QUEST 2014

Back from Vancouver where attended QUEST 2014 Conference and Trade Show. I will share more when process all the information which was a lot. Here are some of the impressions from the conference.  

Saskatchewan - More Lessons To Learn

I hate to sound negative and say "I told you so" but in fact I did. The fire at the pump station in Prud'homme Saskatchewan showed that not only electrical power grid is susceptible to failure with wide and costly impact, but the same with potentially more dangerous consequences applies to a gas and other pipeline grids.

And we still want to build more pipelines ... 

Bullitt Centre - Connecting technologies and 90 percent rule

 
Another example of connecting technologies - Bullitt Centre in Seattle - has been called the world’s greenest office building.

The 52,000-square-foot building outfitted with cutting-edge environmental technologies, such as insulation and energy-saving heating and cooling systems, aims at meeting the rigorous standards of the Living Building Challenge. It is supposed to be completely powered by the 575 photovoltaic solar panels on the over sized roof. Completed in 2013 (a year behind the schedule), the US$18.5 million, 6-storey building, designed by Miller Hull Partnerships, is built to be “zero-energy”.

To make enough room for 14,000 square feet array of solar panels the roof had to be made projected as much as 20 feet beyond the building's perimeter. According to the designers, the solar array delivers 242 kilowatts of power in total. In the summer, it will produce more electricity than it uses, and in the winter it will produce less. The surplus power will be sold into the Seattle electric grid. The building then draws electricity from the grid in the winter months when production is low. To achieve its “net zero energy” goal, the summer production surplus must meet or exceed the winter production deficit. While strictly speaking it is not a 100% efficiency, this is a way around the 90 percent barrier.

"Green" light at the end of the tunnel for India

According to the MIT Technology Review, even today in 21st century 1.5 billion people on this Earth currently lack electricity. Nearly 70% percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, approximately 600 million people, is without electrical power.
India is a country whose economy including technology sector is growing faster than most developed countries. However today there are still 400 million people without electricity in the country. The ambitious plan of the new government is to bring the light to each household without building mega power plants but rather using individual home based solar panels. Time of "gigantic centralized systems has passed. Multitude of small but interconnected cooperating (synergetic) systems offers the advantage of flexibility, reliability and evolvability - be it an intelligent network of distributed energy modules, or a swarm of micro-satellites". (Evolving Technologies)

Watch out Canada !

Students Present Designs of the Mountain Health Centre

On April 28 students of the Thompson Rivers University (TRU) presented their designs of the Health care and Community building to the Sun Peaks Mayor and Council. While varying in architectural style, from traditional Thyrolean to distinct modern, all designs carried energy efficiency and "green" features - from optimal building orientation for better use of natural sunlight and enhanced thermal insulation to incorporating solar panels and accommodating other onsite energy generation capabilities. The project was a collaboration between Architecture & Technology Department of TRU and Ascent Systems Technologies.

Performance Home, Part 2

Picture a hole in the side of your house that’s just as a big as a typical computer screen. Imagine the wind blowing through that hole. The hole is real. If you were to combine all the cracks and crannies in a typical Canadian home, they’d add up to almost 1,400 square centimetres, roughly the size of 2.5 magazine pages.

Plugging that hole is the simplest way for Canada to save energy. Plugging the hole also saves money, creates jobs, cuts greenhouse-gas emissions and makes our homes more comfortable.

We know how to find the hole. Canadians pioneered the use of a tool that can measure the airtightness of a building. Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has used this “blower door” to test more than 800,000 Canadian homes.

Canadians also know how to fix the hole. Way back in 1977, they built a house so airtight and so well insulated that a hair dryer could have kept it warm through the winter – in cold Saskatchewan.

Yet despite the fact that buildings account for roughly one-third of our national energy consumption and the fact that we’re world leaders in small building energy-conservation technology, Canadians still haven’t plugged the hole. Most of our existing homes remain quite drafty, and most of our new homes fail to meet decades-old efficiency standards.

Builders have long known that heat claims the lion’s share of the energy consumed in Canadian homes: 57% of the total, compared with 24% for hot water, 13% for appliances and 5% for lighting. They’ve also known that heat escapes wherever air escapes, mostly under doors and around windows.
A standard measurement agreed upon is: the number of times per hour the blowerdoor fan would suck all the air out of a house at a prescribed pressure of 50 pascals (Pa). The metric is called “air changes per hour (ACH)” at 50 Pa. With gaps totaling 1,400 sq. cm, the average Canadian home leaks enough air to result in 6.85 ACH@50Pa.

In the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the Saskatchewan Research Council designed an energy-efficient home appropriate for the Saskatchewan winter. The oil crisis prompted many similar projects, with most focusing on new ways to trap solar heat within a more or less standard building. The Saskatchewan team elected, instead, to design a radically more efficient building envelope. The Saskatchewan Conservation House, completed in Regina in 1977, was likely one of the first buildings to combine three key elements: superinsulation, extreme airtightness and a heat-recovery ventilator.
In an era when nearly all houses were constructed of four-inch-thick walls filled with R-8 insulation, the two-storey Saskatchewan house featured 12-inch-thick R-40 walls and R-60 roof insulation. Likewise, single-paned windows were then the norm; this home had triple-glazed windows. The house also boasted extreme airtightness. Most new houses at the time scored in the range of 9 ACH@50Pa; the SCH achieved 0.8 ACH@50Pa. At the time it was likely the tightest house in the world.
To provide fresh air to the airtight house, the Saskatchewan team built an air-to-air heat exchanger. This device pulled in fresh (but cold) outdoor air through a series of baffles. Stale (but warm) indoor air was pushed out through the other side of those same baffles, and heat was transferred from the exhaust air to the incoming fresh air.
The SCH had no furnace. Instead, it relied on a system that collected solar heat during the day, stored it in a water tank, then released the heat at night. All told, the house required less than a quarter of the energy consumed by a standard home of the time.

That same year, the “House As a System” approach pioneered in Saskatchewan formed the basis for a new national building standard that required R-20 insulation, blower-door test results of 1.5 ACH@50Pa or better, the installation of a heat-recovery ventilator and the use of non-toxic materials. The new standard became a partnership between NRCan and the Canadian Home Builders’ Association. It was the toughest standard in the world at that time and presaged by decades the advent of green building initiatives such as BuiltGreen or LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). The new standard was voluntary, but its authors intended for its gradual integration into the national building code. With their sights set on plugging the hole in Canadian homes by the turn of the century, they named the new standard “R-2000.”

The above content is mostly a shortened re-print of the article High-Performance Homes - Why isn't Canada spearheading the movement to build more sustainable homes? published in June 2012 issue of Canadian Geographic.

Performance Home, Part 1

Those who have been following my postings undoubtedly noticed that I am trying to avoid using such terms like "sustainable", "green" or even "eco-friendly". Instead I prefer talking about the "performance home" or "performance building" (sometimes also called "high-performance building"). It is probably time finally to find out what is a Performance Home.
Is it a something like a sphere, which everybody familiar with thermodynamics knows is the most efficient shape? 

Is it a shiny futuristic glass cube, which is usually much more functional ?

Is it a house stuffed with all sorts of techno-gadgets?

Or, it is a some sort of combination? May be, but not necessarily. One has to look at the performance house as a system, which it undoubtedly is. Then one must recognize that it - as any system - consists from many smaller systems (structure, insulation, ventilation, heating and cooling, water supply, electrical etc) constituting the whole, and in turn is a part of a bigger urban system, community, natural environment etc.  Then it will be obvious that performance home to be built in Sun Peaks Resort on elevation of 2,400 m would be totally different from the one to be built in Saudi Arabia.
     

Old "New" Challenge for performance buildings, or Lessons Learned - Part 3

Monitoring data in Performance Building proves to be a challenge for a reason, which may seem unexpected. There is no clear understanding on what data to collect, at which points, how often to take the measurements and for how long to store the data.
One approach is a "bulldozer" approach - take as many data as possible, at as many locations as possible and as frequent as possible. From the first glance this seems to be a bullet proof method - you will never miss anything. In fact, the opposite is true. The amount of data collected quickly becomes overwhelming and unmanageable, and apart from the difficulty of retrieving necessary piece of information, it presents another unexpected challenge. The value of storing the data is in ability to keep track of historical records, because only a relatively long period of time can be representative for the actual performance of any complex system, performance building included. Now, an attempt to estimate what would it take to create a data storage for one such building, utilizing the "bulldozer" approach described above, hits an obstacle - the data warehouse for keeping track of ALL data will cost over $400,000 !!  No wonder, it is decided, or rather occurs automatically, that the wast amount of accumulated data is discarded after a relatively short period of time to let the room for the new batch of data. But what about the analysis?
What if we need the data for more than one month, and typically we want to monitor performance for at least a year? How can we even be assured that what we need is there, when what is collected spills over?
Following up on and consistent with what I have discussed previously (see e.g. Lessons Learned - Part 2)  there is a need in the agreed upon hierarchy of the data sets, common format of data being collected, stored and retrieved. With the time it may and probably will evolve into the industry standard. But the work needs to be started, or we are going to face the hurdle not unlike or even worse than the Tower of Babylon - not only being unable to speak one language, but not even understand ourselves... 

In order to be able to communicate we need to speak one language.

Performance Home designs presented at the Council

From October 2012 through April 2013 Ascent Systems Technologies in cooperation with Architecture and Technology Department of Thompson Rivers University conducted a students’ contest for the best design of the performance home for Sun Peaks Resort. 20 actual vacant Sun Peaks lots were chosen by the students. The competition was completed in April when Ascent Systems Technologies presented a cash prize for the best performance home design, while Sun Peaks Corporation supported the initiative by donating two ski passes to the author of the design which was the best accommodating the resort guidelines. Some of the best designs were presented at the Sun Peaks Municipal Council meeting at on June 24, 2013. The purpose was to show to the Council and to the residents the home built at Sun Peaks Resort can be energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and at the same time seamlessly integrated in the overall look of the resort. The presentation was received with great interest. 

Performance homes, together with other efforts undertaken by the Sun Peaks Municipality, will form part of the Sustainable Community concept at the Resort.   

Green Home designs for local landscapes

From green buildings - to Green Planet

Amazing video from NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory

It is so realistic - you almost want to touch it, but also want to be careful not to damage this fragile globe!

Out Of Control ?

Worth reading whether you agree or not:  Out Of Control

The author talks about the problems with controls for performance (a.k.a. sustainable) buildings. I have seen it again in a number of most recent buildings with very high claims. The author calls for a disruptive technology. Perhaps, the solution is not in the disruptive technology, but in simpler, intuitive design and applying principles of systems architecture throughout conceive-design-implement-operate-evolve cycle.

One thing is clear: performance building has to be simpler and smarter.

ASPA

Efficient building may incorporate multiple components from autonomous electricity generation system to waste water regeneration and number of others. Many of the components have overlapping functions. A specific combination of those components and its interconnection should be determined based on the needs of the specific building as a system. 

Aero-Solar Predictive Algorithm (ASPA) is an automated Knowledge-Based Algorithm, accelerating and enhancing the decision-making on the optimal configuration of the performance thermal energy system for a building, facility or a building complex. It is built on the principles of Systems Architecture, and comparing to other products operating within the same space, it has an advantage of being multi-dimensional (i.e. considering a full set of existing or potential technology) rather than being optimized by one specific parameter.

The ASPA project has been developed with support from IRAP funding by National Research Council of Canada.