The Passive Solar Power of Daylighting

Jun 15 2009 9:25AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

By Grant Gable

Daylighting’s approval as a renewable energy technology Under EPACT 2005 amendment in January, 2008 may cause the art of daylighting to become mainstream.

On May 22, 2009, at a conference regarding solar energy financing, a Treasury Department official commented favorably on the new program that lets renewable energy providers claim cash grants in lieu of tax credits. Ellen Neubauer is the Program Grants Manager within the Treasury Department’s Office of Fiscal Assistant Secretary. In her remarks at the IPED solar energy conference, she confirmed that her office has been delegated the management and supervision responsibility of the grants in lieu of tax credits (the “Cash Funding”) program under Section 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “ARRA”).

Section 1603(b) of the ARRA provides that the amount o...Read More

May 14 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

By Grant Gable

On May 5, 2009, The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today introduced Commercial Lighting Solutions, its latest innovation designed to improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings with a major focus on retail energy initiatives as well as Daylighting. The interactive Web tool is designed to help commercial building owners improve lighting efficiency by at least 30% over ASHRAE 90.1-2004 and begins to bring focus to the major changes that ASHRAE 90.1-2007 adds especially when it comes to daylighting of buildings with controls. This tool produced by the DOE provides great insight into the benefit that daylighting can provide to the building owner.  With a small amount of information, a building owner or developer can discover daylighting techniques that can reduce electric energy consumption by more than 50% just by utilizing daylighting and controls. Commercial Lighting S...Read More

Apr 27 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |

By Grant Gable

I don’t know if you are like me, but when I opened my inbox today it was filled with ump-teen emails regarding Earth Day.  Save the planet was the model for all and how their product or service would help save the environment.  I related the experience to the overwhelming throng of people who end up in Church on Easter Sunday or Christmas Eve only to find the next week a half vacant church. On this Earth Day, I chose to wait till the day after to post to my blog as it isn’t the” one day a year that someone makes a difference to our environment, it is the forward moving commitment everyday that gets the job done. If we were to change our focus to “Earth Month” or Earth Year” not only would we produce a true impact to the ills in our environment, but we would open our eyes and see that going green actually makes you ...Read More

Apr 14 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (2) |

By Grant Gable

There is a lot of misinformation out there when it comes to toplighting or daylighting with skylights for energy savings.  The miss information has even lead many northern city’s building codes to be set with standards that minimize the true opportunity available through daylighting.  The biggest misnomer in daylighting is this...Thermal efficiency (increase U-Value at the risk of a reduction of hours that you can shut your lights off in the building may actually be costing you more total energy dollars!  

Engineers for years have had a negative thought about skylights.  Prior to the current addendums to ASHRAE 90.1, when a building designer would add skylights into their design it was assumed that the common skylight product brought in too much heat in during the summer and that they lost way too much heat during the winter to be thought of as a...Read More

Apr 1 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (2) |

By Grant Gable

Besides the recent information posted on this blog on the reduction in CO2 production that daylighting provides through reduction of kWh energy usage, The Energy Performance Act of 2005 (EPACT) also poses a great incentive to consider daylight harvesting under the energy efficient lighting program with the inclusion of lighting controls. A tax deduction of up to $1.80/sf is available for buildings that achieve a 50% energy cost reduction compared to a standard reference building meeting ASHRAE/IESNA 90.1-2001. System-specific deductions up to $0.60/sf are available for interior lighting, HVAC and building envelope that achieve a 16 2/3% energy cost reduction compared to the standard reference building. Interior lighting systems that have substantially lower power density than the lighting requirements for the energy standard are eligible for the system-specifi...Read More

Mar 9 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |

By Grant Gable

In 2008, the U.S. Federal Government amended Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPACT 2005) to include the use of qualified new renewable energy sources  to count towards the EO13423 Requirement under EPACT 2005.  How the EO13423 Requirement Impacts the EPACT 2005 Goal is that it requires that all agencies use new renewable energy sources equal to half of the EPACT 2005 renewable energy requirement. Daylighting is specifically mentioned in the latest EPACT language. While EPACT 2005 only allows electricity calculations from renewable energy sources, EO13423 allows agencies to use new non-electric renewable energy sources to meet the requirement for new renewable energy.   How it figures the impact of new non-electric renewable energy sources is through the obtained reduction of kilowatt hour (kWh) usages through the use of daylighting.  This ...Read More

Feb 23 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

By Grant Gable

Daylighting systems, which use natural lighting to supplement electric lighting, have the potential to cut energy use, reduce peak demand, and create a more desirable indoor environment, yet these systems often fail to live up to their potential. One reason they fail is that they are sensitive to photo sensor placement and performance, but there have been no easy-to-use tools to help designers predict performance and determine optimum sensor positioning.

The Solution
The Sensor Placement and Orientation Tool (SPOT™) is a free software package that helps designers establish correct photo sensor placement relative to a proposed daylighting
and electric lighting design (Figure 1). It also analyzes and predicts overall system performance prior to ...Read More

Feb 17 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

By Grant Gable

Daylight harvesting has the potential to save significant electric lighting energy by bringing daylight into buildings while dimming or shutting off electric lighting based on available daylight. The availability of daylight generally coincides with utility peak demand periods, making daylight harvesting a particularly valuable tool for peak electricity demand reduction. However, control systems to enable daylight harvesting have faced many barriers including expensive commissioning and unreliable operation. The California Lighting Technology Center (CLTC), sponsored by the State of California and U.C. Davis has developed a daylight harvesting control system that uses two sensors to measure available daylight and adjusts the electric lighting accordingly.
 
