Retrofit of Empire State Building to Slash Energy Use by 38%
Progressive Automotive X Prize Names 111 Registered Teams
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Retrofit of Empire State Building to Slash Energy Use by 38%
A unique team of private companies and non-profit organizations has devised an energy retrofit for the Empire State Building that will reduce its energy use by 38%, including a 33% reduction in cooling load and a 3.5-megawatt reduction in peak electrical demand.
The retrofit project, a small part of a $500 million upgrade for the New York City landmark, will reduce energy loads by upgrading windows and lighting and by adding radiative barriers behind the radiators. To deliver the remaining energy more efficiently, the retrofit will upgrade some of the chillers for the building while removing others, and it will install new variable-speed air handling units. And to better control energy delivery, the retrofit will add demand-control ventilation and tenant energy management systems, while also upgrading energy controls and meters for the building as a whole. Efforts to be completed by the end of 2010 will yield half the energy savings, while the remainder will be achieved by 2013.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the retrofit project is the process used by the project partners, which can be applied to other building retrofits. They used both existing and newly created modeling, measurement, and projection tools to analyze the Empire State Building and establish a full understanding of its energy use, as well as its functional efficiencies and deficiencies. The Clinton Climate Initiative convened the project team, which includes Johnson Controls, Jones Lang LaSalle, and the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), which documented the process and tools on a new Web site. See the Johnson Controls press release and the RMI feature article on the project.
Progressive Automotive X Prize Names 111 Registered Teams
The Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, a multimillion-dollar competition designed to inspire a new generation of viable, super fuel-efficient vehicles, announced its official list of 111 registered teams. The teams hail from 25 U.S. states and 10 other countries, and they collectively represent 136 vehicles.
Although six teams remain confidential, the publicly available list still includes only one major automaker-the U.K. branch of Tata Motors Limited, India's largest automaker-as well as a couple university teams (Cornell University and Western Washington University) and a handful of recognizable small and startup companies, such as Aptera Motors, Lightning Hybrids, Myers Motors, Tesla Motors, and ZAP. Many of the teams carry more obscure or humorous names suggestive of small, one-time efforts, such as "GotPower," "V-Mobile," and "XLR8SUN." Among the smaller teams is the Goodwin-Young LincVolt team, which has electrified Neil Young's 1959 Lincoln Continental.
The LincVolt team is among the majority of teams that plan to bring all-electric or hybrid electric vehicles to the competition, although there are also a fair number of vehicles that will run entirely on gasoline or diesel fuel. A few teams will use alternative fuels such as compressed natural gas, hydrogen, biodiesel, and E85 (a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline), while some teams will draw on more exotic fuels, like biobutanol, solar power, human power, urea, compressed air, and even water. In the coming months, each registered team will undergo design judging based on their detailed data submission, which will provide information on their vehicle's features and their team's production capability and business plan. Those that pass the design judging will move into the performance testing phase.
