Illustrations of this challenge occurred in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona this past month. Record cold temperatures in Texas and New Mexico contributed to a series of technological failures in the region’s natural gas pipelines that ultimately led to electricity blackouts in Texas, a complete shutdown of natural gas supply in many areas of New Mexico for close to a week, and the shutdown of seven gas-fired electricity-generating plants in Arizona. While the exact causes of these events are yet to be determined, they illustrated the brittleness of the pipeline system in the face of unexpected climatic conditions as well as the challenge of bringing the pipeline system back online once it had failed.

Another illustration from the Southwest involves ongoing water shortages in the Colorado river system. Lake Mead, from which Las Vegas draws the bulk of its water supply, sits at record-low water levels. Further reductions in water levels would cause the water to drop below the level of the pipeline that takes water to Las Vegas. To prevent that, rules governing the allocation of Colorado river water would kick in and significantly reduce water availability to users in the region. In the short term, water managers will probably allow water to flow into Lake Mead from upstream reservoirs rather than implementing water restrictions. But if ongoing drought in the region continues or escalates, water restrictions for the region’s agriculture are likely to come sooner rather than later.

Infrastructure reform has received high-profile attention in Washington, D.C., in recent years. The American Society of Civil Engineers report on the state of U.S. infrastructure described the serious degradation of the economy’s technological foundations. President Obama called for significantly increased infrastructure funding in his State of the Union address, and the administration’s FY 2012 budget released this week includes funding for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank.

Somewhat surprisingly, however, adapting infrastructure to the challenges of climate change has received little attention in this conversation. To be sure, the National Academies spilled some ink on the topic in its recently released series of reports on “America’s Climate Choices.” Nonetheless, engineers, policymakers, and the public remain largely unaware of the significant challenges ahead.

Now is the time to begin a serious conversation about climate change and the future of the nation’s and the world’s engineered systems. When we upgrade the country’s infrastructure, climate change must be front and center in our engineering, policy, and business—not only because of the need to think systematically about how infrastructure contributes to carbon dioxide emissions but also because the world is committed to at least modest climate change, no matter how fast we reduce atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases. Hurricane Katrina may or may not have been influenced by anthropogenic climate change. Even so, its devastation of New Orleans highlighted the risks of extreme weather events that exceed the design parameters of technological infrastructures. We are now entering an era where climatic patterns may systematically drift outside the designed operating conditions of many of our most critical systems.

One last point: Infrastructure transformation is not simply an engineering problem or a finance problem. As Boston’s “Big Dig” project made clear, reengineering major infrastructural systems in place requires a new kind of engineering—and a new level of collaboration between leaders in engineering and other societal institutions—that recognizes the social, political, and economic dimensions of technological systems. The country needs engineers, policymakers, business leaders, and citizens who understand the infrastructure challenges we face and who are prepared to work together through the difficult challenges of redesigning and reengineering some of the most complex sociotechnological systems on the planet.

Clark A. Miller is associate director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University.

Trower, a 27-year veteran of the software giant, has been motivated by a variety of technologies over the course of his career—from the BASIC programming languages that enabled the expansion of PCs in the 1970s and 1980s to the first two releases of Windows, which he managed. A few years ago, Bill Gates sent him on a fact-finding mission to figure out what Microsoft could do in the field of robotics. Since then, he’s learned that the machines aren’t just great educational tools. Indeed, the field of robotics may hold solutions to major problems in military transport, providing health care for an aging population, and keeping our floors clean.

Science Progress spoke with Trower about the future of robotics in the United States and around the globe. The interview has been edited and condensed; a recording of the full conversation is available in the sidebar.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt, Science Progress: How can robots can get students interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields?

Tandy Trower: I think it’s incredibly important because today, the U.S. is ranked about 6^th in engineering bachelors degrees, following China, the EU, Russia and India. It’s starting to look back up again, perhaps with the change in economy, but traditionally, in computer science in the U.S., there has been a steady decline in enrollment. It turns out though, that robots are just this marvelous motivating device. If you stick a robot—I don’t care if you’re talking about grade school kids or high school students—if you put a robot in the middle of the room, there is something captivating about the technology.

At Georgia Tech, for example, they have been able to use robots as a way to teach basic computer science. They’ve been able to stem the tides in the decline of computer science by using this technology. But even before the college level, you have a number of programs throughout the U.S. which are just tremendous in terms of their benefits. For example the FIRST organization, which was started by Segway inventor Dean Kamen. What he loves to talk about more than anything else, more than the things he’s created, is this organization where the primary competition is for high schoolers to build robots that compete.

I had the opportunity to welcome the students to the Seattle regional event that Microsoft sponsored, where they actually doubled the number of teens that participated from the previous year. They had this very complex competition where the teens had to build robots to distribute foam balls from one location to another, and the engineering was just incredible.

But the key thing about FIRST is its not just about the kids building the robot. It’s about teamwork, collaborative interaction. The teens not only get points for the competition itself, but also for collaborating with other groups. So you’ll often see one team help another team out; if one team is having trouble with their robot, another team will be motivated to go over and help them out and make sure they can compete. It’s about marketing also. I was led around by a student who was a senior at a high school in Spokane. She didn’t get to participate that much in the engineering of the robot—that wasn’t her area of expertise—but she was able to participate in the promotion of what her school was doing, what her team was doing, and she was so excited about that.

The results from FIRST are incredible when you look at the history, and they’re not the only competition. If you look at the statistics that the FIRST people provide, they mention that students that participate in their teams are 50 percent more likely to go onto college and four times more likely to major in engineering. They have some incredible stories about the different high schools and the benefits they provide. There’s even a high school in Denver, Colorado for convicted felons, students who got into crime early in life. The school is offered as an alternative to prison; only 13 percent of their students go on to do post secondary education. But of those that participate in the FIRST competition, 80 percent go on to post-secondary education.

