Environmentally Sensitive Design
It is important to create environmentally sensitive design. Over the coming months we will be bringing you environmental issues that can assist you in your buildings.
A building owner pays for good footings, good timbers, good roofing and doesn't expect these items to pay anything back until the owner outlives the building. Perhaps we shouldn't expect low impact energy systems to pay us back immediately either. The reason easy energy systems like petrol and grid electricity are used is because the current financial outlay is inexpensive compared with low impact energy systems. However are these energy systems truly cheap with the information coming out about the long term effect on the environment of carbon dioxide emmissions and global warming and subsequent cost to repair the environment? Like good footings, floors, timbers, roofing etc it is now being shown that when a property sells with low impact energy systems like solar and wind power, the financial return (and obviously environmental return) is greater than if these features are not in the building.
"Syd gets fired up when people question the effi ciency of solar power, he says, ‘There is 1kW (kilowatt) of energy per square metre in sunlight. A solar panel extracts about 15.5%-16.5% of that energy from the sun. A coal fired power grid is not even 1% efficient.’" Article from the Echo Newspaper 17/7/2007 by Syd Welling of Sunbeam Solar Energy.
Some topics to cover:
Glazing
Innovative design solutions incorporating low impact energy systems
Low energy materials
Low toxicity materials
Passive and low impact cooling systems
Passive and low impact heating systems
Solar orientation
Solar power
Wind power
Water Harvesting
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