Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

Okay, so I'm totally geeking out but I don't care, because I think this is so awesome I HAVE to share it.

One of the classes I'm taking is Sustainable Building Design. For my midterm paper for this class, I had to visit a 'green' building, tour it and learn about some of the sustainable design principles and technology it incorporates. I visited a Harvard building, as Harvard has been doing a LOT of sustainable building for the past ten years or so (I think any new buildings or renovations that the university conducts must be certified at the LEED Silver level, minimum; the building I toured is LEED Gold, the next level up). I took a tour yesterday with a classmate at Hyerly Hall, which is office and workspace for employees and fellows at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. At the end of our tour, we spent a good half hour or 45 minutes playing with a real-time data monitoring system near the front door. It was a touch-screen apparatus where you could see the real-time water, electricity and heating usage, as well as historical usage data, and other information like local weather conditions, GPS bus tracking, and get a general overview of the building's systems and LEED features (the geothermal heating/cooling system is a technological masterpiece).

While researching further information and details to write my paper, I discovered online access to this piece of awesomeness. I could mess around with this for hours. It's just so awesome (at least to me) I had to share it here.

Plus the building is profiled on Harvard's Sustainability Office's site.

Wow! That IS neat. I am plying the the site right now. Very interesting.

It is neat, isn't it? It was sure handy for writing my paper (which I turn in today). Especially the energy usage data and the fact that it can automatically convert any power consumption data into money spent or carbon emissions. All that together actually allowed me to come to a rough figure for how much money and carbon emissions were saved due to the lighting control systems for one month, making at least some assumptions, if reasonable ones, on how the building is used based on what I do know. The teaching assistants, who handle grading, don't expect us to be able to do precise or thorough calculations, or do energy audits, but they do expect to do some rough calculations like savings from various measures.

What I really like about the building, though, is that from the outside, it still looks old, as it's constructed from brick and there's lots of old chimneys on top. When they renovated it a few years back, they maintained a good chunk of the existing structure (almost 90%, to be precise…which earns LEED points). But go inside and it looks like any other modern office building.

Amazing site ! Very interesting and I didn't know that there were some buildings like that !