Advertisement
But the energy landscape is changing.
 |
Sustainable architect and builder Roald Gundersen lives in a straw bale insulated timber pole supported A-frame house in a rural setting between La Crosse and Coon Valley.
PETER THOMSON photo
|
It’s being reshaped by architects such as Roald Gundersen, whose home gets more than 70 percent of its energy from the sun, and by large organizations such as Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center, which by year’s end will tap as alternative energy sources both sunlight and methane that City Brewery now burns as waste.
To visit our interactive Go Green section, with a month's worth of tips for become more environmentally friendly at home, work and play, click here.
Gundersen, a local architect who builds homes and structures with small-diameter, unmilled trees, foresees a future in which it’s common for people to produce some of their own electricity from renewable sources bought relatively cheap at retail stores.
“People are going to say, ‘God, remember back in 2008? Nobody had their own electricity. Now, 30 percent of us generate our electricity,’ ” Gundersen said.
“It’ll be like the Internet. Only 14 years ago, I had never been on the Internet.”
The number of photovoltaic, or solar electric, systems being installed in Wisconsin each year is growing by 80 percent, said Don Wichert, director of the Focus on Energy’s Renewable Energy Program.
This energy transformation is one component of a wave of sustainability beginning to reshape structures in the region.
From construction methods incorporating straw bales, earthen bricks, recycled carpeting or nontoxic paint to finding local materials to cutting down
on waste during construction, the dwellings that shelter humans here are beginning to reflect a growing concern about the environmental impact of human activities.
A transitional period
Many builders in the region are in a transitional period, in which sustainable building practices play a still small but increasingly larger role in construction and in what consumers — such as Gundersen Lutheran — seek.
Reducing energy use and finding clean, renewable sources is central to becoming sustainable.
Wisconsin saw 23.6 million tons of coal burned in 2006 to produce 70 percent of the state’s electricity, according to a report by the Wisconsin Office of Energy Independence. Coal accounted for 29.5 percent of the energy used in the state.
In 2004 electricity production contributed 42 percent of the state’s carbon dioxide pollution, a leading factor in climate change, according to a recent Wisconsin Environment report.
By the end of 2008, solar energy will provide the electricity in Gundersen Lutheran’s new parking garage and heat some of the water in its laundry operations. The hospital plans to break ground in 2009 on a critical care facility that will be 100 percent powered by renewable sources.
Administrators also are exploring ways to produce wind energy at the hospital and are developing a comprehensive plan on how sustainability will shape the medical center’s future.
“We can decrease the cost of health care and be environmentally sound at the same time,” said Gundersen Lutheran CEO Dr. Jeff Thompson. “That’s what we’re going to prove to people, that’s why we’ll get national recognition, and that’s what we’ll be able to teach other health care facilities.”
A better bottom line
As with most other decisions, consumers looking at sustainability also must consider their bottom line. But rising energy prices have made that an easier decision.
Gundersen Lutheran in January signed an agreement with City Brewery to install and own an energy generator at the brewery’s wastewater treatment facility.
The Jenbacher engine will use methane gas — a waste product from the brewery’s anaerobic digesters that now can be seen burning off as flames on Front Street — to
power the engine, which will send enough energy to Xcel Energy’s power grid to power 492 average Wisconsin homes, according to a Focus on Energy press release.
But while the project’s environmental benefits, which would remove the equivalent of what 792 vehicles emit each year, are one motivating factor, so is money.
Xcel will pay the hospital for the energy, reducing its energy costs.
“There are a lot of organizations doing green things just because they’re altruistic,” said Jerry Arndt, senior vice president of business services at the hospital.
“We’re doing this with that in mind, but we’re also doing it as an opportunity to help reduce our costs of operation, which ultimately translates to lower cost of care.”
Arndt said the engine generator and components will cost about $1.5 million, paid in part through a $250,000 Focus on Energy grant. The purchase will meet the payback requirements the hospital typically has on investments.
Local living patterns
A big piece of Roald Gundersen’s vision of reduced energy use hinges on localizing economies and living patterns.
The trees he uses in construction come from local forests, which cuts out the energy spent shipping building materials across the nation and world. As with food, Gundersen said, the more local building materials used, the more jobs created locally.
His technique of whole-tree building cuts down on energy spent in processing lumber and improves the health of forests, as it often uses invasive, wind-damaged or diseased trees.
But while the structures Gundersen builds are on the cutting edge of sustainable practices, he said some of the easiest things people can do sometimes are the least sexy: better insulating homes, buying more efficient appliances, installing a solar water heater.
“The future doesn’t have to be gloomy. Global warming is scary as hell, no doubt, but these are really hopeful things that we can do, some of which we can do pretty quickly,” he said. “There’s so much of the American entrepreneurial spirit that’s in the quest for a greener future.”
