I’ve been involved this year with the “public” part of the process that supposedly gets the USGBC’s LEED rating points approved. As a result I’m wondering if it’s only a good PR to make people feel they can have a saying in the process or a Kafkaesque bureaucratic process inspired by his novel The Castle. First off
IGCC is heading towards the final public hearings in November. One article in particular Article 505.1.1 Service Life, raised a lot of objections during the second IGCC public review since it asks that all electrical products must have a design life of minimum 25 years. NEMA proposed that the “electrical” category be removed altogether from
The U.S. Green Building Council ( USGBC ) has been recently challenged by a third-party to a LEED certification. It involves an appeal of the Gold building certificate awarded to Northland Pines High School in Eagle River, Wis in 2007. The appellants contend the design and construction of the school did not meet a number of prerequisites for the certification
The promise of a more efficient electric power grid is coming closer and closer to reality. Many of the overarching concepts have been defined and now considerable activity is underway to define the myriad of interactions between the multitude of actors in this huge play. One such activity, sponsored by North American Energy Standards Board ( NAESB
The High Performance Building is coming along quite well technologically. New ideas and products show up like mushrooms after the rain. One product area where we’ll definitively see improvements is the good old receptacle and its matching plug. In addition to already familiar functions like GFCIs for personal protection we’ve seen recently
On September 29 th 2009 the IEC published IEC/TR 62602 Conductors of insulated cables - Data for AWG and KCMIL sizes. The informative publication completed the first of several stages in a process initiated by NEMA members to ultimately produce a normative IEC standard for both metric based and N. American sized conductors. A good reason to celebrate
With 30 states having completed adoption processes for the 2008 National Electrical Code® (NEC), support for section 406.11, which requires tamper-resistant receptacles to be installed in new homes, has been overwhelmingly positive. Twenty-nine of the 30 states have adopted the 2008 NEC with the tamper-resistant Code intact. These include: Alaska
Plug-in vehicles, either hybrid or all electrical, are just around the corner. The big question is how are they going to be recharged? The answer depends a lot on who you are asking. In the US the most significant effort is made by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE International). A number of standards are in the works to cover vehicles charging
Energy consumption is by far the low hanging fruit on the sustainability tree. Since, according to Energy Information Administration, a whopping 65% of the energy produced by mostly non-renewable sources is lost in conversion processes, it stands to reason to look closer at these conversions and develop more efficient technologies to get what we need
Several days ago the High Performance Building Congressional Caucus issued a series of recommendations regarding Producing High-Performance Federal Buildings . The first one on the list asks Congress to require that for all Acquisitions of Federal Buildings True Life-Cycle Analysis and Decision - Making be performed. The second would require total building