So the impact of this technology is just incredible. It’s also very important, as the industry needs to feed itself.  If we’re going to see the breakout of this technology in the next ten years, what we really need is a set of engineers. The U.S. ranks behind much of the world population in terms of engineering students, so particularly in this country, it is important to have these kinds of motivating competitions to get kids excited about not just robots, but the whole idea of what it means to work collaboratively on an engineering project. Whether it’s on the side of the engineering software, or the hardware, or from the organizational principles, the presentational principles, or the marketing—the fact that you can use a robot to provide this sort of motivation is not only beneficial, but it’s critical for us being competitive in this technology.

SP: When people think about robots they have images from movies, TV, and science fiction—but in fact robots have been an integral part of U.S industry and manufacturing and other sectors for a long time. And a lot of robots like the Roomba don’t really fit the traditional molds of what robots are. What do you see the future of consumer robots looking like?

Trower: It gets down to the definition of what a robot is, and often that’s the hardest question I get asked. What do you think a robot is? How do you define one? And the difficultly is, as you point out, that there are so many different kinds of robots that it’s difficult to characterize it and put it all in one place.

Robots have historically been a real boon to factory automation and the manufacturing sector. Most cars that are produced today, go by and see several robots along the way. They’ve really been involved in what the industry calls the “three Ds”: the dull and the dangerous, and dirty kinds of work. But what I see happening right now an evolution of the technology where it’s moving out of the factory floors and starting to show up in our homes. You pointed out one of the excellent examples of that: the Roomba from iRobot. They sold between three and four million of those little vacuum robots; they’ve been extremely popular. There’s also an increasing number of very sophisticated robot toys that are on the market place, whether we’re talking about the little Pleo robotic dinosaur from Ugobe, or the LEGO educational robotic kit, or the latest version of Elmo from Sesame Street, which has become increasingly sophisticated over the years in terms of the abilities of what he can do.

What we’re seeing in that technology is two things. One is that the technology is becoming increasingly more sophisticated; it’s becoming increasingly more oriented towards interacting with human beings. The factory robots have been too dangerous for most people to interact with, they’re kind of like what the mainframes were like in the ‘70’s: they’re big and require specialty operators and really didn’t effect people in personal way, unless it was the university computer figuring out what classes they were going to take, or run their grades or running some accounting. People didn’t really feel the same way about them, and yet when PCs came to the market it really changed that dynamic. What we see is these technologies starting to creep in the door and not just in the obvious forms we’ve seen so far.

Take your car for example. If you have an anti-lock breaking system in your car, that really is a form of robotic technology; it’s a system that senses a slip of the wheel and adjusts the breaking, and really changes the behavior of how you drive. When I learned to drive they told me on slippery roads you have to pump your breaks. Well, when my daughter learned—and she learned in a car with anti-lock breaks—they told her just to apply steady pressure, because the system takes over, so that’s a robotic system.

I’m seeing an additional evolution where traditional PC technology is starting to get integrated. Japanese robots are an example, particularly the humanoids. Those are a very advanced form, a very challenging form of robots. I think we’re going to see generations of robots somewhere between the Roomba and those kinds of robots. They don’t all need to walk around to be useful. We’ll see a generation of these mobile robots that piggyback on top of the PC technology we see today and leverage the wealth of information and productivity we have. Then I think the next generation will be amplified. We’ll see manipulation come in soon after: the ability of the robot to safely manipulate things in a human environment, and to be mobile and function safely in a human environment.

SP: Bill Gates asked you to go out and sort of explore the state of robotics; you traveled all over the country and talked with people in the field. In the intervening years, what has changed since you went out exploring?

Trower: I’ve been at Microsoft for 27 years now, and I’ve had an opportunity to play around with and lead and manage a number of different projects with Microsoft. But this was a unique challenge that I got to go out and talk to the community. The first thing that I would say is it’s a very diverse community. There’s not just a single segment of it. There are people who are using robots in education; we talked about the industrial factory automation usage; there are people doing very intensive research out there in the university community; and there’s even this evolving, emerging generation of these consumer robots.

This diverse community in some ways parallels the early PC community. It wasn’t just a particular segment. It wasn’t just people who loved computer science. It was really quite a diversity of people who were interested in using the technology in a variety of different ways. I also discovered that it’s definitely a world-wide phenomenon. There isn’t just a single place in the world where this is happening. Traditionally Japan has been the hotbed of robotics development, and there’s defiantly still great work that’s being done in there. But what I see now is that it’s becoming more wide spread throughout the world in terms of the investments that are going on in this space. In addition, its not just the investments, but every major economic entity seems to have robotics on their list of significant technologies that they want to participate in and believe will be an important part of their future.

So there’s all this excitement and anticipation of something that’s coming, and that was actually the thing that motivated Microsoft, and me particularly, to show an interest in this. This community was communicating with us at Microsoft, saying “Do you realize that there’s something significant that’s starting to happen? Its not just the traditional factory automation, its really starting to blossom in a number of different areas.” And they invited Microsoft to participate. It’s also an area where there’s this tremendous amount of research going on, breakthrough research.

Ten years ago something like vision recognition technology was still a black art among many developers, but today you can find a number of examples where you can just go to the web and download several algorithms and put this on some of the simplest robots, like the little education robots that are on the market today. I found all these great things, and the technology was becoming more accessible and more affordable to a wider audience. But I also learned that it’s not all just rosy out there. It turns out that there are some development challenges. The difficulty is in trying to bring software from one platform to another, every robot is still kind of its own world unto itself—the technology still needs to go through a little evolutionary refinement. Using the PC analogy, it’s like we’re looking at the Apple IIs and the Commodore PETs and the Sinclair Micros that were available in the 1970s. It wasn’t until 1981, when IBM came to the market, that we started to see a more stable platform.

