What kind of nerd does it make me that I’d rather go to an architecture lecture than get down on the dance floor?
This weekend I flew through Chicago on my way to a wedding in Madison, Wisconsin – that of our wind-energy-PhD-holding friend Suzanne [1], who works at the National Renewable Energy Lab [2]. The wedding was great, a very sweet ceremony, and the reception was at the Monona Terrace [3], the Madison convention center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright [4], in the aptly named Hall of Ideas. One of the other guests was my friend Ric, who works for a big energy consulting firm [5] – and who, incidentally, hipped me up to geoexchange heating systems [5] when I wrote about them last year.
The scene on the dance floor: many folks, young and old, getting down with their funky chickens [6] and their hesitation swingouts [7]. (Suzanne and her new hub, John, would put those Dancing with the Stars [8] fools to shame. They’re like the Fred and Ginger [9] of Monona Terrace.)
The scene back in the far corner of the hall: Me, Ric, and his wife and mine, nerding out about big solar farm projects [10] Ric’s been studying.
Just this morning, when we rolled into Chicago’s Midway airport, I heard a voice call my name through the pre-caffeine clouds: It was my architect, Brian Fuentes [11], on his way back from the North American Passive House Conference [12] in Urbana, Illinois, put on by PHIUS [13], the Passive House Institute US, and E-co Lab [14]. A passive house [15] is a super-insulated house that uses passive solar gain and internal heat gain – the energy given off by the people moving and dogs chewing bones and computers computing inside it – to heat it. It’s largely a European concept, pushed along by the Passive House Energy Standard [16], in which houses are designed to use 80 percent less energy than a standard code-compliant house. Built Green Colorado [17] homes, by comparison, use about 30 percent less. So we're talking pretty efficient housing here.
Along with Brian (and my friend Dave, whom some of you will remember from blogs gone by [17]) a lot of Germans [18] were in attendance. Apparently, after the oil scares of the 70s faded away and Americans lost their fever for energy independence and earthships [19] and solar power, the Germans kept cranking. The Passive House concept is big in Germany – and in Austria, which is where another member of Boulder’s green mafia comes from: Norbert Klebl [20], who’s building a zero-energy housing development out in Arvada, 20 miles down the road from Boulder. Tight, super-insulated buildings (roofs insulated to R-50!), geothermal heating, solar power, Solar Harvest [21]-like energy recovery ventilation systems – bringing outside fresh air into the home via underground tubes that use the earth’s consistent underground temps to warm incoming winter air or cool incoming summer air… Two hundred fifty single-family homes, townhouses and co-housing units in a zero-energy, New Urbanist [22]-esque development. Sweet.
Anyway, Brian let me leaf through his conference program on the flight back. What does it say about me that I look at talk topics like “Climate Change and the 2000-Watt Society” and think, Damn, maybe I should have skipped the rehearsal dinner?