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High Tech Buildings Use Sunlight and Sea Water To Save Energy
By Ellen Simon - AP Technology Writer
At Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, the lights are controlled by sensors that measure
sunlight. They dim immediately when it’s sunny and brighten when a passing
cloud blocks the sun.
At a new middle school in Washington D.C., the air conditioner shuts off
when a window is open.
A wall of windows at a University of Pennsylvania engineering building has
built-in blinds adjusted by a computer program that tracks the sun’s
path.
Buildings are getting smarter - and the next generation of building materials
is expected to do even more.
Windows could trap the sun’s energy to heat hot water. Sensors that measure
the carbon dioxide exhaled by people in a room could determine whether the
air conditioning needs to be turned up.
“
More potential products have been invented in the last 15 years than in the entire
prior history of architecture,” says Philadelphia architect Stephen Kieran. “We’re
only beginning to tap the potential of those materials.”
The new materials and technology are being used in a wave of buildings designed
to save as much energy as possible. They range from old ideas, like “green
roofs,” where a layer of plants on a roof helps the building retain heat
in winter and stay cool in summer, and new ideas, like special coating for
windows that let light in, but keeps heat out.
Most commercial buildings in the United States still lack the most rudimentary
technology, such as timers for lights, but the idea of buildings that use technology
to save energy got a boost from the 2000 energy crisis, when California experienced
blackouts and electricity prices rose.
That year, the U.S. Green Building Council launched a program to accredit
building professionals in environmental design. Interest in the program, called
LEED,
for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, has skyrocketed. Since 2000,
about 19,000 people have been accredited, 9,000 in the last month alone.
About four percent of new commercial construction is now completed under
LEED guidelines, said Taryn Holowka, a spokeswoman for the Green Building Council.
Many new building materials are first developed in Europe, where energy is
more expensive. “The construction industry is behind the times in some ways,
compared to many other industries,” said Patrick Mays, chief information
officer of architecture firm NBBJ.
Smart building technology in the United States was formerly reserved for
large projects and college campuses.
“
Now we’re seeing it make its way down, even to the residential market,” said
Jim Jones, an architecture professor at Virginia Tech. Think of the motion-sensing
lights common outside garages and front doors.
As technologies such as sensors become cheaper, their uses spread.
In the elevators at Seven World Trade Center, which is under construction
at New York’s ground zero, a dispatch system groups people traveling
to nearby floors into the same elevator, thereby saving elevator stops and
trips.
People
who work in the building will enter it by swiping ID cards that will tell the
elevators their floor; readouts will then tell them which elevator to use.
The building also has windows with a coating that blocks heat while letting
in light.
More sophisticated building materials are in development. Architect Stephen
Kieran’s
firm is working on “smart wrap” that uses tiny solar collectors to
trap the sun’s energy and transmitters the width of a human hair to move
it.
“
The materials in smart wrap are either commercially available or they’ve
been developed in corporate or university research labs,” said Kieran,
a partner at Kieran Timberlake in Philadelphia. “They’re poised
to change the face of the construction industry in the next decade or so.”
Still, relatively cheap energy costs in the United States mean most building
owners remain unconcerned with efficiency, said Srinivas Katipamula, a research
engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Of the roughly 4.7 million
commercial buildings in the United States, only ten percent have energy management
systems or time clocks that turn lights on or off based on the time of day,
he said.
Carlton Brown, chief operating officer of building developer Full Spectrum,
is finishing a smart, green 128-unit condo project in New York City’s
Harlem neighborhood that took more than five years to get off the ground.
“
We were talking about a green building and a smart building and people were not
really interested,” he said. Full Spectrum is finishing the project,
which includes wireless broadband in every unit and washing machines that can
be reserved
via the Internet.
Interest in smart, energy-efficient buildings is growing, especially among
those who manage large facilities, such as airports, and buildings that traditionally
use lots of energy, such as laboratories.
That’s because “the operating costs of a building in its lifetime
can be hundreds of times more expensive than the building was in the first place,” said
Doug Lockhart, who until recently worked as energy manager for Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory.
A new building at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii will be a “net
zero energy building,” using no energy from the electric grid. The building
will be cooled with piped-in 43 degrees Fahrenheit sea water and the condensation
on the pipes will be used for irrigation.
New systems use energy when it’s cheapest.
The Dallas/Fort Worth Airport installed a six million gallon thermal storage
tank that lets the airport chill air conditioner coolant in the middle of the
night, when energy is cheapest, for use during the day, when energy is more
expensive. This has cut cooling costs by 91 percent during periods of peak
electrical demand.
“
This saves real money while we use less resources and pollute less,” said
Jim Crites, executive vice president of operations at the airport.
Gray water systems, which recycle water from sinks and showers, were once
largely the province of hippies.
But President Bush’s ranch in Crawford Texas, has such systems, as
will The Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park in New York, a 54-story building
being developed by the Durst Organization.
Douglas and Jody Durst, co-presidents of the company, said they first became
interested in environmentally conscious buildings when they worked on energy-saving
retrofits to their older buildings during the 1970s.
“
We realized there was a better way to build them from the start,” Douglas
Durst said.
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