Dwayne Romero Talks Development and Sustainability at the Alliance Center More than 14,000 miles into a listening mission to all Colorado counties, the executive director of Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT), Dwayne Romero, swung by the Alliance Center on April 18 to give a briefing and hear input from the Center’s tenants. Romero’s odyssey is a key part of Governor Hickenlooper’s Bottom-Up Economic Development Plan, an ambitious effort to encourage and support the state’s counties and regions to think strategically about jobs and development. Romero seemed tuned in to tenant concerns. “Sustainability should be part of the state’s brand,” he said during a wide-ranging and free-wheeling discussion. “We need to find a core set of philosophies that can be used for all economic development that keeps values and priorities in balance.” Romero’s tour is taking him around the state three times, to nearly 100 meetings (so far) in all 64 counties. Over 8,000 Coloradans have attended one or more meetings to take part in what OEDIT is calling a “statewide conversation” about development and to offer their own impressions of their counties’ needs, priorities and ideas. The goal is for counties to use this information in drawing up county-level development plans, which will then be aggregated into composite plans for each of the 14 regions. In addition to Romero’s road trip, OEDIT is collecting info via an online survey. More information about the Bottom-Up plan in general can be found at www.advancecolorado.com/bottomup. Live as if Our Future Matters Thousands of young people and allies are gathering at noon in Denver on May 14th for the iMatter March to urge corporate and government officials to “live, lead, and govern as if the future matters”. Up to 10,000 marchers will make their way from Cuernavaca Park (near the confluence of the Platte River and Cherry Creek by the REI flagship store) to the state capitol to urge action on climate change. This mega-march in Denver is the culmination of over 100 iMatter Marches around the world to be held between May 7-14. The Denver March will be led by 16 year-old Alec Loorz, march organizer and founder of Kids vs Global Warming. Other national and local celebrities invited to attend include Governor Hickenlooper, singer/ songwriter and activist Willie Nelson, Ute Elder Kenny Frost, globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean-energy economy Van Jones, singer Richie Castro and many more. The Alliance for Sustainable Colorado is joining Earth Guardians and a dedicated coalition of local organizations and individuals to make this March meaningful. We urge you to join us: 1.Sign up to march 2.Make a donation to cover event permits, drinking water, bathrooms and microphones. 3.Forwarding the Denver iMatter March link to your friends asking them to partner on this event. Make history. Make a difference. Support the next generation’s leadership for the future, because it matters!
Alliance News Mayoral Sustainability Forum Update Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Colorado Conservation Voters, Colorado Environmental Coalition, Denver Museum of Nature and Science and Greenprint Denver Advisory Board hosted all ten candidates for the Denver Mayoral Sustainability Forum on April 5th. The hosts were joined by eGo Car Share, Bike Denver, Colorado Renewable Energy Society, and Revision International in a partnering role. The forum was a smash success filling the Ricketson Auditorium in the Museum to capacity, as well as having an overflow area brimming with 150 people and over 500 people watching the live video stream. Eli Stokols, Fox 31 political reporter, moderated the event. The evening started with a question for all the candidates about the role Greenprint Denver would play in their administration. After the initial question, candidates were sequestered into two different groups and each group was given five minutes to answer two different questions. The groups were then shuffled to allow different perspectives on two new rounds of questions as they interacted with each other. The evening’s fireworks came during the lightning round, which consisted entirely of “yes” or “no” answered questions. Questions focused on the triple bottom line – people, planet, profit – and included whether or not candidates believed in evolution, human-caused climate change and a woman’s right to choose. Getting candidates to answer these with a “yes” or “no” proved a bit difficult; but, most of them managed to do it. This was by far the audience’s favorite part of the evening. After that, questions were given to a pair of candidates with a short 30 second response time. The event ended with each candidate giving a brief closing statement, and then a reception was held that lasted well into the evening. While details have not been solidified for a run-off debate, the three main sustainability hosts Alliance, “CCV” and “CEC,” are currently working with Fox 31 to make sure that sustainability is well-placed at any future debate. 2011 Hero of Sustainability The Alliance for Sustainable Colorado has named Denis Hayes as our 2011 Hero of Sustainability. Denis was the organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970, which is credited with launching the modern environmental movement. The magnitude of success of the first Earth Day is hard to comprehend in our 2011 world where apathy seems to be the mainstream attitude. In 1971, approximately 20 million people marched in Earth Day events and demonstrations and events were held in nearly every city in the United States. New York City closed down 5th Avenue! And the fight didn’t stop there – Denis and other activists took on 12 US Congressmen with the worst records on environmental issues and, in the process, took down 7 incumbents. Whoa!!! Now, imagine something like this happening today? If you’d like to hear Denis speak, please SAVE THE DATE for September 8th at the Grand Hyatt in Denver.
