Living the green dream

Music

>> Paul Holland: I'm Paul Holland. I'm a general partner at Foundation Capital, where I manage the CleanTech practice.

Music My wife, Linda Yates, and I are attempting to build the greenest custom home in America. We're hoping this becomes a motivation and maybe an inspiration for others to live a greener lifestyle.

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Speaker: This is all glass.

>> Paul Holland: Um-hum.

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Speaker: So you will see through --

>> Paul Holland: At this point in time, on the drawing board, it's the highest lead point house in the country. There's several big pieces of the home that seemed to capture people's attention. Number one; the house is energy independent. We have 21 kilowatts of solar power in the house. We have ground source heat exchangers. We have all sorts of passive sources of energy that are available to us so that essentially we've had the ability to take the house off the grid, and we're taking the house to a place where it's fossil fuel free. Beyond that, we're using all environmentally regenerative materials. We're using forest stewardship certified woods. We're using recycled steel and recycled elements within the house. By 2020 in California, the rules state that any new residential construction has to be energy independent. And we have to think about the fact that roughly 40 to 50 percent of the energy we use on the planet is associated with a built environment. If we can get ourselves into a place where we can make those structures energy independent, it's one of the most important things we can possibly do as a species. The primary driver for Linda and me in building this home is that we have three small children today. At some point in the future, 30, 40, 50 years from now, if I have the opportunity to speak to them, I want to be able to look them in the eye and say that I did everything I could to try to solve the major crisis facing my generation at the time I could do it.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====