In New York State we are fortunate to be surrounded by family farms, a beautiful landscape, and (some) thriving local communities. In the towns in and around the mountains and valleys of the Hudson Valley you will find communities that are supporting their neighborhood businesses, farms, and farm stands. Local produce, beef, chicken, duck, and pork are the rule in resident’s refrigerators, not the exception. Yet local economies in New York are struggling, like much of the rest of the country.
New jobs are needed, along with tax revenue. The fossil fuels industry has made billions upon billions for the elite upper class in this country while very little has seen its way into the betterment of the lives of residents in each town, village, hamlet, or city in this country. In fact, the drilling and mining exploits of big oil & gas has left many areas of the country devastated by environmental damage.  Centralized, globalized Multi-National Conglomerates are dominating and leaving little choice to be had for the average citizen.

The alternative energy industry has been marginalized ever since its inception, even though the possibilities for a renewable & sustainable energy economy are real and expanding as we speak. Thermal Mass Construction INC has developed a system that achieves energy independence for home owners by reducing or eliminating their reliance on fossil fuels for heat and electricity. The call to retrofit homes for energy efficiency is just beginning in New York, and the goal is to create jobs. We are hoping that the new 'Green Jobs Financing Law' will put real investment into helping residents substantially improve the efficiency of their homes and put money back in their pocket. The local contractors can have consistent work rebuilding their communities. Excavators, general contractors, finishers, trucking, and drilling will all get a major boost from this law if serious funds are implemented to make the transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy for home owners.

Working class citizens deserve a break. They are locked into the grid and completely reliant upon the fossil fuels industry for the necessities of life (running their home). Renewable energy used with our "Thermal Mass Concrete/Radiant Panels can break that reliance and generate local wealth for the local businesses that are innovating to harness it in the most beneficial and effective way.  By choosing to support Green Construction we are in turn supporting our neighbors, local economies, and the environment.  Once you build a TMC INC Green Home you no longer are tied to the price fluctuations of fossil fuels.  Once they no longer receive billions in government subsidies they will be unable to buy politicians with donations and job offers.  Their industry has caused countless environmental catastrophes and needs to be moved away from.

The cost to our environment is too much.  There are only so many mountain tops the coal industry can blow up, only so many water aquifers Natural Gas can pollute with fracking, and only so many lifeless, industrial swathes of land we can tolerate.  We see things degrading all around us in terms of quality of life; I say it’s time we did something about it.  The planet cannot sustain it, and our wallets cannot sustain it.  Let’s go Green NOW!

The truth is we can actually take you completely off the grid with the right combination of Geo-Thermal, Solar, and Thermal Mass Construction panels. The geo-cell will provide the storage space for heat in the hot Summer months; the stone aggregate holds the heat in and reradiates it back into the structure when the outside temperatures begin to drop, a proportionate solar array will supply the heat for your hot water as well as supplying electricity for mechanical needs, and the thermal mass panels that will make up the housing structure will be the core of the heating and cooling system. The panels lined with radiant tubing will absorb and retain the heat while circulating pumps will transfer the warm air throughout the entire structure, keeping every inch at 70 degrees.

Can retro-fitting be done to existing homes using Thermal Mass Construction? The answer is YES. As long as the structure is supported we can retro-fit one panel at a time. If you want to do it in stages it is very easy to do one side of the structure at a time. Our structures do not require load bearing walls so adjusting the positioning of the panels prior to setting is easy.

As fuel electricity prices rise the average working class citizen is wondering how to keep up with the cost of living. Heating oil and gasoline prices have skyrocketed in the past decade due to speculation in the market, and wages have stagnated leaving the average workers reaching for lint their pockets.  Many economists believe the cost of food and fuel will cause another recession, and if the government allows the United States default on its debt we will suffer a hardship not many in this country are prepared for.  It makes us all wonder if there is something more we Americans can do to solve the energy crisis.  The short answer is, we need to empower ourselves, not industrial corporations.

The truth is alternative energy solutions exist all over the globe, but in America we have not done all we can to support and grow the industry. Oil & Gas companies are some of the most profitable corporations on the planet and are extremely influential in the political arena.  The fossil fuel industry is connected to nearly every quadrent of our economy, which is why there is valid hesitation concerning a transition to a sustainable~renewable energy economy. They have worked to suppress alternative energy to some degree on the local and national level, yet right here in New York State we have created a company that can build you a residential or commercial structure 100% off the grid for good.

'Thermal Mass Construction INC' has developed a set of building materials and procedures that allow us to build residential or commercial structures 100% off the grid. With our “Thermal Mass Green Building System” we have a set of options for the level of efficiency a home buyer/owner can afford to achieve according to their budget including the amount of government subsidies and tax credits are available at the time. A client may have certain restrictions on the size and scope of a new build, or the amount of retrofitting they can do at a time.  Yet we are able to offer sustainable energy efficiency in varying degrees to our clients that can be built one phase at a time according to their needs and budget.

