Testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy

Energy Realities: Rates of Consumption, Energy Reserves, and Future Options

May 3, 2001

Dr. Alexandra von Meier
Sonoma State University

Mr. Chairman and Committee members, thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this hearing.

The subject of energy is currently drawing fresh attention and awareness nationwide, which is a good thing - insofar as the general public is recognizing the importance of the choices to be made, understanding that the consequences of these choices will be with us for a long time, and sincerely wants to do what is right. Of course, the circumstances that bring us to this increased awareness are troublesome and, to some extent, painful. My testimony will focus on two key areas where solutions can be found: reducing energy use in buildings, and taking advantage of renewable resources, particularly solar and wind energy. Finally, I will conclude with some observations regarding the comparison of renewable and nuclear energy for securing long-term supply.

Energy Use in Buildings

Residential and commercial buildings use approximately 35% of the energy in the United States, counting both electricity and fuels. This amount of energy can be cut in half, if not more, by implementing the things we already know about how to make buildings more energy efficient and, at the same time, more comfortable.

At Sonoma State University, with funding support from the National Science Foundation and the California Energy Commission, we are just completing the Environmental Technology Center (ETC) that demonstrates building science "live." This building uses 80% less energy than California's codes allow, which are already the most stringent in the nation as to energy efficiency. How can such a dramatic reduction of energy use be accomplished, and still make for a charismatic building that is comfortable year-round?

There is a wide spectrum of techniques at the disposal of architects and builders today who choose to build with an awareness of energy. These techniques range from the very simple to the very sophisticated. They begin with zero-cost design methods such as simply considering which way a house is oriented, and avoiding what some architects call "indecent exposure" - like having all the large windows on the north side.

In the ETC, we use large glazed areas including a clerestory window facing south for passive solar heating and for daylighting, allowing us to cut down dramatically on heating and lighting energy. In order to prevent glare and overheating in the summer, there are different types of adjustable shading devices. Those mounted on the exterior of the window surface are particularly effective, because they keep the glass itself from transferring heat. Interestingly, we had to buy our exterior Venetian blinds from a European manufacturer, because nobody in the United States makes them.

The architect's toolkit of energy conserving measures includes many other basic features such as insulation and thermal mass to even out the building's temperature swings. The ETC, which takes advantage of our colder nighttime temperatures to pre-cool its concrete and earth walls in the summer, does not even have an active cooling system installed. Sonoma State University is now also considering a retrofit of existing buildings with evaporative cooling systems (I/DEC, for Indirect/Direct Evaporative Cooling) to replace conventional air conditioning, at a fraction of the energy use. I/DEC technology is proven, readily available, and highly effective in the drier climates of the western United States.

After numerous other techniques and devices for increasing energy efficiency, at the most sophisticated end of the spectrum there is "smart building" technology, which allows all the energy-relevant components - heating and cooling, ventilation, windows, lighting and shading - to be controlled automatically in real-time, based on measurements of indoor and outdoor data such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, and light levels.

Finally, it is worth considering not only the energy used in an occupied building, but also the embodied energy and resources required to manufacture the building materials themselves. Among other "green building materials" that are now available on the market, the ETC also pioneered the use of an energy-efficient concrete mix. This mix replaces half its Portland cement with fly ash and rice hull ash, providing superior structural strength while reducing energy inputs and CO2 emissions. Note that cement production accounts for about 6% of CO2 emissions worldwide.

A more comprehensive list of energy-saving features in the ETC is provided in Appendix I of this testimony. Not every one of the diverse techniques showcased in the ETC is necessarily appropriate for every building. Some options are feasible for retrofitting existing buildings, while the most dramatic savings can be obtained in the earliest phases of new building design. The key point is that an entire arsenal of building techniques and off-the-shelf technologies exists today for dramatically reducing energy use, and these options are available to anyone with an interest or incentive to take advantage of them.

The fact that even those efficient building options with negative first cost or very short payback times are not finding the widespread application they deserve suggests that demand for energy efficiency is not driven by economic factors alone. I believe that two things are urgently needed:

C Building codes that are far more stringent with respect to energy consumption, and
C A large-scale educational effort to address the gap of knowledge and simply energy awareness among architects and builders accustomed to traditional, wasteful building approaches.

