April Upstate New York Green Real Estate Report*

Ithaca is located in the heart of New York’s Finger Lakes region, an area of beautiful lakes, waterfalls, rolling hills, farmland, vineyards, and state parks. The city was just named the second “Best Green Place in America” in a survey commissioned by Country Home Magazine, which reported that more than sixteen percent of Ithaca's residents walk to work- the highest percentage in the nation. By combining walkers with bike riders and public transit riders with home office workers, Ithaca is number one when it comes to green commuters. (Image of 2005 Cornell Solar Decathlon Team entry above). Most of the green commuting in Ithaca is a result of Cornell University’s policies, which are a model for the entire country, and include things like indoor bike storage in new buildings and alternative fuel recharging areas for Cornell electric vehicles to encourage transportation alternatives. With 20,000 students, it is hard for the green scene in Ithaca to not be dominated by Cornell, which sits like emerald city, a shining beacon of greenness, on a hilltop overlooking the city and 40 mile-long, 400 foot-deep Cayuga Lake- the largest of the Finger Lakes of central New York State. University students, staff, and faculty members make up a third of Tompkins County’s population of 97,000 and support an amazing number of green initiatives. When it comes to real estate, Cornell has a lot of it. There are more than 260 major buildings on the 745 contiguous acres that comprise Cornell's flagship campus. How energy is generated and how efficiently it is used in all of this real estate is crucial to sustainability, and Cornell has been working hard to address clean energy production and energy efficiency. Because Cornell is so big- about 14 million square feet of indoor space across 260 campus buildings- it has established its own Green Building Oversight Committee, and it seems as if everything Cornell does revolves around sustainable issues.

Cornell is green from top to bottom- it offers more than 100 courses related to sustainability. The KyotoNOW! student-led group- the Kyoto Task Team- was created in 2001 to help guide the University’s CO2 reduction efforts. Aggressive campus energy efficiency and conservation efforts since 2001 have reduced energy use by five percent despite significant physical campus growth. Not to be out-greened by Cornell’s students, President David Skorton has made a commitment to move towards Carbon Neutrality by recently signing a letter of intent pledging his support for the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. Cornell’s intent is to achieve climate neutrality, by which the University would have a net-zero impact, particularly in terms of its campus CO2 emissions. Colleges and universities all across the United States are joining in this commitment which will help to advance education for sustainability across all sectors of society. Even before announcing its intent to be a zero net energy user, Cornell has been implementing energy efficient real estate improvement projects for the past 25 years that now save the university $7.6 million annually in energy expenditures and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 21 percent, or 71,000 tons, per year. A simple program to reduce electric use, including computers and monitors, over its thirteen day holiday break alone saves 4,000 kilowatts of electricity. Other methods such as demand-controlled ventilation, high performance building controls, high-efficiency lighting, increased building insulation, and replacing windows all help curb energy waste. While Cornell’s energy needs cannot be met without an adequate supply from the public utility (NYSEG), an impressive 16 percent of its power is generated by the University. Cornell now operates a 1,100 kilowatt hydroelectric plant in Fall Creek, which supplies about 2 percent of its energy. The school also has a steam/electricity cogeneration plant, which extracts added energy from nearly every pound of steam on its way to heat campus buildings- meeting 14 percent of Cornell's demand at 80 percent efficiency (twice that of conventional power plants). Moreover, Cornell has plans for a new combined heat and power plant which is scheduled to be completed in 2010. It will drastically improve efficiency and reduce coal usage by nearly 50 percent. The CHP project will add new cogeneration equipment that produces electricity and heat together, using significantly less energy than making them separately and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by over 20 percent.

