Categories
building design energy

Amory B. Lovins on Integrative Design

I’m going to give you a little bit of homework before we get into the meat of this post. Watch this video:

(I’ve probably posted that before. I’m a wee bit obsessed with Mr. Lovins and his work)

Now let’s talk a little bit about integrative design. Integrative Design is a method of design based on working from the top down. Basically you look at the entire system – the entire car, the entire house, the entire factory, with the intention to make it as energy efficient as possible. By looking at design from the top down you ask how to make the best holistic design by intertwining the functions of the different components.

Integrative Design is different from traditional design methods which focus on optimizing each individual piece of the system and then fitting them together and adjusting how they interact. This traditional method creates the most optimized walls and plumbing and HVAC. But the integrative design approach allows you to say, what if we didn’t need the HVAC at all  (or at least not our idea of the most optimized HVAC) because we change the way we build the walls completely.

At the end of the Autodesk video Amory mentions the 10xE principles of integrative design, and I want to share those here:

  1. Define shared and aggressive goals.
  2. Collaborate across disciplines.
  3. Design non-linearly.
  4. Reward desired outcomes
  5. Define the end-use.
  6. Seek systemic causes and ultimate purposes.
  7. Optimize over time and space.
  8. Establish baseline parametric values.
  9. Establish the minimum energy or resource theoretically required, then identify and minimize constraints to achieving that minimum in practice.
  10. Start with a clean sheet.
  11. Use measured data and explicit analysis, not assumptions and rules.
  12. Start downstream.
  13. Seek radical simplicity.
  14. Tunnel through the cost barrier.
  15. Wring multiple benefits from single expenditures.
  16. Meet minimized peak demand; optimize over integrated demand
  17. Include feedback in the design.

In Amory’s lecture he talks about using integrative desing in building design for heating and cooling, in auto design for using less fuel, and in factory design for pumping fluid. Stay tuned for a bit of a deeper dive into these topics in the future, including how the integrative design principles lead to radically different approaches in each of these categories.

Categories
living green

Things making me go wtf this week

The Joy Cardin show on Wisconsin Public Radio had a local meteorologist as a guest on Friday morning to talk about the changing season and what sorts of weather to expect this fall and winter.  A guest called in asking if global warming is really caused by humans (insert massive eye roll and side eye here), and the meteorologist dodged the question by saying he didn’t think there was enough scientific knowledge yet to decide one way or another. He also said that he thought it would take us 50 to 100 years to make a decisive scientific verdict on the question. When people called in to continue  the discussion (and presumably to correct this man’s view of where the science stands) Joy stated that the purpose of the show was to talk about the weather, the season changing, and what to expect for this years winter, and they would not be taking call-ins regarding climate change. She then let the meteorologist re-state his dodgy stance that we just don’t know yet, we don’t have the science yet.

I had to change the radio station a couple times during this drivel because I was driving and I could feel my blood pressure sky rocketing as I rage-listened to this meteorologist.

It turns out that the this meteorologist’s view point is not uncommon among meteorologists. So here is an important public service announcement: Meteorologists are not climate scientists. They are NOT EXPERTS IN THE FIELD OF CLIMATE SCIENCE.

The Joy Cardin show was followed by NPR’s On Point, during which Tom Ashbrook covered the recent report showing that CO2 numbers in the atmosphere are soaring at a record rate.

Can we please stop giving climate change deniers a public platform? The science has shown every time that rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere are causing global warming, and the rate that CO2 levels have risen since the industrial revolution is unprecedented. This isn’t a question anymore, folks. Shouldn’t this meteorologist have been vetted on the subject before hand? Joy Cardin’s producers couldn’t have honestly thought that if they had a meteorologist on the show the subject of climate change wouldn’t come up, could they?

And now, to make me feel a little bit better about this whole thing: Who’s a Climate Scientist?

Categories
building energy

Tell Me More About Energy Star

Chances are you’re familiar with the blue and white logo that can be found on many types of home appliances, but do you know what being Energy Star certified actually means?

The Energy Star program was started by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy in 1992 as a labeling program for energy efficient appliances. Energy Star is now an international standard for energy efficiency. The Energy Star label can now be applied to computers, servers, appliances, heating and cooling systems, home electronics, imaging equipment, lighting, and new homes and buildings.

In 2010 it came to light that the Energy Star label was being wrongly granted and misused. It was being granted to products that did not exist, and if a company had one product certified they were able to download the label and put it their other, non-certified products as well. Since then, a number of critical audits were completed, and the Energy Star label and certification process has been revamped to prevent these sorts of fraudulent claims.