Solar Energy Options: Photovoltaics

On the roof of Sonoma State University's Environmental Technology Center is an integrated photovoltaic (PV) system that produces 3 kilowatts of electricity, roughly the same as the building's consumption. The system is grid-connected with net metering, allowing the building to draw power from the grid when necessary and to return excess power back into the grid, running the meter backwards. The availability of such net metering arrangements is key to opening the opportunity for small-scale, distributed generation to benefit the entire grid.

Of the renewable energy technologies, PV is by far the most expensive. The installed cost of a small-scale residential or commercial system, depending on many specific factors, currently ranges between $5 and $10 per watt of peak output. Spread out over the lifetime of such a system - a calculation whose result is very sensitive to the initial assumptions about sunshine and financing terms - the levelized cost comes to anywhere between 20 and 50 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electric energy. Until quite recently, such figures sounded exorbitant. They no longer do.

Even when the price of photovoltaic power is above market wholesale or retail rates, this technology offers distinct benefits that may balance or outweigh its costs. These benefits include the following:

--Reliability of supply, protecting against blackouts;
--Absence of problems associated with conventional (diesel or natural gas fired) back-up generation, including air pollution and noise;
--Unique simplicity and practicality owing to no moving parts, minimal maintenance, and zero fuel requirement;
--Unique ease of siting owing to the above factors and agreeable aesthetics;
--Flexibility in sizing and modularity, allowing installations to be expanded over time; and
--Technical benefits to the electric distribution system including power quality (voltage, reactive power, and harmonic suppression) and reduction of line losses by locating more generation closer to demand.

Owing to current events, and a well-conceived rebate program offered by the California Energy Commission (which reduces the installed cost to the consumer by $3 per peak watt), the phones of PV installers in California are ringing off the hook. Interestingly, this jump in the general interest level and actual installation orders has occurred even before the impact of electricity price increases has met retail customers.

The ultimate potential energy contribution of photovoltaics depends on the proportion of overall electric demand that stands to benefit from the specific advantages of distributed PV generation, and on whether an economic mechanism exists to capture its benefits to the transmission and distribution system and translate this into an investment incentive. Without specific analysis, my rough estimate of this proportion would be on the order of several percent of total demand.

Bulk Generation from Solar and Wind

For generation of bulk electricity on the megawatt and gigawatt scale, the most plausible resources available today include solar thermal and wind power. Solar and wind are particularly important because their availability is less site-specific than other renewables such as hydro, biomass, ocean, and geothermal power.

Solar thermal electric generation, which essentially uses mirrors to boil water that then drives a standard steam turbine, is a proven commercial technology. In Southern California, roughly 350 megawatts (MW) of parabolic trough generating systems are currently on line and reliably producing electricity, with individual generating units on the 30- to 80 MW scale. These systems employ thermal storage tanks and can also supplement the solar heat with natural gas, which offers the advantage of making the generation dispatchable (i.e., controllable depending on the needs of the grid).

The cost of generating solar thermal electricity with parabolic trough mirrors has varied and generally declined throughout the years of development and refinement; it is now in the neighborhood of 10 cents per kWh, if not below. This is not only far less than California's average spot market price of recent months, but comparable to the rates at which the State of California is outright purchasing electricity through long-term contracts. Furthermore, as the cost of solar energy represents payments on an up-front investment, it is completely predictable and the supply absolutely certain, in contrast to natural gas-fired generation which exposes society to the risks of fuel price increases and supply or delivery constraints. By any measure of common sense, the question for California today is not whether solar power can or should be used to alleviate our electricity shortage, but how fast we can get more solar generation on line.

In addition to the well-established parabolic trough technology, extremely interesting developments are taking place in the area of more modular point-focus solar concentrators that generate from five to 60 kilowatts (kW) with each unit. These devices use round parabolic mirrors to focus sunlight onto a Stirling or Brayton engine mounted directly in the center, which produces electricity at high efficiency directly from a hot gas (without the need for water).

