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The United Center

“The Bulls and Blackhawks have demonstrated their commitment to better environmental performance and their fans everywhere can easily do the same,” said Bruce Stewart, chief retail marketing officer for Constellation. The energy efficiency tips that Constellation shares with its Illinois residential customers include ways to enhance efficiency for lighting, appliances and air conditioning. Residential customers can choose Constellation as their home energy supplier at home.constellation.com and many can also opt to receive 100% wind energy.

The Bulls, Blackhawks and Constellation jointly announced a five-year sponsorship designating Constellation as the official energy provider for United Center. The agreement also calls for Constellation to sponsor Go-Green games by purchasing Green-e Energy Certified renewable energy certificates (RECs) to match the electricity use on each game day. RECs represent the environmental benefit of electricity generated by wind and therefore avoid emissions associated with fossil fuel generation.

The RECs for the Blackhawks game Sunday avoided 63 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly the equivalent of burning 146 barrels of oil. The use of RECs for the Bulls game avoided 52 metric tons of CO2, approximately the amount of emissions from 2,100 propane-fired home barbeques.

Constellation, an energy supplier since 1999 to Illinois businesses, schools and hospitals, sponsored similar efforts last year for the Chicago Bears, Cubs and White Sox. In addition to powering the United Center, Constellation also supplies electricity to Wrigley Field and Halas Hall, the Bears’ team offices and practice facilities.

These green games also provide an opportunity for fans to learn more about the growing trend to shop and save on home electricity, just as consumers shop for internet or phone service. More than 376,000 Illinois residents have chosen new home electricity suppliers in the past year and a half.

"There were no energy saving thermostats then, there were no compact fluorescent bulbs, there wasn’t a fraction of the things that we have today. We’ve come a long way."

“You don’t run up Mt. Everest,” Ed Begley Jr. likes to say when encouraging people to live as sustainably as they are able, not as they feel that they must. “You get to base camp and you get acclimated. Then you climb only has high as you can.”

You may know the veteran actor from his breakout role on St. Elsewhere or one of the hundreds of movies and TV shows he has appeared in since. You might also know him as an environmental activist; Begley, along with his wife, Rachelle Carson, starred in Living With Ed, which followed the couple as they bantered about just how sustainable of a lifestyle one can lead, whether that’s installing solar panels or pedaling a stationary bike to generate the energy needed to make toast. “We have the only Hollywood marriage I know of with a pre-nup that includes carbon credits,” he said.

Begley acknowledges his father—the actor Ed Begley Sr., “a conservative who liked to conserve”—with instilling in him a reverence for nature. Starting with the first Earth Day in 1970, he has tried to lead an environmentally responsible life, such as making energy upgrades on his 1936-built home and investing in a commercial wind turbine.

Begley was in Schaumburg recently to deliver the keynote address at the Better Buildings: Better Business conference. He agreed to sit and discuss the environmental challenges and successes he’s experienced over the years, the politics of sustainability and the new, LEED Platinum house he and his wife will soon construct and document for On Begley Street.

Could you give me a brief description of the house featured on your show?
I bought it in 1988 and it’s a 1,600 square foot house. When I moved into it, I quickly realized turning on the heating or air that it was highly inefficient. It was leaking like a sieve. So I did all the cheap and easy stuff right away: weather stripping, energy saving thermostat, energy efficient lighting, attic insulation. Right away the bills dropped. I had some very old windows that were damaged and needed to be replaced anyway. T. M. Cobb, the original manufacturer from 1936 is still in business, so I put in T. M. Cobb double pane windows. Then I blew cellulose insulation in the walls, you know, recycled newspaper. I put in recycled denim in the attic.

This is in ’88?
No, in ’88 I put cellulose in the attic and then later did the denim. That cellulose from ‘88 had settled. So I put in the recycled denim in 2007. But at each one of those stages, I could see the bills drop. And because I live in noisy L.A., the other comfort benefit, besides the house not being drafty, was noise. It got quiet as a church in there.

In talking about your very humble beginnings trying to live more sustainably, you mentioned grabbing the low hanging fruit and gradually adding more ambitious projects onto the house. Were there financial or availability challenges back in those days?
There were some challenges. As a perfect example, the light bulbs back in 1988 and 1989 were very expensive. There’s good news and bad news with that. They’re very expensive, but some of these old Panasonic lights are still working. It’s not like they just got occasional use and that’s why they lasted 22 years. They’re in my office, I had them on every night.

Energy saving thermostat, that was not a problem back in ’88 and ’89. They started having those at Home Depot then. They got more sophisticated and easier to use, but the basic idea is the same: wake and sleep, leave and return modes; you program it to your lifestyle.

