Urban wind technology

I haven't written about anything green in forever (a recession will do that to you), but I was intrigued the other week while driving through a rural windmill farm in Indiana. Now I can combine windmills with my blog!

Real Estate Ancillary Revenue has posted a story about the WindCube, a 22-foot high urban windmill of sorts designed to serve a single property. Its $300k cost can apparently be absorbed in part through tax credits and the like, with a relatively short estimated payback time.

In an day and age where you are trying to look for possible revenue sources and technologies that might make your building more green, I guess it is worth a look. I"ll also bet there will be some interesting counterparts in Las Vegas in two weeks.

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Dear Jenner & Block - stop working so hard!

A Trump Tower Chicago resident is apparently complaining that Jenner & Block's lights are on 24/7, and that this is disturbing her sleep, not to mention that Jenner's wasting energy. Not very green, I guess, but yhey are a BigLaw firm, and that's the way many of these folks operate. (When I was in BigLaw lights went out around 9 as I recall; after that you had to work them manually in your office.)

OK, so this buyer never bothered to check out a million dollar-ish condo at night for the views or other issues? She's apparently using eyemasks now (uhhh, yeah, a good idea), but that's not good enough.

But at the end of the day I don't understand why the Tribune story failed to catch a key issue here, one that hopefully makes this story a non-story soon. As I recall, Jenner is moving to new digs later this year. Hopefully that solves this "problem."

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What if this working from home thing actually catches on?

If I were still working at a law firm, I would demand to be able to work at home whenever I could. Why? Energy prices and recaptured hours.

The main reason I created my own gig was because I needed that flexibility. A 120 mile commute was not working for me.

But what if, instead of 1-2% of people working from home, that number went up to 10-20%? What would happen to the commercial real estate market? That's one of the thought-provoking questions in this post by Lisa Michelle Galley.

I have two observations:

First, prices would take a dip for sure. Supply -- demand, blah, blah, blah. But then developers would stop building until demand caught up with supply. So there's an additional lag and no new construction for a bunch of years. People in Chicago know all about that -- how many years did we go without a new high rise?

Second, not everyone can do this. Certainly my wife as to go to the office and the hospital and people have to come to her (although when I was a kid both my pediatrician and my dentist worked out of their homes, come to think of it). And many retail and service based industries have to do the same. But phone-based customer service people? Consultants? Lawyers? Accountants? The demand for an office is not as compelling in 2008 as it was in 1988 in my opinion.

The big obstacle was always IT. But gee, these days you can almost always call in to a computer to fix a problem. I have that ability and I use it all the time. (Ironically, however, a friend of mine who works for Citrix told me the other day that he always seems to be in his office!)

I'd personally like to see this, maybe because I took the plunge myself. On the other hand it may not be as good for business as I'd like.

PS: imo employers should also encourage the policy as well as flex time and 4 day weeks when possible. I think anything to cut back on energy demand is good for the country and the economy right now.

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