Those are still some of the challenges, and probably the biggest one that everyone identifies—again this is very analogous to the early PC industry—is the fact that there really hasn’t come to the front a compelling application. In the old days we used to call those “killer applications,” but that’s probably not the right term to use here. But it’s true that robots, just like PCs, need that kind of compelling application that really demonstrates their value, and I think we still haven’t seen that.  We’ve seen a tremendous amount of innovation in terms of the technology. With the DARPA Grand Challenge, we saw the ability of teams to build cars that could navigate through deserts or even on simulated urban roads with other vehicles running around and obeying the traffic rules. So we see the evolution and innovation going into the technology, but we still haven’t seen come to market yet that compelling reason, other than entertainment or education, for everyone to want to have one of these in their home.

SP: Can you explain the DARPA Grand Challenge?

Trower: DARPA set up what was originally called the “Grand Challenge,” and the second one was named the “Urban Challenge” because it was a different scenario. Teams had to build vehicles that could autonomously, not by remote control, navigate through roads in the desert. There was no one on board, just computers with sensor systems. In the first year that they ran the challenge, there were a number of teams that participated, and even the best team—which was from Carnegie Melon, led by Red Whittaker, who is a real pioneer in the robotics area—even they failed. They got seven and a half miles though the course. They had built their robotic car on a Hummer platform and it got stuck and they had to shut down because it couldn’t free itself.

DARPA did a brilliant thing. They just banked the money and held the challenge the following year and four teams finished within the regulation time. Even though he actually had two teams that qualified in the end, Red came back again and it looked like he was going to take it. In the end he got beat out by a former Carnegie Mellon professor, Sebastian Thrun, now at Stanford. Sebastian with his team narrowly beat out Red, and so you actually had five teams complete the course.

Then DARPA said, “Ok that’s great, the vehicles by themselves can navigate across desert roads. Lets up that again.”

They took over an old army base with streets and they set it up so that the vehicles had to navigate across these streets and had to obey the traffic rules. They had to stop at the stop sign; there were other robotic vehicles as well as human-powered vehicles traveling on the roads at the same time. Now the real incentive for all this was that they had a Congressional mandate to develop technology that will allow them to have a third of military vehicles be able to operate autonomously. What I believe will come out of this, even though it was done with kind of a military mentality, will be some tremendous innovations in even the way you and I drive safely on the streets.

In some ways that’s not so unusual, DARPA is the same agency that’s responsible for the ARPANET that became the foundation for the Internet that we have today. And so I think it’s a great way of using public money and while it may have had military purposes, the implications and the ramifications it may have down the road are tremendous in terms of pushing the technology. Here was an investment they made—a fairly modest investment—it was a million dollars, but it was still a modest investment overall when you think about that in terms of getting all these all these brilliant minds to solve a very hard problem. And what came out of it was not just one solution but many solutions to really advancing the state of the art in terms of technologies that will not only allow us to drive more safely in the future, but will really advance the state-of-the-art of robotics and effect our lives in a very personal way.

SP: What are some of the possibilities for those critical applications that new types of robots would be able to take on? One thing as well that you’ve spoken about are robot applications that can support citizens with disabilities, or help care for aging members of the U.S population.

Trower: Robotics still needs that compelling reason for why people would want to have one in their homes. Healthcare is one of the biggest opportunities and the biggest needs for technology, especially digital technology, which includes robotics but is not exclusive to robotics.

Today in the U.S alone there are over 40 million people over the age of 65, and that is expected to almost double in the next 20 years. Not only that, but the number of people over 80 is expected to triple. What this means is that we have more people that are going to be in the senior category and more of these people are living longer lives. At the same time what were finding is that already there is a gap in the care industry for being able to care for all of these people. So the question is how are we going to solve this problem in the long run?

Everyone knows that as we age, our physical and cognitive capabilities diminish and we become increasingly prone to chronic types of issues. For example, at age 65 your chances of getting Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease increases exponentially. So how do we deal with these problems? With the prospect of increased costs? We have a larger population and fewer people to take care of us. And it’s not just in the U.S—this is a world-wide phenomenon, and if you look at the population curves which traditionally have been this very nice pyramid where the smallest part of the pyramid was the oldest people and the largest was the young people, that’s actually flattening out and is expected to invert as we go into the future. Robots and other forms of digital technology are a great way of trying to address this gap, not as a replacement for care givers but as a way to extend the care network that’s there.

The ways that I think it can do that are in terms of providing communication, just as PCs have become great tools for communication as much as they are for productivity, whether its email or other kinds of communication. For example my daughter who is graduating from high school this year. She communicates more with her friends through her PC more than she does on her cell phone or on the house phone, so it’s been a great tool for communication. That’s particularly important because, as seniors, your social circle naturally becomes smaller as you age. Your friends may be there. It may be more difficult to get out and see your friends and family. So it’s being a communication aid, a connection with the care network to doctors and nurses, rather than having to make physical visits, helping monitor the state of how people are.

There’s also a role in terms of memory aids, whether it’s just remembering to take medication, which I think is a critical issue. One of the biggest problems that you find with seniors is they often have to be on a regime of several medications and applying some technology that reminds them, that doesn’t care how many times it reminds them, that never gets tired of reminding them and helps them stay on their regime, could be very beneficial as well.

Mobility is a significant issue for the seniors themselves, so if we talk about robots that are mobile devices, even if they don’t have manipulation. Robots with cup holders would be a valuable thing for moving things back and forth for seniors. There are valuable ways this technology can be applied to help solve what some people consider will become an epidemic in terms of how do we deal with this growing populations of seniors that are going to need assistance. We need to find some way to solve this, and while robots may not be a complete solution, they can be a part of that answer.