Being kind of a gearhead, I’m one of those people that didn’t have to be coerced to really make it an efficient device. Most people don’t do the important thing of programming it, they just leave it on the default settings. It’s going to do you a little bit of good I suppose, but if you program it for your leave at nine a.m. return at five kind of stuff and if you well insulate, it’s not like your house is going to get freezing cold in the winter for the pets or what have you. You’re not going to have ice on your countertop, it’s just going to be a little bit cooler. But it’s going to be nice and comfortable when you return to your home.

It was certainly a challenge. Let me really back up to 1970. There were no energy saving thermostats then, there were no compact fluorescent bulbs, there wasn’t a fraction of the things that we have today. Weather stripping you had to put up with carpet tacks—there was no adhesive-backed weather stripping back then. So we’ve come a long way.

What did you do after the weather stripping and insulation?
Light bulbs, weather stripping, insulation and thermostats. Those were the first steps in ‘88 when I moved in. And the insulation was a good deal. They were starting to be energy conscious at some utilities, certainly the company now known as Semper Energy, which was known as Southern California Gas back then. They had a zero interest loan to put in attic insulation. How do I lose at this game? Interest rates were 11% or something back then. So yeah, come in and put some insulation in my attic. I paid it off over time. What I paid for that loan was less than the savings I was getting on my natural gas bill. So I made use of those things. There were some things that were available, some that were not, but that’s how I started. Then two years later, 1990, that’s when I put in the solar electric on my roof.

Have any new challenges cropped up in the last few years?
I’m always talking about the things that work. It’s important I suppose to talk about the things that didn’t. I was a big fan and spokesperson for vertical axis wind turbines. Traditional ones like the one I bought in 1985 in the California desert as an investment, those are horizontal axis, like a pinwheel.

In municipalities like L.A., you can’t have a wind turbine. Why? Because of the hazard of a big Cuisinart on your roof. And the noise; if you want to tolerate it, will your neighbor be happy with it? So you can’t have them. I think that’s probably a good rule.

So with these vertical axis wind turbines, now there’s no bird death, no bat death, it’s not harming any wildlife. And the quiet, it’s wonderful. The only problem is, I know they don’t put out a lot of noise, they also don’t put out a lot of power. I kept searching for the holy grail of vertical axis wind turbines. I decided to stand down for a while until someone is highly successful over a period of time. The units that I would go and test worked well, but they were prototypes. When they made them in production they didn’t work as well. So that was a misstep.

There was a gray water system … Again very well intentioned people at every turn, nobody was doing anything that was improper. But the gray water system I had had some problems, so I’m not going to put a gray water system on the new house. But I will have rainwater catchment. I’ll have a big rainwater tank of about 10,000 gallons, much bigger than what I have now which is a 550 gallon rainwater catchment.

It sounds like the driving force for the new house might be Rachelle. What drove you to build the new house as opposed to staying where you were and comfortable and had put so much effort in?
First of all, I’ve been married now twelve years and going with Rachelle nineteen years, so I like the idea of being a good partner and not always saying no. Then there was the idea of actually having lower energy bills than I have today, which are pretty darn low. Bigger vegetable garden, more rainwater catchment, all those ideas appealed to me so I said yes to it.

She just wants more closet space, let’s be honest. She wants a bathroom that she’s not sharing with her soon-to-be thirteen year old daughter. So she has some good points too. That could get dicey as Hayden approaches teen years, to be sharing a bathroom with a thirteen year old. There’s some validity to that. The house we live in now is very small. It’s a mansion by world standards. By Hollywood standards it’s a shack.

The rainwater that you’re going to capture, how will you be using that?
Just the garden.

No toilets?
We’ll see about that. It’s possible it will flush some toilets. But it will all be purple pipe so that any plumber in the future will know right away that this isn’t something you can hook up to an ice maker or drinking fountain. It’s purple pipe water and can be used to flush toilets, but I think we’re just going to use it in the garden because I’m going to have a lot of vegetables and a lot of fruit trees, as I have now. But even more of both, so I’ll need some water and most of the year it will come from rainwater. If you’re saving 10,000 gallons and you last had rain let’s say in April or May, you can make it to July or August with that amount if you’re careful with your water.

I take it you travel quite a bit and when you do, you stay in hotels. What frustrates you the most when you’re on the road and you’re in unsustainable environments like hotels.
There are some frustrations, but I’m the guy who always sees the glass as more than half full. I’m just so pleased nowadays that hotels have compact fluorescent bulbs in every fixture. Normally when I come to Chicago, if I have to fly and I’m not able to drive in a hybrid, I take my CTA pass which I keep in the briefcase. But here [in Schaumburg] this was a challenge. I pressed the little transit icon on my iPhone and there was no public transportation here so I had to get in a cab.

And then I met this guy Tim who came out here who said, “No, you can take the Metra rail out to here,” and then he walked like three miles. Buddy, you’ve out-Begleyed Ed Begley. He lives here, so he knew. But that’s what it’s all about. It’s doing the best you can. I try to avoid flying but sometimes you have to. Monday in L.A. and then Tuesday in Illinois, so I get in a plane like anybody else and then buy a Terra Pass, a carbon offset.

