Do Green Spaces Have to Gobble Up a Ton of Energy?

The U.S. Green Building Council reports that green LEED-certified buildings consume 25% less energy. While this is a vast improvement over traditional structures, it is still excessive, considering the initial construction cost and maintenance. For LEED-certified buildings to be a worthwhile investment, they need to be more energy efficient.

Fortunately, new advances are making LEED-certified buildings more efficient every year. Wout Broere, a civil engineering professor and researcher from The Netherlands, has written on urban planning solutions and green infrastructural solutions that help minimize energy waste. Other researchers have introduced similar findings over the past year.

Even older green spaces pay off over the long-run. The U.S. Green Building Council states that the ROI for a standard green building is about 19.2%. However, it still takes slightly over three years to break-even on the initial construction costs. By making the necessary improvements to make the unit more energy efficient, future LEED-certified buildings may break-even in two years or less.

Every day, new techniques are developed and discoveries are made that allow developers to decrease the amount of energy green spaces require to stay healthy. In this post, we’re going to highlight some of the changes that have recently been made to green space energy consumption.

First, however, let’s talk about what a green space is. The EPA defines a green or “open” space as:

“Open space is any open piece of land that is undeveloped (has no buildings or other built structures) and is accessible to the public. Open space can include:

• Green space (land that is partly or completely covered with grass, trees, shrubs, or other vegetation). Green space includes parks, community gardens, and cemeteries.
• Schoolyards
• Playgrounds
• Public seating areas
• Public plazas
• Vacant lots”

For a long time, green spaces were limited to ground-level areas. Over the last decade or so, however, engineers and developers have found that installing green and open spaces on the tops of buildings and parking lots is a fantastic way to reduce the amount of energy required to maintain these spaces and reduce the energy consumption and carbon footprints of the structures on which they are installed.

Grass Choice

Grass seems like such a simple part of a green space but if you don’t make the right choice you could wind up planting a type of grass that is incredibly high-maintenance. This is why landscaping experts recommend opting for grass seed choices like sheep fescue instead of the usual Kentucky bluegrass that is usually planted. Fescues, say the experts, are hardy and low-maintenance grasses. They can handle a variety of environments and climates and don’t require a lot of watering. In fact, it only needs watering a few times a month (as opposed to a few times a week for other types of grass). This cuts way down on your carbon footprint (which translates to energy savings) and cost of maintenance.

Water Usage

We’ve talked before about how the water industry needs to catch up to the energy industry. Strides have been made with the installation of smart water meters and sensors in some parts of the country but more could be done.

In this respect, many city planners and engineers have started looking at green spaces as a way to reduce municipal water consumption and even to use water as a method of producing energy for the building on which it sits or those that stand nearby.

Another way that municipalities are reducing their water usage in green spaces is through the use of cisterns and rainwater collection. This “gray water” is then used for watering the plants, toilet flushing, and other tasks (not consumption-based). These collection practices are entirely green and carbon-neutral so they don’t require much energy to run.

In California, the Burbank Water and Power EcoCampus captures rainwater and storm runoff from solar panels and uses it in their hydro-power plant, making it the first power plant in the world to run using 100% recycled water.

Turning Urban Spaces Green

It is important to understand that the use of green spaces isn’t just about making parks and green roofs more energy efficient and sustainable. It is also about looking for ways to turn otherwise “ordinary” spaces and structures green.

For example, scientists at Cambridge University have created “green bus shelters” that use solar power and harvest the electrons produced via photosynthesis done by plants that are planted in pockets that are built into the shelter’s walls and use the harvested energy to light up the bus shelter.

Another popular initiative that is being put in place all over the world is the installation of “green buildings” that take what would have been ordinary office buildings and turn them into carbon-neutral structures and, in the case of some, green spaces with indoor courtyards, rooftop gardens and lawns, etc.

The bottom line is this: green spaces–from lawns to city parks–don’t have to be the energy vampires that they’ve been in the past. In fact, they can even be energy producers!

Photo Credit: Ian Dick via Flickr