Pittsburgh Gets Cool with White Roofs

Via Energy Manager today, a look at Pittsburgh’s white roofs program:

Pittsburgh launched the Mayor’s Cool Roofs program, an initiative that will coat the roofs of 10 city-owned buildings with reflective paint, making them more energy efficient.

Community volunteers will begin by painting the roof of Fire Engine 27 in Mt. Washington.

The Cool Roofs program, based on the Cities of Service Cool Roofs Blueprint, will make Pittsburgh buildings more energy-efficient by coating roofs of city-owned buildings with white reflective paint, reducing internal building temperatures by up to 30 percent and reducing operating costs.

In its first year, 10 roofs will be coated, covering approximately 50,000 square feet. The city’s Department of Public Works will work with volunteers to clean and paint the roofs.

Funded by $56,000 allocated from a Cities of Service Impact Volunteering Fund Grant and $25,000 from the city’s Green Trust Fund, Cool Roofs is a combined effort between Mayor Ravenstahl’s Office of Service & Civic Engagement, Office of Sustainability and Energy Efficiency and the Department of Public Works.

The City of New York, the first city to implement Cool Roofs, has donated its time and resources to help bring Cool Roofs to Pittsburgh.

In addition, Cities of Service was founded in September 2009 in New York City by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and 16 other mayors from across the nation, as a bipartisan coalition of mayors committed to addressing critical city needs through volunteerism.

Pittsburgh also boasts the Pittsburgh 2030 District, a collaborative of public and private organizations, working to create a high-performance building district in its downtown area.



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About This Blog And Its Author
As potential uses for building and parking lot roofspace continue to grow, unique opportunities to understand and profit from this trend will emerge. Roof Options is committed to tracking the evolving uses of roof estate – spanning solar power, rainwater harvesting, wind power, gardens & farms, “cooling” sites, advertising, apiculture, and telecom transmission platforms – to help unlock the nascent, complex, and expanding roofspace asset class.

Educated at Yale University (Bachelor of Arts - History) and Harvard (Master in Public Policy - International Development), Monty Simus has held a lifelong interest in environmental and conservation issues, primarily as they relate to freshwater scarcity, renewable energy, and national park policy. Working from a water-scarce base in Las Vegas with his wife and son, he is the founder of Water Politics, an organization dedicated to the identification and analysis of geopolitical water issues arising from the world’s growing and vast water deficits, and is also a co-founder of SmartMarkets, an eco-preneurial venture that applies web 2.0 technology and online social networking innovations to motivate energy & water conservation. He previously worked for an independent power producer in Central Asia; co-authored an article appearing in the Summer 2010 issue of the Tulane Environmental Law Journal, titled: “The Water Ethic: The Inexorable Birth Of A Certain Alienable Right”; and authored an article appearing in the inaugural issue of Johns Hopkins University's Global Water Magazine in July 2010 titled: “H2Own: The Water Ethic and an Equitable Market for the Exchange of Individual Water Efficiency Credits.”