Thursday, August 14. 2008RoofRay Launches Online Solar ClearinghouseThe biggest complaint we hear from homeowners who are considering rooftop solar systems is the lack of information: How much will it cost; how long until it pays off; who’s the best local installer? A new site that launched this morning, is looking to help answer all of those queries using satellite data and a hands-on web site RoofRay.com The creator of RoofRay, former dotcom entrepreneur Chris Bura, says his site is like Zillow meets Lending Tree for residential solar. Basically it’s a solar clearinghouse that uses Google satellite data and info from the National Renewable Energy Labs to help users make good decisions about what sort of system to buy. Here’s how it works: enter an address, pull up the satellite image of the chosen building’s rooftop and then using the RoofRay tool based on Google maps, draw your solar arrays (see image below and YouTube video below the jump). Data on square footage of the system, slope of the roof, power per square foot and total peak power all show up in a chart, and the info displayed depends on how big you’ve drawn your system. After drawing the panels you can dive into metrics based on the size and location of your solar system, including projected performance, financial analysis, average monthly utility bill after solar is added, total cost summary and, our favorite, time until the system pays for itself. (Update: Currently the site only has California utility rates, but Bura says he is adding in other states soon). When Bura walked us through the site, we made our roof top solar system quite massive and discovered it would be a good decade until it would break even. Overall the system gives users as much detailed info as they’d ever want about a system. (Solar geeks, you’ll be in heaven.) Though, all that information could also be a drawback; a simpler option for users that don’t want to spend so much hands-on drawing time could make it a lot more user-friendly. We’re also not sure how close the projections are to how the solar system will actually work in real life, but users with existing solar systems, test it out and let us know. The biggest potential of the site for the user could be the ability to test out how good a home’s solar potential is before buying it. (That’s where the Zillow comparison really comes into play.) There’s also a search function to be able to find solar systems on buildings in your area, so you can see which installers your neighbors have been signing up with. Bura spent under $50,000 over the last 6 months building out the site with the help of just one engineer. He plans to raise funding, incorporate the company, and hire a co-founder and 2 developers to build out the site even more. The site is free to use and Bura says his business model is a combo of AdSense ads and potential partnerships with solar installers — we could see the site as a potentially good lead generator. Check out the system and give Bura some feedback; he’s currently working on validation testing.
Posted by Christian Babski
in Sustainability
at
07:49
Defined tags for this entry: software, sustainability
Tuesday, August 12. 2008Green plug prospects
The unsightly plastic warts on our walls are sucking down terawatts of power globally each year. It’s time to put a stop to that needless energy drain by replacing dumb bricks with smart hubs -- putting a computerized stake through the hearts of our home electrical vampires. Devices that are plugged in but not in use consume between 200 and 400 terawatt hours (TWh) per year, according to the International Energy Agency. Other research pegs the not-in-use drain from 5 to 25 percent of all residential energy used in the U.S., with numbers rising. Research doesn’t divvy up between the consumption of DC-converting “wall warts” that provide juice to recharge batteries or convert power for various electronics, and the power sucked by the standby mode of televisions, microwaves and other appliances that are ostensibly “off.” But experts believe the adapters drain a significantly greater amount. DC adapters waste power through excess heat in transforming AC to DC current, through continual charging (which shortens device lifespans), and through drawing power even when nothing is attached to its DC plug, or when an attached device is powered down. Most DC converters are cheaply built, vary widely even from the same maker in efficiency, and have little of the prowess built into most other home electronics and computing peripherals. With the rise in prices of oil and the volatility of electrical prices in the U.S., there are many different efforts underway to reduce standby power, as well as shift recharging power from daytime to off-peak hours when electrical demand is low. Building a DC Ecosystem In Green Plug's model, a central hub with multiple USB ports handles anything that’s plugged into it. It checks for whether a given device has its smart technology built in, and whether the device is high- or low-power. Unless a higher charge is required, the hub uses only USB-compatible low power. In standby mode, it simply shuts off power, instead of allowing an unneeded trickle. According to company founder and CEO Frank P. Paniagua, Jr., the system works because it's a natural transition for consumers. “You don't have to change your behavior: you plug in, you save