The University of Georgia’s Agricultural Energy Innovation Center celebrated its groundbreaking this past Monday, May 3rd. The first stage of the Agricultural Energy Innovation Center will be a demonstration home, which showcases ideas for saving, as well as producing energy. The home will have a platinum LEED, Leadership of Energy and Environmental Design, certification and will use a hybrid system of solar thermal and solar voltaic systems. City, county, and state officials shared the groundbreaking experience. Congressman Jack Kingston spoke of the many research and educational initiatives that will take place in the Agricultural Energy Innovation Center
The Agricultural Energy Innovation Center, led by the University of Georgia, is a research, extension, and education initiative dedicated to enhancing agricultural efficiencies and on-farm energy production. Soon, with the help from Cadmus Design-Build, Moultrie Technical College, USDA, DOL, and DOE, we will begin to build the first of several facilities that will aid this effort.
Features of the Agricultural Energy Innovation Center home:
- Net-Zero Energy: To help the family be time and resource efficient, and achieve net-zero energy primarily by design - using an integrated solar PV and thermal system to provide the small amount of energy needed. We believe the home can be built at a cost comparable to a conventional build.
- Environmentally Friendly: Construction materials properly chosen and efficiently used, coupled with water and other resource cycling systems and requiring less than 1/3 the energy of a normal home will all work together to help the home achieve our goal of a Platinum Level Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.
- Working Partner: The home & farm will be a research platform for an efficient and easy to use farm information, monitoring and control system to enhance farmer efficiency
for the future of food, energy, and the environment.
- Edible Landscape: The Innovation Center landscape will include a variety of edible plants, trees, crops, and feature frost tolerant citrus developed by UGA plant breeder Dr. Wayne Hanna.
- Graduate Students & Education: Several lucky graduate students involved in Agriculture Energy Innovation Center projects will be housed in the home and play a crucial role in the evaluation of the function, features and house design. It will be a research and education home, designed to test ideas, handle groups of school children and showcase innovative ways to improve energy efficiency, production and use in the home.
- Design & Construction: The home is being designed by Simone du Boise, AIA and Denise Donahue of Cadmus Design-Build utilizing their signature EcoCraft Hybrid Home design and construction methodologies. Designed and Built to Nature’s Code because building codes just aren’t enough, the home will be a model of energy and water efficiency and environmental sustainability with integrated renewable energy solutions. Cadmus designed and built the first USGBC® LEED® for Homes Platinum Certified Home in Georgia with the best HERS (Home Energy Rating System) Index on record in the US.
The home will be constructed by Moultrie Technical College’s Green Technologies program. Tony Grahame, MTC’s new Green Technologies Department Head and construction instructor, together with MTC and UGA students will be building this energy efficient “lab” home adjacent to the UGA NESPAL facility. Tony, together with his students at his former position at Yavapai College in Prescott Arizona, received 11 national awards from the US Department of Energy for energy efficient residential construction. What a team!
For more information, please visit the Future Farmstead website.
Click here to view the May 6, 2010 Georgia FACES article on this event.