For years I didn’t travel for that very reason. People would say, “We want you to come to our energy saving conference in Indiana.” I said, “Good, here’s my contribution to your energy saving conference: I’m not coming. I’m going to save the jet fuel, I’m not going to come, but I’ll make a videotape and mail it to you or something.” That was what I did for years. And then David Suzuki, a noted Canadian geneticist and environmentalist, said, “Ed, I love that you’re driving around L.A. on your bike or your electric car telling people about this stuff, but it’s also important to get out in the world and to share your knowledge about energy efficiency.”

So those are some of the frustrations. But people are really trying and I think the biggest hurdle we have to overcome is making sure that everybody has the information, a list of things they can do. People have decided to stand down on the environment because they think they have to run out and buy solar panels or an expensive electric car. There are other things you can do. Light bulbs, thermostats, weather stripping; stuff that’s going to save them money right away. That’s green stuff too.

The ozone hole was largely healed because of the Montreal Protocol and you mentioned the smog in L.A. which, if not gone, is largely cleared up. Those are success stories. But we still seem to be fighting about whether or not climate change is an actual threat. Is the political will not quite there right now?
I don’t think the political will is there now. The front door is locked on climate change in many peoples’ minds. They will not go to the NASA website and see the information there. And if they do, they think they’re part of the conspiracy too. So if you’re not going to get in the front door, you have to go in the side door and say, let’s do it for these other reasons.

Boone Pickens, an oil man, is on the same page as me. $350 million a year is leaving the country to imported oil. He’s in favor of wind power too. Lets agree with Boone Pickens on this. How is Boone Pickens part of the conspiracy? What’s wrong as a conservative, with conserving? I learned all these wonderful environmental things from my dad. Forget about what we don’t agree on. You don’t believe in climate change? Fine, let’s do this. That’s what I do, not beat my head against the front door, just go in the side door.

A conservative who liked to conserve: U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (left) in Yosemite National Park with Sierra Club founder John Muir. Photor courtesy Library of Congress.

You mentioned that your father was a conservative who liked to conserve, but the overlap currently between conservatives and conservationists is so small. Why do you think that is?
I’m a Democrat, but I don’t know how the Democrats have taken this from the conservatives to conserve. It’s my dad’s ethic, it’s Teddy Roosevelt kind of stuff. I don’t know how we’ve grabbed it but we have. But believe me there are plenty of Democrats that are in with the oil companies too.

But it seems to be much more of a progressive thing than a conservative thing, and that’s unfortunate, I think. It’s not the way it’s been historically. Hopefully that will change. As quickly as I say that, there are many, many Republicans that I’ve run into all around the country who say, “I don’t agree with you on this, but I’ll tell you, I like what you’re doing because your actually doing it, not just talking about it.” And these are good things that are going to save us money. It will be good for the country to get off foreign oil.

Are you optimistic on that front? Do you see some of those minds actually changing?
Yeah, I see peoples’ minds changing. But I think it’s human nature. I think there’s going to have to be some very clear signs of large amounts of ice sliding off of Greenland or Antarctica or something. The ice that’s already in the water is one thing, that’s like ice in a glass that melts. It doesn’t go over the top, but the ice on the edge of the glass that melts, that’s going to make it overflow. The stuff that’s on land in Greenland and Antarctica, that’s the real challenge. That could have some unfortunate consequences for conservatives and progressives alike in south Florida and lower Manhattan and the poor people in the Marshall Islands and elsewhere.

It’s so interesting to me that the people are looking with a jewelers eye at every email from some scientist about a hockey stick. They’re looking with incredible detail at every little thing, but the one basic statement is just a statement: you go broke with all the green stuff. That they don’t inspect. They don’t scrutinize that statement for a moment. Why are jobs on oil derricks and coal mines better jobs than making wind turbines and double pane windows? What’s different? Do they pay them in a different currency? They’re jobs and jobs of dignity.

And nobody is suggesting that you stop burning coal tomorrow and stop drilling for oil. These lights will go off and the groceries won’t get to the store. But you start to move in another direction. That direction is enabled by energy efficiency and then you move towards renewables with a steady, serious pace. And you retrain people; as there are less jobs in coal mines, we’ll have more jobs making solar panels and wind turbines.

For a while, there was a guy, John Brown, at BP and he was the first [in the industry] to say that climate change was real. The head of an oil company said that climate change is real and we’re going to begin to do something about it.

They had that unfortunate spill in the Gulf of course, but he made this statement repeatedly that we are an energy company and we’re going to make the best solar panels and what have you. Now, sadly, they’ve discontinued the solar panel production and they had the problem in the Gulf.

If I was the head of that company, I would have said, “This is terrible and for now, we’ve put a hold on some of this deep water drilling. But in the meantime, we want to get these people to work. We happen to make solar panels, so we’re going to be out there with shovels tomorrow breaking ground on a new solar panel plant and were going to make panels in Louisiana.”

