It Doesn’t Always Have to be the West
By Clara Fishel
June 16, 2008
It’s summer and I’ve had air conditioning on the brain -price to run it, high; emissions from it, high; temp in the grocery stores these days, way too low; etc. I was working on minimizing my home usage without melting away when I came across this announcement from my alma mater.
The University of California, Davis’ Western Cooling Efficiency Center and its partners (including Pacific Gas & Electric Company, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Sempra Energy, Southern California Edison, Target Corporation, Wal-Mart, the California Energy Commission, and the U.S. Department of Energy, among others) announced the Western Cooling Challenge for the design, production, and marketing of high-efficiency rooftop cooling units for dry climates. The Challenge will help Western States to meet their green-house gas reduction targets, and supports a policy directive from the California Public Utilities Commission. It offers a major opportunity for the HVAC industry to begin to transition to a climate-sensitive future.
The partnership between academia, business, utilities & govt. is inspired regional problem solving that will create creative, green jobs in the process of lowering GHG emissions and operating costs in buildings that utilize the new tech.
How about the same sort of solution for our humid climates . . . GA Tech, SCAD, UGA, Home Depot, Southern Company. . . It doesn’t always have to be the west.
Connect Savannah recently featured THIS article by Jim Motavalli, editor of E: The Environmental Magazine. The article pointed out that while the southeast continues to be a huge GHG emitter and is still lagging on per capita investment in green technology (it’s the nation’s lowest), sales of Energy Star products and policies to address climate change, we seem to finally be waking up.
What’s goin’ on around here: Do any of you readers know of cool regional partnerships addressing sustainability issues?
Posted in Business, Energy, Global Warming, Green Building
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June 20th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
This is not exactly just the region-level, but… The Partnership for a Sustainable Georgia provides free technical assistance to businesses and agencies that want to reduce waste and consumption while improving bottom line. You can see what organizations have signed up (and agreed for their organization name to be listed publicly) at http://www.p2ad.org/dnr/partners/public.
It is not solely focused on greenhouse gases, as the effort has been around since 1993 in the Pollution Prevention Assistance Division of the Georgia Dept. of Natural Resources.