Built Environment Team
With its brilliant lights visible for miles and water features of every imaginable size and shape, the Las Vegas Strip is definitely not a poster child for sustainability. But where some see extravagance and waste, RMI’s Built Environment Team (BET) sees opportunity.
Recently, the group signed a consulting agreement with MGM/Mirage to assess its environmental footprint. By analyzing the company’s 68-acre City Center project and the rest of its building stock, the Built Environment Team is helping the casino conglomerate establish benchmarks for energy and water use that will serve as metrics for future projects.
Consulting with MGM/Mirage is just one example of how the Built Environment Team is working with high-profile clients to make the case for green building.
As the demand for their expertise grows, the Team has been able to select clients who want to set a radical new standard in energy-efficient buildings. These clients are demanding innovative and cutting-edge designs. By adopting the 2030 Challenge, the Team is working toward buildings that at least halve comparable designs’ typical greenhouse-gas emissions.
“We’re trying to be more selective and much more effective,” explains BET principal Victor Olgyay, AIA.
That goal has led the Team into a partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI)—a long-term endeavor to encourage wholesale building retrofits in some of the world’s largest cities. Following the AIDS-drug model developed by CCI’s parent, the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, RMI is helping link vendors with buyers, creating a larger market for energy-efficient design and systems.
Even with these successes, Team members say they still encounter a good deal of public skepticism.
“People ask, ‘How can you possibly do that?’” explains Olgyay. “There’s still a lot of inertia and superstition in the building industry.”
To counter this thinking, the Team has been compiling case-studies for a series of short video productions, the first of which will be unveiled at this year’s GreenBuild Conference in Chicago.
Team members hope that this production will open people’s eyes not just to the benefits of green building, but also to the vast possibilities these designs create. By employing better design practices, Olgyay notes, buildings can do more than cut their resource use—they can actually give back more than they consume.
Need proof? Take the newly opened National Energy Laboratory of Hawai‘i, for example. The Built Environment Team helped the project earn LEED Platinum status—making it one of the ten best green buildings in the world. Because of its efficient design, the building produces twice as much energy as it uses. Case made.
Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) Team
Picture cars running on wind, solar, and hydroelectric energy, uncompromised, with long range, with better safety, and at a profit.
Sound a little far-fetched?
Members of RMI’s new Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle Team don’t think so. In fact, the researchers on RMI’s PHEV Team are so convinced renewable electricity can be used to power vehicles, they’re strategizing how to make such vehicles—fifty thousand of them a year!—competitively by 2012.
Working as part of a Consortium of automotive equipment and high-tech firms (Alcoa, Johnson Controls, and Google), as well as a foundation (the Turner Foundation), the Team is using clean-sheet design integration to optimize all the synergies embodied in GM’s EV1 and RMI’s Hypercar®—ultralight construction, low-drag design, hybrid- electric drive, software-rich architecture, and efficient accessories. The Consortium’s automotive engineers are currently designing the most energy-efficient drivetrain, wheels, suspension, interiors, tires, and other components imaginable, and showing how, artfully combined, they can all make sense and make money.
Of course, renewables aren’t big enough to power the U.S. automotive fleet, or even a sizeable portion of it—yet. But, PHEV Team Leader John Waters is quick to point out that carbon-based fuels will become a key bridging strategy. Having cars running off grid power will only increase (though modestly) the demand for electricity of all kinds, including renewable electricity.
“There have been more than seventy studies on this question,” John notes. “Do we net a better carbon dioxide reduction by relying on the grid rather than relying on gasoline or diesel? Depending on how you evaluate it and which region of the country you study, there’s a 30–75 percent reduction in emissions by using coal-based electricity rather than liquid fossil fuels in cars and trucks.
And fifty thousand of these vehicles replacing today’s models and driven for ten years, PHEV Team members have calculated, would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 23 million tons.
Detroit is taking notice, too. RMI’s PHEV Team has already consulted with one automaker about adopting some of these platform efficiency strategies in its products.
John Waters is glad he and his automotive engineers have been “spun out” from his former Breakthrough Design Team (BDT). BDT was working with multiple industrial clients, and the opportunity to focus on this one transformative transportation solution with huge global benefits was too ripe to ignore.
The next phase may see strategic members and investors starting a company with the Consortium providing the intellectual capital that will drive design and manufacturing, along the lines of RMI’s four previous for-profit spinoffs.
The challenge, then?
“Funding that enterprise so we launch it quickly and empower it for long-term success,” John says, is the next step. “It needs the right amount of smart, upfront investment. But the world needs our solution yesterday.”