energy, you cut e-waste. Plus, it's safe: it detects what that client device is on the other side.” A related benefit of Green Plug’s approach is that the charging system has smarts. Any hardware enabled with Green Plug’s chips can transmit information about its status—number of battery cycles, current charge, and other details. Home users might use this information to see the power they’re consuming, to find out whether they can unplug a camera or phone and use it for the day, or to help with technical support when a device goes south. In offices, this information could ultimately be aggregated and used to control when power is used, as companies can often score off-peak prices from utilities, or spot faulty hardware. It’s the enabled hardware that’s the limiting factor for adoption, however. Will Manufacturers Buy In? Paniagua believes that they have a fighting chance because of regulatory and energy market changes. Manufacturers in some countries, including those in the European Union, must plan for a product’s lifecycle, and be able to accept and disassemble systems when they’ve expired. “If you manufacture it, you're going to have to take it back." (Read more about producer take-bake programs in the Worldchanging archives). Green Plug likes to emphasize the waste resulting from the adapters' short lifespans. The company estimates 3.2 billion external power supplies will be built worldwide in 2008 (with about a quarter coming to the U.S.), and that 434 million will be retired this year in just the U.S.—with only a small percentage heading into electronics recycling. Green Plug’s system—which, as their reference design demonstrates, uses water-soluble plastic and solder—easily comes apart at end-of-life, making it easy to harvest recyclable components. The Future of Charging Utilities are looking for “a real-time secure protocol” that they can work with, he said, and Green Plug hopes theirs becomes the winner. For instance, a plug-in hybrid or electric car with Greentalk inside could be scheduled through an owner’s computer to charge between 1 am and 5 am in the morning, with the device figuring out the amount of current it needs to draw to charge within that period. This could allow the kind of personally managed power shaving that utilities love: moving power usage off peak daytime hours into the night when power is cheap. Utilities that own plants also run their least-efficient, most-expensive, and most-polluting facilities last. Ultimately, the inefficiency of almost every part of electronics power usage, from cords to adapters to power supply components, has to be addressed as the cost of raw materials increases, manufacturers are more obliged to use less and accept back more, and power prices climb. Green Plug may not have the only answer, but they do have a viable one. Equipment using their technology should start appearing as soon as late this year. Glenn Fleishman is a Seattle journalist who focuses on technology, and how to overcome it. Glenn writes regularly about wireless data at Wi-Fi Networking News, and Macs at TidBITS. Image credit: Green Plug.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology, Sustainability
at
09:22
Defined tags for this entry: energy, hardware, monitoring, research, science & technology, sustainability
Friday, August 08. 20085 excellent ideas for prefabricated housing
The Museum of Modern Art's current show, Home Delivery: Prefabricating the Modern Dwelling (through October 20) surveys the history of prefab homes in the U.S. It shows old ideas that never caught on as well as the latest in prefab home technology. An outside portion of the exhibit contains five modern prefab houses that were built especially for the show. The word "prefab" doesn't inspire warm, fuzzy feelings in most people. In fact, it may make you think of a trailer park. But architects think that prefabricated houses — houses that are at least partially assembled away from where they're built and whose parts can be mass-produced — have potential. Their optimism is for three main reasons: 1) Mass-producing parts for homes as if they were cars is more efficient than building them on-site, which makes them more environmentally friendly. 2) Prefab houses tend to be smaller than most suburban dwellings, so use less energy once they're built. 3) Architects think prefab houses are just plain fun — the concept lets them design modern, minimalist spaces that could be built easily for people all over the world. Click Continue to read about some of the coolest elements from the MoMA exhibit— from walls made of bottles to one of the most compact but livable houses around.
5. More portable than a trailer: the inflatable home.
4. Make your home from bottles.
3. Live in a very, very small space.
2. Forget "external fasteners" (i.e. nails).
Of course, eschewing nails and glue is not a new strategy — just think of an antique chest of drawers or . But the prefab exhibit shows that designers are being creative with the concept. Take this Flatform wall, commissioned by MoMA for the exhibit. It's a wall stamped from standard-sized sheets of stainless steel. Its flat components are "cut, scored and folded to assemble structures without external fasteners." Modern computer modeling is letting us leave nails behind not just for materials like carefully cut wood but for mass-produced commodities like metal sheets.