In 2005, Cornell finished construction on the first LEED-certified buildings in Central New York State. Two new residence halls were granted green building certification under USGBC’s LEED system; these were the first university residence halls anywhere to earn a LEED rating. Among the many sustainable design elements that earned the buildings their certification were installing carpet, tile, doors and other products that were extracted and manufactured locally and/or that included recycled product content, designing spaces to take advantage of natural light and views of the outside environment, and choosing wood products from managed forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

The two new LEED residence buildings are centrally cooled with very low energy input and zero refrigerant use via the University's Lake Source Cooling plant, thereby avoiding the need for tons of greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases. The Lake Source Cooling plant cools other buildings on campus as well by using cold water from the bottom of Cayuga Lake to chill water from the campus, which is then used for air conditioning and equipment cooling in various Cornell buildings. A bank of heat exchangers is a major feature of the Lake Source Cooling project’s facility. Water from the depths of Cayuga Lake is pumped into the exchangers, and inside them the cold lake water absorbs heat from a separate, sealed water supply that is pumped to the campus to cool campus buildings. In this process, cold lake water cools a separate closed water loop that is utilized to air-condition campus buildings, allowing the university to reduce electricity use for central cooling by 86 percent (eliminating 10 percent of campus electrical use). Perhaps the most exciting thing going on at the campus right now is the University's participation in the Solar Decathlon, which is an international competition that takes place in Washington, D.C. where teams from universities around the world construct energy efficient, commercially-feasible solar-powered homes. The Cornell University Solar Decathlon team (“CUSD”) was founded in 2003 by a group of undergraduate engineering and architecture students. They rounded up support within the University, started recruiting, and began designing to compete in the 2005 Solar Decathlon. That team would end up involving over one hundred students from across campus, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, making national news and placing second in a field of sixteen colleges and universities from around the world. Its members have mostly graduated; the few that remain are intensely involved on the new team. (The 2005 team's website.)

The 2007 team began after a long car ride from Washington, DC as younger students were coming back from the competition. Although exhausted, they were so excited to get started with their own design that they couldn't wait until morning- they put the word out that a new team was starting, and soon a new generation of CUSD was formed. By the time the next semester (Spring 2006) started, CUSD members numbered in the hundreds. I spoke with Bryan Wolin, who is the PR rep for the CUSD and he told me the following:

CUSD is run entirely by students, with faculty members serving solely as advisors, allowing engineers and architects, business students and landscape architects, graduates and undergraduates, and those experienced and inexperienced in sustainability to learn from each other and collaborate on a fascinating and exciting project. Funds are student-raised, construction is student-led, and design is student-driven. There are currently 111 students enrolled in the Solar Decathlon engineering independent study course.

Bryan was excited about the unique “solar canopy” that is part of the 2007 design. He said that “[t]he Solar Canopy embodies CUSD's novel approach to old problems. It is a standalone structure where our solar panels, evacuated tubes, green-screens, and whatever else we like will be mounted. The canopy is designed such that anything from porch swings to exterior lighting may be mounted on it, allowing enormous versatility for the home's occupants. Additional versatility comes from the canopy's standalone design, allowing it to be easily adapted for many different building styles.”

The next competition will be held in October 2007 in Washington, D.C. The Solar Decathlon is a competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in partnership with its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The American Institute of Architects (AIA), American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), and the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).

One Ithaca – based, Cornell-connected person you may have heard about already is Michael deEstries, who started the internationally-known web site about all things green groovygreen.com and its sister celebrity green gossip web site ecorazzi.com. A passionate advocate for the environment, Michael discovered his love of sustainability after moving to Ithaca in 2004. Currently working at Cornell as a Web designer and tech guy for Cornell Law School, deEstries, 28, came to Ithaca with his wife, a massage therapist who teaches at the Finger Lakes School of Massage.

The town and its people changed his perspective on “alternative living” and sharing that news with others has become not only his passion but his profession. His web site states that “Groovy Green was started as a way to organize the large amounts of information swirling about the little town of Ithaca, NY concerning renewable energy and sustainable living. Over the past few months, it has branched out to cover national and international news, products, and the people fighting to make a difference in promoting sustainability.”