While these engines are available off-the-shelf, the key to the commercialization of point-focus concentrators lies in the economical production of mirrors. Unfortunately, the National Thermal Test Facility at Sandia National Laboratories, where research and development of this technology was conducted, has recently experienced drastic funding cuts. Development efforts are continuing in the private sector, and one Texas-based company projects generation costs as low as 2 cents per kilowatt-hour based on a new and inexpensive mirror manufacturing process. Whether or not one believes this specific projection, it is beyond doubt that solar thermal concentrators can work effectively and at reasonable cost, and that they can fill a potentially large market niche for intermediate-sized distributed generation.

The ultimate contender as to low-priced, commercially available renewable energy is, of course, wind. Large wind turbines are on the market today at costs barely above $1 per watt of rated output. Depending on the local wind resource (and again the financing assumptions), this investment converts to a levelized energy cost as low as 4 cents per kWh in a prime wind location, and certainly below 10 cents for more average sites. Indeed, in some parts of the United States, wind is now altogether the least-cost energy option.

Resource Potential

The undisputed environmental advantages of solar and wind power combined with altogether reasonable costs should make them obvious choices for expanding future energy supply. Yet the conventional wisdom on the subject, reflected in popular media coverage as well professional and academic discourse, contains a surprisingly persistent fallacy regarding the potential contribution from these resources. A recent article in the New York Times exemplifies the problem: "Environmental advocates call for investments in efficiency and in 'renewable' sources like wind and solar, but so far those sources are tiny compared with demand."

This logic is fallacious because it implies some causal connection between what was done in the past and what can be done in the future, without examining what this connection is or whether it exists. Certainly, it is legitimate to wonder about the possible ramp-up rates in the production of solar cells or wind turbines, but this is no different in principle from stepping up the manufacture of other devices like gas turbines or nuclear reactors to unprecedented quantities. It would also be fair to argue that the idea of acres upon acres covered with solar collectors and wind farms simply doesn't match our vision of what an advanced technological society should look like; this is a legitimate question of cultural and aesthetic preferences. What is false and misleading, however, is to claim that it would be technically or economically infeasible.

U.S. electricity demand in 2000 was approximately 3,700 TWh (billion kilowatt-hours). Generating this entire amount from solar thermal energy would, by conservative estimate, require a land area of roughly 20,000 square miles of Southwestern desert land, or a square of about 140 miles on a side. Alternatively, generating the same entire amount of energy from wind farms in the Midwestern plain states (where the land can be simultaneously used for agriculture) would require an area of perhaps twice that size.

Though this is no doubt a large piece of real estate, it is certainly plausible on the geographic scale of the United States, and indeed not even as large as one might think in comparison with traditional energy resources once their various components such as mining and infrastructure are taken into account. For example, the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is designed with an exclusion zone that extends 12 miles, or an area of about 450 square miles that will be inaccessible for other uses. If covered with solar collectors, this area could produce in the neighborhood of 2% of U.S. electric energy.

Or, to consider another example, wind generation occupies four to five times more area per megawatt than coal generation, but only about 5% of the land on the wind farm is actually "used" or physically affected, while 100% of a surface coal mine is affected. In this sense, renewable resources are actually less land intensive than the conventional alternatives. Furthermore, land used for solar or wind generation can be readily restored to other uses in the future, while land used for fossil fuel extraction or nuclear facilities becomes permanently sacrificed.

A common misconception holds that intermittent resources like solar and wind require energy storage such as batteries to back them up. This is only true for stand-alone applications such as remote residences, where energy must be stored so that it will be available when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. For grid-connected applications, whether distributed or centralized, the grid simply absorbs the variations in the output, just like it absorbs the continual variations in demand as people switch their appliances on and off. Physically, it is the large rotating steam and hydro generators that are capable of absorbing and compensating for these variations in real-time. Solar thermal generation, it should be noted, also takes advantage of thermal energy storage on-site to smooth its output or shift it to the later afternoon hours when the electricity is needed most.