Using the materials and procedures developed by Thermal Mass Construction INC new construction for a client is priced at approximately $100 a square foot for the panels and assembly of the structure itself in terms of new construction, which leaves considerable room for profit by the local contractors. Our “Thermal Mass Green Building System” incorporates the heating & cooling system into the mass of the structure itself by way of thermal mass insulated concrete panels that have radiant loops embedded in them.  The system can gather heat from a solar array that is connected to a heating manifold, heating the water in the radiant system to 100+ degrees, or can work in concert with a geo thermal deep well recovery component.

Energy efficiency: Real estate’s next granite counter top?

By Elisa Wood

By Matthew Rader, Director of EPAct §179D and Cost Segregation, SourceCorp Professional Services

With energy efficiency in the forefront of the building landscape, functioning “off-grid” is the ultimate realization of efficiency.  The only way to achieve that is to have on-site renewable energy in one form or another.  There are all kinds of pros and cons with different systems of renewables.  One benefit they all share is tax incentives in the form of credits and deductions, and in some cases both.

The energy efficiency retrofit industry for public buildings is relatively well developed worldwide compared to the private building retrofit industry. It is a large market in the United States, with annual revenues for energy service companies in the vicinity of U.S. $4 billion. However, long-term energy efficiency and carbon mitigation targets worldwide will rely heavily on improving the efficiency of the entire building stock. Public buildings represent only about a quarter of the total commercial building stock in the United States, and retrofits have barely begun to touch the private building stock.

One reason for the sluggishness of efficiency in the private building stock is the lack of post-retrofit data on building performance. Although there are many successful examples of retrofits in the private sector, the industry as a whole needs a robust set of data on post-retrofit performance and payback before they will be convinced that the opportunity to reduce operating costs is real, the risks are low, and the ROI is high enough to justify investments in efficiency.

Today, I read a book entitled, "Green Recovery," by Andrew Winston, the co-author of "Green to Gold." First off, I highly recommend this book because it provides best practices that corporations are using today to "help build a leaner, greener world." Andrew Winston provides a simple green roadmap for businesses to follow: Get Lean, Get Smart, Get Creative, and Get [Your People] Engaged.

As this month rolls along and I continue to research information for the Journal, I find more and more approaches design and build teams take to reach zero-energy, or energy neutral, with their buildings. One example of this type of construction I came across this morning is the first home on the South or West Coast to meet Passive House energy requirements. This in and of itself is a great accomplishment as Passive House requires drastic energy reductions in new construction without the use of many active systems.

The home is located in Lafayette, Louisiana, and satisfies Passive House design criteria of a 90% reduction in energy usage over traditional homes built to current codes. In addition to this, a building integrated photovoltaic solar laminate system is used to cover the remaining ten percent of energy required to bring the home to zero-energy status. The Passive House standard is gaining steam here in the US after proving itself in Europe for many years. It is one of the most stringent building standards available today, and I hope more people take notice of it to demand better building codes.

Researchers at UC Berkeley are perfecting a technique that will allow clothing manufacturers to embed microscopic fibers that can produce electricity from simple body movements, such as hiking, walking or stretching. While it might take up to three years for clothing containing this technology to hit the shelves of your local GAP store, this new breakthrough technology offers us a great opportunity to reduce our electricity demands on local utilities and reduce our costs for charging all of our high-tech devices.  

These nano sized generators are constituted of micro-filaments that are similar to fishing line, extremely flexible, but are so small they can barely be seen with the human eye.  These ultra flexible fibers can withstand not only the laundry cycle, but are resistant to chemicals and heat.  And when they are woven into clothing fabric according to the researchers accounts “the fibers can soak up the untapped energy produced by the human body” and with even more vigorous motion in certain joints, additional energy is generated.  

This new fiber technology utilizes piezoelectricity, that allows you to produce energy through applied stress, similar to rubbing your hands together to keep warm.  While the dream of producing energy from tiny components has been a far off dream for many scientists, the research team at Berkeley has developed an innovative way to effectively solve this problem.

While this technology is not yet available,  I love to read and learn more about innovative research and development, but only wish we had the funding through loans, grants and subsidies, to inspire and enable more creative and innovative minds the opportunity to design, create, and implement new products to compete in a new market that can create jobs in the green sector as well as revive our economy.  

I welcome your thoughts, comments and feedback on my post.  I would love to engage thought leaders in evolving technologies to offer us insight and education on new developments in alternative energy projects.