Ecotect Example Output

This is my last semester at Penn, and in the architecture department, that usually means it will be the most difficult and time-intensive semester of your undergraduate career. So while my Econ-major friends are taking 3 credits and having fun on the weekends, I’m spending free time working in teams and learning how to use a new piece of software: Autodesk’s somewhat unknown Ecotect Analysis.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bitter about the dichotomy of work vs. play; most of us architecture students would much prefer learning a new piece of software or discussing the latest smart building material over a night of drinking, so this is pretty exciting stuff. I had never heard of Ecotect prior to about a month and a half ago, and what I knew was very limited.   Read more…

Yesterday, we talked about John Coleman and his sorry excuse for a climate change lesson. As a reader pointed out to me, one piece of evidence in particular has generated another climate news scandal recently. As a refresher:

…according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, global glacier thickness has declined every year for the past 4+ decades. The most recent academic research I’ve seen was published 2 months ago, and it concluded that Antarctic ice loss has been vaster and faster than the IPCC predicted. Another paper published around the same time found that, based on historical evidence, Antarctica is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought.

When many people hear “glaciers,” they think of the Himalayas. One of the most startling predictions of the 2007 IPCC report was that this gorgeous region in South and East Asia will lose all its glaciers by 2035. If you trace that claim back to its original source, you find quotes in New Scientist and Indian magazine Down to Earth by Syed Hasnain, who studied the Himalayan glaciers for the International Commission on Snow and Ice. Hasnain, it turns out, made the prediction based on “speculation,” not evidence.

Let’s be clear about what this means: Nothing.   Read more…

John Coleman is a TV weathercaster, best known for being one of the founders of The Weather Channel. Nowadays he hangs out at KUSI-TV in San Diego, where he has recently taped a segment on the great hoax of global warming. Coleman’s credentials make him a hero of global warming skeptics, but don’t confuse him with The Weather Channel itself. The Weather Channel’s official position is that greenhouse gas emissions are causing a “significant warming trend”:

The potential exists for the climate to reach a “tipping point,” if it hasn’t already done so, beyond which radical and irreversible changes occur.

They are very careful about not predicting too much, but their statement is 180 degrees different from Coleman’s video clip.

Coleman’s disagreement with the scientific consensus on climate change has been known for some time. As a result, he has said many things that are flat wrong. (Click here for examples.)   Read more…

I was reading an article a few months ago on cleantech and came across a quotation that I thought was most noteworthy, “storage is the Holy Grail of cleantech.” I don’t think there is a truer statement about renewable energy than that. So why is that?   Read more…

In a previous post, I promised to revisit the topic of natural gas. If you’ve been following the American natural gas market you know that prices have fallen substantially over the past year. Now a lot of this has to do with a lack of demand because of the recession as well as other market factors, but there have been some very interesting technological developments that have also had a profound effect on the price of natural gas.

Source: Bloomberg

To preface this post, I’d like to say that I am not attempting to fully answer the question of why natural gas prices are lower as of recently, nor am I predicting where they are going, but I’d like to provide some perspective to some of the technical factors that have driven prices down lately.

First, some fundamental information about natural gas. Not surprisingly, natural gas (at typical terrestrial temperatures) is in gas form. Now this is quite trivial given the commodity’s name but has very important implications for natural gas, especially when comparing it to its good friend crude oil (which is a liquid). Since natural gas is in a gaseous state, the way in which it can be transported is much different than oil. With most kinds of sweet light oil (the stuff that’s traded at WTI prices), you can effectively flow in a pipeline directly from a well into a tanker and then to anywhere in the world.

Natural gas, however, is a very different story. Natural gas is in gaseous state; therefore it cannot be transported as easily as crude oil. This is because it takes up a lot more room and more importantly is dangerously volatile. To transport natural gas it must be done through a pipeline or on a liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) tanker (compressed natural gas exists as well, but plays a minor role currently). To utilize LNG, infrastructure has to be in place that will liquefy the natural gas, which means that there needs to be a facility that will cool the gaseous commodity to -162°C. And, as is obvious, to pipeline something the location must be “pipeline-able” (as I like to call it). Essentially that means that you can’t build a pipeline across the Atlantic ocean (well you can, but it’d be pretty silly), but you can from Alberta, Canada to the Chicago or from the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston. The pictures below show you oil and gas movement in the world.

Oil Trade

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009

Natural Gas Trade

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009

Since natural gas has historically been a regional commodity, the supply and demand characteristics are also regional. This is one of the main reasons why we see the wide variances in natural gas prices around the world, whereas oil prices are pretty closely tied together (generally, differences in price are due to differences in quality of the oil). Up until just recently, things were looking pretty dismal for the United States on the natural gas front. There were diminishing US supplies but increasing demand—and no real in-country way of adding supply to offset the rising demand.

As of recently, though this problem has been solved by new technologies that can tap into in-country natural gas resources which previously were unrecoverable—which is another way of saying that with current technology and  prices the natural gas was either uneconomic or technologically impossible to recover —are now recoverable. These resources are known as shale natural gas. Previously, shale did not have the permeability to let natural gas flow in a manner that was economic and technologically possible to produce. New technologies, most notably the hydraulic fracturing of a well, can make the previously uneconomic shale economic by increasing the permeability. Essentially what fracturing a well does is create cracks in the rock formation in which the natural gas is present so that the natural gas can flow through the rock and above to the surface. These cracks are created by pumping a fluid with grains of sand or rock (to hold the fracture open) into the well at high pressure forcibly breaking the rock formations and increasing permeability making the natural gas recoverable. This technology has been and continues to be industry-changing.