MOVE Team
RMI MOVE is the name of a new RMI Research & Consulting team established to work on all things pertaining to transportation. MOVE Team Leader Michael Brylawski thinks buildings and electricity generation get too much credit for being the monsters of global warming.
“Everyone wants to claim the most carbon, but if you look at carbon contributions, it’s pretty even between electricity generation, transportation, and buildings,” he says. “All modes of transport add up to a third of the United States’ carbon emissions. Transportation accounts for 70 percent of U.S. oil use.”
The Team’s objectives are strongly aligned with RMI’s Winning the Oil Endgame efforts. The Team is involved with several large-scale, transformative projects in the car, truck, plane, and cargo arenas.
The MOVE team is spearheading the market, business, and lifecycle analysis for RMI’s PHEV car project—which itself ramped up so quickly that it is now an important stand-alone project complete with its own team.
A second MOVE project—the “Transformational Vehicle”—is underway in conjunction with a major automaker, and shows much commercial promise in RMI’s 17-year quest to design more energy-efficient vehicles.
A third major effort is lightweighting the ubiquitous steel shipping container (a typical 20-foot container weighs 5,140 pounds empty!), while a fourth area of work will be defining sustainability solutions for large transportation firms.
Finally, the team is helping to redesign long-haul truck-trailers, which cause threefifths of a large truck’s total aerodynamic drag and use two-thirds of its fuel.
If just half the United States’ 2.6 million Class-8 trucks were given a “simple” package of fuel-saving devices (idle-reduction devices, effiient tires, and aerodynamic kits), their owners or operators could save 2.9 billion gallons of diesel a year. The fleet would emit 30 million metric tons less greenhouse gas per year—the equivalent of taking 170,000 trucks off the road.
“We want to tackle a high-impact area that no one else is addressing,” Michael said of the trailer redesign. “RMI’s core strength is to use our unique demand-side analytical approach to find breakthrough opportunities like the long-haul trailer, then bring diverse stakeholders together to create market-attractive solutions.”
Recently, a speaker at the RMI25 anniversary celebration mentioned that “saved lives” is one metric for his venture capital firm. “That could be a metric for us,” Michael says. “But we’re about saved barrels of oil. For us, it’s all over a barrel.”
Energy & Resources Team
RMI’s Energy & Resources Team is working to change the energy paradigm from waste to efficiency, risky fossil and nuclear fuels to benign renewables, gigantic to right-sized, brittle to resilient, and costly to affordable.
“For a utility, efficiency and renewable sources aren’t just fringe items that save a little fossil fuel and get you some good PR,” said current Energy & Resources Team Leader Dr. Joel Swisher, PE. “They should be at the heart of the game.”
RMI’s energy clients are mainly electric utilities and large power users, like industries and commercial firms. ERT provides these clients with unique mix of deep technical knowledge and holistic, strategic perspective to create end-toend strategies that are radically more efficient, reliable, and competitive.
Changing the energy paradigm, though, means digging into the details as well. Recent ERT projects have assessed the cost-effectiveness of energy efficiency programs, analyzed demand-response programs (shifting energy use from peak periods to non-peak periods), and identified the regulatory and financial risks of greenhouse-gas emissions.
In addition to burgeoning client work, ERT researches cutting-edge energy topics, like variable renewables and cellulosic ethanol. Wind, for example, is considered a non-”firm” or variable power supply, available only when the wind blows. However, RMI’s research has confirmed that many wind turbines spread across a large geographical area can offer a far steadier power supply than any single turbine. Likewise, cellulosic ethanol—made from woody and grassy plants or waste residues rather than an annual food crop like corn—is not yet cost-competitive, but ERT is uncovering ways to make it so.
“Energy needs to be thought of as a portfolio, as a package of resources— both supply and efficiency—that complement each other, rather than one RMI MOVE Team continued from page 10 big centralized resource. Think of the financial markets—people don’t put all their money into only one stock,” Joel noted. “They create a diversified portfolio of stocks that balance risk and return. Energy systems should do the same. Historically, however, we’ve thought about energy planning in terms of large, individual resources, such as coal plants. The big challenge is to fundamentally change the way energy planners, and our society in general, think about energy.”
The ER Team is currently undergoing minor changes. It will now be headed by Dr. Stephen Doig, who brings tremendous expertise from his former roles as special advisor at McKinsey & Company and as an energy expert with the Air Force. Joel will continue to expand RMI’s leading-edge research efforts while working closely with CEO Amory Lovins.
Recent ERT clients include electric utilities Duke Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric, City of Palo Alto Utilities, Silicon Valley Power, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Kansas City Power & Light, and the Nebraska Public Power District. Corporate clients include Texas Instruments, Wal-Mart, Frito-Lay, and mining giant Rio Tinto.
