| June 29th, 2009Guest speaker Secretary Ian Bowles to discuss the vision for
Massachusetts’ zero energy future LEXINGTON, Mass., June 10 /PRNewswire/ Over the course of the last year, Massachusetts’ investor-owned electric utility companies – National Grid, NSTAR, Unitil and Western Mass Electric Company — successfully implemented a unique energy efficiency pilot program called the Zero Energy Challenge. Five home builders competed to construct super energy-efficient single-family homes and will be awarded prizes based on their results totaling $50,000. The awards event will be held June 29, 2009 at 1:00 p.m. at the Massachusetts State House with guest speaker Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Ian Bowles. The purpose of this initiative, in alliance with Governor Patrick’s Net-Zero Energy Goal and the Massachusetts Green Communities Act, was to promote the use of advanced energy efficiency technologies and engage Massachusetts homebuilders in utilizing advanced building techniques. Each competitor in the Zero Energy Challenge was challenged to use best practice HVAC installations, demonstrate the use of advanced and replicable building techniques and integrate the use of renewable energy systems into their projects to make them as energy-efficient as possible. The homes used energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies such as double-stud wall and super-insulation, passive solar design, thermal air panel, heat-recovery ventilation, mini-split heat pump technology, super efficient windows, photovoltaic electricity panels and other state-of-the-art green building methods and technologies to achieve their goals. “These homes will serve as ‘laboratories’ to help identify innovative and cost-effective building technologies and practices that can be used by all building professionals interested in constructing homes that have close to zero energy use,” states David Ruggiero, Zero Energy Challenge Manager. The winners were selected based on their project scores on the nationally recognized ENERGY STAR/HERS rating scale. The Home Energy Rating System (HERS) index runs from 100 to 0. Typically homes built to the prevailing code standard would score 100, homes built to the ENERGY STAR standard would score 85 and a zero energy home would score 0. The homes, located in the following communities, are a mix of income eligible, affordable, and market rate projects: Lawrence National Grid Bread & Roses Housing Sudbury NSTAR Electric Private residential development Townsend Unitil Transformations, Inc. Greenfield Western MA Electric Rural Development, Incorporated Turners Falls Western MA Electric Private residential development For more information, please visit http://www.zechallenge.com. |
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009 MONTAGUE – The American dream was once about owning a home. Now, for many, it’s about owning a home with low utility bills. Christina I. Clarke had a bigger dream – no utility bills. But when the Montague resident got her April electric bill, she realized reality had exceeded even that ambitious hope. The solar panels on her roof, which convert sunlight to electricity, had produced more power for the month than her highly energy efficient home had used, with the surplus sent back into the electric grid. The Western Massachusetts Electric Co. informed her that for April the utility owed her $103. “We knew we were over-generating, but we were surprised at how much more,” she said. These days, when you say your home is green, it usually has nothing to do with the color of your clapboards. Clarke’s home, built for about $200,000, is so green that it won the statewide “Zero Energy Challenge.” Put up by the state’s major electric utilities, the prizes were awarded Monday in a ceremony at the Statehouse to three of the builders for innovation in constructing homes that create as much energy as they use. Florence home builder Bick Corsa, who constructed the home for Clarke and her partner, Douglas A. Stephens, took the top prize, $25,000. Corsa said the things that are most successful at lowering utility bills in a new home are tried-and-true design techniques. “People tend to go for glamorous high-tech gadgets. There is nothing wrong with that stuff, but I tell people to go with the things that pay for themselves. A superinsulated shell for the house; put your money into that. It has no maintenance and it will save you on your heating,” he said. Also, homes that have lots of windows that face toward the sun, called passive solar heating, will reduce heating bills. In this region, facing to the southwest gets you the most sun exposure. “Those two things together – superinsulation and passive solar heating – are by far the most effective ways to have a really low-energy house. They are simple things that do their job year after year,” Corsa said. The home, which Clarke and Stephens have lived in since December, is 1,152 square feet on a single floor. Built on a slab with no basement, it has three bedrooms, a living room and a combination kitchen and dining area. “The house is really well insulated and really tight,” Clarke said. “We’re able to harvest the sun’s energy in four ways – the solar panels on the roof (that convert sunlight to electricity), the hot water panels (that use the sun to heat water), the