Indeed, from the perspective of technical grid operation, it is quite plausible to envision an electric supply system running on 100% renewable energy. This would require some baseload generation such as hydro and biomass to operate consistently throughout day and night; some dispatchable hydro and/or biomass generation to can absorb the variations in demand and supply; wind power to generate whenever wind is available; solar thermal and photovoltaic power to generate during the daytime when the sun shines and demand is greatest; and finally a modicum of pumped hydroelectric storage (as is currently used) to help optimize the utilization of all available generation assets.
Let me stress, then, that there is no physical or technical reason why our country could not supply 100% of its energy from renewable resources. This same conclusion has been reached by numerous other authors in the energy field.

Policy Implications

Given the tremendous resource potential of solar and wind power along with energy efficiency, these technologies undoubtedly offer positive externalities, or benefits to society and the environment beyond those captured in markets. These benefits, which have been more or less widely discussed in the literature, include the following:

--Environmental benefits owing to absence of pollution or greenhouse gas emissions;
--Continuous resource availability and price stability to offer reliable support for long-term economic planning;
--Potential development of a lucrative and socially responsible export commodity; and
--Intrinsic compatibility with competitive markets.

The last point requires brief annotation. Energy efficiency and especially small-scale renewable generation technologies offer some potential to correct the three most important failures of electricity markets. These failures have been evidenced most dramatically in California recently, but are generally applicable to electricity markets unless specifically addressed in market design (though their impacts are sometimes avoided by the sheer luck of oversupply). These key market failures are:

-- Low or zero price elasticity of demand, meaning that consumers will not demand less power as the price increases - either because they are shielded from spot market prices (as in the California design), and/or because they lack the capability to reduce electric demand while meeting their essential needs and obligations;
--Market power, the polite term for the situation in which certain sellers can essentially name their price; and
--Congestion, or the inability of the electric transmission system to deliver any desired amount of power from one location to another.

Efficient buildings and appliances provide consumers with one alternative to energy consumption and thus make demand more price elastic, albeit on the intermediate time scale of hardware investments. On a shorter time scale, the emerging combination of responsive buildings with real-time energy pricing is particularly promising, as it allows devices to automatically be shut off when the price rises. (Constrained by metering technology, this approach is now being implemented for larger commercial customers in California.)

On the supply side, solar and wind generation intrinsically do not favor aggregation in the hands of a small number of suppliers with market power, unlike ownership of traditional large and complex generation assets and ownership of fossil-fuel resources or their delivery capacity. This property, of course, owes both to the ubiquitous access to the resources and the relative absence of economies of scale in the technology.

Finally, owing to their smaller scale and the feasibility of siting solar or wind generation close to consumers, these technologies can alleviate transmission bottlenecks by being placed exactly where they are needed, and thus help avoid local price spikes or market power of already conveniently situated producers.

Given the current policy priority of encouraging competitive markets, it would stand to reason that technologies which assist rather than impede competitive behavior deserve some measure of governmental support, as means to an end. This new factor appears in addition to the other long-term positive externalities such as environmental benefits that have historically (and, in my view, correctly) justified policies aimed at increasing the supply of desirable energy technologies for the benefit of society at large.

Government-sponsored research and development has traditionally been an important component of such subsidies, and I find it most regrettable that this funding has now been substantially reduced. I also believe, however, that the most urgent need in view of our energy situation today lies in the area of commercialization and implementation of the technologies we already know, rather than research on new approaches and devices. In this regard, I believe that two simultaneous efforts are called for:

--Education and decisive leadership to demonstrate and emphasize the feasibility of renewable resources on a national scale and to dispel popular myths about their limitations; and
--Facilitation of market entry for renewable energy suppliers by reducing the uncertainties and investment risks encountered particularly by small firms facing competition with large and well-established actors.

In the United States today, we have the resources, technology, and know-how at our disposal to bring about a positive, sustainable solution to our energy future. The situation reminds me of the Good Witch Glynda telling Dorothy that she already has everything she needs in order to get back home. Of course, solving the energy crisis constructively with energy efficiency and renewable resources will take more than clicking our heels together. But it is not an implausible effort, nor is it rocket science. What we need is simply the brains to apply our common sense, the heart to recognize the tremendous good that can come of a new approach to energy, and the courage to implement it. I thank you most sincerely for your efforts to this end.