SP: Do you see a need for incentives or a specific public policy push to get people to do more work in robotics, say with healthcare applications or outside of the militarily driven ones that are happening now?

Trower: The military applications have been good. As I said, DARPA’s investment in the Grand Challenge and the Urban Challenge have been really great in stimulating the thinking, technology, and innovation that will have ramifications and implications in terms of improvements in the overall technology. I do think it would be useful or helpful. I’m concerned that in this country we may fall behind because in other parts of the world the focus isn’t just on the military side of things—its really more about care or other ways this kind of technology can be used.

In fact there are several agencies that are looking at that right now. There’s a consortium of U.S. professors led by Henrik Christensen at Georgia Tech, and it includes a number of the significant professors from all the U.S. universities who are trying to build awareness about the fact that we really do need greater investments in these other application areas. While we may derive benefits from the military applications, there are opportunities to invest in this other area and its not just a matter of research funding; it’s a matter of investing in the educational value. We really need to build up our own foundation of researchers that can really develop this technology.  It’s a matter of changing policy to make this technology more accessible to people. If we’re talking about health care, how can these devices be easily certified so that they can be covered by insurance? It’s also investments in other technologies that feed into this, that are not just robotics-centered.

For example, for a robot to be functional and operational in the home, it has to have a source of wireless power. In some ways its actually good that we’re facing this crisis and trying to build fuel-efficient cars, because it’s driving us to more creative and innovative ways of building battery power, whether its fuel cells or batteries or even wireless transmission of power, those kinds of things will be critical because robot technologies will benefit as well.

SP: You have been at Microsoft for about 27 years. How does this kind of work fit into a long career in the technology industry?

Trower: The success of the robotic industry as a whole is really dependent on contributions from a lot of people, not just the ones who have all the resources. It’s probably been one of the most exciting things I’ve worked on at Microsoft.

For me it’s a bit like deja-vu. I’m old enough that I’ve been through the PC evolution and I’ve seen it go from kind of toy computers on one end into very practical devices: From where friends and family would ask “Why do you have such a thing as an Apple II sitting on you desk?” to where they all have their own computers today. And I’m seeing this again in the same way in the robotics community. But it’s different in the sense that it builds on the already rich foundation that the PC and the web have already set before us so that the possibilities seem kind of endless.

The building construction industry has already been proceeding down this path, albeit more slowly than is needed. LEED and other green building certification systems, the 2030 Challenge, the 2010 Imperative, Green For All, the Mayors Climate Protection Center,^[3] and similar programs are all steps in the right direction. And the Recovery and Reinvestment Act provisions devoted to greening our built environment will increase the pace of this green “revolution.”

Yet with all of these efforts fundamental changes to the building construction industry’s standard operating procedures are still needed if we’re to succeed. The New Building Institute released a study last spring comparing the performance of LEED to non-LEED facilities.^[4] While the average performance of the former was better than the latter, on an individual basis the LEED facility performance was widely scattered, with 30 percent performing significantly better and 25 percent performing significantly worse than expected (21 percent worse than the predicted code baseline modeling). We’re simply not reducing the amount of energy consumed by our buildings as fast as needed. Why?

We generally don’t view buildings as experiments, even in the building construction industry, but that is essentially what they are.

The proximate causes can be attributed to many aspects of development, design, construction, operations, and general use that vary depending on the specific situation at hand. But the ultimate reason consists largely of the lack of a consistent, systematic process for evaluating and verifying the efficiency of all building projects—residential, commercial, governmental, or otherwise. We generally don’t view buildings as experiments, even in the building construction industry, but that is essentially what they are. They’re “laboratories” where we test a) the performance of materials and building systems, b) theories of organizing space relative to human physiological, psychological, and social/cultural needs, c) the process of design, d) construction methodologies, e) the implementation of codes, regulations, and standards—and the list goes on.

Unfortunately we generally do not collect and analyze data on buildings to see what works, what doesn’t, and why within a given setting. There are of course exceptions. “Post occupancy evaluation,” a somewhat generic term, refers to the process of evaluating a facility’s performance and effectiveness with regards to such things as energy performance, productivity, safety, and security. “Retrocommissioning” is the process of identifying low-cost facility, operational and maintenance improvements to existing buildings that will enable them to meet their original design intentions, or the current usage needs if they are different from the original design scope. “Built environment ethnographies,” a term my former business partner, Robert Leonard, and I coined, refers to post-occupancy evaluations that focus primarily on the occupant side of the equation. And perhaps most notable is the growing use of “evidence-based design” in the health care sector, a more comprehensive and integrative design and evaluation process in which the design team works closely with the client, contractor, and specialists to makes decisions based on the best information available from research, project evaluations, and evidence gathered from client operations.

An example of this process is the 2006 Heart Hospital addition to St. John’s Mercy Medical Center in St. Louis, Missouri. The design team, hospital staff, and supporting specialists made use of design efficiency modeling and previously conducted research to inform the initial hospital design. Subsequent surveys, interviews, observations, and data collection were then performed six months after occupancy to determine how effective the initial design was and fine-tune it based on the unique staff culture of the Heart Hospital. Successes and improvements achieved from the initial design process and subsequent evaluations included (but were not limited to): a) a significant reduction in the noise level occurring in the patient rooms, b) improvements in nursing efficiency by reducing the miles walked per nurse over the course of a shift, c) a reduction in staff turnover, and d) an increase in patient satisfaction.^[5]

But as I indicated, these are the exceptions to the rule. The reasons for this are many, and the most often cited is cost. With prices for effective evaluations ranging from $0.10 per square foot to over $4.00 per square foot, the relevant parties involved (private and public building owners and/or tenants, the design team, the contractor[s], and the tax payers) are often hesitant or unwilling to justify or pay for what is incorrectly thought to be an unnecessary expense with limited benefits.