architecture of the house, with south facing windows (through which the sun heats the interior), and hot air panels (that use the sun to heat air that is distributed around the house).” The solar, or photovoltaic, panels on the roof are rated at 5 kilowatts. Without government subsidies, such a panel system typically costs $36,000 to $46,000, according to the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. But depending on a buyer’s income, with state and federal renewable energy subsidies, it would cost considerably less. Clarke and Stephens paid about $11,000 for their system. Another Pioneer Valley home that took part in the competition is an attached residence in Wisdom Way Solar Village in Greenfield, a “near zero energy” housing subdivision being developed by the Rural Development Inc. A nonprofit organization that was created by the Franklin County Housing and Redevelopment Authority in 1991, the agency develops affordable homes for low and moderate income individuals. Calls to them have increased sharply in the last year, said Anne Perkins, director of home ownership programs for Rural Development. “Oil and gas prices went so high and the bottom dropped out of the economy, and then along with that, people have a growing awareness of global warming that has led them to want to build as energy efficient homes as they can,” she said. Like Corsa, she said it is not new technology or techniques that make zero-energy homes possible. “Almost all of it is bringing older knowledge together and utilizing it in such a way that the home can be ‘net zero energy,’” Perkins said. Turning an existing home to a zero-energy residence “is definitely more challenging. They call it a deep-energy retrofit. They used to call it a gut rehab,” she said. The entry to the contest from Wisdom Way Solar Village is 1,392 square feet. Half of a duplex, it has three bedrooms and a full basement. The photovoltaic panels on the roof are rated at 3.42 kilowatts. It has solar heated water; high-efficiency windows; superinsulated walls; an Energy Star refrigerator, dishwasher, and clothes washer; and compact fluorescent light bulbs throughout the house. The other three entries in the competition are in Lawrence, Sudbury and Townsend. For those interested in seeing what zero-energy living is like, Clarke and Stephens plan to hold open houses at their home Thursday and July 9 from 4-7 p.m. The address is 14 Marston Alley in Montague. While the specific home at Wisdom Way Solar Village that was part of the competition has been sold and is occupied, other similarly energy-efficient homes in the village are periodically opened for public tours. To find out when the next tour is taking place, call Wendy Forbes of Rural Development at (413) 863-9781, Ext. 141.
©2009 The Republican © 2009 MassLive.com All Rights Reserved. By Paul Restuccia
Photo by Brian Megliola POWERHOUSE: Tina Clarke and Doug Stephens built this three-bedroom house in Turners Falls. How green can a house get? A Bay State couple lives in a highly energy-efficient home that creates two-and-a-half times more power than it needs. Tina Clarke and Doug Stephens, who built the three-bedroom house in Turners Falls for just $180,000, just won a $10,000 prize for the best “Zero Net Energy” project from the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, which starts its 35th annual trade show in Boston tomorrow. “We built this home to show others that you can have a comfortable home without using fossil fuels,” said Clarke, who works for Transition Town, a group that encourages sustainable communities. The 1,152-square-foot, cedar-shingled house has a metal roof covered with photovoltaic solar panels that last year generated 4,892 kilowatt hours of electricity. The house itself only used 1,959 kilowatts for the entire year – making its annual energy bill for heating, cooling, hot water, cooking, appliances and lighting an astoundingly low $392. The couple sold 2,933 kilowatt hours worth $586 back to the grid. “We didn’t just build a house but a powerhouse, an official company on the grid,” Clarke said. The house stretches east to west, creating a long roof with southern exposure and deep overhangs that keep it shady in the summer. The roof is covered with 26 panels made by Evergreen Solar of Marlboro, as well as solar hot water panels. The outside walls are a foot thick and filled with insulation made of ground-up newspapers treated with fire retardent. The attic has 30 inches of such insulation. Windows are triple glazed and most floors are four-inch thick concrete with foam underneath that absorbs the sun’s heat in the winter and holds coolness in the summer. The house has careful air sealing throughout, a high-efficiency heat recovery ventilator and an air-source pump used for heating and cooling. But this “super-green” house is by no means sterile looking. It’s filled with light, especially an open living, dining and kitchen area with tall south-facing windows. “It’s a comfortable light-filled, gorgeous place,” said Stephens, a land surveyor, who said he’s willing to give away the blueprints. “We didn’t set out to win a prize, but just to build a simple, very efficient house that we would want to live in.” http://www.bostonherald.com/business/real_estate/view.bg?articleid=1238366 |
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