The dual sensor system improves upon existing single sensor systems by offering auto...Read More

Feb 11 2009 12:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (4) |

By Grant Gable

On February 5, 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama spoke in a press conference held at the U.S. Depart of Energy and declared that now is the time for America to become more energy efficient.  Well, there isn’t a better place to start then with building energy efficiency as the lowest hanging fruit.  According to the U.S. Green Building Council website (www.usgbc.org), commercial and industrial buildings utilize 72% of all the electricity produced in the United States while producing 39% of all the CO2 emissions into our atmosphere. Basically, U.S. Industrial and commercial buildings are single handedly the biggest energy hogs and need to go on a diet!  According to John McHugh of McHugh Energy Solutions (an industry expert, daylighting engineer and toplighting consultant to ASHRAE), if all ...Read More

Jan 22 2009 8:30AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |

By Grant Gable

On January 12th, Time Magazine’s cover story came with the title, “Why We Need To See The Light About Energy Efficiency.”  Well, it’s about “Time” that the mainstream media finally discovered that the easiest and most cost effective way to help gain our energy independence is as simple as using less energy!  Energy efficiency doesn’t pollute, it doesn’t require a lot of up front capital, it doesn’t require an investment in infrastructure.  It simply requires a little effort and with the ever rising cost of energy around the world, the money needed to make efficiency measures happen may simply be hidden in your monthly utility statement. 

You see, every time a business pays for energy, it is not through capital dollars, but rather expense dollars.  Expense dollars are profits lost as expenses a...Read More

Jan 13 2009 11:43AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (7) |

By Grant Gable

Could an answer to our growing climate crisis and failing electrical infrastructure simply be daylighting? Properly designed, high performance daylighting measures can play a major roll in reducing America’s peak electrical load demand by replacing electrical lighting with daylighting for approximately 70% of daylight hours. According to John McHugh, former research Mechanical Engineer with the Heschong-Mahone Group and pioneer in daylighting sciences, if America were to retrofit all existing buildings that make sense to daylight with high performance skylights, the reduced peak load is worth approximately 20,000 Megawatts. That is equal to output of 40 average size 500 megawatt coal fire electric plants.

How can electrical energy from lighting damage the environment? Well, here’s how. Each day, your local power plant will commonly burn coal, oil, and gas to g...Read More

Dec 30 2008 10:02AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

By Grant Gable

In 1999, Dr. Joseph Romm, the former Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, published a book titled Cool Companies – How the Best Businesses Boost Profits and Productivity by Cutting Greenhouse Gas Emissions.  In his book, Dr. Romm points to many different strategies on how businesses can inject energy efficiency practices that lower a business’s operational expenditures that invariably reduce the use of electricity that is created mostly from fossil fuels.  However, Dr. Romm injects the notion that there are efficiency practices that can actually have a positive increase on productivity for the business that can even outweigh the savings from energy expenditures.  In chapter four, Dr. Romm writes, “Whoever best uses energy efficiency and pollution prevention to lower costs and increase pr...Read More

Dec 21 2008 6:35PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

By Grant Gable

In 2008, Wal-Mart, the world largest user of high performance daylighting solutions, achieved a significant environmental milestone. They have eliminated the equivalent output of a 500-megawatt coal fired power plant from the electrical grid through daylighting.  For over 15 years, Wal-Mart has made the commitment to daylight the majority of their Supercenters around the world. To date, Wal-Mart has daylit more than 2,200 of their 200,000+ square foot Supercenters with a connected light load of approximately 240 kW per store. This brings the total connected light load under control with daylighting to over 528,000 kW. Wal-Mart has estimated that on average, around the world, a daylit Supercenter is able to turn off its connected light load for 2,800 hours a year.  This combined energy savings through high performance daylighting provides a substantial reduction to our electrica...Read More

Sep 18 2008 4:58PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

By Grant Gable

From Addison, Texas

The 2008 International Council of Shopping Centers' RetailGreen Conference opened today with a focus on the sustainable design and practices for the retail sector.  One of the major themes of the event has been on the impact that high performance daylighting is having in the retail market and the success that many major retailers have experienced with daylighting. The show started with a tour of the new Wal-Mart High Efficiency (HE.2) Store in Garland, Texas hosted by Don A. Moseley, Director of Sustainability for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.  Opened in May 2008, this Wal-Mart is one of the most efficient stores in the world, using 25% less energy than comparable Wal-Mart Supercenters. One of the major energy efficiency features of the facility was the high performance prismatic skylights coupled with an advanced daylight harvesting system that was d...Read More

Aug 28 2008 4:28PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (1) |

By Grant Gable

Daylighting of retail sales is not a new concept, but over the last few years, more and more national brand retailers are turning to daylighting as a way to reduce the rising cost of energy while increasing lighting standards in their store designs. However, energy savings through daylighting is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to opportunity for the retailer. Studies by Pacific Gas and Electric as well as follow up studies by the California Energy Commission have shown that high performance daylighting can increase retail sales substantially. In 2003, the California Energy Commission released a technical report titled Daylighting and Retail Sales outlining their findings in a study of 73 chain stores of which 24 stores had a significant amount of daylight. These stores were monitored over a three year period. The study was modeled after the Pacific Gas & Electric study which...Read More