Would have been brilliant PR. It also would have been something of substance, it wouldn’t just be PR. And they are an energy company. You make money selling crude and the refined products, I understand that, but you also can make money selling solar panels. So I’ll be happy when they all realize that they are energy companies and that energy comes in many forms.

BP is an interesting specific company. For a while they were rebranding themselves…
Beyond Petroleum.

Right, Beyond Petroleum. But even before the spill, they were diverging away from that. Is it just a path of least resistance? Oil is here and its cheap and its easy for us? Why did they seemingly abandon that avenue?
I think people don’t take it seriously and they haven’t seen enough evidence that it really is going to be taken seriously by the public. It’s like Who Killed the Electric Car. The head of GM, from early on, said these are a bunch of golf carts, we really were forced by California law to do it. We don’t like it, we’re going to do it and prove that this is a joke.

The fix was in—not by everybody at GM, there are many engineers and middle management that really believed in the electric car—but a lot of people at the top thought it was a bad idea. They hated being forced to do it by California law and they had their minds made up that it was going to fail and of course it did.

Well, when they asked [former CEO Rick] Wagoner when he left GM what’s the biggest mistake he made, he said “Killing the electric car.” And now you have the Chevy Volt, plug-in electrics, Nissan Leaf and others.

What’s wrong with the plug-in hybrid? It’s the best of both worlds. You can drive to new York in it if you need to and you can plug it in for those crucial, key first forty miles, which is 90% of our driving. They’re all in the game now. It was a little early for [GM]. Maybe it was a little early for BP. But I’ll tell you this: when you have [29] people dying at Massey Coal in 2010 and then later that same year with the Deepwater Horizon disaster, 11 people dying there—when people are dying so we can have cheap energy, the least we can do is what they did in World War II.

People got together and saved tires for the rubber and pots and pans for the metal to put in battleships and do their part. The least we can do is put up some light bulbs and some weather stripping and do something for the people who are out there in coal mines and on oil rigs dying so we can have cheap energy. My God, if we can’t do that, what’s wrong with us?

Well, during the ‘40’s, there was a direct threat. There was a war on. Today, I think, it’s a little bit more ephemeral, the threat. People think, “It’s not going to affect us, its decades from now.” What path do you think will be most efficient in terms of living more environmentally-friendly: education of both the public and policy makers or advancements in technology in terms of energy conservation?
I think education. I’m all for advancements in technology. I’d hate to shut anybody out, but education is key. People must not get it still that they can save money doing this stuff because people are still not buying the energy efficiency light bulbs in the numbers that I think are appropriate. This is the cheap stuff, the stuff you can get nearly free. They’re having light bulb giveaway programs at utilities and not enough people are showing up to get a free light bulb. What do you have to do? So I think its education. People think its baloney, they think it’s some sort of granola notion and they don’t want to be part of it when it’s as American as apple pie and as conservative as my dad and Teddy Roosevelt.

You were very engaging and funny during your delivery earlier. Is that the way to do it? How do we engage the more hard-headed on this topic?
I think humor is very helpful. Jon Stewart uses humor in his show to great effect. I use it on the show Living with Ed. I’ve had environmental shows in the past. I had one on in the mid-‘90’s; it was on at 4 a.m. on the Discovery Channel. Nobody, including myself, really every saw it. I never saw my own show. It was on at 4 a.m., I’m not going to get up at 4 a.m. and watch a show, because there was no humor in it. It was very factual stuff about saving energy and protecting the environment. Good companies doing good green things. It was “just the facts, ma’am.”

Rachelle is the one that was promoting the idea of doing this reality show with she and I and our very unusual way of dealing with each other. “What do you mean? What are you doing? You’re riding a bike to make toast? You’re an idiot.” That kind of reality show fodder. And people ate it up with a spoon. I got my message out finally because of my wife. I wasn’t getting my message out effectively at all. The humor of it, and that engagement, made it palatable to people.

People turn to you as a voice on environmentalism. Where do you go when you want to get more information? Who are your sources?
I go to PhDs, Nobel Prize-winning scientists. That would be the Union of Concerned Scientists; I’m on their advisory board. I direct people to the NASA website, because I really don’t think they’re part of a conspiracy. They’ve got one of those readouts like the national debt going up and up. CO2: up. Global temperature: up. Sea level ice: down. Sea level: up. They’re just numbers. You can be mad at the numbers, you can do whatever you want. You can be happy, sad or ambivalent about it but they are numbers and they’re real.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that Al Gore is up there in the Nimbus 7 oceanographic satellite with a 7/16 wrench skewing the data. It’s just data. You take that data and form your own opinion. If you have trouble with that, just talk to somebody, anybody, with PhD after their name. There are people on college campuses that don’t believe in climate change, people in the science department. But there are precious few, so I’ll roll the dice on that. Just go to any college campus, talk to somebody in the science department and see what they say. Or go to NASA, go to National Geographic. I don’t know how wide people think this conspiracy is to deceive. But at some point, you have to go, “Maybe there is something happening.” There are conspiracies, but maybe this isn’t one of them.

