VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA - If you think energy efficiency can't do much to beat high fuel prices and tackle global warming, consider a 15-acre neighborhood under construction in Victoria, British Columbia. Your view will include a heating plant fed by waste wood chips, and water from a sewage treatment plant trickles gently outside the back door.
Dockside Green is no architectural hair shirt. Residents do indeed gaze upon a stream partly fed by the outfall of a tiny, on-site sewage-treatment plant. Yet the water is almost clean enough to drink. It burbles among rocks, driftwood and native vegetation between town houses with private planted terraces and apartment buildings that rise as high as 10 stories. Runoff from roofs and driveways also feeds the stream, which tumbles through reed-planted basins among stairs and walks. A long-legged egret may drop by for breakfast.
The woodland stream is the centerpiece of what will become a 26-building, 1.3-million-square-foot (120,000-square-meter) mix of apartments, restaurants, stores and offices at completion, perhaps six years from now. Victoria-based Windmill Development and Vancity, a local Canadian credit union, have rescued a close- in, industrial site near the edge of the Inner Harbor in this picturesque city of blue ocean inlets and fir-covered ridges on Vancouver Island.
On a recent visit, builders were assembling a biomass gasification plant about the size of a tractor trailer. It will accelerate the decomposition of wood waste, creating gas that is burned for low-cost, soot-free heat and hot water. Few developers are interested in treating sewage and burning lumber leftovers, though Windmill's co-chairman, Joe Van Belleghem, sees what's called natural capitalism as a new lens for creating value.'' He offered to pay the city of Victoria $1 million if the project doesn't achieve a platinum award (the highest) from the Canada Green Building Council's LEED rating system. That got everyone's attention, Van Belleghem said by telephone. The 108,000-square-foot first phase scored higher than any other development rated by LEED.
While politicians and lobbyists debate massive, years-long investments to increase North American energy supplies, Dockside Green dramatically cuts energy use now. Conservation and efficiency have generally been treated condescendingly in the U.S. energy debate, like the bright but annoying student whose hand always shoots up first. Experts argue about what truly constitutes carbon neutral, though Dockside Green certainly comes close without using unproven technologies or promising to plant trees in Brazil. The development avoids the self-conscious display of its eco-tactics. If anything, it's too blandly, reassuringly pleasant.
Vancouver architecture firm Busby Perkins & Will has calibrated the depth of apartment balconies to shade the units from excess sun, augmented by sensor-driven awnings that unfurl automatically. The rooms are arranged so that most ventilate naturally - a necessary feature in the days before air conditioning yet now largely a lost art. The care taken in the building's configuration means air conditioning isn't needed. The biomass boiler supplies a radiant heating system in the floor and hot water for bathing and washing.
With these and other measures, bills for heating and hot water among a homeowner's largest expenses are almost eliminated, along with the greenhouse gases that would be generated by conventional heating. Residents also save because the development puts almost nothing into the city's sewage stream. That means a great deal to cities hitting their sewage-treatment limit just as floods worsen.
Dockside Green also shows how community design can reduce reliance on cars. The close-in location links residents to four bus lines, a tiny passenger ferry that chugs to various locations around the bay, and the Galloping Goose bike path, which is fast becoming a commuting artery, not just a road for weekend excursions. A car-sharing service may permit some families to sell one of their vehicles. A recent analysis of similar communities designed to reduce auto use suggested that a one-third reduction in miles driven is achievable. That's huge compared with the gains that will come from the 35-miles-per-gallon U.S. fleet average'' mandated by Congress for 2020.
According to Van Belleghem, one family moved from a suburb to Dockside Green because they wanted to trade long commutes and house maintenance for a short bike commute that allows more time at home with children. I think of this when people tell me we cannot cut America's energy profligacy because it will require radical lifestyle changes and politically unpalatable sacrifice. Dockside Green's appeal suggests that we need an attitude change: Let's start thinking about how to make lemonade (a shorter commute) out of lemons (higher gas prices).
Source: Bloomberg