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Transition Tallahassee's World Cafe

Sun, 6 Oct 2013 16:08:20 -0400

For Transition Tallahassee’s World Cafe, Sustainable Tallahassee board members Mark Powell (chair of Sustainable Tallahassee’s Renewables Advocacy Committee) and Tom Cordi volunteered to lead a breakout discussion on Solar Community Gardens. Our table first discussed the components of a Solar Community Garden and then summarized and discussed two different models for solar community gardens (below). Tom Cordi expertly discussed the Colorado model and provided a lively summary of our break out session to the rest of the audience.

1) The Orlando Utilities

The OUC Garden is a 400 kw system that acts as roof on parking area. The Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) between OU and 3rd party is .18/kwh but they subscribers are charged .13/kwh. OU makes up difference selling REC credits on voluntary market. 3rd party gets fed tax credit. Based on notes from a OUC powerpoint, the program allows OUC customers to put down a $50 deposit and buy "shares" of the farm in 1 kw increments up to 15 kwh. The shares allow subscribers to pay a fixed rate of $.13/kwh on their electric bills over a 25 year term. A 5 kWh share costs $14 per month. The program sold out in 6 days. The program also has "virtual net metering" which credits their bill if they have a larger share then they use. For example, if their 10 kWh share of the 400 kWh farm produces 1200 kWh in a given month and their home energy usage is 1000 kWh, the customer pays $.13/kwh for 1000 kWh on their bill ($130), $28 for their 10 kw share, and then is credited for the 200 kWh "excess" (presumably at the $.13/kwh rate) so the bill would end up $130 + $28 - $26 = $132).

2. Colorado

The Clean Energy Collective has acted as the go between the utility and the investors. For $750 a person can purchase a one panel share in the garden. They have been able to get the price paid to investors to about down $.12/kwh and offer a 50 y guarantee with a 12 year payback period on the investment, as well as regularly scheduled maintenance. Partnering with this group could also provide benefits to non profits such that some portion of the garden would be available to non profit participation. A local Green investment fund could potentially help lower income folks to invest in the program. It seems that this group (or another similar one) would be critical in helping "sell" such a program to the city and county.

This is the model we think best suits Tallahassee and over the next few months we will be working on how to make this a reality.

Rainbow Rehab Home Awarded LEED Gold!

Mon, 8 Oct 2012 17:44:44 -0400

It was a long process but well worth the wait. Way back in late 2008, Sustainable Tallahassee and Rainbow Rehab partnered to commence work on a gut rehab of a home on Putnam Drive in Tallahassee with the goal is adding to Tallahassee’s affordable home stock. But rather than a normal renovation, a dedicated team decided to go after certification by the U. S. Green Building Coalition’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. Of course also in 2008 the country was hit by a financial crisis that caused major upheavals, including relocations of several team members who were involved in the project. Having gone through the LEED process as team leader for building my own home, I decided help out with this project as a new board member of Sustainable Tallahassee. I used the existing documentation to assemble and submit the LEED package, and Steven Service completed the third party green rating for the home. The package was submitted in May and we were just notified that the project was awarded GOLD with 70 points. This is a big deal and will be celebrated at a future Sustainable Tallahassee meeting.

Team members who contributed to the success of the project include: Buddy Holshouser (Rainbow Rehab President), Mark Worley (Worley Construction), Steven Service (Green Rater), Marc Dick (LEED AP , Landscape Architect, and TCC Workforce Development Program Specialist), Rachelle Jewel-McClure (Original Team leader and LEED AP, RR), Loren Mason (Benson’s HVAC), Larry Peterson (ST), Tom Cordi (ST), Kristin Dozier (ST), Anne Hingst (RR), Cara North (RR), and all the wonderful volunteers who participated.

Here’s a Documentary film on the project produced by Jeanette Castillo of Florida State University’s School of Communication.