Now each application is reviewed for approval. Products must be third-party tested in EPA approved labs. Additionally, each year off-the-shelf tests are conducted on a percentage of Energy Star labeled products to ensure that the consumer is receiving products that meet the standards.

So what does it mean if something has and Energy Star label

Each product has a set of standards that it has to meet in order to receive the label. For example, a refrigerator must save 20% of energy based on the industry minimum standard, an air conditioner must save 10%, and a light bulb must save 75% vs a standard incandescent. These standards are updated every couple years or so, in particular when at least 50% of the market is held by energy star labeled products.

The Energy Star label and buildings

There are currently Energy Star ratings for new homes, commercial spaces, and industrial plants. Buildings are evaluated for the energy efficiency of their heating and cooling systems, water management, and air quality. Buildings are evaluated by professional engineers or registered architects and have to receive a rating of 75 or higher (out of 100) in order to receive an Energy Star label.

Categories
energy living green

LED Light Bulbs

I hope you all had a lovely long weekend. Between the Holiday and adjusting to the ever changing schedule that is medical residency, Tuesday’s post got away from me. I hope you didn’t miss my wrap up on light bulbs too much. 

LED Light BulbLED stands for Light Emitting Diode. LEDs are comprised of a semiconductor material and two leads. Basically what happens is that when the LED is connected to a circuit, a voltage is applied to the leads. This provides enough energy for electrons to jump across the band gap, and when they do, they release energy in the form of photons, or light. The color of light emitted by the LED is determined by the band gap in the semiconductor. If all this talk of semiconductors sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s the same concept behind solar cells. Only in this case, the energy is coming from the wall rather than from the sun. LEDs are great as far as energy efficiency goes because they require a very small amount of electricity to produce light. They are also compact, robust, and have long lifetimes. LED light bulbs are made up of a collection of LEDs designed such that they emit a white, or slightly yellow light. Recently LED light bulbs have become increasingly available for home lighting, so let’s see how they compare to Incandescent and CFL light bulbs.

  • Light Quality: Mixed Reviews. Like CFLs I have frequently read reviews that LED light bulbs produce light that is too cold. We can probably all easily identify LED holiday lights because they have that tell-tale blue tinge to the light. I am happy to report that the LED light bulbs that I recently purchased produce a warm soft light, just like we expect are accustomed to seeing from incandescents. LED light bulbs will probably need to become more mainstream before they beat the cold blue light rap.
  • Price per bulb: Con. Standard LED light bulbs typically run $10 a bulb. If you buy them in a six-pack you can get them for more like $9, but there is definitely a bit of sticker shock that comes with spending over $50 on lightbulbs just for your home use. And if you want anything fancy, like a dim-able bulb, you’ll easily be paying double.
  • Availability: Pro. You may not be able to find LED light bulbs on the shelves of your local grocery store yet, but Target, Home Depot, and Amazon all carry them, and I imagine many other stores as well.
  • Style: Con. Similar to CFLs, LED light bulbs fit standard sockets, but the choice of bulb is limited. There are candelabra bulbs, but they don’t look the same as the incandescent equivalent.
  • Energy use: Pro. An LEDbulb that produces a comparable amount of lumens as a 60 watt filament bulb requires only 9 watts.
  • Lifetime: Pro. 25,000 hours! You read that right, a LED bulb will last more than 3 times as long as a CFL bulb. That translates into nearly 23 years of light at 3 hours a day. The LED light bulb that I recently put in our lamp will burn for longer than my youngest brother has been alive. That’s crazy town.

And bonus: LED light bulbs contain mostly recycle-able materials. Contact your local recycling provider to see if they can recycle your old bulbs. Although, you can probably wait 20 years  or so before you have to deal with that.

So the tally when comparing LEDs to CFLs and Incandescents is 3 pros, 2 cons, and 1 mixed review. Now let’s look at the long term cost.

10 year cost for burning filament bulbs in one lamp: (3 hours a day, $0.12/kwh cost of electricity, $9.00/bulb, 1 bulb) = $20.83.

And bonus: that same bulb will burn for another 13 years at that rate.

Pretty cheap when compared to the $96.84 it would cost to run the same light with a incandescent bulb, and it even beats out the $22.40 for the CFL. 

And more importantly, over that same 10 years you could save 550 kWh of electricity if you switch from an incandescent light bulb, or 55 kWh if you switch from a CFL.