1. Make your walls out of cellophane (and fill them with solar panels).
Posted by Christian Babski
in Architecture, Sustainability
at
08:08
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, sustainability
Thursday, August 07. 2008Buildings--the Biggest Bang for the Buck in Global CO2 AbatementThe Vattenfall/McKinsey Report "A Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction" contains a graph (below) that everybody needs to see. The graph shows how much greenhouse gas abatement potential lies in some popular strategies/technologies, and simultaneously shows the monetary cost of each strategy. The first thing you notice when you see the graph is that the cost for many abatement strategies is negative. That means these strategies make money, they don't cost money. The second thing that you notice is most of the money-making strategies are in the building industry: better insulation, better HVAC, better lighting, better water heating. Also in the money-making realm are better vehicle fuel efficiency and sugarcane ethanol. Forestry has perhaps the largest single abatement potential but is one of the more expensive methods; the power industry has the largest total abatement potential, but different technologies have different costs. There are some aspects of the graph I am skeptical about. For instance, the extremely high price of biodiesel--in San Francisco right now, biodiesel is cheaper than petro-diesel. (But Jørgen Vos of Sustainability Planning Partners and Natural Logic has done a paper indicating biodiesel makes less sense ecologically than we might think.) Also, nuclear power shows up as cheaper than wind, which is not true according to Rocky Mountain Institute's Winning the Oil Endgame. And finally, sequestration by plankton in oceans and biochar in soils do not even appear on the graph. But still, the graph is a fantastic visualization of most strategies and their costs. It should inform strategic planning in companies and governments.
One governmental strategy for CO2 abatement is cap-and-trade systems. Emissions trading schemes in the EU and US currently only count CO2 abatement at the source--energy generation. But anyone who knows about efficiency (such as Amory Lovins, LBL, LLNL, NREL, and many other research labs) will be quick to point out that avoiding one unit of end-user electricity use avoids three units of primary energy use, due to the inefficiencies of generating electricity. Therefore, end-user efficiency should be valued right alongside clean power generation. A movement has started to get efficiency equal footing in emissions trading schemes. Lend Lease Corporation, Lincolne Scott, and Advanced Environmental (a subdivision of Lincolne Scott) have proposed an Integrated Emissions & Efficiency Trading Scheme (EETS). The 70-page document details both the rationale of the system and how it would work. For instance, they quote the Stern Report and Bill Clinton, saying: "If upstream emissions from heat and electricity are included, emissions from buildings total 40% of global emissions and up to 80% of total greenhouse gas emissions in our cities and towns. The building sector provides more potential for quick, deep and cost effective greenhouse gas mitigation than any other industry..." They also quote the McKinsey study, saying "High value carbon credits of AUD $34 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2-e) could realistically achieve a carbon zero position in commercial office buildings at nil cost and, based on the McKinsey cost curves, energy efficiency in buildings represents an estimated cost negative abatement of US$45 billion to the United States economy, and $5.2 billion to the Australian economy." How would cap-and-trade work for efficiency? It would be similar to emissions trading, but instead of caps on emission from power generation, building owners would calculate the amount of CO2-equivalent emissions their buildings use (adding up all their electricity, oil, gas, and other energy use), and there would be a cap for an allowable amount of CO2 emission per square meter of building. This would not replace normal emission trading. The integrated EETS system would have an efficiency cap-and-trade market in addition to the power generation emission cap-and-trade market, working in parallel. Detractors have argued against efficiency counting for emissions offsets because of concerns about double-counting. (If a building uses less energy, couldn't the building owner trade abatement credits while the power company also trades abatement credits for not generating the additional power that would have been used?) The EETS avoids this by having the two separate buckets, one for power generation and one for building energy use. Each is its own separate market, and efficiency credits would not count toward a nation's Kyoto Protocol goals. Another argument against such a scheme is that cap-and-trade schemes are a form of tax and subsidy, and there is no need to subsidize CO2 abatement methods that are already money-makers (and they clearly are, by the McKinsey graph above). Architect and consultant Huston Eubank, formerly of the World Green Building Council and Rocky Mountain Institute, explained that in existing emissions trading schemes, "A project only qualifies... if it can prove that the emissions reduction would not have occurred without the project. In its strictest sense, this means that the project must not have been financially feasible without carbon credits." This causes the unintended consequence of not encouraging financially sustainable strategies for environmental sustainability. True sustainability needs to be commercially viable as well as ecologically helpful: isn't it a much better use of taxpayer money to launch an industry that will become self-sustaining rather than spend money on things which would never be economically feasible by themselves? Obviously the scale of our environmental challenge is large enough that we can't limit ourselves to money-making schemes--we need to pump money into every technology that works--but it would be foolish for us to skip over the low-hanging fruit in favor of more expensive, slower, and less proven strategies. That is effectively what we are doing with the emissions trading schemes that exist now. The exclusion of money-making strategies for CO2 abatement in the building industry also ignores the perverse incentives of the building industry's economy. This is an industry where the people paying for a building's energy use are not the same people who built the building, where first cost is nearly always at odds with life-cycle cost. A cap-and-trade scheme is perfect for an industry like this, because it introduces a new feedback loop that counteracts (and in the long run overwhelms) the existing perverse incentives. It effectively rationalizes the economy of the industry, internalizing some of the externalities of inefficiency.
