters and four run-of-river hydros, which are coming back into vogue after a century of neglect.
The sense of independence is ingrained into the mentality. Most of the farming families were attracted to the area 500 years ago when the Monastery at St Peter, just down the road, offered freehold land to farmers who settled into the area and independence from the Dutch overlords).
“Now you see farms starting to look at battery storage,” says Erhard Shulz, the founder of the locally based Innovation Academy, and my guide for the day. “Independence is very important. That is why the families came here 500 years ago, for independence from the Dutch. Now it is for independence from the nuclear and the fossil fuel companies. This is very important.”
Dispatchable power, VARs… that’s more like it. (I wonder how the interface to the system operator is handled?)
The Houze’s energy module thing isn’t described in any detail, but it sounds suspiciously like the engine/generator module of a FreeWatt furnace. The FreeWatt burns natural gas to produce about 1 kW of electricity, plus heat. It’s not terribly efficient as a generator, so it makes no sense to run it if heat is not required.
My opinion several years ago, and today: the FreeWatt isn’t designed for the future. Sure, it avoids overproduction of electricity, relative to what the average house requires today. However, a house with plug-in vehicles is going to have a substantial boost in total demand, at least some of which can be scheduled. This likely merits a larger generator. If this can be combined with grid-support functions, the whole could be greater than the sum of its parts.
In the long run, natural gas as a fuel will go away. That’s a problem for almost all of these schemes, but the energy modules will probably require replacement after a couple of decades anyway so that may not be as big an issue as it might seem.
Santa Clause, the Tooth Ferry and then what?
The Easter bunny, then climate denial…
Turn off your spell check, greenman. To be consistent with kingDUH’s oh-so-clever “Clause” and “Ferry”, you need to dumb down a bit. Perhaps Easter Bummy would be more appropriate?
“POWERED BY 100% CLEAN NATURAL GAS AND A GAME CHANGING POWER CELL”
I’ll take a Passivhaus and you can keep the natural gas.
Living concepts outside the Corpocracy are normally hard to clearly visualize, express, even confess into Americanese. Social Democracies, Germany, Canada, Scandinavia, etc. Accept adapt these, to the overall economic benefit, and competitivity of the nation, over the purely Capitalist situations.
Wish this type of building had been available when I purchased my home (instead of being a prisoner to ever increasing power bills) – this concept is catching on “down under” in New Zealand too.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU1206/S01104/nzs-first-zero-energy-house-leads-move-to-end-power-bills.htm
http://zeroenergyhouse.co.nz/
Natural gas is not clean. True, burning it doesn’t directly put as much crap into the air as an energy-equivalent amount of coal. However, if that natural gas is from fracking (which is, unfortunately, becoming the norm) then it’s anything but clean. Aside from the pollution to groundwater, a good deal of methane escapes fracking operations and goes directly into the atmosphere. The drilling companies do not measure this, and are not required to report it, so the actual quantity is not known. However, it’s blatantly obvious in many cases – you an actually see bubbles rising in rivers and lakes in areas that have been fracked. Since methane is 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, it only takes a small methane leak to make natural gas more damaging to the atmosphere than coal.
“Clean natural gas, clean coal.” Oxymorons both.
That’s why Steve Aplin has been pointing out the ties between Ontario “renewables” (wind) advocates and the natural gas lobby. The LDP’s lock on the province actually shattered over that one.
The crawl in the screen cap at the top gave me a chuckle
Styrofoam is a brand name for one of a very large family of insulative closed-cell extruded polystyrene foam. If I had more git-up-n-go I would find an industrial chemist and start a company that would manufacture solid high-strength foam blocks which would come in a limited variety of interlocking designs for home construction.
Each block would be sized to be small enough so a single or two-person crew could maneuver them around and erect a home as a DIY project. Blocks would be at least two feet thick – giving walls a ridiculously high R factor. Blocks would come pre-formed and pre-fitted with connective hardware for supporting joist, for anchoring solar panels on roof sections. There would be exterior dados ~ one inch deep to accommodate woven stainless steel belts to anchor the structure to the ground or foundation in case of high winds. Interior dados for wiring.
A single flat-top truck could deliver an entire home’s worth of blocks, and a single fellow could put up a two-story structure pretty darned fast. Blocks glued together = super-high insulation, minimal air infiltration, and extremely quiet homes. Interior and exteriors easily coated with plasters or stucco.
Anybody know anything about the load-bearing potential of custom foam?
People have gotten there ahead of you. Google “insulated concrete forms” and go from there—lots of Youtubes. The systems are not as “elegant” as what you propose, but they do seem quite workable
PS Have you ever checked out haybale construction? Highly dependent on “renewables”, and DOES give you two-foot thick walls.
http://www.thermabuilt.com/
That seems to be a more traditional panelized/modular system. What Roger is talking about is better demonstrated by the Igleo system (more Lego-like) or the GlobalBlock ICF system.
It’s an SIP, but not very traditional; the lack of thermal bridging and not needing lumber for structural support is somewhat unusual. It’s also fireproof and amazingly strong; I’ve seen the test rig used to verify shear strength.
ICFs may do the job for you, or may not. You’re probably not going to get as much insulation in a given thickness of ICF as you will in a sandwich panel. It’s always worth working the numbers.
I foresee a major return-to-the-land movement in twenty years.
There are going to be a lot of young, not very affluent folks, who are going to want to buy a parcel, grow their own. Nobody in that demographic is going to be able to afford carbon fuels by then. And buying cheap and retrofitting is going to be way, way more expensive than putting up your own block home.
I know foam blocks would work for small single-story homes. There is a company right now putting up yurt-like domes made of styrofoam sprayed over with some sort of plaster. And small on-room structures for disaster relief have been put up with foam panels.
Hay bales are cool, but really labor intensive. And you need to have the materiel, so building one is a more than one year proposition. If you are a young urbanite trying to avoid the coming disaster that city life with an imploding economy is going to represent, you need to get out and get established fast. What could be easier than foam. You want to renovate? Pull out a saber saw.
I have seen some extruded foams used in marine applications. The stuff is really tough and strong. I just wonder if a formulation can be made strong enough to use as a building materiel itself, not just used as insulation or as a mold for concrete. Roof sections would likely need to be reinforced with metal channels or a stiff plaster.
In twenty years or so, nobody is going to be able to afford to heat their homes with gas or oil, and nobody is going to want to put more CO2 into the air either. If a home isn’t superinsulated, nobody is going to want to live in it. ( Unless we accomplish my dream, which is to have free electricity for everyone from our new National Renewable Energy Utility. :))
This is no different than Energiewende throughout Germany, except in scale. In fact, it is a model of how it happened since almost all,of the renewables are locally and privately owned. no wonder there is a Greentea coalition in the US. Both are opposed to large corporate ownership and the alienation it creates. Both take pride in self sufficiency and independence. One small difference is that Freiamt is gathering as a local community. If the residents of Georgia do the same, they might also succeed at overcoming corporate welfare schemes with government guided by corporate pressure.