An example of how enthusiastically deEstries's message is being spread: When I was at April's Green Drinks in NYC with Jonathan Schein, publisher of New York House Magazine, the first person we met was Melissa Rosenberg who works with Timberland in NYC. As a conversation starter she immediately asked us if we had ever heard of GroovyGreen and Ecorazzi and told us how she wanted to contribute to one of deEsteries’ web sites as a writer.

When I called Michael up to interview him for this column he took the time to return my call while headed back to Ithaca from NYC where he had just cut a deal with a New York Television production company to turn his eccorazzi green gossip concept into a weekly television show.

Michael's' positive enthusiasm echoed what I was hearing from the Solar Decathlon's spokesman Bryan Wolin. Michael said that “there are some real changes we have made in the past to make the world more sustainable. We are making strides. But instead of assuming we are going to do great things. I am going to talk about what is happening now because seeing what is happening now inspires people to make even more changes and inspires more results.” He concluded by saying that “the optimism coming out of the green and sustainability movement is what I want to talk about. It is a counter to the dark truth that is revealed in Al Gore's movie. What I am doing is meant to be a point of light in all the doom and gloom we hear on a regular basis. There are a lot of good things that are often overshadowed by the bad. So it is important to find balance between what is serious and what is promising. Obviously as a blogger you see a lot of things that make you worry. We need to encourage people to act so in fact we can create change.”

Getting back to Ithaca real estate, Michael told me he has plans to build a straw bale house. For a guest house or office studio he would like to build an Eco-Dome, which is a structure similar to straw bale with plaster coatings on each side of earth-filled sand bags. The Eco-Dome web site states that “[t]hey are tree-free, earth-filled Superadobe coils that can be built by teams of 3-5 people. Based on the site specs, there’s no real limit to how creative you can get with circular additions. One Dome can give you about 400 square feet- a perfectly manageable size for a first-time owner builder. Depending on local code, you can also incorporate a wood stove, solar, or radiant heating.”

Cornell and Ithaca should be applauded for leading the state and our nation toward energy independence and sustainable living. What Cornell has been doing for the last few decades with respect to greening its real estate is clearly extraordinary. Years before the current call to end global warming, Cornell has been a model of self sustaining real estate development. It is in creative self-sustaining places like Ithaca that solutions to all our environmental problems will be solved - with or with or without the important support of government subsidies and tax incentives or mandated green building codes and certification. Way before LEED was on the horizon, Cornell was enacting practical programs to take less energy from the grid and give back to the community by being a steward of the local environment. This is evidence that, regardless of what standards are applied to green building certification, it is not government mandate but true passion, belief and education that will set the standard for green building.

With the birth of the Internet it is easy for everyone to see what the folks up in Ithaca are doing and what communities across the continent can do to respond to the world's pressing environmental needs. As Michael deEstries said when referring to eccorazzi in an article in the Ithaca Journal newspaper, “we're lucky to be in a position (with the Internet) to be in Ithaca and in Hollywood, on the red carpet. With the Web, it's great because you can have 24-hour coverage.”

I look forward to hearing more from Ithaca 24/7 - Emerald City of Upstate New York. My red carpet is rolled out for Ithaca. And good luck, Cornell Solar Decathlon Team 2007. We're rooting for you to take first place this year in the competition and I look forward to seeing you all in Washington, D.C. this fall!

*The Upstate New York Green Real Estate Report is a monthly column here at gbNYC.com, written by Paul McGinniss, a partner at the New York Real Estate Group and an advocate of green and sustainable real estate development. Paul teaches a class at SUNY Ulster called “Green Home Building and Renovation,” and he and his business partner, Joseph Walker, teach a monthly class at the Learning Annex in New York City called “How to Invest in Upstate Real Estate.” Paul is also a partner in the media and public relations company Serendipity Associates, which is helping to organize New York House magazine’s Best in Green Building Competition.