The renewable energy industry is growing -- and growing fast. But there are still significant challenges to scaling up solar, wind, biofuels and other energy sources to meet our future demand.
That’s the take-home message from the Solar 2008 conference in San Diego, CA, an annual conclave of scientists, entrepreneurs, consultants and policy experts hosted by the American Solar Energy Society.
A big part of the solution, according to speakers from Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), is to improve the efficiency of our built environment.
Buildings account for more than two-thirds of all electricity used in the United States. RMI's Built Environment (BET) team contends that cutting back on that use through good design means we’ll need fewer renewable resources to meet the energy demands of the future.
At the conference, BET principal James Brew and consultant Ashley Muse brought a group up to speed on LEED for New Construction, the U.S. Green Building Council’s latest standard for high-performance new buildings.
“These [sessions] are so powerful because you can see in people’s eyes that they’re getting it,” says Muse.
Many of the participants in the class were new to green building.
Across the hall, BET principal Victor Olgyay and analyst Josh Hathaway conducted an advanced workshop on daylighting, teaching architects and engineers how to bring natural light into the spaces they design.
Over the past century, explained Olgyay, there’s been an architectural trend toward isolation from the environment, as new technologies such as electric lights, steel and other materials allowed architects to wall people off from the world.
According to Olgyay, bucking that trend is key to designing high-performance spaces.
“There’s a manifest destiny to technology that is not inevitable,” he argued.
Learning how to bring daylight into a building -- as architects were forced to for many centuries -- can reduce the need for electric lighting and improve the thermal performance of a building, making it more comfortable for occupants.
To aid architects in this effort, Olgyay also presented a tool called 'Chhaya' with Vikram Sami, from Lord Aeck Sargent Architecture in Atlanta. Chhaya helps lighting designers quickly model factors -- such as sun angles and building balance points -- that affect daylighting design.
In addition to these presentations, BET consultant Caroline Fluhrer and fellow Erik Bonnett also delivered a paper on how to overcome barriers to constructing high-performance multi-tenant buildings.