Southwood Nature Videos Released on Youtube

Mon, 8 Oct 2012 11:21:00 -0400

After a late spring and summer of filming in Southwood’s conservations areas, a series of videos have been released to help educate residents about our conservation areas:

YouTube video links:

Southwood Green Space Stewardship

Green Space Connections

Southwood’s Natural World

Southwood is lucky to have diverse wildlife within its conservation areas including deer, Sherman’s Fox Squirrel, wood ducks, wood storks, otters, Gopher Tortoise, bald eagles, owls, hawks, falcons, kestrels, foxes, Pileated woodpeckers, bluebirds, hummingbirds, and even Whooping Cranes. Residents were concerned about maintaining the wildlife habitats in the areas.
Among the concerns were car speeds on adjacent roads, dogs running off-leash threatening the wildlife, motorized model aircraft and water craft in and over the lakes, and golf carts on nature trails and conservation area grounds creating unsafe conditions. The videos are intended to inform and educate about these areas, their rich history, and connections so we can protect them for residents and wildlife together.

The films were the brainchild of Carolyn Bibler, a dedicated Southwood resident and community activist. The Capital Region Community Development District (CDD) has responsibility over Southwood’s conservation areas. With the support of the Southwood Capital Development District (CDD), especially supervisors Wayne Toothman and Barry Brooks, Carolyn pulled together a team led by experienced videographer and documentary producer Lex Matthews of Matthews Motion Video. Several residents appear in the films as subjects or in interviews. During the filming I found out that Lex and I had both been 7th floor residents of Salley Hall at FSU during our undergrad days. Lex continues to deny the rumors that he instigated the streaking episodes that made FSU (in)famous way back then. And if you see film 3, I did Not place the tortoise in the lake!

A scientist reflects on Hurricane Andrew

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:34:17 -0400

Just tell me if Andrew’s coming

On Saturday, August 22nd 1992, I was meeting with Herb Saffir (coauthor of the Saffir Simpson Scale) in his Coral Gables office on a manual for post-storm damage investigation as the hurricane scientist member of a panel Herb was chairing for the American Society of Civil Engineers. As the meeting ended it became apparent that Andrew, which had become a hurricane that morning, was approaching the Bahamas and was not going to recurve northward as hoped. It was coming right at us! I called my wife and told her to get to Publix since a hurricane warning was imminent and we knew from earlier storms that there would soon be a run on supplies. I headed off to Home Depot for plywood and wondered how I would protect the house and still make my scheduled research reconnaissance flight into the storm Sunday on one of NOAA’s P3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft. As a hurricane wind specialist I would be monitoring the wind field and radar displays over a proposed ten hour mission. That mission was scrubbed when it became apparent that the aircraft would need to be evacuated from their base at Miami International Airport. Instead, the Air Force Reserve’s of the 53rd Weather Squadron out of Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi flew a C-130 into the storm late Sunday, while I thankfully completed my shutters and we accommodated some friends (and their pets) who lived in a storm surge evacuation zone. Our home was near 20 ft above sea level on the coastal ridge in Coconut Grove (about 3 miles south of downtown Miami) so flooding would not be a problem.

Well, Andrew hit overnight and by 9 am Monday morning and we seemed to be OK. Lots of trees were down and the power out but the house was intact with just a few broken roof tiles and one cracked window. We walked down to Biscayne Bay to check on the flooding and took some pictures, feeling the excitement of viewing a dramatically changed landscape. The mood changed when we received a call from another friend who was crying and upset about damage further south. We spent hours picking our way about 10 miles south to find that our guests home in “Whispering Pines” was within ground zero of the northern eyewall of Andrew. Their roof covering was peeled, double front doors were blown in, and all their living room furniture had been blasted through a sliding glass door into their pool. Our friends were in shock and time was short due to an impending curfew so we made our way to Dixie Highway (difficult since all the street signs were blown down) for the drive back to Coconut Grove. We were marveling at the lack of any organized response, when we noticed a white school bus making its way southward on US1. We all cried when we saw that the first responders were the City of Charleston Police Department. This was pay back from 1989, when Charleston was hit by Hurricane Hugo and Metro-Dade County helped in the response.

