Posted from Greenbuild '08. As my colleague Nadav Malin has written, attempts to achieve LEED credits, particularly in the materials and resources category, sometimes involve "magical," that is, wishful, thinking. At a session this morning on green blogging, a guy popped out of the audience who wields a much more interesting and perhaps even more audacious type of magic toward achieving LEED credits...

Posted live from Greenbuild. This morning we had our annual breakfast at Greenbuild with invited participants from the top green firms in the industry — taking their pulse, getting their take. Architects were in force, but engineers and builders were also represented. Much of the discussion revolved around the 2030 Challenge — who has signed up and who hasn't (the room was split roughly equally); why and why not; what the vague Challenge actually means (does it include occupant transportation, etc.?) and how to specifically measure it (Btu/sf? Energy use? Carbon?).

Posted live from Greenbuild. There are a couple booths that warrant special mention. This year, the Armstrong Ceiling Systems booth is a metal greenhouse frame (below banners reading "Come see what's growing") that, after the show, will be donated to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Nice.

Posted live from Greenbuild. Vortex Fine Filters by Wisy, offered in the U.S. by Rainwater Management Solutions, passively filter debris in rainwater collected from drains and downspouts. An offset input on the top of the unit spins draining water around a self-cleaning stainless steel mesh filter; 90-something percent of the water is filtered and exits to holding tanks or more processing.

Posted live from Greenbuild. Yesterday, the president of Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES), Don McLean, stopped by our booth at Greenbuild to run through the features of his company's Virtual Environment energy and carbon footprint simulation tool for SketchUp and Revit. The new version of the software already works with the new features in SketchUp 7.

Posted live from Greenbuild. A shot of the trade show floor. Click for bigger. Scuttlebutt is that total registrations are expected to be on the order of 30,000.

Posted live from Greenbuild.

	At the Selux booth, I'm told that these will be introduced to the market shortly, intended for grid intertie.
	Their standalone PV area lighting has been on the market for some time.

Posted live from Greenbuild. Rock-filled channels between parking rows drain to a large detention area beside the lot.

In the background, rental cranes dance in the sky.

Posted live from Greenbuild. Stream it if you aren't here. (You'll have to set up a username and password.) About ten minutes before show time, the room (seriously, they tell me there's seating for 10,000) was about a quarter full, but people were pouring in. Ten minutes after start time, they still are.

Posted live from Greenbuild. Our BuildingGreen after-party starts in about a half-hour, and I'm the designated greeter/bouncer; about 300 people are expected. (It was decided to have our after-party on the first night, which I think was a darned good idea.) So probably no more posts from here tonight (from me anyway) unless I find some active brain cells and wifi. UPDATE - three pics after the jump...

Posted live from Greenbuild. We're fans of TimberSIL. We're such big fans that we named it a Top-10 product in 2004.

We humans number about 6.5 billion. How many trees are there? NASA has been taking satellite pictures of the Earth's forests for years and sharing them with ecologists who have figured out an algorithm for calculating worldwide tree totals based on patterns of sunlight. The result of that research is a worldwide tree census, as of 2005, of 400,246,300,201, or 400 billion.

Hey, you Twitterers (there must be a few of you out there)... in addition to posting here, we'll be microblogging from Greenbuild. You don't need an account to follow along. Additionally, there's a #greenbuild hash that people are already using — you can follow everyone's Greenbuild Tweets here.

The 140 acre array of photovoltaic panels at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada generates 14 megawatts of power..

Almost all of our methods for generating electricity are fundamentally the same. Coal-, nuclear-, and natural-gas-fired power plants boil water to produce high-pressure steam that spins a dynamo in a "steam turbine." The wood-chip-fired combined-heat-and-power (CHP) plant that we want to build in Brattleboro works the same way.