The Zero Energy Building (ZEB) is happening. Announcements of new ZEBs are popping up everywhere. Most recently: NASA's Ames Research Center, but also: Singapore's first ZEB, BASF's model ZEB for home builders, a Vermont school field house, a net zero island, a 71 story tower underway in China (rendered to the right).
All this ZEB focus is at once impressive and insufficient. Impressive in that so many projects are breaking ground in the few years since the ZEB concept debuted, insufficient if real headway is to be made in reducing building energy use (buildings, which use over two thirds of our electrical power). The ZEB, or more specifically a world blanketed with ZEBs, would be a breathtaking goal requiring significant focus and commitment. But it also could be just a mere stepping stone to the ulterior goal: the building as power plant, as producer of energy to power things like, uhm, cars. (What do we call this? Building based power plant? Net plus? Energy Plus?).
Crafting the dream-ZEB:
Strip down the building's need for power:
- Optimum orientation of building to sun
- Thermal massing
- Insulated Concrete Form Walls
- Chilled concrete beams
- Underfloor air distribution
- Green Roof
- Solar Chimney
- High efficiency windows
- High efficiency lighting
- Smart building (sophisticated building automation controls)
- Smart grid
- Geothermal
Make power:
- Wind turbines integrated into the building structure
- Photovoltaic
- Solar Thermal
- Geothermal
- Enhanced Geothermal
- Wave/Tidal (assume this building's next to big water)
Export the surplus power:
- to the grid
- to the electric vehicles parked in the building's parking garage.
Rendering: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP
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