However, without systematic evaluations we cannot achieve the full benefits of green design and construction. Such benefits are manifold, and include increased energy and water savings; decreased impacts on the environment; decreased operations and management costs; increases in occupant performance, productivity, and health; decreases in tenant and employee turnover rates; and increased real-estate values and occupancy rates.^[6] In properly functioning green facilities the total financial benefits can be well over ten times the average initial investment required to design and construct such facilities. And energy savings alone exceed the average increase in green building costs, which on average are only 2 percent to 3 percent of conventional building costs.

This need for evaluation relative to energy performance is illustrated by a high performance elementary school in Albuquerque, New Mexico that was underperforming its peer group schools in terms of energy performance, in part because of the use of segmented light shelves. A light shelf is a horizontal architectural element typically projecting both inside and outside of an exterior wall directly below a clerestory window, the vertical window near the top of a wall that is installed specifically to allow daylight to enter high up in a space. Daylight penetrates the clerestory window, hits the interior portion of the light shelf, reflects back up to the ceiling, and then back down into the room further into the space. A segmented light shelf simply refers to the shelf not being a solid piece, in this case with gaps running down the full length of the shelf to allow a small portion of the direct sunlight through to create aesthetic light/shadow patterns on the wall.

As a high performance, green school, the architects incorporated daylighting into the classroom design, making use of clerestory windows and these segmented light shelves to bring daylight into the space. However, the segmented light shelves (as opposed to completely solid light shelves) allowed direct sunlight to reach the eyes of the students in the south side classrooms during the winter months. As a result, teachers closed the automatic blinds over the clerestory windows and turned on the lights, greatly reducing the energy savings that the design team had intended. The fix was relatively simple—replacing the segmented light shelves with solid versions that eliminated the penetration of direct sunlight down to the occupant level. But the real lesson from this was that some type of evaluation was necessary in order to find the problem and rectify it.^[7]

Southside classroom with clerestory window and light shelf

In addition, the financial benefits incurred from improvements in occupant performance, productivity, and health are substantial. A few examples include:

• A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study, summarized in a report to California’s Sustainable Building Task Force,^[8] found that improvements to indoor air quality could save U.S. businesses as much as $58 billion in lost sick time and an additional $200 billion in worker performance.
• A study by office furniture company Herman-Miller showed up to a seven percent increase in worker productivity following the move to a successfully functioning, green, day-lit facility.^[9]
• And among the hundreds of studies on health and human benefits of successfully functioning green buildings reviewed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University,^[10] they found a 74 percent reduction in the incidence of headaches from replacing noisy magnetic ballasts with noise-free electronic ballasts in fluorescent light fixtures and therefore a reduction in lost sick time (a ballast starts and controls the voltage, or regulates the current, in fluorescent lamps—magnetic ballasts use a magnetic core to do this, sometimes producing an audible hum in the process, while electronic ballasts use quieter, solid state electronic circuitry); 14 studies that link personal temperature control to performance gains of between 0.2 and 7 percent; and 12 studies indicating that improved lighting design enhances individual productivity between 0.7 and 23 percent.

These occupant factors comprise a large portion of business operating expenses. Over the span of about 20 years, the ratio of building construction cost to building operations costs is about 1 to 1.5, but the ratio of construction costs to business operations is on the order of 1 to 15. So the occupant-related financial benefits of successful green building far outweigh the energy- and operations-related benefits. But the only way to ensure that the interface between green facilities and occupants operates successfully is through evaluation and verification, and this expense is but a fraction of the long-term business operations costs.

However, human interaction and decision making (at the individual and group level) doesn’t operate purely on a financial cost/benefit basis, particularly if the benefits come five or more years down the road. Human interaction is a complicated, messy process with multiple competing interests and benefits that occur at the various levels of individual and group interaction involved in any given situation. This, along with the hierarchy of variables involved in our consumption, conservation, and self-preservation habits can elevate short-term considerations above medium- or long-term considerations.

Fear is one these variables. We live in a very litigious society, and the historical structure of the design/construction process has encouraged finger pointing among all of the relevant parties involved. This is exacerbated by the erroneous expectation among the general public that buildings are “end products” to be occupied and used without any further adjustments to the facility or how it should be used. In such an environment, the design team and contractors have become wary of evaluating their work, fearing what they could be held liable for (legitimately or not), and afraid of what that could do to their reputation. As well, building owners and maintenance personnel are hesitant to open up what they fear could be the floodgates of complaints from their employees, occupants, patrons, and tenants.

We must create a selective environment that encourages evaluation and verification. A full discussion of creating such an environment is beyond the scope of this article, but the following three items would be part of this process:

1. Education. We must continue to educate building owners and occupants, the general public, policymakers, and even members of the building/construction industry themselves that the combined built environment/occupant “system” represents a constantly evolving experiment that requires evaluation and modification, as opposed to an end product of a linear process. Such a shift in viewpoint would go a long way to making evaluation and verification standard practice. Occupants, building owners and the general public would then come to expect evaluations facilitated through federal, state, and local regulations and codes.
2. Integration. Designers, contractors, owners, facility managers, tenants, and occupants must all be on the same team—when there is a single group with clear objectives, there is uniformity, unity, and a sense of the common good. This reduces the impact that fear can have for over-inflating short-term considerations. Integrated design, a multidisciplinary process involving all of the key stakeholders and design professionals through the entire process, from early conception to occupancy, is one path some in the industry are pursuing to bring these disciplines together for individual projects.
3. Transparency. Greater transparency with regards to resource consumption, from the individual home owner to the largest corporate or government entity would also help facilitate holistic design that reduces greenhouse emissions. Along these lines, online resource consumption “virtual worlds” have been proposed,^[11] where everyone’s energy and water usage would be visible for the entire world to see. Such visibility would likely result in social pressure to reduce consumption as well as competition among peer groups, particularly if incentives and penalties were structured to take advantage of such an environment. This would in turn create more of a demand for evaluation and verification—necessary for effective resource consumption reduction.

