LCB President Llewellyn Wells talks about opportunities and challenges for the Denver pilot project. UrbanDesign Podcast focuses on professionals designing the physical environment of cities.
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 Photo: Wayan Vota, Flickr Via Malcolm Kenton, Greater Greater Washington - Within eight years, an organization aims to turn two square blocks surrounding the intersection of 14th and U Streets NW into a national model of environmental sustainability. Living City Block (LCB), a Denver-based nonprofit, seeks eventually to develop block-wide energy and water systems to cut a 2-block area’s use of energy and water, and its output of solid waste, by 75%. Half of this will come from conservation and the other half from clean energy generation using existing low-cost methods such as cogeneration, which uses the heat generated from producing electricity to also heat rooms or water. The zone in question is the two square blocks bounded by 13th Street NW on the east, 15th Street on the west, U Street on the south and V Street on the north. This parcel contains a microcosm of the city: a large city government building (the Reeves Center), two public housing high-rises, a small park and playground, several townhomes, two luxury apartment buildings, and a thriving commercial corridor of bars, restaurants and shops. LCB’s first step will be to compile a detailed statistical snapshot of the two square blocks as they exist. This will provide a baseline to which to compare future measurements after transformations begin. Read More Via Mike Cote, Planet-Profit Report – Living City Block aims to help building owners reduce energy consumption: The biggest stumbling block to making existing structures more sustainable is to justify the upfront expense. Sure, making an office more energy efficient will save money in the long run, but when budgets are tight, such efforts get put on the backburner. Living City Block aims to change that dynamic by helping building owners band together to secure funding for sustainability initiatives, including renewable energy and water and wastewater management. The non-for-profit — spun out of the Rocky Mountain Institute last year — is working on a two-block project in historic lower downtown between 15thand 16thstreets and Wynkoop and Blake streets. It’s working on similar projects in Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, N.Y. The goal is to “create an aggregation of building owners so that they can together accomplish more than they could ever accomplish own their own,” said Llewellyn Wells, president and founder of Living City Block. Read More
The DC location is one of the city’s hottest, a two-block stretch in the heart of the recently revitalized (and still revitalizing) U Street, NW corridor. The neighborhood is home to new and historic condos, Victorian rowhouses, shops, restaurants, music clubs, galleries, and the Frank D. Reeves Municipal Center, one of the DC government’s largest and most visible administrative buildings. Read More Via Rick Nicholson, IDC Clean Energy Blog – Last November Living City Block, a non-profit organization that was spun out from the Rocky Mountain Institute, received a $600,000 ARRA technical assistance award from the U.S. DOE as part of the Commercial Buildings Partnership Program. Living City Block is using the award to help achieve its goal of taking one and a half city blocks in Denver and transforming it into a sustainable community. Living City Block will perform modeling and implementation work to significantly reduce the energy consumption and environmental impact on these blocks. By the summer of 2012, Living City Block Denver plans to reduce it’s aggregate energy use by 50%. By the summer of 2014, it plans to reduce total resource use 75%, and by 2016 it plans to have helped at least two historic buildings reach a net zero energy profile. Read More U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that 24 projects are receiving a total of $21 million in technical assistance to dramatically reduce the energy used in their commercial buildings. This initiative, supported with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will connect commercial building owners and operators with multidisciplinary teams including researchers at DOE’s National Laboratories and private sector building experts. The teams will design, construct, measure, and test low-energy building plans, and will help accelerate the deployment of cost-effective energy-saving measures in commercial buildings across the United States. “These Recovery Act projects are bringing together experts from our national laboratories and the private sector to help businesses and organizations reduce the energy they use in their facilities, saving them money on their energy bills and making them more competitive economically,” said Secretary Chu. “This initiative will also demonstrate to other commercial building operators that cost-effective, energy-efficient technologies exist today that will help lower the operating and energy costs of their buildings.” Through DOE’s Commercial Building Partnerships, teams comprised of private sector technical experts and personnel from national laboratories will help guide projects to achieve 30% measured energy savings in existing buildings and 50% energy savings in new construction projects. About half of the two dozen projects focus on energy efficiency upgrades for existing buildings. The three-year projects will provide comprehensive business and technical case studies for broad publication, including actual energy performance data from the completed projects, to help spur wider adoption of energy-efficient building practices across the industry.  LCB featured in a recent Denver Voice article by Kristin Pazulski. Photos by Adrian DiUbaldo “Green. Sustainability. Collaboration. The first two are buzzwords we are familiar with in today’s new developments, but collaboration? That is something Living City Block is bringing to the table. Living City Block (LCB) is taking the goal of sustainability a bit further, by attempting to convert existing buildings with various owners into a fully sustainable community. LCB is focusing on creating this energy producing community on just one block in Denver (specifically the square block between 15th and 16th Streets and Wynkoop to Blake Streets in Lower Downtown). Its goal is to retrofit this block, so that by 2014 the buildings and businesses on the block will be creating their own energy with no waste, and two years later will be creating more energy than they use.” Living City Block’s Chad Riley is interviewed at the West Coast Green Conference 2010 in San Francisco. |
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Via Kaid Benfield, NRDC Switchboard –