This group of educators without a school voted to create a new college and, according to legend, purchased the Auditorium Building—the arguable masterpiece of Adler and Sullivan—from the city for $1. “They picked up buckets and mops and literally scrubbed the building back to habitability,” said Lesley Slavitt, Vice President for Government Relations and University Outreach at Roosevelt University. “We have lovingly tried to not just repair, but restore it to its historical elegance.”

Moved by their actions, Eleanor Roosevelt allowed the new school to be named after her and the late President Franklin Roosevelt who had died just two weeks after they received a charter. Decades later, the school has grown but changed little. Roosevelt University now has a second campus in Schaumburg and an enrollment of around 7,000, two-thirds of which are first generation college students.

Most of the Chicago campus classes are held in the Auditorium Building and student housing was split between the University Center—which also serves students from Columbia College, DePaul University and Robert Morris University—and the Herman Crown Center.

Chicago’s new sprinkler legislation forced Roosevelt’s hand on the Crown Center; it was deemed cheaper to build a new structure than to attempt installing sprinklers and performing other upgrades.

“I think we spent more than half our fee trying to figure out those connections,” said Chris Groesbeck, a principal with VOA and the lead on the Roosevelt project. Further complications arose with the building’s footprint; the university wanted classrooms, lecture halls, student services, dormitories and other facilities on a 17,000 square foot lot. To accommodate all these needs, there was nowhere to go but up.

Roosevelt and VOA ultimately decided on the undulating, 35-story, blue gem that has risen up from behind the cliff of buildings along Michigan Avenue. The 420,000 square foot building, whose zigzag façade is inspired in part by Constantin Brâncusi’s sculpture, The Endless Column, also features an offset core to suit the many large assembly spaces needed on any college campus.

Because the northern exposure was the only one in danger of being occluded by future development, they suffered little loss by moving the core to the north and losing possible views.

Constantin Brâncusi’s The Endless Column

But to Groesbeck, this isn’t just a building, it is a vertical campus. The floors are color-coded on a neighborhood concept; green is at the bottom and contains administrative offices, the red floors contain dining halls, a fitness center and student activities, classrooms and labs are orange, the yellow floors house the business school and topping it all are the dormitories on the blue floors.

The views were dedicated to where students would spend most of their time. Most floors have a common area overlooking the lake to the east and several atria connect floors to facilitate pedestrian traffic. The exit stairways, with their glass-front doors on each level, are also meant to be used on a daily basis in lieu of the elevators.

“If you had taken this program and spread it out somewhere else, you’d be taking up a lot of land, you’d be extending infrastructure,” said Groesbeck. “The actual savings in energy and resources by staying here is enormous.” The building will achieve at least LEED Silver, though Groesbeck is hopeful for Gold.

The incredible views aren’t the only reason the building has floor to ceiling windows; high stress was put on daylight harvesting. Automatic, adjustable shades were installed and the use of task lighting ensures that the high-rise has a very low watt per square foot ratio.

The roofs are just over 50% vegetated. With such a small site footprint, and a need for rooftop mechanicals, this called for some creativity. Several setbacks, some no more than a few feet deep, were planted with green roof trays to achieve the necessary requirement. Onsite rainwater detention mitigates stormwater runoff.

There are some operable windows, but the envelope is mostly very tight and claims better than an R-20 perimeter. Flooring also adds to the building’s sustainability. Rapidly renewable bamboo was used, as were recycled rubber mat flooring in the fitness center and Plyboo support flooring. Signage through-out the campus educates students, faculty and visitors about the building’s sustainability.

Some have questioned Roosevelt’s supposed folly of expanding in the midst of such a horrendous economic slump. But everyone involved sees the university’s new tower as not just an expansion, but a commitment to the community.

“This will do better for the block and for the neighborhood, as far as sustaining a sense of activity,” said Michael Siegel, Associate Principal with VOA. “[The students] are here 24/7, they don’t go to work during the day and disappear.”

Roosevelt’s new campus is the second tallest educational building in the Western Hemisphere and Groesbeck sees many parallels between it and the tallest. That honor belongs to the Cathedral of Learning on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, which was conceived of during the Roaring Twenties, but not constructed until the Great Depression.

If the new Roosevelt University campus stands for anything, it is the future and the possibilities that lay therein. It says that Roosevelt is not going anywhere; they’ve committed themselves to Chicago, to the Loop with its 65,000 resident students. Plans are currently underway for a new athletic center on the corner of Congress and Wabash.

And they aren’t abandoning the Auditorium Building, the nation’s first mixed use building. “The Auditorium Building bridges what Chicago was and what it became,” said Groesbeck. “Built before the Burnham Plan, it was at the time when we started thinking big.”

