原创 Green Buildings and Homes-Part 1

I have wanted to write about Green Buildings and Homes for a while. Here are my thoughts on Green Buildings and Homes.

Let’s first define “Green”. Green in a broad sense anything that is Environmentally Friendly. How do we make any building partially green?

Three basic things that one can look at for making a difference: 

a.   The Power saving advantages of CFL over Incandescent is already well known. Now the drawback of CFLs is being looked at. These is mercury content in CFLs, the power factor of the CFLs, THD and Noise that is introduced on the power line to which the CFLs are connected.

Some of these drawbacks are overcome by the use of LED lighting. The power consumption of the LEDs is less than half of that of a CFL and the electronics associated with driving the LEDs is lot less complicated compared to CFLs. This helps in reducing the power line noise. Power supply controllers that drive the LEDs help with greater than 0.95 Power Factor resulting in better THD. These LED lamps are retrofit into the existing sockets

a.   Lighting Timers: After the office hours, the lighting inside the commercial buildings can be either dimmed or completely turned off keeping only what is required. This saves lots of power reducing the building’s carbon footprint

b.   Every commercial building rooftop has large unused area. Solar panels can be installed to power the part of the building especially the areas that are powered by LEDs. I say this because the solar panels’ light to electricity conversion efficiency is low so even a large panel will not produce large power. However the power produced by these panels is more than adequate to power the LED lamps. An inverter over 95% efficiency can be used to convert the solar power to usable AC power.

Some of the easiest technologies one can adopt as a first step towards greening his/her home are

a.   LED Lighting

b.   Solar water Heaters

c.   Rainwater harvesting

First of all we have to show the masses the long term benefits of making a building Green. For example when one buys a solar panel, he or she benefits from the power from the panel for Thirty Years. The barrier to entry today is the cost of the panels, sensors, monitors etc; but if you amortize the cost over thirty years, it ends up being inexpensive. In the last six to eight months the cost per watt of solar power has come down 30-40%.  National Solar mission coupled with government subsidies, solar power will become affordable in the near future. The breakeven for solar panels until recently used to be seven years but now I believe it is almost three years. Added solar panel capacity and the wider adoption of renewable energy through awareness, will bring down the breakeven point even lower. Corporations can marginally deviate from the norm and adopt the green building concept. I say “deviate” because it takes additional effort/money to make buildings green. Corporations can be the crusaders of these initiatives. Use of green building materials, solar glass panels, BLDC for Air-conditioning compressor motors, solar water heaters, LED lighting are few of the examples that Green Buildings can readily adopt.

Let me show you the cost differential involved in lighting: 18W CFL costs Rs. 220/- today. Equivalent 6-8W LED lamp costs Rs. 600/-. However CFL has 10,000 hours of life compared to 50,000 hours of life of an LED lamp. This price of LED lamp will come down as the volumes ramp up. The reliability of the electronics will only go up giving all an opportunity to adopt LEDs. Rework is nil and the power saving are enormous. Most of all it is right thing to do for the planet. Rs 600/- LED will more than pay for itself in energy savings alone in the first few months of operation.

This is getting to be too big for anyone to read in one go. I will write about metering, government mandates, awareness etc. in part 2.

Please let me know if anyone wants to discuss this in detail. We can look into the technicalities of the implementation.

Ram