Regionalizing Our Sustainability Efforts
How many of you reading this newsletter have a good idea of all the other organizations and groups working on the same sustainability issues you’re working on? How many of you would like to see more collaboration on sustainability initiatives from a regional perspective? Over the last 4 years we, at the Alliance, have learned of a tremendous amount of work being done to make Colorado more sustainable. What’s been missing until now has been a coordinated approach to many of these efforts. Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments (PPACG) has developed a model to approach sustainability on a regional level. When the Alliance learned of their work back in November 2010, we thought it was such a compelling approach to sustainability that we decided to offer it as a best practice model in other regions. In just a few short months we’ve talked with many other organizations about adopting this model in their backyards and a few of them have decided to take similar steps to PPACG. In March, the Southwest Colorado Council of Governments Board of Directors voted unanimously for the Four Corners Office of Resource Efficiency (4CORE) to adopt PPACG’s process. 4CORE has already made extensive progress with their Resource and Energy Action Plan (REAP) which will be the basis of their regional coordination effort. 4CORE is currently developing an outreach and implementation plan for REAP and will partner with the Alliance for a regional roundtable meeting this fall to advance this process. The Alliance is partnering with the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments (NWCCOG) to host a regional sustainability roundtable meeting at the Donovan Pavilion in Vail on May 26 at 1:00PM to discuss the formation of a regional sustainability council in NWCCOG’s jurisdiction. NWCCOG’s board of directors will be in attendance and sustainability leaders from Jackson, Grand, Summit, Eagle and Pitkin Counties are encouraged to attend. The goal of the meeting is to assess current projects and develop a collaborative approach to continue sustainable development efforts in the region. There are a few other regional organizations that are interested in this type of coordination and we will continue to keep you updated on our progress. Alliance and School of Mines Collaborate on Living Building Challenge Exercise
For the second year running, Alliance Center Director Phillip Saieg has worked with Colorado School of Mines students on a state-of-the-art building renovation exercise. Teams of undergrads taking Adjunct Professor Tamara Carey’s class on engineering design methodology put theory to work by selecting a design project from among a pool of more than 15 ideas submitted to Prof. Carey, mostly by outside clients. Carey approached the Alliance about submitting a proposal, and Saieg challenged the students to come up with a plan to renovate the Center to the standards required by the Living Building Challenge (which, among other things, means achieving zero net energy). The process is intensive and involves a good deal of back-and-forth consultation with the client, mimicking the interactions between professional engineering firms and their clients. Two student teams tackled the Center’s proposal. Saieg’s favorite design, by “Bigfoot Engineering Consultants,” focused on four areas and made recommendations in each area: • Reducing energy use by using light aqueducts and solar tubes to direct sunlight into the building interior, and by encouraging “green” behavior such as using stairs instead of elevators, working toward a paperless office, and hiring bicycle messengers for local package delivery.
• Increasing energy efficiency by making improvements to the existing HVAC ductwork and control devices and installing a Coolerado heating and cooling system coupled to a direct exchange geothermal system to preheat and -cool entering air. Other suggestions included replacing our current fleet of compact fluorescent light bulbs with even more efficient Phillips A19 bulbs.
• Adding some photovoltaic electricity production to complement the energy saved by the above measures; the Center could lease space on adjacent building rooftops to raise output.
• Enriching the building’s environment by, for example, making the stairwells more user-friendly by repainting them with glow-in-the-dark paint and/or installing light-up LED stairs, which come on in several steps when a pressure-sensitive switch is triggered and stay on for a few seconds. Friendlier stairwells would also save energy by reducing elevator use. Other suggestions included doing more interior plant-scaping.
As it happens, many of these suggestions are already under consideration for the Center’s NetZero deep energy retrofit, so having confirmation of their value from a team of aspiring engineers with a fresh outlook was very welcome. Even better, they managed to come in well under budget.