The rules that will direct allocation of funds from the stimulus package are a potential means to encourage and require building evaluation and verification on a large scale. Federal, state, and local projects focused on greening our built environment should include evaluation and verification as a stipulation for receiving stimulus funds. Such evaluations would ideally occur one to two years after the work is complete to verify performance and make the necessary revisions to ensure that the energy savings are being met, and that facilities and residences are maximizing the quality of the human experience within the built environment. Otherwise we’re not obtaining the full potential of our tax dollars, and may even be wasting them. And without such changes, we will not reduce the built environment’s carbon footprint enough to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Marcel J. Harmon, P.E., Ph.D., is a built environment analyst at M.E. Group, Inc., an engineering and sustainable consulting firm based in Lincoln, NE, and heads up M.E. Group’s Human Inquiry services out of their Kansas City, MO office.

Notes

[1] Energy Information Administration, “Annual Energy Outlook 2009 Early Release with Projections to 2030,” 2008, http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/emission.html; United Nations Environment Program, “Buildings and Climate Change: Status, Challenges and Opportunities,” 2007, http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/DTIx0916xPA-BuildingsClimate.pdf.

^[2] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change 2007: Mitigation, Contributions of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” 2007, http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg3.htm.

^[3] U.S Green Building Council, “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System,” http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CategoryID=19; Architecture 2030, “The 2030 Challenge,” http://www.architecture2030.org/2030_challenge/index.html; Architecture 2030, “The 2010 Imperative,” http://www.architecture2030.org/2010_imperative/index.html; Green For All, http://www.greenforall.org/; The United States Conference of Mayors, “Mayors Climate Protection Center,” http://www.usmayors.org/climateprotection/.

^[4] New Buildings Institute, “Energy Performance of LEED® for New Construction Buildings,” 2008 http://www.newbuildings.org/downloads/Energy_Performance_of_LEED-NC_Buildings-Final_3-4-08b.pdf.

^[5] Crain, C. and C. Siepel-Bechman. “Research That Supports Evidenced Based Design and Effects Positive Patient Outcomes and Staff Satisfaction” International Conference and Exhibition on Health Facility Planning Design and Construction, Orlando FA, March 10-13, 2008.

^[6] Kats, G. “Greening America’s Schools: Costs and Benefits,” (Capital E., 2006), http://www.cap-e.com/ewebeditpro/items/O59F12807.pdf; Kats, G., L. Alevantis, A. Berman, E. Mills, and J. Perlman. “The Costs and Financial Benefits of Green Buildings: A Report to California’s Sustainable Building Task Force,” report (California Sustainable Building Task Force, 2003) http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/News/News477.pdf; Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the British Council for Offices, “The Impact of Office Design on Business Performance,” 2005, http://www.cabe.org.uk/AssetLibrary/2191.pdf; Miller, N., J. Spivey, and A. Florance. “Does Green Payoff?”, 2008, http://www.sandiego.edu/business/documents/July142008DoesGreenPayOff-Ed.pdf.

^[7] Harmon, M. J. and R. D. Leonard. “A Post Occupancy Evaluation of the Edward Gonzales Elementary School, Phase I (Interim Study)”, report in possession by the New Mexico Public School Facilities Authority (Human Inquiry 2006).

^[8] Kats, G., L. Alevantis, A. Berman, E. Mills, and J. Perlman. “The Costs and Financial Benefits of Green Buildings: A Report to California’s Sustainable Building Task Force,” report (California Sustainable Building Task Force, 2003) http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/News/News477.pdf.

^[9] Heerwagen, J. “Do Green Buildings Enhance the Well Being of Workers?”, Environmental Design and Construction Magazine, July/August 2000, http://www.edcmag.com/CDA/ArticleInformation/coverstory/BNPCoverStoryItem/0,4118,19794,00.html.

^[10] Loftness, V., V. Hartkoph, and L. K. Poh. “Sustainability and Health Are Integral Goals for the Built Environment,” Healthy Buildings, June 4-8, 2006. http://www.dcat.net/workshoptoolkit/Workshop_Toolkit/Benefits_files/sustainability_and_health_loftness.pdf.

^[11] Byron Reeves, “Anticipating the Future: Immersive New Media – Evidence and Ideas from the Science of Fun” Opening Plenary, Behavioral, Energy and Climate Change Conference, Sacramento, CA, November 16-19, 2008.

The Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency most focused on heat island mitigation, walks a tightrope between promoting environmental practices and not offending certain industries or social groups. One way to reduce heat islands, after all, would be to pave, build, and drive less. For instance, when Purdue University studied its home Tippecanoe County, it found almost three parking spaces—not counting the multiple floors of parking garages or lots on private property—for every one resident.[2] (Sprawl smears rather than vitiates heat islands.) But EPA focuses less controversially on the materials with which we urbanize, not how or why, though this approach still helps cool urban areas and reduce energy consumption.

Heat islands increase ground-level ozone (smog) by evaporating more volatile organic compounds from gas tanks and accelerating chemical reactions that contribute to ozone. Many cities, especially in the eastern United States and in southern California, violate National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone. Their heat islands aggravate the problem. Heat islands also increase air conditioning use, which means cars or power plants burn more fossil fuels. This, in turn, raises building energy costs by consuming more energy at the most expensive peak times, exacerbates climate change, and releases more pollutants like mercury or nitrogen oxide, a precursor to both smog and acid rain. The cumulative acute consequences can kill thousands of people, as did heat waves in the Midwest in 1995 or Europe in 2003. As atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are currently increasing at the fastest rates yet,^[3] heat islands presage what life may be like in the future outside urban areas. Nonetheless, few cities have taken concerted action to address heat islands. Ameliorating heat islands now, though, could save energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and help locally offset global temperature increases.

