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| Green Building Neighborhood |
At the Green Building in the NuLu neighborhood, Stephanie Brothers is
giving a tour of the facility. She says the building’s electrical and
heating systems required a lot of up-front investment, but they’ll be
worth it in the long run. “The solar panel array that we installed
will actually start paying us back sometime within the next 8 to 12
years,” she said. “The geothermal system that we installed will start
paying us back on that original investment sometime in the next six
years.” The Green Building is Louisville’s only Platinum
LEED-certified building and nearly every piece of it is recycled or
engineered to be efficient. But this is an extreme case.
Greg Luhan is a professor of architecture at the University of Kentucky. He says green building techniques can be deployed on a much smaller scale.
“Good green building strategies always take advantage of everything that’s free, first. And take advantage of views and the site,” he said. “And of course, from a planning standpoint if
You can develop subdivisions or even any type of building that takes advantage of all those things first, the value-added concepts are passed directly from the builder to the homeowner.”
It’s easy to build a top-of-the-line green building and spend lots of money, Luhan says. But it’s more of a challenge to design an inexpensive home that’s efficient and will save its owners money on their utility bills—and he thinks those smaller buildings can be more beneficial to the environment.
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| Green Building Neighborhood |
“If
you get into large-scale production homebuilders and Habitat for
Humanity, for instance, is the largest homebuilder in the country, if
you can now do thousands or hundreds or tens of thousands of these
buildings at the scale of the impact of doing good green design and best
practices, it’ll have a lot greater impact on the environment,” Luhan
said.
UK
is working with several Kentucky Habitat for Humanity chapters to
develop homes that will produce as much energy as they consume. The
standard house in Kentucky has an average utility bill of five dollars
per day. Right now, Luhan’s prototype is down to 54 cents a day, and he
says it will eventually be below zero and sell energy back to the grid.
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