New Alliance Website Goes Lively After a careful, months-long development effort that began last year, the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado launched its new website in late March. Working with the Boulder-based design firm Vermilion, we’ve replaced our old website with a state-of-the-art model bristling with interactivity, useful features and user friendliness. For instance, if you want to learn about the sustainability issues facing Colorado and the nation—water, energy, food, the built environment, climate change, community design and many others—check out our Issues pages and the Alliance blog. To find out what we’re working on in 2011, visit the Alliance Program pages. Want to know some definitions of sustainability, or what’s in the Colorado Climate Action Plan? See the Sustainability Resources page, which offers loads of basic information and is searchable by topic and geographic region. And if you’re with a group working on sustainability and think something’s missing from our mix, we invite you to share your expertise with the rest of the Colorado sustainability community. The whole site is searchable by keywords and tags. And of course we’ve also kept the best of the old version. If you can’t get away for a “live” tour of the Alliance Center (ongoing at 2 p.m. on the first Friday of the month, or by appointment), take a virtual tour instead. And as always we urge our tenants, partners and friends to view and post upcoming meetings, conferences and other events on our sustainability calendar. The new site should be far better able to support our goal of becoming the hub of sustainability in Colorado. Please look it over and let us know what you think. Alliance Center NetZero Project Update The Alliance’s project to push our century-old converted warehouse toward being a net-zero building (one that uses no more energy than it produces) passed a critical milestone last week with the completion of a rigorous and demanding analysis of desired outcomes, the risks that go with them and ways to mitigate those risks. Representatives from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Living City Block Project, the Rocky Mountain Institute and other key partners met intensively over two days with Alliance President John Powers and Alliance Center Director Phillip Saieg to list every desired goal and categorize each one as “mission critical” (i.e., if it’s not achievable, we won’t carry out the project), “highly desirable,” or “if possible.” One measure of the project’s ambition is that the participants easily came up with over 40 goals. The overarching purpose is to show how achieving very high performance in existing buildings can make a dent in the major share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions they account for. Against that background, the goals are functional, such as to undertake a major retrofit while maintaining the services and support the Alliance strives to provide our tenants. Other top goals include making the project economically sustainable—especially with respect to demonstrating that high-performance buildings make good business sense—and operating the building as a laboratory to help us create a replicable framework for making existing buildings into high-performance ones. This process aims to avoid the built-in failure risks that characterize traditional ways of carrying out construction projects, which often lead to dissatisfaction, waste and cost overruns. The Alliance is following the design/bid/build model, in which a great deal of careful work is done up front to make the project specifications and desired outcomes as comprehensive and explicit as possible. With the results—and the available budget—thus nailed down, competing design/build teams are left free to propose any way that works to achieve them—a method likely to spur innovation. The Alliance has high hopes for the NetZero project. As noted above, existing buildings are major culprits in emissions of greenhouse gases and addressing that crisis will be impossible if buildings are left out of the equation. We’ll be reporting on future project developments regularly in Catalyst; stay tuned. Social Media Challenge In the spirit of collaboration, the Alliance has teamed up with Ego CarShare for a social media challenge! Log in to Facebook and “like” both the Alliance and Ego CarShare and you will be entered into a drawing to win a free Ego CarShare membership! Deadline to enter is Friday, May 20 and winners will be notified by June 1. Do you Tweet? Follow us on Twitter as well at @AllSustCo and @EgoCarShare and double your chances! Alliance Earth Week Update The Alliance staff and tenants did not just celebrate Earth Day, we made a full week of it! The week kicked off with Alliance Center tenants being charged with a Building Challenge to reduce their water and energy usage, as well as utilize alternative modes of transportation to get to work, leaving our parking lot as empty as possible. We reached out to the City of Denver, and they also created a similar challenge for many of the city buildings. The Alliance then purchased carbon offsets from the Colorado Carbon Fund to offset the energy use of our staff. On Earth Day, Alliance staff participated in the Civic Center Park Earth Day Fair where we focused on educating the public about the Alliance Center as well as our new website! Living City Block and Ego CarShare also joined in the activities at Civic Center Park. At the end of our eventful Earth Week, Alliance staff worked together to clean up the downtown areas of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. You should have seen the amount of trash and recyclables we collected!
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