Heat Islands 101

Heat islands draw energy from two main sources: the sun and human activity. Compared to trees, grass, and dirt, surfaces like asphalt roads and tarpaper shingles absorb and retain more solar radiation and trap much less water, which could evaporate and cool the surfaces. The net effect means the urban infrastructure gets hotter—sometimes 30 to 50°C hotter for components like black roofs[4]—and stays hotter than vegetated areas. This surface heat bleeds into the air, even long after sunset, to form the heat island.

At the same time that they soak up heat, cities produce it. All those residents maintain a healthy internal temperature of 37°C (roughly 98.6°F). Computers, blenders, and light bulbs emit heat, as do the automobiles, air conditioners, and bakeries. This anthropogenic heat often contributes less to the heat island than solar radiation, but it can be significant, as David Sailor at Portland State University has argued. “While it is true that anthropogenic heating is small compared with summertime mid-day solar insolation,” he wrote, “it plays a major role in the surface energy balance at times when the urban heat island effect is at its maximum (night time and winter).”[5] The resultant heat island is further modulated by airflow through the city, nearby bodies of water, and other regional characteristics. For example, irrigated lawns in a desert city like Phoenix may actually keep some neighborhoods cooler during the day.

The Environmental Protection Agency, within its current constraints, tries to encourage heat island mitigation. Of the agency’s five broad goals, “Clean Air and Global Climate Change” in recent years received about 13 percent of the agency’s $7 billion budget, 3 percent more than the last-place priority, “Compliance and Environmental Stewardship.”[6] Some of that 13 percent trickles down to the Climate Protection Partnerships, mostly voluntary ways for industry and consumers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Much of that trickle goes to Energy Star, the joint Department of Energy-EPA program to promote energy efficient appliances and, more recently, buildings. State and Local Programs, meanwhile, houses the Partnerships’ work on heat islands, which has produced public meetings, a website, and on-line calculator after an initial study of five urban heat islands from 1998-2002; a guidebook in progress was originally slated for publication in 2007.[7] (In full disclosure, I was involved in the outreach involved for about a year as an EPA contractor.)

Many of studies have shown heat waves increase mortality from the following factors and perhaps other causes:

Cool Construction

As mentioned previously, EPA policy revolves around building construction methods, and zeroes in on three generally accepted options: increased vegetation, cool roofs, and green roofs, with cool pavements emerging as a fourth choice. Other efforts, such as New York or Houston’s heat island initiatives or Arizona State’s National Center of Excellence,[9] likewise focus on these technologies.

These technical approaches operate similarly and often have benefits beyond heat islands. The first option, planting more trees and other vegetation in cities, reduces heat islands because vegetation reflects more light back to space than common construction materials, shades surfaces and buildings, and stores water that then evaporates and takes heat with it. But that’s not all. By shading roads, for example, trees reduce the pavement’s temperature fluctuations, prolonging its service life. Trees also raise property values, sequester carbon dioxide, and filter pollutants from the air and water. These benefits almost always outweigh the cost of planting and maintaining urban forests.[10]

flickr.com/416style

Place vegetation on a roof instead of alongside sidewalks, and you create a green roof. Modern green roofs began catching on in Germany and Switzerland in the 1970s. This one in is in Toronto.

Place vegetation on a roof instead of alongside sidewalks, and you create a green roof. Modern green roofs began catching on in Germany and Switzerland in the 1970s. They are spreading in the United States because they boost insulation and enable evaporative cooling, the process that wicks heat away with water into the air, which keeps the roof cooler and reduces the heat island. The living insulation reduces energy costs associated with buildings and also protects the roof membrane underneath the plants and soil from exposure to the elements, thus extending the roof’s life. In addition, like vegetation elsewhere, vegetated roofs can expand habitats for wildlife and beekeepers, filter pollutants, and also reduce runoff by keeping rainwater on the roof or slowing its rate of discharge. Portland, Oregon, already has 9 acres of green roofs and hopes to quintuple that number soon, primarily to keep pollution out of local waterways and the ocean. Chicago, meanwhile, has focused on green roofs to save energy and keep the city cooler, since a grassy expanse absorbs less heat than sheets of rubber.

A cheaper, albeit less beneficial, alternative to green roofs is the cool roof. Cool roofs utilize the principle that white surfaces reflect more light than dark ones and thus stay cooler. Consequently, white plastic sheets or sprays coat many roofs, including California’s state capitol. Certain clay tiles can also reduce temperatures. Cool roof products have Energy Star certification and are more popular in southern states like Florida, Arizona, and Texas. But even Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia benefit from them because they can lower heat-wave mortality and typically save more money from decreased air conditioning than they cost in increased heating.[11] One study estimated that 5 to 10 percent of a city’s electricity demand compensates for the increased temperatures from the heat island alone.[12] That is one reason California began to require cool roofs for certain types of construction after the soaring electricity prices and rolling blackouts of 2000 and 2001.