Renewable Energy and the Nuclear Option

If the popular claim were true that renewable resources are either insufficient or the technologies not ready to supply energy on the national scale, then it would be legitimate to argue, as advocates of nuclear energy do, that nuclear fission represents the only option for securing our long-term energy supply without environmentally unsustainable CO2 emissions. However, as my preceding testimony underscores, the premise of this argument is incorrect.

Recognizing the ultimate resource and environmental constraints on fossil fuel use, the issue is not whether we as a society need to accept the costs and risks of nuclear technology in order to maintain energy security. Rather, the question is whether nuclear energy can compare favorably with renewable energy options, specifically solar and wind, in order to achieve the same objective.

The economic comparison of nuclear and renewable energy is interesting because the overall costs for deploying a large-scale supply system of either type may well be similar. Yet the cost structure of such deployment is very different, as is the degree of uncertainty.

Nuclear industry representatives assert that a new generation of inherently safe light-water reactors could produce electricity at a levelized cost below 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, which would make it competitive with wind power. However, such levelized cost calculations in general contain important tacit assumptions, and for the nuclear case in particular they mask numerous potentially profound complications.

While the science of nuclear fission is compellingly elegant, it is important not to falsely extrapolate from the beauty and compactness of the fission process to the industrial and institutional reality of implementing a nuclear energy supply system in society. Indeed, you might say that nuclear power becomes more complicated and messy the farther you extend your view away from the reactor core. Once human institutions and infrastructure conditions are accounted for, the overall cost, or the level of effort required of society to sustain the nuclear endeavor, becomes greater and more uncertain.

Thus, with regard to projections of energy costs from a new generation of nuclear plants, the following areas warrant inquiry:

-- Liability Insurance. The Price-Anderson Act, which limits nuclear plant operators' liability for damages (effectively representing a substantial Federal subsidy) is due to expire in 2002. If the current policy priority of non-interference with competitive markets were to be consistently applied to this case, then the issue of whether a properly insured nuclear program can be economically viable on its own merits ought to be determined through the competitive private insurance sector.

--Reliability of Electric Grid. The traditional operating context assumes a reliable electric grid that allows the continuous and undisturbed operation of nuclear reactors as baseload power plants. Grid disturbances or outages, while historically very rare in the United States, are extremely costly to nuclear plants, not only in terms of lost revenues, operational effort, and mechanical fatigue of plant components, but also in terms of the investments required to assure safe unit shutdown upon the loss of off-site power. Adapting the design and operation of nuclear reactors to function in the context of less reliable electric grids, as may emerge under competitive market pressures, entails potentially high costs in addition to those of basic reactor design and operation.

--Waste Disposal. The U.S. Department of Energy is presently expending significant effort and funds in order to accommodate and assure the safe disposal of spent fuel from existing commercial nuclear plants, of which it assumed responsibility in 1998. While nuclear plant operators contribute substantial sums to decommissioning and waste disposal funds, these contributions are by no means certain to cover the actual costs of properly cleaning up after fission.

--Time Delays and Contingencies. The actual cost of existing U.S. nuclear facilities has vastly exceeded original projections in large part due to construction and licensing delays, which in turn resulted from political controversy and the need to demonstrate an extremely high level of safety. Though advocates of nuclear energy argue that political dynamics have unfairly distorted the costs of our nuclear program, these dynamics nonetheless represent the reality of our democratic society, and few would disagree with the demand for safety, however cumbersome to assure, as an absolute priority. Due to its intrinsic complexity, nuclear technology is particularly vulnerable to cost overruns resulting from delays or unanticipated complications, and realistic projections must account for such contingencies.