How likely is an EETS to be implemented? Eubank provided me with documents from the UNEP's Sustainable Buildings & Construction Initiative, which said, "At the moment, a number of projects regarding energy efficiency in buildings - such as those that introduce solar power, more efficient lighting devices, HVAC systems, and cooking devices, such as stoves in rural areas that require less biomass in their operation - are eligible for the flexible instruments of the Kyoto Protocol, particularly under the CDM. These projects are, however, still rather few in number and limited to active solutions, such as PV cells, or other technological options. Passive solutions, such as the design of better oriented and ventilated buildings, are not yet applicable under the instruments of the Kyoto Protocol." What's required for passive systems to count are universally agreed-upon benchmarks and measurement standards, so that legitimate quantitative values can be established for energy savings. Luckily, data and calculation methods for this have been built and refined for over a decade in the US, as part of the LEED rating system, and have been worked on by some of the best labs and consultancies in the industry. The World Green Building Council and other groups can work together to establish similar benchmarks and measurement systems for national and international EETS systems. However, as Eubank pointed out, "Getting UNFCCC approval for a new methodology is a long and arduous process. Thus the importance of supporting this initiative." Encouragingly, one of the UNEP's documents said that "At a June side event in Bonn, Germany, the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] secretariats requested UNEP-SBCI's to assist in reviewing how to put the building sector on the agenda at the upcoming Conference of the Parties 14 in Poznan, Poland in December 2008." Public awareness of Lend Lease, Lincolne Scott, and Advanced Environmental's integrated efficiency and emissions trading scheme is still slim, however, and it needs to come to the attention of more policymakers. It would be foolish of us to bypass the low-hanging fruit of 40% of the world's CO2 emissions, which can be abated not only without economic hardship but with economic gain. "An integrated EETS will... improve the energy efficiency of the vast majority (98%) of building stock: existing buildings which hold the lowest cost abatement opportunities in the world." Related Links:Wednesday, August 06. 2008Mapping the World's Renewable Energy PotentialAs renewable energy technologies become more competitive, investing in them is becoming a more viable venture. Yet, uncertainties about cost and ROI are still keeping some investors at bay. Wind blows, rain falls and the sun shines, but differently at different times and locations, making wind, hydroelectric and solar power dependent upon weather and climate systems. A new Northwest-based energy efficiency company, 3TIER, is using their science skills and computer smarts to remove some of that guesswork.
The 3TIER team uses their technology-assisted powers of analysis to calculate the weather and climate and its impacts on renewable energy. The group customizes their forecasts with data from each client’s site to help them save money and optimize power. They take multiple readings from the site, for an extended period of time, and combine the reading with weather and climate knowledge for that region to tell wind farmers, for example, an estimate of how much energy they'll be generating, and at what time. The group recently finished helping oilman turned renewable energy propent T. Boone Pickens illustrate his national plan to help propel the U.S. energy economy with wind. Using wind maps from 3TIER, the Pickens Plan explains how the U.S. can use wind power to meet more than 20 percent of its electricity demand within 10 years. (View a video about the plan here). 3TIER is currently working on a project called REmapping the World, which combines their prediction technology and analysis with Google maps to assess solar and wind energy potential from locations around the world. So far, they have mapped North America, but they plan to map the renewable energy potential of the entire world by 2010. Take a FirstLook at the project's “Find Wind Fast” function. Here clients from renewable energy project operators to developers, financiers to marketers, can select the height of a proposed turbine and its location to get an estimated read on how much wind power is in that area. For more exact details, clients can order custom reports that provide information like monthly windspeed and power capacity, hourly windspeed and power distribution and more. But you don’t need to be one of their clients to play around with the maps, and it is pretty fun to look at the potential from afar as well as to click around and see how much specific potential lies where. Potential just happens to be the perfect word to describe this project, this company and the renewable energy movement. Being able to more accurately estimate how much we can depend on renewable energy systems will only aid in their much needed proliferation, and hopefully, forecasting where the wind will blow will only become more valuable with time. Image credits: The 3TIER Group.
Over 90 percent of the renewable energies used for electricity generation are weather-driven; in other words, they are completely dependent on the weather/climate system for their fuel. So while these sources of renewable energy have the capability to liberate us from our dependence on fossil fuels, they introduce another complicating dependency: the weather. This dependency affects all aspects of weather-driven renewable energy projects: from proper placement to ongoing operation and integration. Related Links:
(Page 1 of 2, totaling 7 entries)
» next page
|
fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
QuicksearchCategoriesCalendarSyndicate This BlogArchivesBlog Administration |