Classes will still be held there and students will have several points of access between the old building and the new. The new tower even features a warm-up space for performers to use before going on stage next door, with a special floor, acoustics and other features modeled after the Joffrey Ballet’s State Street studio.

“Roosevelt University was born out of an act of revolution,” Slavitt said. “They stood up and walked out, not knowing what was next.” On display outside the president’s current office is the original paper signed by Sparling and the other faculty members who exiled themselves, though they were unsure of what the future held. Can we not say the same today?

These rebates are becoming more visible and utilized as utility companies expand the range of available rebates. The main reason for the recent growth is that federal money for tax credits has vanished. The 2012 Residential Federal Tax Credit only includes 30% of the cost with no upper limit, expires in December 2016 and is only applicable to existing homes and new construction toward geothermal heat pumps, wind turbines and solar energy projects. Other than that, easy pickings like furnace and insulation credits are all gone.

Without federal money available, it is up to us, as the taxpayers and users, to pay for the rebate programs. One way or another, they are already paid for and almost everybody funds the programs and might not even know it.

Users can figure out how much they pay for the rebate programs by looking at their current bills. There is a line item on each bill that notes monthly contribution to the programs. In order to get this money back, an energy efficiency improvement has to be made.

The Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE) describes various types of financial incentives and rebates at the state and local level. However, the most common rebates are equipment installation by contractor, multi-family direct installs, energy audits and on-bill financing. Utility companies like Nicor, Peoples Gas, ComEd and Ameren all offer these types of rebates. Every company offers almost identical programs to one another as well as combined programs to create stackable and multiple discounts.

Equipment installation ranges from water heaters to furnaces to boilers. Even though they are typically the largest up-front investment, these equipment replacement rebate programs provide a significant return on investment. For example, Nicor offers homeowners $350 to replace and install a high efficiency furnace with a 95% Annual Fuel Utilization Energy (AFUE) and an Energy Star rating.

In addition to that, if residents replace a boiler before March 31, 2012, they are eligible for an additional $100 bonus. With the bonus, there can be anywhere from a $350 to $550 returned to the homeowner just for replacing old equipment.

In addition to single equipment replacement, Nicor and ComEd offer Complete System Replacement (CSR) rebates. With one application, the resident can get a significantly larger amount returned to them. For instance, one CSR including a furnace with a 92% AFUE and a central air conditioner with a seasonal energy efficiency ratio of 14.5 can yield a $600 rebate. A CSR can be beneficial because the resident can get a check in the mail or work with the contractor to get the money instantly off their bill.

Rebates in multi-family direct installs include incentives on common area lighting, low-flow shower heads and other low-hanging fruit that can be easily identified and corrected. Ameren Illinois’s ActOnEnergy rebate program enables multi-family property owners to make critical energy-efficiency improvements that will lower energy usage and save on maintenance costs. In addition to that, Ameren offers free high efficiency shower heads, compact fluorescent lights and faucet aerators. The only stipulation is that the properties must have three or more units and the units must be customers of Ameren Illinois.

Home energy audits or energy savings programs conduct an entire home assessment for approximately $100. These assessments include a comprehensive review of the home’s HVAC, hot water, lighting, insulation, air leakage and major appliances. Nicor and ComEd have been on the forefront with this rebate program that can offer incentives of up to $1,250. Through the process—completed by Conservation Services Group—auditors will install up to ten compact fluorescent light bulbs, high efficiency faucet aerators and shower heads and a hot water pipe wrap. Once completed, they give the residents an estimated payback report so the residents will know how much the improvements will pay back.

A more controversial program is on-bill financing. As of now, this program is only offered through Peoples and Northshore Gas. These rebates allow the resident to get a very low cost loan that goes onto the utility bill to help pay for the energy efficient improvements. This program is not stackable, but it does include equipment and project costs up to $20,000 with a three, five or ten year loan at five percent with no money down. The resident’s overall utility cost will decrease, but the payment will increase due to the loan. Hopefully in the end, the costs will offset each other and the resident will be operating at a more energy-efficient level.

There are more conventional, smarter ideas for homeowners that can result in hundreds of dollars of rebates. ComEd offers their customers a range of rebates that range from free installation of energy-saving products for qualified buildings and Energy Star lighting discounts. ComEd also offers refrigerator, freezer and clothes washer rebates. They will pick up and recycle a second working refrigerator or freezer for free and pay owners $35 for it. Similarly to the freezer and refrigerator rebate, residential customers can get a $75 rebate on a top-loading Energy Star clothes washer.

The free money is out there, it just take some alternative strategies and thinking outside the box to find them. Besides DSIRE, there are other sites that can help you save money on energy efficiency improvements.

Energy Impact Illinois provides information on low interest loans for home improvement projects such as boilers, furnaces, water heaters and other Energy Star equipment. Energybills.org helps find available rebates based on geographical location. HomeEQ Now provides a baseline score for energy usage and waste. It provides residents with a benchmarking tool (a report) to see within ten minutes if they need an energy audit.