--The Closed Fuel Cycle. The reprocessing of spent commercial nuclear fuel for the purpose of extracting fissionable plutonium to supplement mined uranium in fresh fuel (the "closed fuel cycle") has been prohibited in the United States by past Administrations, for reasons of preventing the proliferation of key technology and materials for nuclear weapons. However, from the perspective of nuclear engineering, our present "once-through" fuel cycle is wasteful and illogical, and it condemns nuclear energy to a far more limited resource supply (only the naturally fissionable uranium-235, which is a small fraction of total uranium reserves) than it could enjoy if the conversion of abundant uranium-238 into fissionable plutonium were exploited. In the context of ambitious plans for long-term energy supply through nuclear fission, revisiting the issues of reprocessing and breeder reactors (those designed for the explicit purpose of converting the abundant uranium) would become inevitable, and arguments in favor of such a policy reversal would undoubtedly be voiced once the nation had committed to the nuclear path. Yet the complexities and risks (and thus the potential economic and political costs) of a closed fuel cycle and breeder program would vastly exceed those of our accustomed once-through cycle.

It should further be noted that nuclear technology, owing to its intrinsic hazards and economies of scale, is antithetical to the philosophy of competitive markets. A nuclear program cannot be done piecemeal - at least not economically. Indeed, the lack of standardization among U.S. reactors and procedures has often been cited as a reason for the high cost of our nuclear program (and unfavorably compared in this regard with the French system, which is completely centralized). And a nuclear program cannot be done in good conscience without government oversight.

Despite the high historical costs of nuclear technology, people tend to find it easier to imagine large amounts of inexpensive electricity produced by nuclear power plants than from renewable resources. I believe this to be a perceptual distortion resulting from the different cost structures of these two very different approaches to energy supply.

A nuclear energy program presumes a substantial investment in an extensive infrastructure, from uranium mining, fuel fabrication, plant design, construction, and decommissioning, identification of appropriate sites, spent fuel storage, transport, and disposal to personnel training, security, insurance, and regulatory design. In every country with a nuclear program today, this infrastructure is government-subsidized, and some of its costs may be further masked by being exported into the future.

However, once this infrastructure is assumed to exist, the marginal cost of each additional megawatt-hour generated is very small. It thus becomes easy to neglect or underestimate the sunk infrastructural cost and focus on the low marginal energy cost, which becomes lower per unit of energy the larger we assume the initial infrastructure to be. This type of declining cost structure entails the psychological effect of de-emphasizing awareness or selectiveness of energy consumption - in essence, promising a world in which you needn't worry about turning off the light when you leave the room.

The cost structure of renewable resources, by contrast, is never declining. Rather, it is excruciatingly linear: each additional megawatt of solar or wind power, from the first to the last, will use the same amount of additional land area, and will cost about the same. Thus, while renewable resources can supply all our essential energy needs, they will never do so without confronting us with the question: Do we really need that last megawatt? I believe it is this implication of an omnipresent and undeniable awareness of the costs of producing energy that many people find so unpalatable about renewable resources.

Yet these costs reflect the reality of a finite planet. A society of indiscriminate energy consumption is not the future; it is history. At the present juncture, where resource scarcity, economic pressures, and the limits of our environment's ability to absorb the impacts of our activities are all becoming apparent, a significant investment in a new energy strategy is inevitable. Alas, crisis has a tendency to shorten one's time horizon for making decisions. But today it is more important than ever that we choose to invest prudently, intelligently, and for the long run.

Thank you.

Appendix:

Environmental Technology Center, Sonoma State University

Building Features and Objectives

Objective Feature Notes

Building Control Building Management System (BMS) The brains of the smart building; connected to thermal, occupancy, and other sensors and actively controls windows, lighting, and shading

Direct Solar Gain South-facing windows Glazed area in office, research prep room, and entryway facing South

Clerestory windows Vertical south-facing windows of large area in clerestory atop roof

Sun space Room with closed doors & interior window absorbs heat during day; open at night to distribute heat
Indirect Solar Gain Trombe wall Selective surface absorbs visible solar radiation but does not emit infrared; stores heat in thermal mass

Solar Gain Control Light shelves Controlled by BMS, reflect daylight into office space or permit shading

Venetian blinds Controlled by BMS, exterior shading devices in front of clerestory windows open and close as necessary to maintain appropriate temperature and daylighting