Overnight more than 200,000 were left homeless without power and with few supplies. Fifteen died from blunt trauma or drowning in the storm surge. It took days for significant relief to arrive with Kate Hale, the Dade emergency Director pleading “Where the hell is the cavalry on this one?” Despite the slow pace of response, it was amazing how the communities of South Florida pulled together to help each other out, with neighbors helping each other and sharing supplies.

It was also amazing that the Air Force crew on that C130 flew all night, monitoring Andrew as it strengthened through landfall and continuing to fly a hazardous pattern over land as the storm progressed inland. For several months afterwards our lab worked to piece together data and reconstruct Andrew’s wind field. We visited sites with incredible damage where lives were lost. The public sent data in and we worked with wind engineering colleagues who wind tunnel tested anemometers similar to the one that measured the peak wind speed in Perrine. State Attorney General Janet Reno called to check on how strong the winds were to allay some of the rumors. Back then the reconnaissance aircraft did not have a way to measure the winds near the surface so storm intensity was estimated as a fraction of the maximum flight-level winds, resulting in a Category 4 assessment on the Saffir-Simpson scale. After 10 years, a new type of instrument, the GPS dropwindsonde, could provide measurements closer to the surface suggesting that Andrew may have been a Category 5 storm at landfall. Our recent research on the Stepped-Frequency Microwave radiometer, a new instrument that remotely senses wind speed from the radiative emission of sea foam, reinforced the Category 5 assessment.

Hurricane Andrew had a profound affect on everyone living in South Florida at the time. Its one of those life milestones from which we measure everything before or after. Miami-Dade county responded with a tough new building code with product testing and enforcement, which influenced the eventual development of a unified Florida Building Code. The insurance industry started to use sophisticated models that could estimate the risk of future Andrews, and performance in emergency management and response was found to influence presidential elections. The rebuilding created an economic boom, but many folks moved away while others moved in transforming rural areas like Homestead from farm fields into suburbs.

We developed a research analysis system called H*Wind, which now allows us to monitor and analyze the wind field in real time using every piece of data we can get our hands on, including portable MET towers placed just ahead of the storm by engineering and atmospheric science students and faculty at the University of Florida and Texas Tech. We have a much better idea of the intensity and extent of the damaging winds now, and also developed new damage scales based on integrated kinetic energy that consider the destructive potential of large storms.

Thankfully Florida’s big bend has not experienced any Andrew’s but many will remember the power outages and downed trees from late season Hurricane Kate in 1985. As I write this, Tropical Storm Isaac is entering the Caribbean Sea and some of the global scale prediction models suggest Florida, perhaps even the Big Bend, will be threatened next week. Its too early to trust these predictions just yet, but its not too early to reflect on Andrew and Kate, and other hurricanes that have affected our state and country.

Andrew occurred during a year forecast to have “below normal” activity. I’m often asked, “What kind of year are we going to have”?
My answer: It doesn’t matter... just tell me whether Andrew’s coming.

Mark Powell is an atmospheric scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Hurricane Research Division. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and a Certified Consulting Meteorologist. Mark is stationed at Florida State University’s Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies. This piece represents his opinion as a scientist and does not represent an official position of NOAA.

References:

Powell, M.D., S.H.Houston, and T.A. Reinhold, 1996: Hurricane Andrew's landfall in South Florida Part I : Standardizing measurements for documentation of surface wind fields. Wea. Forecast. 11, 304-328.

Powell, M.D., and S.H.Houston, 1996: Hurricane Andrew's landfall in South Florida Part II : Surface wind fields and potential real-time applications. Wea. Forecast. 11, 329-349.

Powell, M. D., S. Murillo, P. Dodge, E. Uhlhorn, J. Gamache, V. Cardone, A. Cox, S. Otero, N. Carrasco, B. Annane, and R. St. Fleur, 2010: Reconstruction of Hurricane Katrina?s wind fields for storm surge and wave hindcasting. Ocean Engineering, 37, 26-36.

