This month U.S. electric utilities have been setting records for electricity output. So far, the grid has held up. But the electric industry says more has to be done to keep up with growing demand. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
This month, U.S. electric utilities have been setting records for electricity
output. So far, the grid has held up. But the electric industry says more
has to be done to keep up with growing demand. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
With drought and high heat, demand for electricity in many parts of the
nation has hit record highs and the power companies have been able to meet
that demand with few problems. Jim Owen is with the Edison Electric
Institute, an electric industry association. Owen says places where there
have been black-outs in the past are keeping up this summer.
“Take Chicago, for example. Here a couple of weeks ago they set
all-time record demand for elecricity pretty well without any reported
problems. So, we are meeting demand pretty well all across the country.”
Owen says new peaker plants that come on only during high demand periods and
a few new big traditional electric generating plants have helped avoid
problems. But while the capacity has increased in the past few years, demand
has grown faster. Owen says that gap needs to close.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
Many farmers in the Midwest are bracing for huge crop losses. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jo Ingles has details:
Transcript
Many farmers in the Midwest are bracing for huge crop losses. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jo Ingles has details:
Just three months ago, some Midwest farmers were struggling to get their
crops planted because the weather was so wet and cold. But now, many
farmers are finding it’s too dry and hot for their crops to grow. Joe
Cornealy, a spokesman for the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, says new
statistics show, in Ohio, more than half of the corn and soybean crops are
considered to be in very poor to poor condition. And he says Ohio is not
alone.
“The latest USDA statistics say this drought has impacted a lot of the country and we’re looking for substantial reductions in corn and soybeans….perhaps the smallest corn crop we’ve seen on both of those….since 1995 on corn and 1996 on soybeans.”
Cornealy says consumers are already paying more for sweet corn and other
vegetables because of crop loss. And he thinks some farm related jobs could
be eliminated if this agricultural downturn continues.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jo Ingles.
The City Hall in Chicago is topped
with plants and trees to try to cool things down. The city
is working to reduce the heat island effect caused by so many blacktop roofs and parking lots. Photo by Lester Graham
On the nightly TV news in large cities, the meteorologist sometimes talks about the heat island effect. That’s where all the blacktop roofs and asphalt parking lots soak up the heat and increase the temperature on a hot summer day. One major U.S. city is trying to do something to reduce that effect. To set an example, the mayor decided to start with City Hall. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
On the nightly TV news in large cities, the meteorologist sometimes
talks about the heat island effect. That’s where all the blacktop roofs
and asphalt parking lots soak up the heat and increase the temperature
on a hot summer day. One major U.S. city is trying to do something to
reduce that effect. To set an example, the mayor decided to start with
City Hall. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Standing on the roof, eleven stories up, isn’t really far enough to escape
the noise of the city below. But this rooftop is an escape. It’s a garden, a
big one. There are even trees. Not in pots, but actually planted on… or…
in the roof.
Marcia Jiminez is the Commissioner of the City of Chicago’s Department of Environment. She says Chicago wants building owners to
do what they can to cool the city down… and planting gardens on the
roof is one way to do it. So that’s what the city did on top of City Hall.
“Well, the garden on the rooftop is addressing what we call an urban heat
island problem. By putting the garden with light colored pavers and the
green plants on top of the roof, we’re actually helping to use less energy
inside the building and it actually helps to keep the building cooler.”
Cooling down the building is just the beginning of this garden. Despite
being eleven stories up in the middle of downtown, the roof is alive with
bugs and butterflies.
“Actually birds and all of the insects, many of them, have found their
way up here. We’ve actually put up birdhouses to study what kind of
birds are coming to the rooftop garden. This is a place of
respite as well as a place to feed.”
The whole rooftop has become something of a lab. Scientists research
what animals have made a home here… and they’re monitoring how the
plants are spreading.
Kimberly Worthington worked on the City Hall project to see it go from
the drawing board to rooftop. She says they chose plants for color, form
and for survivability.
“The design that we went with was low maintenance, was what we were
looking for in our plant selection. And the landscape architects that were part of the design team focused on plants that would require less water. And they also wanted to keep as many native plants as possible. So, there are a lot of prairie plants up here.”
The Chicago City Hall rooftop project also reduces rain water runoff. 75-percent of a one-inch rain will be soaked up right here in the garden. That’s good because too much rain overflows sewers into Lake Michigan. If enough buildings in the city had rooftop gardens, stormwater runoff problems would be curtailed a bit.