Operable awning Additional shading on south windows with seasonal control

Deciduous vines Trellises above windows for growing vines that provide shade in summer and lose their leaves in winter
Active Heating Radiant slab floor Warm water heated by natural gas circulates within concrete floor slab, heating the building by radiation

Heat Conservation Insulation Various walls insulated with foam panels or cellulose fiber

Low-e glazing Low emissivity in the infrared range prevents radiative heat loss from window surface

Low-e paint Paint on interior walls prevents radiant heat transfer

Airlock entry Double-door airlock foyer prevents excessive air changes as people enter and exit

Window & door sealing Reduce air infiltration to a maximum of 0.5 air changes per hour

Thermal Mass Concrete floor & walls Insulated 4" concrete slab floor, 8" concrete masonry and 2" masonry veneer in internal walls store warmth in daytime and release in evening; store coolth during summer nights

Rammed earth wall Thermal mass wall by entryway to store warmth & coolth; uses local earth material

Passive Cooling High clerestory with north-facing openings Natural convection draws warm air upward; clerestory windows and skylights operated by BMS

Daylighting Clerestory, south windows and skylights Large glazed area allows sufficient sunlight to penetrate even in winter to require minimal interior lighting

Light shelves Adjustable light shelves reflect incoming sunlight as necessary for optimal angle

High-Efficiency Lighting T-5 fluorescents High-efficiency fixtures

Lighting Control Occupancy sensors BMS turns off unneeded lights

Renewable Energy Generation Photovoltaic system Roof-integrated 3.3 kW thin-film PV with grid-interconnect inverter typically meets at least building load

Environmental Technology Center

Objectives for Material Selection:

--Use products that conserve resources, i.e. materials that are reused, recycled, use by-products, uses faster-growing species of wood from sustainable forests, sustainable agricultural practices;
--Use products made from, with, and packaged in renewable resources obtained in a sustainable manner;
--Use products that have low embodied energy, including transportation, i.e. products whose production is efficient in the use of electricity, petroleum, water, etc.
--Use products that are durable, low maintenance, and do not require painting or coatings; consider life cycle cost and longevity including resistance to weather, fire, vermin, seismic and wind stress;
--Use products with low(er) toxicity in mining, manufacturing, installation, use, and maintenance;
--Consider deconstruction and use components that are reusable, recyclable, or at least biodegradable.


Material Characteristics

Concrete Ultra-low content of (energy- and CO2-intensive) Portland cement; replaces with rice hull ash and fly ash (organic, recycled materials). Innovative mix that requires a longer curing process but results in superior structural stability and durability than conventional mixes.

Cellulose fiber insulation Organic, non-hazardous material with high R-value.

Structural wall panels Integrated panels with expanded CFC-free polystyrene foam core; offer low weight, high R-value, low infiltration.

Rammed earth wall Thermal mass wall made from local earth, rammed into form.

Lumber Wood posts, beam and trusses from reused or locally salvaged lumber wherever possible, else from sustainably harvested trees; also recycled plastic lumber.

Tile Bathroom tile made from recycled glass.

Paints and varnishes Low or zero content of volatile organic compounds (VOC).

Roof Galvalume standing seam metal roof is recyclable; provides substrate for PV laminate; clerestory roof from recycled copper.

Photovoltaic system Thin-film amorphous silicon laminate minimizes embodied energy in PV manufacture; grid-intertie design avoids need for toxic lead-acid batteries.


Notes

[1] Vern Goldberg, WGA Associates, Dallas, TX.
[2] "Industry Gives Nuclear Power a Second Look," April 24, 2001.
[3] Assuming an area usage of about 6 acres per megawatt of installed capacity and a plant capacity factor of 0.20.
[4] Area usage for wind may vary from 10 to 80 acres per megawatt, depending on a tradeoff between resource use efficiency (machines not blocking each other's wind) and land use, with capacity factors around 0.25 depending on local wind.
[5] Assuming a circular area of 12 mile radius. Actually, this zone borders on nuclear test sites that are also off limits.
[6] See Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995.