The 2008 West Coast Green will be taking place on September 25-27th 2008 at the San Jose Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley. The focus this year will be towards green building, innovation and technology. There will be over 380 exhibitors and over 100 experts and leaders presenting.
The featured keynote speakers will be former Vice President and Noble Prize Winner Al Gore, Sarah Susanka, author of “Not So Big House” series, and David Suzuki, author and TV Host of “The Nature of Things.” There will also be a showcase of the SG Blocks Harbinger Showhouse that is built from reused shipping containers. Below is a slideshow of the construction of the LEED certified Harbinger House that will be on display at the convention.
The headquarters of Applied Materials in Sunnyvale California has completed its parking lot solar panel system installation. This system provides 2.1 megawatts of energy, which is currently the largest solar power deployment at a corporate facility in the United States. The panels are provided by Sunpower and are equipped with solar cells manufactured using Baccini technology. Baccini is a European company that specializes in manufacturing tools for solar that Applied Materials bought earlier in the year. By having the solar panels above the parking lot, it provides for a great canopy over cars. It is much better to park under solar panels than under trees since solar panels dont leak tree sap all over your car.
San Francisco Bart is considering charging different rates depending on the time you take the train. I think that is the stupidest idea. Their goal is to have people adjust and take the train at different times to alleviate congestion. Obviously the busiest times for public transit would be during commute hours since everyone has to get to work at a certain time. Just because it is cheaper to take BART at a later time does not mean everyone has the luxury of getting to work later or earlier.
It is suppose to be a good thing that the ridership is increasing for BART as people are choosing to take public transportation but yet, the city wants to punish people for it. This is coming from the city that is trying to be more green and promotes “Spare the Air Days”. Some of the newer stations are also not getting too much ridership and if it costs more to commute into the city, they will even get less people to ride the train. Some people are choosing to take BART because of higher gas prices and they are also being more green. If the prices increase, more people may just go back to driving to work and be less green.
Obviously the best solution would be to have more trains and have trains run more frequently. In Japan, millions of people commute using public trains everyday and they always find ways of making the commute efficient for people. There are other ways that the city can improve on making the BART stations more efficient such as making faster elevators and escalators and having more passageways and improving the flow of people traffic entering/exiting the stations.
On a side note, I hope Proposition 1A on the Nov. 4 ballot passes. This proposal was added in at the last minute by Arnold Schwarzenegger that would cost an estimated $32 billion for the construction of a 800 mile high speed rail system between Northern and Southern California. The train would travel at 220 mph and would take 2 1/2 hours to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles. This system should have been implemented a long time ago because if it passes, we wont be able to ride it until at least the year 2020.
In Japan, there is a bicycle parking garage where you can bike to the train station, swipe your card with a RFID scanner, and a robotic arm will park your bike in a underground lot. When you want to pick it up, you swipe your card again, and the bicycle will be retrieved in 10 seconds. The service costs $19 a month and is a great commuting alternative to get to the train station.
Unfortunately, this is something that we probably will not see in the United States for many reasons but it is nice to see how other countries are using technology to be more green.
Are dishwashers green or are you better off manually washing your dishes? The simple answer is that normally if you have a water efficient dishwasher and it is filled with dishes, then it will most likely use less water than hand washing all of those dishes. I have talked about this comparison in a previous post and there are studies that show a dishwasher would use less water. In the study done by Scientists at the University of Bonn, in Germany, dishwashers usually use half the energy, one-sixth of the water, and less soap than hand washing the same set of dishes. If you have a old dishwasher, however, they may not be as efficient as newer ones. Older dishwashers may also require you to rinse your dishes first before you load them in, but most new dishwashers do a pretty good job and actually do not need any rinsing or scrapping. Even though most people dont, you can actually put your dishes right in after you are done eating.
Many people may think that a dishwasher is not green because they think that it uses a lot of water, and in addition, it also needs electricity to run it, and then also to dry it. Hand washing dishes can vary significantly between different people because there is no correct way to do dishes. Some people tend to let the water run the whole time. There are also different techinques that can vary such as soaping all the dishes first, then rinse, etc. The main point is that as long as your dishwasher is full, you are using it to its full capacity and it is performing efficiently. Obviously, if you just have a couple of dishes, it is better to hand wash them or to just put them into the dishwasher and wait to fill it up before you start the dishwasher. For some asians, they may not even have this problem because a typical stereotype, yet true, is that asians dont use their dishwashers very often and tend to use dishwashers as a dishrack!