Cool pavements, finally, take advantage of reflectivity, evaporative cooling, or both. Some pavements, like concrete with lighter additives, have a higher albedo (reflect more light.) Others, like porous asphalt, allow water to drain through them into the ground, which replenishes groundwater and also cools the pavement when that water evaporates from the soil. But given all the pavement and roofs in the world, and with a planetary population that is increasingly urban, widespread changes in net albedo could make a huge difference. Hashem Akbari, a prolific heat island researcher, and his collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that increasing the reflectance of roofs 40 percent and of pavements 15 percent would reduce energy consumption enough to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 44 metric gigatons, much more than a year’s worth of global greenhouse gas emissions.[13] Simulations elsewhere have suggested widespread green roofs and cool roofs could also lower average city temperatures, which may become increasingly worthwhile as overall global temperatures rise.[14]

Add It Up

In the general absence of defined heat island policies, the drive toward more environmental construction currently enables heat island mitigation, but often as a byproduct. Residential and commercial buildings each account for about 17 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions when you include the electricity they consume.[15] Making them more energy-efficient saves their owners money and typically cuts their contribution to the local heat island. The large-scale effects of such efforts, supported by programs like LEED and GreenGlobes and increasingly written into city and state codes, will be known only later. Meanwhile, the benefits of other projects, like replacing roadways with cooler pavements, contribute less directly to the contractor or owner and are instead diffused across the entire public.

Heat islands reveal what life may be like in a world a few degrees hotter. They also reveal the tragedy of the commons that plagues efforts to slow or adapt to global climate change: some individuals benefit greatly from business as usual while everyone loses in the end. However, even the constrained, initial attempts to address heat islands show both individuals and societies can win, but that much more collective will and political coordination is needed for the winnings to increase and spread.

Mark Meier is a freelance writer with a particular interest in ethics, identity, and social structure.

Notes

^[1] Greater London Authority, “London’s Urban Heat Island: A Summary Guide for Decision Makers” (London: Greater London Authority, 2006), available at www.london.gov.uk/mayor/environment/climate-change/docs/UHI_summary_report.pdf. New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, “Mitigating New York City’s Heat Island with Urban Forestry, Living Roofs, and Light Surfaces” (2006), available at http://www.nyserda.org/programs/environment/emep/project/6681_25/6681_25_pwp.asp.

^[2] Douglas M. Main, “Parking spaces outnumber drivers 3-to-1, drive pollution and warming,” Purdue University News (2007), available at http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2007b/070911PijanowskiParking.html.

[3] Global Carbon Projectm “Carbon Budget 2007,” available at http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbontrends/index.htm.

^[4] S. Konopacki, L. Gartland, H. Akbari, and I. Rainer. 1998. “Demonstration of Energy Savings of Cool Roofs.” Paper LBNL-40673. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA. S. Konopacki, and H. Akbari. 2001. “Measured Energy Savings and Demand Reduction from a Reflective Roof Membrane on a Large Retail Store in Austin.” Paper LBNL-47149. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA.

^[5] David J. Sailor and Hongli Fan, “The Important of Including Anthropogenic Heating in Mesoscale Modeling of the Urban Heat Island,” (American Meteorological Society conference, 2004), available at http://ams.confex.com/ams/84Annual/techprogram/paper_74444.htm.

^[6] FY2009 EPA Budget in Brief, available at http://www.epa.gov/budget/2009/2009bib.pdf.

^[7] http://www.epa.gov/heatislands.

[8] The information in this table is drawn from EPA’s “Excessive Heat Event Guidebook” available at http://www.epa.gov/heatisland/about/pdf/EHEguide_final.pdf and Health Effects of Ozone in Patients with Asthma at http://www.epa.gov/03healthtraining/effects.html.

^[9] http://ccsr.columbia.edu/cig/uhi/index.html, http://www.harc.edu/Projects/CoolHouston/About/, and http://asusmart.com/.

^[10] See for two examples: Portland Parks and Recreation. 2007. “Portland’s Urban Forest Canopy: Assessment and Public Tree Evaluation” available at http://www.portlandonline.com/shared/cfm/ image.cfm?id=171829. And also E.G., McPherson, J.R. Simpson, P.J. Peper, S.E. Maco, and Q. Xiao. 2005. “Municipal Forest Benefits and Costs in Five US Cities.” Journal of Forestry 103(8):411-416.

^[11] S. Konopacki, H. Akbari, M. Pomerantz, S. Gabersek, and L. Gartland. 1997. “Cooling Energy Savings Potential of Light-Colored Roofs for Residential and Commercial Buildings in 11 U.S. Metropolitan Areas.” Paper LBNL-39433. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA.

^[12] H. Akbari, “Energy Savings Potentials and Air Quality Benefits of Urban Heat Island Mitigation” (2005), available at http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/860475-UlHWIq/860475.PD.

^[13] Akbari, H., S. Menon, and A. Rosenfeld, “Global Cooling: Increasing Solar Reflectance of Urban Areas to Offset CO2,” (2008). In press, Climatic Change. Reported in Research Highlights. “White Roofs Cool the World, Offset CO2, and Delay Global Warming.” http://www.energy.ca.gov/2008publications/LBNL-1000-2008-022/LBNL-1000-2008-022.PDF.

^[14] 1) K. Liu. and B. Bass. 2005. “Performance of Green Roof Systems.” National Research Council Canada, Report No. NRCC-47705, Toronto, Canada. 2) C. Rosenzweig, W. Solecki et al. 2006.” Mitigating New York City’s Heat Island with Urban Forestry, Living Roofs, and Light Surfaces.” Sixth Symposium on the Urban Environment and Forum on Managing our Physical

^[15] The 1990-2006 Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks is available from http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/usinventoryreport.html.

CNN reports: “Within the concrete of the new bridge are embedded 323 sensors that will generate a record of how it handles the stresses and strains of traffic and Minnesota’s harsh climate. The data will help engineers maintain the bridge and advance the art of bridge design.”

Reece Rushing covered the promise of monitoring technology earlier this year on Science Progress in a piece on “Catching Crumbling Infrastructure.” He warned:

Before it collapsed, the Minneapolis bridge was one of more than 70,000 bridges nationwide declared by the Department of Transportation to be structurally deficient. One in three urban bridges fall into this category.

Replicating the design and monitoring elements that now protect the I-35W bridge will pave the way to a safer infrastructure for the entire country.