In June of this year, the Potential Gas Committee reported that estimated natural gas reserves increased by 35% over the past year to 2,074 trillion cubic feet in 2008 (up from 1,532 trillion cubic feet in 2006). This is the biggest increase in 44 years. The massive increase in prospective supply has had a profound impact on the market for natural gas in the United States and has contributed, from a technical perspective, significantly to the drop in the price of natural gas.

This technological advancement once again reminds us that we’re not running out of fossil fuels by any means; we just need to find more clever ways of producing what are now unrecoverable resources.

One of the subjects that surrounds my daily life is sustainable architecture. Being from an architecture background and having a mother who gave money religiously to the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club, I learned to appreciate sustainable planning and architecture early on. One of the organizations that has been getting quite a bit of press in the last few years is the United States Green Building Council, a federally-operated organization that runs the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, or “LEED,” as most people know it. As part of the recent “green” trend that has swept the nation, LEED has been borne to the forefront of the issue of sustainable architecture.

While this program and others like it are admirable in their efforts, it becomes apparent that they are usually costly and complicated in their endeavors, acting as a disincentive for homeowners especially. I think that while this is a good step in the right direction for green architecture, we still have a very long way to go before we can make a country that builds (as a whole) green architecture.

The process to plan, design, and certify a LEED building can be very costly, confusing, and if not done correctly, will fail. The costs of registration alone can deter some people (especially smaller businesses and homeowners), and the upfront cost of investing in sustainable and efficient measures for a new building can be overwhelming for some. As part of my work at the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, I have been doing some research on LEED for Homes in the Philadelphia region, and the results were a bit startling, if not depressing: There are currently only four (yes 4!) registered and completed Platinum-certified homes in the City of Philadelphia. And they were completed by a developer for a profit. The total number of completed, certified homes in the region is sixteen. While the Mayor of Philadelphia proclaims that he wants to make Philadelphia the “greenest city in America,” the residential sector is a place that is quite obviously and painfully lacking in the green department.

Other cities and states are far ahead of us here in Philly: Chicago, Portland, New York, and a number of other major cities now require that all new government buildings be LEED certified. Others help with financing green projects (Chicago being on the forefront), and still others have tax incentives and grants that are available. Philadelphia is in a state of transition right now, rewriting the zoning code and implementing new programs like GreenWorks Philadelphia and is following the paths of many of the aforementioned cities. A lot of the environmental groups in the region, however, are wondering how we are planning to pay for new programs in the economic downturn and how we can incentivize green building. Both of these are heated topics, but I think that it needs to start first with education. Anyone who is vaguely interested in this topic should read up on the USGBC website and learn a little bit about green building in your area and what programs and incentives are available to do green projects. Pennsylvania has state-wide grants available for solar energy projects, green roofing, and other retrofits for small businesses and homes. We need to start taking responsibility for the type of architecture we are putting forth now, as buildings consume almost half of our energy resources. As a part of global climate change that is not really being addressed, architecture needs some serious scrutinizing in how we make standards of green building, how we incentivize it, and how to educate people about it.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times reported about a plant to harvest electricity through a solar thermal application in the African desert and then transmit it back to Europe for use. Upon initial consideration, this sounds like a really great idea: Africa is blessed with heat and lots of sun (the two resources needed for a successful solar thermal project), and Europe needs lots of electricity. Since the technology to do this scheme is there, why not use it?

Plus, there are many technical reasons to go forward with this plan:

• It is estimated that 15% of the EU’s electricity demands could be satisfied by such a project.
• DESERTEC (a foundation with the mandate to provide Europe with electricity through solar thermal applications in deserts) has announced a preliminary financing plan for their solar thermal project.
• Green, renewable technologies are the latest hype right now.
• Solar thermal, in the right application, is arguably an economically viable electricity generation alternative.

There is a lot going for this project. But there is also a lot going against it, particularly on the social side. The sentiment of European Imperialism is still in Africa. And coming in and exploiting yet another resource is not going to go over well. Look at how Shell has been treated in Nigeria over the past couple of weeks. They have been forced to shut-in oil production (i.e. stop producing wells) because of massive destruction of their facilities there. Additionally, and more importantly, is exploiting a resource from a historically poor continent for use in a historically wealthy continent something that a socially responsible company does?

But socially it’s not all bad. This project could have a lot of positive effects on an economy. The typical increase in jobs that comes with any new development would be excellent for the economy as well as quality of life of the citizens. Furthermore, this kind of solar thermal allocation would require skilled labor, which requires additional education of citizens, another great benefit to any country.

It’s is a great concept from a technical perspective, and if the cards are played right, it could be a great development from the social side too. The question is, how are the cards going to be played?

Differentiating Solar Energy Technologies

I feel the need to say something about different kinds of solar power because, unlike wind or wave or tidal power, the methods of generating electricity from solar power are very different, yet they always get clumped into the same bucket.

Although there are many different methods to use the sun to generate electricity, two of the technologies are mainstream these days. The first is solar thermal, and the second is photovoltaic.

Read more…