While the city is touting the environmental benefits of its rooftop garden, in another part of the city a planned rooftop garden is all about people.
Brenda Koverman is with the Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital in Chicago. We’re up on the roof where she’s showing me landscape renderings of how the surrounding area will look once the planting begins. Stone paths, fountains, flower gardens and shrubs.
It’ll look beautiful. And it’ll probably cool things down up here. But Koverman
says this is for the patients who are learning to be mobile after disabling injuries. The hospital hopes that patients in rehabilitation will find the rooftop garden more pleasant and helpful than institutional tile floors and plastic obstacles as they learn to
manuever…
“You know, so, are patients more able to maneuver their wheelchairs in the community? Are patients able to use their hands better so they can cook better at home? Are patients able to stay out of the nursing home and go to their home? So, if we can get any kind of
those outcomes, then it’s a huge success.”
It might be more interested in the patients, but the hospital will still be helping Chicago reduce its heat island effect.
There aren’t very many of these projects in the city, so it’s hard to say whether the rooftop gardens could cool things down all that much. But Environment Commissioner Marcia Jiminez says all you have to do is go up on the roof on a hot day. City Hall sits right next to the County Building. In fact they look like the same building. But not from the roof. Only one side is garden.
“In last summer in 2001 on the hottest day, while it was about a hundred degrees on the city hall side, it was 165 on the opposite end of the building where’s there’s a blacktop roof.”
Even if you’re not interested in planting a garden on your roof, the city still requires some effort to cool things down. City ordinance calls for light colored material when a roof is replaced. And parking lots have to plant some trees before they can get a permit to resurface. Rooftop gardens aren’t mandated… but city officials say they’re learning first
hand that it’s a much better use of space in the city.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
Principles of sustainable design, or “green building” have been around for years. These are designs that, among other things, reduce energy use and create more comfortable working environments. Yet they are often dismissed as costly, impractical, and experimental. But green design has come a long way in recent years. The construction cost of an environmentally-friendly office building today is comparable with the cost of more traditional methods, and the maintenance costs are often much lower. Architects and builders across Pennsylvania have learned that, and the result has been a major shift in how buildings are constructed. And the lessons learned there could eventually make their way across the entire Great Lakes region. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder reports:
Transcript
Principles of sustainable design, or “green building” have been around for years. These are designs that, among other things, reduce energy use and create more comfortable working environments. Yet they are often dismissed as costly, impractical, and experimental. But green design has come a long way in recent years. The construction cost of an environmentally friendly office building today is comparable with the cost of more traditional methods, and the maintenance costs are often much lower. Architects and builders across Pennsylvania have learned that, and the result has been a major shift in how buildings are constructed. And the lessons learned there could eventually make their way across the entire Great Lakes region. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder reports:
The Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum Marsh lies just around the corner from the Philadelphia International Airport. The refuge is also home to the Cusano Environmental Education Center, celebrating its first anniversary as what many consider to be the city’s greenest building.
The Center’s heating and cooling relies on a geothermal system. About five hundred feet below the Cusano Center, the temperature remains near 50 degrees all year round. Deep wells reach into the ground to borrow heat in the winter, and cool air in the summer.
(Natural sound marsh machine)
The Center also makes use of a “marsh machine,” to clean and recycle wastewater. Refuge Manager Dick Nugent says the machine uses natural processes to filter water through a “constructed wetland” of PVC pipes, gravel, and marsh plants. Nugent says the city water department delivers drinking water, but the marsh machine has a more important use.
“We wanted this here as an environmental education tool. It isn’t as if we needed it for the functionality of this building. The message to take home is that marshes serve a very important function.”
Cyrus Baym is a volunteer coordinator at the Cusano Center. He says people come expecting to learn about nature, but wind up getting something special out of the building.
“The people that are coming in, they see this fabulous building, a lot of space, a lot of glass, and then when you start explaining along with the exhibits the sustainable design features, the use of recycled materials, passive solar windows their eyes get even bigger. They get more excited and want to implement it in their own house.”
Refuge Manager Dick Nugent says there was some additional cost to innovations like the geothermal system and the southern wall of the building, which is made mostly of glass windows. But in the long run, many of those additions will wind up saving money on electricity and heating. And the overall goal isn’t to be frugal, but to teach.