Powell, M. D., S. H. Houston, L. R. Amat, and N Morisseau-Leroy, 1998: The HRD real-time hurricane wind analysis system. J. Wind Engineer. and Indust. Aerodyn. 77&78, 53-64

Powell, Mark D., Eric Uhlhorn, and Jeffrey D. Kepert, 2009 : "Estimating Maximum Surface Winds from Hurricane Reconnaissance Measurements", Wea. Forecasting, 24 No. 3, p.868-883

For more research by Mark go to:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Powell/

Putnam Drive in Tallahassee

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 14:15:27 -0400

As a joint project between Sustainable Tallahassee and Rainbow Rehab, a home on Putnam Drive was renovated according to the guidelines of the U. S. Green Building Coalition’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, LEED for Homes. The LEED provider is the Florida Solar Energy Center and Steven Service provided the rating services.

This home was renovated after a many months of hard work by a dedicated team of professionals and volunteers. Due to the economic slowdown and resulting job transitions for several of the project participants, I have been working to assemble the various LEED forms and documentation that are required for the LEED certification.

Here are the LEED for Homes submission files that were needed for this project:

Accountability Forms:
Builder
Landscaping
Durability

Checklists:
LEED for Homes checklist
LEED for Homes checklist signatures
Rater checklist in excel form (box checking not working)
Rater checklist in pdf form (appropriate boxes checked)

Documentation:
100y Flood
Energy Star
ManualD
Manual_J
ID1.2
ID1.4
LL5
LL6
MR1.1and MR1.2
MR1.3
MR2.1
MR3
Design_Work_Plan
Readme

Landscaping:
ECS
Plan
Survey1
Survey2

Photos (See the album links)
Owner walk through
Exterior and Landscape
Various stages of the project

Presentation at Sustainable Tallahassee Green Drinks

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 12:17:20 -0400

Here’s a pdf version of the presentation in case you missed it at Green Drinks. Green Drinks is a monthly series of speakers and presentations that provides opportunities for folks to share ideas and network. For more info go to www.sustainabletallahassee.org

Brown Bag talk at FSU

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 16:44:30 -0400

We had a full house at FSU’s Institute for Energy Systems, Economics and Sustainability (IESES) for an informal discussion of our LEED Home project.

Here is a pdf file of the slides I presented. I will be presenting the same talk in Miami during the week of June 20.

Dedication of LEED Plaque

Tue, 17 May 2011 10:37:30 -0400

Don't miss this upcoming USGBC Florida Capital Region Event!  Upcoming event information:  Powell Home Awarded USGBC LEED for Homes PLATINUM
4512 Grove Park Drive (Southwood), Tallahassee, FL 32311  Date: 20 May 2011, Friday 06:00 PM  
A Tallahassee home, 4512 Grove Park Drive in Southwood, has been awarded LEED For Homes PLATINUM certification by the U. S. Green Building Council for achievement in green homebuilding and design. The home is the first Tallahassee home to be certified LEED Platinum, and is the highest scoring project listed by the Florida LEED for Homes web site [www.floridaleedhomes.org].
LEED for Homes is a certification program that rewards homes designed and built to be energy- and resource-efficient and more healthy and durable for the occupants. LEED-certified homes complete a technically rigorous process that includes a home energy rating (HERS) and onsite inspections to verify that the home is built to be energy and water efficient, environmentally sound, and a healthier place to live.
Please join the proud owners, Dr. Mark and Linda Powell and the U. G. Green Building Council – Florida Capital Region Chapter members on May 20., 2011 at 5:30 p.m. at 4512 Grove Park Drive for the unveiling and dedication of the award plaque.
Refreshments will be served. Registration is not required, but for purposes of event management please RSVP via the USGBC-FCRC.org website.

Informal talk at FSU’s Institute for Energy systems, Economics, and sustainability

Tue, 17 May 2011 10:26:31 -0400

LEED Snapshot

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:29 -0400

Here is our LEED Project “Snapshot” with help from the U. S. Green Building Council. We will be giving a lunchtime “brown bag” presentation on the project at FSU’s Institute for Energy Systems, Economics, and Sustainability (IESES) in Innovation Park on May 20th. Also on May 20th, we will host the local chapter of the USGBC for an outdoor tour of the project and an unveiling of our LEED Platinum plaque. More details to come.