INSIDE THE HOUSING EVOLUTION by Matthew Sachs
The Third Industrial Revolution
I just finished a very thought provoking book called “The Third Industrial Revolution”, by Jeremy Rifkin. Rifkin’s theory is that the world is on the cusp of a Third Industrial Revolution that will change the world’s economies and societies as dramatically as the First and Second Industrial Revolutions had in the 1800s and 1900s. The [...]
Read moreLive Chat Today on Ottawa Citizen Online
Today I’ll be doing a live chat for the Ottawa Citizen website on energy efficient construction. My guest panelist will be David Foster, the Director of Environmental Affairs for the Canadian Home Builders’ Association. Log in here today between noon and 1:00.
Read more2012 – The Coming Apocalypse for Inefficient Homes
2012 promises to be a defining year for energy efficient housing in Ontario as the Ontario Building Code is being updated to include energy efficiency targets for the first time. In conjunction, the ENERGY STAR® program and the R-2000 program are also changing to make their energy efficiency targets significantly more stringent. With all these [...]
Read morePassive House VS Active House: Two Competing Visions for the Future of Homes
Passive House is a building standard originally developed in Germany that can reduce heating needs by an astonishing 90%. They reach this target by making the house extremely well insulated, virtually air-tight, and by orienting and designing the house to maximize passive solar gain. Although this concept has been slow to take off [...]
Read moreUrbandale Donating Home for Research Facility at Carleton University
I’ve been keeping this quiet for a couple of years because it was not official, but now that it’s been reported in the Ottawa Business Journal, and the Ottawa Citizen, I suppose the cat’s already out of the bag. Urbandale will be building a house on the Carleton University campus to be used as a [...]
Read moreGreen Mortgages
The Ottawa Citizen recently printed an article on the growing popularity of Green Mortgages – where banks offer lower interest rates or other incentives for homes that have achieved a specific level of energy efficiency. I was pleased to see the article because this is something that I have been promoting to my contacts within [...]
Read moreInvesting in Efficiency as Insurance Against Rising Energy Prices
CBC news recently reported on a study that electricity prices across the country are set to rise sharply, and that we should expect to see a rise of more than 50 percent by 2020. While I personally feel that their estimate is optimistic, there is no doubt that energy prices have nowhere to go but [...]
Read moreCarleton University High Performance Housing Group
The Carleton University Engineering program has a 4th year design project that focuses on High Performance Housing. The students in the course have spent the year investigating construction techniques and technologies that dramatically reduce the energy use in homes. I’ve been very closely involved with this group of students because one of their course deliverables [...]
Read moreSolar Water Heaters – The Lonely Spinster Aunt of Energy Technologies
The conventional wisdom around marketing energy technologies has been that the only thing that purchasers care about is payback. Certainly, that’s the first question that anyone asks. The assumption is that the decision to purchase energy efficiency or renewable technologies is strictly financial, and if the technology can pass some internal hurdle rate in the [...]
Read moreThe Only Company that Will Pay You to Use Less of their Product
Last week I joined a group of leading builders in Toronto to discuss what measures Enbridge can take to help homeowners reduce their gas usage. Enbridge has been actively involved in promoting energy efficiency improvements for years through their Demand Side Management (DSM) programs. (Coincidentally, I actually worked with Enbridge in developing their DSM program [...]
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