The waste factor
Another piece of the sustainability puzzle is waste.
When David Romary got into construction about 25 years ago, the crews he worked on would “bang up one house after another” in Milwaukee area subdivisions, he said. The process was about putting up structures as fast and inexpensively as possible, he said.
“Every time we finished the house, there’d be a giant pile of scrap and waste and garbage in the front yard,” said Romary, 49. “I didn’t like seeing the waste, but it took time for me to learn just how you make that go away.”
Romary now lives in Viroqua, Wis., and runs Hearth and Sol Construction and Energy Services, applying sustainability in his building projects.
His partner on most projects, Dan Johnson, taught Romary a building method he learned in Colorado that uses bricks created from soil on site or near where the home is built.
“You can’t get more local than that,” Johnson said.
Johnson and Romary have built only one complete home in Wisconsin using earth blocks made from hydraulically compressed sand and clay. But interest grows every year, they said.
Johnson, who owns Midwest Earth Builders, said his method of using local, nontoxic sources cuts down on deforestation and energy used in the harvesting, production and shipping of lumber and other building materials.
Before he was a builder, Johnson did pure environmental work. He got a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology at Colorado State University, then spent his 20s with organizations in Canada and the western U.S. working to preserve ancient forest and wilderness habitats.
“Some of my greatest experiences of life have been in wilderness and in the presence of grizzly bears. I believe they have the right to exist, and it’s something I want future generations to experience,” said Johnson, now 40.
“So, then, how do we as humans live? Our homes are a place that we spend every day, and how can we build those in a way that is more sustainable and doesn’t have to go into places like that to get our resources?”
While it still is the rare customer who asks for compressed earth block, Johnson and Romary always incorporate certain sustainable practices into their building and remodeling. For example, they use recycled denim jeans or newsprint materials as insulation, which again cuts waste and they say insulates better than fiberglass.
Romary, who also rates homes’ energy use and has passed the Residential Energy Services Network’s National Rater Exam, pointed out while they do some of the directing on green building, the homeowner really is the driving force.
But with the earth block homes as an option, Johnson also hopes to lead by example.
“We’re going to drag people kicking and screaming to become more efficient,” he said. “They’re only going to change, a lot of them, when it means dollars and cents. ...”
Defining ‘green building’
Defining “green building” is complicated.
One tool in defining green building methods are certification programs like LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, sponsored by the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council. Through documentation and a rating system, the program grants various levels of certification to commercial buildings, and recently introduced a certification process for home construction.
Both Romary and Johnson are founding members of the Kickapoo Green Builders Guild, which formed in late 2006 in part to define sustainable building methods and protect the market from “green-washing,” a term used to describe techniques that claim to be green but are not.
Steven Laurdan, another founding member, said certification systems can be more misleading than helpful.
“Most consumers don’t know whether you’re green or not, so we needed a way to promote people who had green values and had (them) for a long time and aren’t just trying to jump on the bandwagon,” said Laurdan, who operates Home Green Homes in Viroqua.
Certification systems such as LEEDS also can cost money to pursue.
While the Wieser Brothers General Contractor Inc. have had clients who’ve used LEED guidelines, they still have not built a LEED-certified building.
For now, most of their construction projects remain traditional.
But Jeff Wieser, who founded the company with his brother in 1994, said before two years ago, they never approached clients about sustainable building methods. Now, they do.
“The green movement keeps happening, it’s the thing happening out there. That’s why we want to be the premier contractor in town that’s doing this,” Wieser said. “It looks better for us, and it looks better for them. They can say, ‘We’ve done the right thing.’ They’re not going out there wasting fuel and energy.”
In 2004, the Viroqua Food Co-Op contracted with Wieser Brothers to build their store at 609 N. Main St. in Viroqua. While the co-op decided against getting LEED certification, they pushed the construction toward green building methods. These included using recycled insulation, recycled rubber flooring and paint with zero VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, which can have negative health effects.
“It all prevails on what the owner wants to have and what they want to pay for,” Wieser said. “We never really had a client who stepped up and said, ‘OK, I really want to go green on this product’ until the Viroqua Food Co-Op.”
Now the company asks clients if they want to incorporate green products into projects, Wieser said. And while it recycled steel and concrete in the past because it made financial sense, since building a distribution center in Cashton, Wis., for Organic Valley last summer, the company now recycles cardboard, wood, aluminum, steel and concrete on other major projects.
Ben Johnson, a project manager for Wieser Brothers, has continued to compile notes and information about green building products and methods into a three-ring binder.
“Before, it wasn’t real clear what green building was,” Johnson said. “There wasn’t a lot of information on it. Now, you’re seeing it everywhere.”
Joe Orso can be reached at (608) 791-8429 or jorso@lacrossetribune.com.
To take a virtual tour of Roald Gundersen's house, click here.
Dan Johnson video
David Klann video