On the other side of the state, another approach toward sustainable design is taking hold.
Pittsburgh is currently home to one-quarter of the nation’s buildings that have been certified as green by the U.S. Green Building Council. The non-profit national industry group represents design, construction, and environmental interests. The council also administers the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, rating system, which judges the overall environmental performance of buildings.
Unlike the Cusano Center in Philadelphia, many of Pittsburgh’s green buildings weren’t designed to be educational tools. The PNC Firstside Center in Downtown Pittsburgh provides workspace for 1800 employees in the bank’s technology and processing divisions.
Elmer Burger was one of the principle architects for the building. He says designing the largest LEED certified building in the country made sense for the project. The large floor space improved communication within business departments, and also allowed for extensive use of natural light.
“With a large floor plate, we had an opportunity to make the ceilings higher and bring daylight further into the building. So you can be as far as 125 feet away from the outside wall and still have daylight in a view.”
Burger says the building’s large windows give employees a view of the Monongahela River, and also save money by reducing the need for artificial light.
Rebecca Flora is director of Pittsburgh’s Green Building Alliance, a non-profit group working to encourage and facilitate environmentally friendly design in the city. She says some non-profit groups are interested in green buildings for ideological reasons, but also wind up getting long-term economic benefits.
“The life cycle value of doing a green building is actually quite significant in some cases. I know with Conservation Consultants, their building actually uses 60% less energy than a traditional building, which can have huge implications in terms of the small operating budgets that many non-profits have to work with.”
Flora says saving money is one of the main factors in getting major institutions like PNC to build green
“The myth that is out there is that green buildings cost more, and that’s one that we’re constantly trying to educate people around in that you get what you pay for. We’re trying to educate people around the fact that green building also adds value, and how do we equate that value with increased bottom line is a real key issue for most people.”
Flora says it’s important to convince clients, and not just architects of the benefits of green design. She says if the demand for LEED certified buildings increases, sustainable design techniques will become more common.
A number of other commercial and non-profit institutions in the city have also chosen green design. Both the Alcoa Corporate Center, and the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank are green buildings. And the new David L. Lawrence Convention Center is the first convention center in the country to earn LEED certification
With so many high profile green projects, sustainable design is starting to look like common sense to many architects and their clients. Elmer Burger says the success of the PNC Firstside Center has led the company to adopt a new policy. All of their new corporate buildings will be designed to meet LEED requirements.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Brad Linder.
Joseph DeSimone, founder and chairman
of Micell Technologies, explains the
cleaning process that clothes undergo in his Hanger’s store in
Morrisville, NC.
Consumers may not realize it, but the simple act of dropping off clothes at the cleaners could end up harming the environment. For decades, dry cleaners have used a toxic solvent to clean clothes. Now there are many contaminated former dry cleaning sites across the country. But a solution to the dry cleaning problem may now be available. A new chain of cleaners is touting a “greener” system that uses a non-toxic everyday substance. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Patty Murray has more:
An Ontario company has developed a way for farmers to turn their vegetable waste into heating fuel. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports:
Transcript
An Ontario company has developed a way for farmers to turn their vegetable waste into heating fuel. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports.
Southern Ontario is home to some of the largest greenhouses in North America. And they produce several tons of vegetable scraps every week. Most of it ends up in landfills, where it decomposes and produces heat that escapes into the atmosphere.
But engineers at Acrolab in Windsor, Ontario say they’ve found a way to capture that heat without using other energy sources. Acrolab makes copper heating pipes that are filled with fluid. When one part of the pipe is heated, the fluid instantly transfers the heat throughout the whole thing. Engineers placed these pipes in compost piles and then extended them into a test greenhouse. The pipes heated the greenhouse for five months. The company is now starting pilot projects in three different sized farm buildings.
They say it’s too early to estimate the cost. But they expect farmers will reduce their energy bills by 40 to 60 percent. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly.
U-S government researchers have found the frequency of days of extreme
heat and humidity has increased over the last 50 years. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
President Clinton has said this summer’s record breaking heat is evidence of global warming, and he blasted congress for ignoring the problem. Most scientists are firmly convinced that global warming is already underway, but there is still some scientific uncertainty about what effects it might have. Around the world, scientists are looking for answers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports on one research project now underway:
