A new model for financing home solar power

One of the charms of living in Berkeley for 8-9 months in 2008 was to discover all that "lovely Berkeleyness" as one resident described it during a sustainable neighbourhoods workshop that I attended. This news item refers to a scheme that was proposed to the Berkeley City Council way back in October 2007. To quote the SF Chronicle of the time: "plan for the city to finance the cost of solar panels for property owners who agree to pay it back with a 20-year assessment on their property. Over two decades, the taxes would be the same or less than what property owners would save on their electric bills, officials say."

Apparently the inspiration was the financing that cities across the USA already undertake for undergrounding cables in a nighbourhood: the city brings together a neighbourhood and brokers the deal with a finance company to pay for this neighbourhood improvement programme. The idea is that the individual house owner cannot afford the individual cost of undergrounding. The Council is needed as the property tax collector to ensure payment over time. Neighbourhood improvements help the house owners, so brokering the deals is not too difficult. Some people in Berkeley thought why not expand this to solar electricity?

I encountered this idea in an East Bay Express article in November 2008: "Will Berkeley's Solar Plan Go Viral?". That article notes: "If Berkeley's plan goes viral and spreads nationwide, it could have a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. According to a yet-to-be released paper from researchers at UC Berkeley, a nationwide program could eliminate a gigaton of carbon dioxide emissions throughout the country. "This would conservatively contribute 4 percent of the savings needed for the US to reach 1990 emission levels by 2020, with very significant additional savings if the program expands to commercial buildings," the report concludes."

On April 19 2009, the Augusta 'Metro Spirit' carried an article by Erica Gies - a freelance reporter - in which she notes:

"In February 2009, Aaron Mann became the first person to benefit from Berkeley FIRST, installing 32 solar panels on his 2,800-square-foot home. Mann estimates that the new system, which generates 25 to 30 kilowatts on a sunny day, will provide 90 percent of his family’s needs. Functionally the electricity works exactly as it did before. Whether the house runs entirely off solar, pulls power from the local utility at night or on cloudy days, or uses a blend, “I don’t know the difference,” he said."

Ths scheme does not come cheap - because PV is not yet cheap. Apparently Aaron Mann got a rebate from Pacific Gas and Electric - his utility company - of US$6,000, cutting the total bill from US$41,000 to only US$35,000! "To repay that $35,000 loan [from Berkeley FIRST] , Mann’s property taxes increased $3,300 a year, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize that his annual pre-solar energy bills with PG&E totaled $4,200. So solar nets Mann an energy savings of $900 a year!"

The most significant part of the Metro Spirit article though is Gies' following two paragraphs which suggest that Berkeley who claim to have lead the world in kerbside recycling may be providing a lead in this solar scheme also 'going viral':

"In coming months, similar solar pay-as-you-go programs will begin in Boulder County and Denver, Colo.; Flagstaff and Tucson, Ariz.; Albuquerque and Las Cruces, N.M.; Austin, Texas; Portland, Ore.; Burlington, Vt.; Belmar, N.J.; and San Diego, Solana Beach, Santa Monica, Sonoma County, and San Francisco, Calif." Apparently several other states are amending their laws to make the scheme possible.

And finally - having started with PV: "Berkeley hopes to expand its program to include insulation, new windows, and other energy-saving projects. More places will likely follow suit."

Materials in Light Studio - procedural materials; and

Procedural issue covered (from Light Studio / Advanced / Materials tutorial online at the course info web site):

• Loading the light studio material library from the P:\LightStudio folder.
• Opening the .cal file that is applied and changing the scale of the materials listed...

Planning the Modelling - and Materials basics in 3DS Max mentalray

Lecture April 1

Topics covered:
Set up a consistent underlying structure for the collaboration:

• structural grid?


• plan AND section joins


• scan images and overaly and cross check dimensions


• this is a model, not a set of construction drawings


• plan to model only what is to be starring in the images at the end

Materials in computer graphics were also examined in the context of modelling. Starting with the online notes about the use of diffuse, bump, displacement and opacity maps within computer graphics, we went through:

applying this picture:






As a diffuse map:













As a bump map:













As a displacement map:













And applying this image:

















as an opacity map:

The optimistic green idea

This article ("The Power of Green", Thomas L Friedman, NYT, April 15, 2007 - and the associated videos - is why the New York Times is such a pleasure to read. Pity their scummy marketing people are trying to sting me for a continuation of my subscription at about NZ$500 for a year, when I am no longer in the country!

Friedman's basic thesis is identified in the byline from the NYT:
What does America need to regain its global stature?
Environmental leadership.

He argues that persuading Brazil/China/India etc to grow clean when the Western world has benefitted from growing dirty (=CO2 and other environmental costs), is futile. His alternative would be for the USA to lead the world with clean alternatives that fuel their growth faster till and thus attract others to the green path...

This is the sort of thinking that is behind the smart grid, the electric car as a storage device for the smart grid, PV on every roof etc... Its fatal flaw seems to be that it ignores the individual people in the equation. How to persuade people to alter wasteful behaviour - to use their share and not keep their buildings (for example) too hot in winter and too cold in ummer. There is clear evidence in the international work on 'Adaptive comfort' that mechanical control of temperature changes our expectation: when people have to open windows for cooling they have very different definitions of what is acceptable than when they push a button on an air conditioner. The Friedman future is more likely to occur if we can change general expectations.

I was reminded of this in a community workshop in the US recently. Some people attending who were significantly altering their behaviour to conserve water (collecting bath water for flushing toilets etc) could not contemplate turning their thermostats down below 20C - overnight, when they went to sleep! And these were so called greenies!

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Thomas L. Friedman: The Power of Green - NYTimes.com/Video

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Thomas L. Friedman: Green is the new Red White and Blue - NYTimes.com/Video

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Wot is it? Twitterspectrum

At this address: http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterSpectrum/TwitterSpectrum.html there is a great toy. It lists two interlocking tag spectra if given two words. This example shows the tag spectrum for the two words 'architecture' and 'window'.



The overlap area is for 'architecture' OR 'window' AND 'tag keyword'... not quite what I expected to be the content out. I had hoped assumed that it was showing overall keyword + tag on the left and right and in the middle both keywords + tag...

Still - a search engine for twitter based upon content not person's name is great.

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California Academy of Sciences - a LEED Platinum Museum

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Munch Museum on waterfront in Oslo - another model?

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Atlanta's Centre for Covil and Human Rights - another building to model?

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2009 Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom | Open Architecture Network

2009 Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom | Open Architecture Network

Now this looks like an interesting project.

Let's hope they get beyond the knee-jerk more daylight is good design reactions we have had of late to the work of Heschong Mahone Group.

There has also been some work done in New Zealand on this topic by Quentin Jackson - essentially testing whether the methodology of HMG could be replicated in a very different environment. Quentin concluded that the methodology was sound, but had insufficient number of students to suggest that his conclusions applied to the broad New Zealand population.

What seems to be clear from both the HMG work and from Quentin's work is that the differences in performance between students when grouped according to the differences in the physical environment were about the same order of magnitude as the differences in performance when grouped by teacher. The quality of the physical is surprisingly as important as the teacher if one looks at measurable performance in standardised tests...!

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Movie about Rem Koolhaas coming to Wellington

Can't find the times on the Paramount web site, but according to Wotzon, on Fri 10 Apr 11.00am and Sun 12 Apr 1.00pm at the Paramount in Courtenay Place a documentary will screen about the former film director, author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan and architect of what to me embodies in one building the best and worst of auteur architecture: the Casa da Musica in Porto:

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Architectural Firms Compete to Design African American History Museum - washingtonpost.com

The Washington Post writes (28 March 2009): "The future National Museum of African American History and Culture -- as envisioned by competing teams of architects -- will most likely include water features and music halls, evocations of slave ships and the African past, and vistas acknowledging its important, monumental neighbors.

Perhaps not enough information to make a model - yet...?

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Web 2.0 - 2009

The lecture today trawled through the concept of Web 2.0: A google 'define': search produces the following Wiktionary definition: "The second generation of the World Wide Web, especially the movement away from static webpages to dynamic and shareable content".

The original Web 1.0 was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 1990's. The arrival of Mark Andreesen's Mosaic web browser around the same time created accessible content: the first mix of text and images on the web, proving to be so powerful a trend that it "made the front page of the New York Times business section".

Examples of interactive web sites discussed are:
Flickr
Twitter
Blogger
del.icio.us

Technologies that are useful in the Web 2.0 world include RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and folksonomies built on simple tags [A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. ..]. The highlighted links at the top left edge of the BBSC 303 Digital Craft Course Information web page is constructed from an RSS feed reporting my Google (RSS) Reader subscriptions under the label 'architecture'. Just below this is a feed of my most recent del.icio.us links.

Other interactive web sites / services include:
facebook
myspace
bebo

In addition, we watched a couple of youtube videos:

The point? Assignment 2 requires you to "... actively document and collaborate online with your team partner and present the development of your project online in the form of a website." The goal therefore is to create a blog EACH, reporting your collaboration. The technologies of Web 2.0 are what will make our web sites readable, informative and able to be navigated simply.

The lecture concluded by referring back to the simple web page tutorial linked to the course web site. We covered again the use of HTML (hyper-text markup language) to place around text or media that affect its display. In particular we looked at the hypertext linking tag.

File translation issues:

The lecture on Tuesday 17 March and the tutorials on Thursday 19 March focused n file translation issues between the different original file formats in CAD and the 3DS Max file formats.

CAD	3DS Max 9 for LS	3DS ax 2009 for mr
Archicad	Export to .dwg: import via Legacy dwg	Export to 3ds; import
AutoCAD	import via Legacy dwg	import via Legacy dwg
Revit	export to dwg. import via Legacy dwg	export to fbx; import via fbx

NOTE: as covered in the online tutorials and in the tutorial class on Thursday, the Right Hemisphere product Deep Exploration can be used to clean up the object names in 3DS Max so that the renderers work properly.

Lecture 2: 2009 - Rendering with Max

The strategies for completing a rendering - a summary of the approaches that need to be adopted to Render within Max.

Basic concepts (summarised from tutorials):

• Global illumination - Radiance (Light Studio) and mentalray
• materials are specific to the renderer
  

1. light studio materials for LightStudio
2. Pro-materials for mentalray OR
3. Arch and Design materials for mentalray
   

• LightStudio only works in Max 9
• mentalray works in Max 9 and 2009: recommend the latter
• in both renderers define a sun and sky in very similar ways

1. Light Studio: Create tab/panel: Systems. Pull-down Light Studio option. Select Daylight. Choose location; date; time
2. mentalray: Pull Down menu. Lighting System wizard. Select tab. Create. Choose location; date; time. Accept options to make sky match sun and to set exposure for daylight with yes.

• in both renderers the 'indirect' illumination in bounces (mr) or as the 'indirect' box (LS) need to be a minimum of 2 outside, and 5 to 7 inside.
• In LS there are two render types: "Simple" FOR PREVIEWS ONLY and "Expert" for producing the actual renders.
• In LS there are many different materials, but 'plastic', 'glass', metal are the ones normally used. Have fun making a metal walled Gehry building!
• The LS manual is siomple and easy to read. The two tutoriala online should take you through all you need to know (the second 'advanced' tutorial is about lighting studies, but the materials section is useful for this course)
• mentalray has 'Global Illumination', 'Final Gather' and 'Caustics' settings: for this tutorial and most of this course, we will ONLY use 'Final Gather'.
  

Lecture - 1: 2009

Topics covered in the lecture:

The Course Objectives
The Tasks to be completed to meet these Objectives

• Task 1 - the tutorial exercises in Archicad, AutoCAD Architecture and Revit - plus Maxrender
• Task 2 - collaborating in the construction of a complex digital model of a daylit gallery
• Task 3 - creating a blog and web page to summarise the digital modelling

The Assessment Contract - and its role in reducing stress and workload
Workload management

The links to the past year's work:

• The Digital Craft BBSC 303 section of the www.arch.school.nz web site for models created between 1998 and 2005.
  
• And in particular the 'buildings' summary of these models.
• Plus the 'Reasonate' web site created by David Harrison in 2006
• Plus the Blogger web sites created by 303 students in 2007

Strategies for completing the tutorials and for choosing a partner to work with on the assignments.

More Autodesk Acquisitions!

At Nex Gen VizTod Stephens has noted the following Autodesk press release:

Friday, October 24, 2008

Autodesk Acquiring Softimage

Autodesk announced yesterday that they are acquiring Softimage.


It's becoming easier this year to see where the conspiracy theorists get their ideas from. Those who would claim that Autodesk is buying up companies so their direct competition do not would point to this as another in the long line of defensive acquisitions. Personally I am not sure, but this is a major buying spree!

I note on the same web site from August 20, 2008:

Autodesk Announces ImageModeler 2009Autodesk announced the release of ImageModeler 2009 at SIGGRAPH last week. This is the first Autodesk release of the software since they purchased it from REALVIZ. ImageModeler is used to create photorealistic 3D objects from photographs, including accurate 3D measurements.


RealViz was one of my favourite non-Autodesk tools that had lots of potential but an apparently small following - and the French developers seemed to have a great web site but no marketing smarts. Until last year when Autodesk bought it. I was starting to wonder what had happened to it. I investigated upgrading our classroom set earlier this year and despite the Autodesk front page to the web site got the usual slow runaround ...

Now, this looks like much better news. Presence with fanfare at Siggraph..

However, on another note, I am working my way through the Max Daylighting tool and wanted to compare its output to Radiance. The best way looked to be to use the 'new' Windows executables available from Francesco Anselmo's MinGW-Radiance distribution with the Radiance Control Panel from Ecotect. I have the RCP from v5.6. However, it is no longer downloadable from 'Autodesk Ecotect' web site... Pity. It was one of the more thorough and robust windows front ends to Radiance. No apparent reason for Autodesk to take it off the list of free software?

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The world of Art has more money than the world of Building Research!

Check this out!

In Building research we try to get a budget to put some instrumentation into a building someone else is already planning to pay for... Temporarily. With this approach we work with the designers to improve what the owner is prepared to pay for - or if we are REALLy lucky - we get a small part of the research budget to add a detail (solar water heater? fancy smart glazing?) to the design.

It seems the Chicago based Museum of Science and Industry  has a different budget!

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New LightUp Photo-Realistic Rendering Plugin for SketchUp

Mac 3D: New LightUp Photo-Realistic Rendering Plugin for SketchUp -- UK-based developer has new LightUp SketchUp Plugin for Photo-Realistic Rendering and it works on the Mac!The news on the interweb at present - more and more and more plugins for SketchUp. Photorealistic = pretty or realistic or REAL? $64k question

read more | digg story

Planning a Semantic Web site

The Semantic Web brings with it the opportunities for users to get smarter search results, and for site owners to get more targeted traffic as users find what they really want. But these benefits don't just magically appear.

For the first time, in many years of following this stuff - since timbl first started writing his web from 50,000ft missives - the very readability of this article gives me hope I might be a participant, not just a user...

read more | digg story

Experimental REFERENCE (from the article): Semantic Web

15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About

15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About
Incroyable! Where in the world does this hype come from?

And what's more, only a few people in the world seem to be asking sensible questions about it yet. And even then, the organisations that ask these questions such as the 'Greenwash Brigade' show their own biases when entering the 'buy local' debate. When they ask 'is a buy local economy really sustainable?' they adopt a xenophobic analysis that appears to assume that anything foreign is almost always bad and limits its reasonable compromise trade ideas to under or over 16okm distances within the USA. What chance remote places (New Zealand pop 4m or Samoa pop 214k) to produce anything but a few of the basics of life in such a non-trading future? The impression that is provided is the historic US isolationist 'I'm alright Jack' approach.

Very few people seem to be addressing the real issues: what are these buildings like to be in? (A couple of people who are: Usable Buildings and 'Performance in Practice' ). From time to time one hears rumours about buildings that have 'gone wrong' and are no longer being touted as 'low energy' / 'good passive design' / 'sustainable' / 'healthy'. What seems to happen, as I heard when I asked about a building I had photographed when on a visit to the USA recently - and about which I had blogged a year or so ago, is that the owners shut down all discussion. This just adds to the legends of sun umbrellas inside to combat solar glare and debates about whether the required performance analyses were done. Perhaps we would move beyond just ticking the appropriate in a LEED score system if we honestly reported mistakes and examined why they occurred? If assessing the performance of a building from its users point of view became mainstream... this type of press coverage would cease. Instead of passing on uncritically the PR of the designers, we would be reading carefully constructed assessments of the real performance 'meters' - the people who live in and occupy the buildings and their community of passers-by and other affected people.

Ref: 'It's way to easy being Green': "Installing a $395 bike rack is worth the same under the LEED checklist system as installing a $1.3 million environmentally sensitive heating system."