Sustainable Silicon Valley

A couple of days ago Phil Yurkonis turned me on to the Sustainable Silicon Valley mailing list. I signed up, and found out that their monthly members meeting is today. So I drove over to the newly developed area of East Palo Alto near the Four Seasons Hotel for their meeting.

There were only about 20 people there, and we each got to introduce ourselves. Several people had already heard of the MV Solar Buyers Co-op and seemed very impressed with it. I gave out some flyers about the upcoming meeting on Feb. 27.

There were two speakers, and the one I really liked was Alan Pong. His specialty is to diagnose and tune the HVAC systems in commercial buildings. He's been doing this for quite a few years for Ferreira Service, Inc. Just like George Denise's talk on Tuesday, Alan told about how he was able to find enormous savings. He described one project where the heating system AND the air conditioning system were both running most of the day, fighting each other. Until he installed data loggers and analyzed their outputs the building owners had been unaware of the situation. After all, the employees were all comfortable because the battling systems DID keep the air the right temperature. He was a really interesting guy and a very good presenter, and I hope to attend more Sustainable Silicon Valley meetings in the future.

Green Buildings at Adobe

I went to the TASC lunch today (Technology and Society Committee). Bob Kirby has been running these events for something like 20 years, and I go about four times a year. Today's speaker was George Denise. He works for Cushman and Wakefield, which manages Adobe's three high-rise buildings in San Jose.

George gave a great presentation (using no Powerpoint!) about all the amazing things he and his team have done to save energy and water and reduce solid waste. They recycle 87% of their waste stream.

He said that they invested $1.4 million, got $389,000 in rebates from PG&E and others, and generated $1.2 million/year in savings -- a payback period of less than a year.

So much energy is wasted in the US -- it's inspiring to hear from someone like George that the savings are just sitting there, waiting to be achieved -- even in a really "green" buildings like the Adobe headquarters complex.

I was able to make a short announcement about the Solar Buyers Group and hand out some fliers for the Feb. 27 meeting (7 PM at the MV High School Theater).