Green Building Expo

We checked out a green building expo “Built Green Conference 2010″  http://www.builtgreenconference.com/1/home.html today to see what is going on.  It was offered by the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties.  The cost to get in was $15.00 per person, so for the fiancée and I $30 plus $5 to park for the 1/2 hour it took to walk the whole expo.  The expo was geared towards builders, but open to the public for a few hours in the afternoon.  My personal opinion is that if these companies and associations want to get people to attend these type of things, free is a really good way to start.  I think there may have been 5 or 6 people at this thing that were paid visitors, not a very high traffic turnout.  If I had a booth at this show and paid what was probably a pretty steep expo fee, I would be a little upset and not looking at coming back in the future.  Just my thoughts on this subject of expos.

As for the actual exhibitors, there was a good mix of companies.  I think one of the most interesting things at the expo for me was a group called the Stewardship Partners  www.stewardshippartners.org and their affiliation with Salmon Safe http://www.salmonsafe.org/ This group does a pretty intensive certification of farms, properties, golf courses, etc. From what I can see, they look like  a good group to support.  There were many other exhibitors selling things such as building panel systems, windows, other “green” things.  I will probably get in touch with the only solar company that was at this show, Northwest Mechanical Inc. www.nwmechanical.com, to have them come out and quote a solar system.  Not sure if it will be PV or hot water, but I think it is time to take the next step.  There were also a couple there that may or may not be so green, but you can look at the list on the website and decide for yourself.

I think it is great that these things “Green Expos” have shown up and are becoming more common.

Random Thoughts

It has been a while since I posted, actually over a month.  I was on a roll with the led lighting, but I am kind of waiting and looking at things for a while.  I continue to use the bulbs that I have bought and the one over the sink at my fiancees house is working good so far.

There are a couple of websites that I wanted to direct people to:

http://www.thegatesnotes.com

Bill Gates has given some talks about energy and is looking at the world of sustainable and renewable energy.  His site has some very good links.  The other site is a book that was recommended by Bill Gates.  The book was written by David MacKay, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air.  It is a free book that can be read online (found at http://www.withouthotair.com/)  and it is a very good way of looking at energy usage.  I particularly like the way he boils down personal energy usage to the equivalent of kilowatt hours which he explains can be visualized as the following:

1 kilowatt-hour = one 40 watt light bulb turned on for one year

In my job, I travel quite a bit by air.  In looking at air travel and the energy usage that I use per year, it is quite scary and not sustainable. I think the most amazing thing from the book and air travel is the following paragraph, which I have copied directly:

A Boeing 747-400 with 240 000 litres of fuel carries 416 passengers about
8 800 miles (14 200 km). And fuel’s calorific value is 10 kWh per litre. (We
learned that in Chapter 3.) So the energy cost of one full-distance roundtrip
on such a plane, if divided equally among the passengers, is

2 × 240 000 litre ______________________	× 10 kWh/litre ≈ 12 000 kWh per passenger
416 passengers

If you make one such trip per year, then your average energy consumption
per day is

12 000 kWh	≈ 33 kWh/day
_____________________ 365 days

So based on what the author of the book says and if I kind of work out a recent flight that I took, Seattle to Oakland, CA a little over 600 miles, and the plane was probably 80% full, a 737-700 gets a little over 40 mpg per passenger or about 0.43 mpg for the plane. So to move me to Oakland and back I used about 1100 kilowatt hours, or I turned on 3 40 watt light bulbs for a year.  Doesn’t look like much until you consider that there are thousands of flights a day all over the world.

Even more amazing and scary, we recently went to an event at Boeing and one of the displays showed all of the airplanes in the sky during different hours of the day around the world.  At one point, there were over 13,000 commercial big planes in the air at one time.  Makes you wonder how long we can continue like this.  I guess that is enough for now, more to come.