The Oil Kingdom

Saudi Arabia is very guarded regarding the state of their oil fields; reserves are not known outside the kingdom. As the largest estimated reserves reside there, and as the kingdom is the lead member of OPEC, this makes the supply – demand equation for oil difficult, regardless of increasing demand from the far east and India.

In the 1980’s Saudi Arabia found itself sitting on vast dollar reserves and embarked on a massive infrastructure program under the auspices of Saudi Aramco. Included were new oil processing and shipping facilities at Jubail Industrial City, and new housing and institutional facilities for migrant workers at Yanbu and Jubail. The effort was led by Bechtel. The model for Jubail’s development is shown above. It was to be a city for 400,000 workers to be built in phases with a typical housing sector providing for 10,000 residents. The urban planning was by TAC, under the direction of San Juan architect Hector Arce and myself.  Because of the flatness of our site and in order to generate any slope for rainwater drainage, relatively flat mounds were built on the land, constructed from soil dredged from the sound. The dredging also provided a channel for tankers. The land-side portion of the operation was the largest landfill in history, exceeding the fill at the pyramids in Giza, according to Engineering News Record.

Experts predict that the price for WTIC will either rise to $90./barrel this year or drop to $40./barrel. 2010 has added complexity regarding forward price: the economic recovery is hard to gauge. Short-term forward demand from China is uncertain, though they continue to grow the economy at over 8%. The spot price sits at $74.60 as of this post. My gut feeling: down to $70./barrel, and then, who knows? There is tremendous demand destruction going on here, and just today Valero announced further cutbacks in refining. US refining utilization stands at 81%, and anyone who has driven during rush-hour recently can note the US demand destruction first-hand.

NYC

New York City already has the lowest per capita carbon footprint of any major city in America. Nonetheless, last month the city enacted legislation to improve the energy profile of buildings across all sectors. The mayor was instrumental in providing leadership.

The legislation creates a New York City Energy Code that existing buildings will have to meet whenever they make renovations; the code will be enforced by the Department of Buildings and goes into effect in June, 2010.

Tudor Redux

These are views of a passive solar Tudor we are designing, showing both existing and proposed views.

Vertical cladding materials are brick, cement plaster, and wood windows and window-walls. Glass is 1″ thick clear insulated. Roofs are clad in natural slate and standing-seam copper.

Greetings from Colorado

In 1891, L.L. Nunn joined forces with Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse and built the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant. Located near Telluride, the town in the center of the photo, Ames Hydro transmitted to the Gold King Mine 3.5 miles away. This was the first successful demonstration of long distance transmission of industrial-grade AC power.

119 years on, power is mostly transmitted AC. We are indebted to Tesla, Nunn, and Westinghouse for their innovation.

Cruising into the new decade, to all our friends, clients, and collaborators: a happy and healthy new year.

NYS ECC

The 2007 NYS Energy Conservation Code is based on the 2003 IECC and has several compliance paths.

Projects are divided into residential buildings 3 or less stories in height (residential), and residential buildings over three stories in height and all other buildings (commercial).

Compliance for residential is either through a NYS ECC (IECC) prescriptive path which addresses lighting, HVAC, envelope, and DHW, and which can be checked through a program such as REScheck, or through two-dimensional modeling programs such as eQUEST 3.6. The former is generally more restrictive.

Compliance for commercial is either through the two alternative paths in the preceding paragraph, or through compliance with ASHRAE 90.1 (2004), which also has both a prescriptive compliance path and a two-dimensional modeling compliance path.

ASHRAE 90.1 defines climatic zones across the country; NYS is covered by two zones, Zone 6 for certain upstate counties and Zone 5 for the remainder of the state.

The prescriptive envelope requirements for Zone 5 are:

Construction photo of Port Authority building, cladding design by S. Behar

Tudor as Passive Collector

Here is still from a Sketch-Up model of a Tudor we are working on. The southeast-facing conservatory will act as a passive solar collector in winter, particularly if we design the floor with some thermal mass. The conservatory is shaded by a mature japanese maple in summer, not rendered here.

Scottish Architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh liked to append highly-glazed spaces to his Arts and Craft residences, the rooms sometimes used for billiards.

 

Below is the model of the existing condition of our project.

MOMA

We’ve been asked to study off-exhibit lighting in public corridors at MOMA. In the space above the lighting currently consists of 5″ diameter specular high hat 60W incandenscents on a tight spacing. Current energy usage is roughly 2.24W/SF yielding 29 FC with fixtures 135″ AFF.

Adaptive Reuse

We tend to attribute the concept of adaptive reuse to the late twentieth century, when portions of cities in the western world were left with vacant buildings as a result of the transition of economies from manufacturing to technological bases.

The concept is in fact much older. Michelangelo’s replanning of the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the Campidoglio, conceived as early as 1536 and built during the mid sixteenth century, introduced order to the irregular geometry of the existing buildings. In the new facades and portions of buildings he added, Michelangelo shaped a trapezoidal space, in the center of which is not an ideal circle but an oval inscribed in the stone paving.

If planning a visit, October-November is a great time.

The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. - Michelangelo

Installed Capacity Program

When the NYSIO anticipates that New York State’s major transmission systems may be compromised due to weather-induced high electric demand, they may declare an emergency. Calls are made to Installed Capacity Program customers with a request to invoke curtailment measures under ICAP. Customers enrolled in the program receive an advisory day-ahead notice followed by a notice two hours before the event to curtail power.

The curtailment measures can include reducing usage or switching to dedicated standby power generated on-site.

Incentives for customers include cash payment of up to $0.50 kWh depending on the Local Marginal Pricing and rebated installation of an interval meter. There are also substantial incentives for standby power installation to meet program objectives, a scenario under which the customer gets to shift some of his capital cost for necessary standby generators and switches to the public sector-utility.

Photo of first major hydro plant in Niagara courtesy Tesla Society

Roof Links

* The albedo of an object is the extent to which it diffusely reflects light from sources such as the Sun. The albedo of fresh snow is 0.9 and that of fresh asphalt is 0.04

* Studies show that white roofs reduce air-conditioning costs by 20 percent or more in hot, sunny weather.

* How shiny is LA? The California South Coast Air Basin’s urban albedo is higher than its suburban albedo because the suburban land use has more vegetation. LBL did a fly-over to take measurements.

* Planted “green” roofs provide insulative value. They do not, however, have the reflectivity provided by white roofing materials, which reduce direct solar heat gain. When seeking highest efficiency per capital investment, the choice between a green roof and a white, reflective one requires study of alternative insulation schemes; climate is a major factor.

Roofs in snow, Brett Weston