Green House Affection

Green house affection is an article in the Kansas City Star this week about one couple's attempt to build a zero-energy home. The house they built is near Weston, MO, a short drive NW of Kansas City, MO.

The home’s architect is calling it “the greenest house in the Midwest, possibly in the country.”

.....

So rather than merely worrying, Hoffmann and Spertus seized their home-building opportunity to use sustainable design and hope the house will be a model for an energy future that’s not far off.

For starters, the 2,500-square-foot house will be so good at generating its own electricity that at times it will send excess electricity back to the power grid. It will use radiant tubes in the concrete slab for heating and cooling.

The house will use half the water of a regular home of its size, with part of the credit going to “dual-flush” toilets, which use a lower water flush for liquid waste than for solids.

I have long thought the next major society-changing, prosperity-creating, technology to emerge would be homes with their power plants operating off some form of sustainable energy. I believe reliable, low-cost energy units for cooking and home climate control would create benefits that would stagger the imagination:

 

• Climate control in many places would reduce susceptibility to disease.
• Boiling water where clean water is scarce would be greatly facilitated.
• Deforestation would lessen the need to use wood for fuel. Plus, more trees and foliage act as scrubbers for the pollutants.
• Lighting would extend the hours available for a variety businesses, education, and recreation.
• Inexpensive computers could be used with ongoing internet access, increasing options for education and integration into the world economy.

There is a way to go, but I fully expect to so the advent of such technology and its use on a wide scale in my lifetime. I am praying for it. Couples like this one are taking us one step closer.

Comments

[Dana Ames]

Amen to that. "Sustainability" is a very popular concept in my part of the world. There's a group in the next town north (pop 4000) who want to work to make the whole burg totally self-sustaining; don't know if that's possible, but the emphasis is definitely on local. Sure would like to see "pork barrel" money go into some kind of incentives for developing workable, affordable technology for alternative energy sources.

Dana

[Michael Kruse]

It seems to be that there is lifecycle to how these technologies develop. Look at how the personal computer industry developed. A bunch of technology geeks would read technical and scientific journals about building your own computer in 1960s and 1970s. They would go to Radio Shack and get parts and build their own computers. But the computers couldn’t do much. So some began developing a computer instructional language called BASIC. The language inspired geeks to build a more sophisticated language which in turn inspired more complex machines. Finally, the machines became standardized enough that quasi-geeks became interested. As they found new applications, they set off new iterations of hardware and software developments until the Apple Computer emerged as a product that could be embraced by the larger public. By the early 1980s, IBM, who had been trivializing the whole personal computer scene, did a 180 and the rest is history.

You see this same pattern with the development of the telegraph, the automobile, the airplane, television and just about every other major technological innovation for consumer markets.

There is a place for large government and corporate investments. The space program and later the controversial Star Wars missile defense programs generated an incredible amount of scientific knowledge (and absorbed an incredible amount of tax dollars.) However, the driving force in bring innovation to the market place comes from serendipitous unmanaged entrepreneurship.

If you had been looking at IBM headquarters, instead of what was going on in Steve Jobs (Apple Computers) garage in the late 1970s, what would your vision of the future have been? Similarly, should we be looking at what is happening at the HQ for GE or should we be looking at houses like this one, and the efforts of the community near you? That is why I find stories like this house exciting!

[Dana Ames]

Yup.
D.