A final place to investigate energy requirements is the Illinois General Assembly website. On that site, it is possible to track any bill when there is a vote or an amendment to legislation.

Energy standards are getting more serious and as a result, utility companies are offering more and more incentives for residential improvements. The standards set in the 2012 IECC and future editions will only be more rigorous. Creative changes to code formatting and/or enforcement will be needed. As the economy continues to stabilize, utility companies will continue to find alternative measures to meet standards and provide rebates and other incentives.

Now, the Green Exchange is at 86% capacity with tenants such as Coyote Logistics, Green Choice Bank, Distant Village Packaging, 2 Point Perspective and more.Ground broke for the building that houses the Green Exchange 99 years ago. Constructed for the Vassar Swiss Underwear Company, the company would put an addition on in 1924 and sell the building in 1967 to the Cooper Lamp Company. Cooper moved out in 2005, but it wasn’t long before activity started up at the four story, 272,000 square foot building.Even the artwork in the Green Exchange is made from reclaimed materials, such as the 1,500 washers over the escalator.”

Barry Bursak, a green consultant in Chicago, went to then 1st Ward Alderman Manny Flores with an idea for a vertically-integrated, green building that would house sustainable businesses. Bursak wanted specifically to avoid developers who were gentrifying the neighborhoods they worked in. Flores put him in touch with Baum Development, who had just received recognition for bringing a landmark building in Motor Row back to life after four decades of vacancy.

“We liked the idea and we worked with him on it but we were not so vertically integrated, although we are symbiotic,” said Baum. The original plans changed over time to fit the market and the property that would become the Green Exchange.

Manufacturing had changed over the years since Vassar and Cooper left, and the building’s one dock and old school, multi-column interior don’t lend well to modern industry. The plan instead evolved into a building with offices and showrooms where environmentally-responsible businesses could cooperate at one epicenter of green commerce.

Most of what led to the building’s LEED Platinum status was what wasn’t done; Baum aimed to retain 95% of the building structure during rehabilitation. “The greenest thing about this building is the fact that we didn’t tear it down,” he said, noting that 4/5 of the energy needed to erect a building like this one goes into the core and shell.

Baum Development operates on a triple bottom line premise, so nearly every new thing that did go into renovating the building was sustainable. All paints and stains are low-VOC and high efficiency filters and air quality sensors monitor the indoor air quality on every floor.

Ninety solar thermal panels help to tame the building’s domestic hot water demand. A 10-ton water absorption chiller will aid with a portion of the Green Exchange’s cooling load. High efficiency heating and cooling systems elsewhere in the building reduce energy use by 22%.

Even the artwork in the Green Exchange is made from reclaimed materials, such as the 1,500 washers over the escalator.

The building’s open, loft design and large, energy-efficient windows mean that every space is well supplied with daylight. Nowhere is this more apparent than the second story “sky garden,” and 8,000 square foot indoor garden and meeting space.

There are plenty of plants elsewhere, such as the 13,000 square foot vegetated roof which features a variety of low-moisture perennials and even an organic vegetable garden. An apiary will also be installed on the roof as spring settles in. Irrigation of both the green roof and sky garden is aided by a 41,000+ gallon rain cistern.

“Not that we are the epitome of what is sustainable, because there’s always something better and it’s an evolving thing,” said Baum. “But we tried to do as best we could in every single space that was available to us.”

As Baum says, the Green Exchange is an evolving thing. For example, the building is not situated in a heavy public transit corridor and in fact overlooks the Kennedy Expressway. But there are plans to install car charging stations and to bring the I-Go car sharing service to the site.

Baum couldn’t elaborate, but the Green Exchange will soon be home to a new restaurant. Designed to be fully integrated into the property, the restaurant will take in honey from the apiary and eggs from a couple of recently acquired chickens. Food waste from the restaurant will be composted and, along with the chicken manure, used to fertilize the green roof.

Baum Development is in the process of looking at other projects to take on as well. Whatever they decide to do next, Baum assures that their triple bottom line approach will not change. “It’s likely to be adaptive reuse, it’s likely to be something that will be highly beneficial to whatever community were building in, and it’s imperative that we build it in a sustainable fashion. That’s just what we do.”

But stick-built homes have many flaws. they don’t hold up to powerful storms, for example, and are susceptible to termites, mold and fire. And it’s not just safety issues. They are hard to effectively insulate and guard against air and moisture infiltrations. Even if you are able to put in stellar insulation, every stud is a thermal bridge that allows unwanted heat to seep in or out, depending on the season.

There is an alternative, however. Insulated concrete forms (ICFs) offer several wall components in one system: concrete forms, insulation, furring strips, air infiltration barrier and vapor barrier. “You pour this wall, you have a lot of work done already,” said Eric Barton of Biltmore Insulated Concrete, Inc.

