Tomado de Newsweek de Enero 2007
INSULATE INSULATE
Space heating and cooling eats up 36 percent of all the world's energy.
There's virtually no limit to how much of that can be saved, as prototype "zero-energy homes" in Switzerland and Germany have shown.
From polyurethane "outsulation" that's sprayed on the outside of buildings to airtight, "superglazed" windows, there's been a surge in innovative ways of keeping heat in and cold out (or vice versa).
State-of-the-art insulation follows the law of increasing returns: if you add enough, you can scale down or even eliminate heating and air-conditioning equipment, lowering costs even before you start saving on utility bills.
That's what Texas Instruments discovered in 2005 when it cut construction costs by 30 percent for its new, hyperefficient chip-making plant in Richardson, Texas. The cost savings produced by reflective roofing (the firm junked 100 tons of AC equipment) and letting in more
daylight (it reduced lighting costs by 80 percent) helped keep the plant's 1,000 jobs in the United States as well. Studies have shown that green workplaces (ones that don't
constantly need to have the heat or AC running) have higher worker productivity and lower sick rates.