ICFs are essentially two expanded polystyrene (EPS) panels separated by plastic or composite “webs.” Designed for quick installation, ICFs are stacked like masonry blocks, with the center void then filled with concrete.

The webs perform several functions. First, they keep the EPS panels separated during installation, but also hold them together during the concrete pour. They provide an incredible stability on their own, but they also have slots to accept horizontally-oriented rebar.

In lieu of 2x4s, the ends of the webs act as furring strips. Since the webs are all eight inches apart on center, subcontractors installing siding, brick ties or drywall will not only have the customary 16 inch stud width, they have a more versatile eight inch gap.

There are three types of ICF wall systems: post and beam, grid and the more common flat panel. The two former types can be stronger and use less concrete, but the challenge of vibrating concrete into all the nooks and crannies directs most contractors to the panel style. No matter the style, the concrete used with ICFs should use smaller aggregate—no bigger than ¾ inch—and have a high Portland cement content.

A breakaway view of an ICF wall. The web ties, in black, act as rebar support, provide ridgidity prior to the pouring of concrete, buttress the EPS panels and act as furring strips for the eventual installation of siding and drywall.

A standard blown-cellulose wall can claim an R-value of around R-14. By contrast, a six inch ICF wall is more like R-24. The key to this is the foam-concrete-foam sandwich. Heat, whether outside in the summer or inside in the winter, is going to want to move through the wall. With ICF’s, it first has to fight through a minimum of 2¾ inches of EPS, though that could be thicker if the client desires. This alone takes a long time, but then there is the concrete core to heat up. On the other side, there is more EPS insulation.

This heat transmission is incredibly slow. “You can never stop that transfer of energy,” said Barton. “The goal is to slow it down and lose as little as possible.”

Approximately 25% of heating and cooling losses are due to air leaking in homes. The continuous, monolithic insulation also means that a properly installed ICF wall is air-tight. Because of this, there is no need to install air and vapor barriers above grade. With no cellulose to act as a food source, ICF walls are also mold-resistant.

One unintended benefit of these walls are the way that they cure compared to traditional, removable-form concrete walls. The secret to durable concrete is retaining moisture as long as possible. The longer it cures, the more substantial it will be. “The strongest way you can make concrete is to pour it and then put it in Lake Michigan,” said Barton.

Since the forms don’t come off of ICFs, the wall holds in moisture longer. The concrete will harden just as fast as in a traditionally-built wall, but it will cure for a longer time, leading to a virtually indestructible wall. The insulated panels mean that ICFs are also a good option for construction in the temperature swings of Chicago’s extreme summers and winters.

When the Greenbuild expo was in Chicago in 2010, the USGBC, Habitat for Humanity and some corporate sponsors teamed up to leave behind a legacy project: two LEED Platinum single family homes constructed side by side in Lake County. The two houses were identical in every way except that the shell of one was built with lumber and the other with ICFs.

The lumber-built house was made with 2×6 framing, with an air infiltration barrier, 1 inch of foam board sheathing on the outside and open cell, spray-foam insulation inside. By any account, it was a far superior wall system compared to traditionally-built homes.

And yet, the ICF house outperformed it with an R-value of R-24, 21% higher than the framed house. It was also much tighter, as determined by a blower door test performed on both houses. The framed house registered 2.76 air changes per hour, less than half of what was allowed by the International Energy Conservation Code at the time. The ICF house came in even better, however, with only 1.15 air changes per hour, outperforming its neighbor by nearly two and a half times.

ICFs are approved by building codes and have been available for nearly fifty years, but they still haven’t taken more than 10% of the residential market share. This is true even in commercial applications where concrete is more common. Masonry blocks, despite a longer installation time and without the built-in insulation, prevail by a wide margin.

But the time may be right for the technology to really get a foothold. It is, after all, five to ten times cheaper to conserve energy than to produce it. Those numbers mean a quick return on investment, something that no building owner—whether that’s commercial or residential—can ignore.

Photos:

Amanda DeVries
Kent Baxter/FEMA

Doors were constructed using recycled resin and low-VOC paint and flooring aid the indoor air quality. By using reclaimed cabinets, they were able to forego new materials. A high-efficiency mechanical system worked more efficiently than originally envisioned. This enabled ORA to surpass the LEED Silver rating that had been designed for and achieve LEED Gold.

“We’re all about providing a unique, comfortable experience for our patients,” said Reggie Thurston, DDS, owner of ORA Dental Studio Wicker Park. “And that’s what green design does. This is something you can’t experience anywhere else in Chicago and is available few other places in the nation.”

Many aspects of a modern dental facility come with the benefit of better efficiency and the promotion of health. The use of digital photography, for example, eliminates petrochemical waste and the need for lead aprons and fittings. Dry dental vacuums reduce water use and steam sterilizers, cut chemical use and improving air quality.

ORA Dental Studio currently has three other locations in the West Loop, South Loop and Gold Coast.