Net-Zero Energy Skyscrapers: A Tall Order

What does it mean for a building to be net-zero energy? What does passive solar mean? What techniques can architects use to reduce energy consumption? Join the conversation with Jonathan, Joe and Lauren.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
forward Thinking. Welcome to forward Thinking. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm
Lauren Vocalbon, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we wanted

(00:22):
to talk a bit about really energy efficient buildings, Buildings
that are so energy efficient that they actually don't either
they do not draw any energy from the power grid
at all, zero net zero, or they maybe they draw
energy from the power grid, but they also put energy
back in still being net zero, or they're just very

(00:43):
very low energy so they draw a little bit from
the grid but not a lot, or they're even energy positive,
which means they just feed energy back into the power grid.
And uh, we wanted to talk about what it takes
to make a building do that, and what it would
take to make a really big building do that, because

(01:03):
it's one thing to design a residential home that can
be uh net zero energy uh compliant, Right, That's that's
one thing. But to design a skyscraper that can do it,
that has a completely different set of challenges that get
much more complex. And so we wanted to kind of

(01:23):
talk about this whole idea and why we should even
consider it in the first place. Uh. So, really, the
net zero thing is is pretty self explanatory. I mean,
you could at least imagine one in theory, you could
imagine that. Let's say that you have a farmhouse that's
on a essentially a plane, right, and you get lots

(01:46):
of sunlight generally speaking, throughout the year, and you also
have some you know, you have some good winds that
go through the area. So maybe with wind turbines and
solar panels and with a very good design of your house,
you might collect this on light appropriately at different times
the day. Right, And we'll get into all of that
in a minute. Uh, that sort of stuff might allow
you to be self sufficient. In fact, you could theoretically

(02:08):
have a building that's so self sufficient it doesn't even
connect to a power grid and off the grid. Yes,
you're off the grid. Uh granted you're you're still being
tracked because someone's always looking for you. Just kidding, just kidding. Well,
so we we've heard of houses like this. At your house,
it it has a nuclear reactor inside, or it has whatever,

(02:30):
it hasnsters running in wheels, whatever it is that makes
this house self sufficient. But you mentioned bigger buildings. Have
we ever heard of a truly truly energy self sufficient,
a net zero high rise, the large kind of building
you'd see in a city. There's, Um, there's supposedly some

(02:54):
I say supposedly because it's it's difficult to to actually confirm. Well,
let supposed a right. So so there's there's a building
called the Pearl River Tower in guang Sho, China, and uh,
and this tower is seventy one stories tall, So I
think that that counts a skyscraper. Seventy one stories tall?

(03:16):
Does that count of skyscraper? I believe you would think
that it would have to. I mean that it's it's
at least a high rise. Yes, at the least it's
at seventy stories I think, I think, I'm I'm willing
to call it a skyscraper. Of course, I live in Atlanta,
where a seventy story building would be enormous. In fact,
we only have a couple that reached that high. UM anyway,

(03:37):
it's it's it's like the the fourth largest or fourth
tallest building in Guangzho and the some somewhere in the
twenties for all of China. UM it's two point three
million square feet of space, and it's an office building.
So there's no residential in here as far as I
can tell. It's all offices. Uh, and it was, it's

(04:00):
it's supposedly net zero. I say supposedly because I don't
I haven't checked it out personally. Well, yeah, I don't
have any way of specifically going there and seeing it
and making sure that in fact, and the numbers on it.
You know, the engineers have have an interest in making
it sound as good as possible. Of course, Well, we
don't want to cast out, but they're fine, upstanding citizens.

(04:21):
But well, they do have an interest, right, right, The
point being that we cannot confirm, right, We can only
take in the data that is available from the people
who built the thing. And and there's no way that
you can say that that's unbiased. I mean, by by
its very nature it's biased. It may still be correct,
but it is biased. Right. But wait a second here,

(04:42):
So a seventy plus story building that doesn't use any
more energy than it makes? How is that possible? All right? Now,
assuming that in fact that claim is true, here's how
they did it. First of all, it was it was
designed by by two American architects, Gordon Gill and Adrian D. Smith. Actually,

(05:03):
I'm assuming they are American. I know that they designed
it in Chicago. Uh. The the building itself was completed
in late early and Uh. The way that they generate
energy is through several different methods. They use something called
uh passive solar power. Actually they call it sunlight harvesting.

(05:27):
That's how they refer to it and there on their website.
But they also use wind turbines. They have two large
sections of the building where it's designed to channel wind
through these sections and wind turbines are in them. So
it's like like a jet engine for your building kind of. Yeah,
if you were to look at the building face on,
you would see that there were two levels within this building.

(05:50):
So it's like the buildings in three big sections, right.
So you see floors where obviously office space exists, and
there's a chunk floors, and then there's this weird level,
and then there's another chunk of floors and the weird level,
and then the third chunk of floors. Those two weird
levels are actually the wind turbine levels, and they're channeling
the wind through. So if you the other thing is,
if you were to look at the building in profile,

(06:10):
the the the the the outward facing walls would look
kind of curved from floor to floor because it's actually
channeling the wind through those turbines. Um they also had
photo voltaic cells also known as solar panels, and they
use stuff like a raised floor ventilation and radiant heating
and cooling ceilings to help control the temperature inside the

(06:32):
building to reduce the need for using energy to to
run the HVAC system. So that's how this building supposedly operates.
It also makes it really uh easy to get all
that sunlight because from the pictures I saw, it's the
only really tall building in its area, there aren't any

(06:53):
other neighboring skyscrapers butting up against this thing, right, which
has to make it immenseally easier to to a catch
that wind and betch the sunlight. Right. Harvesting the sunlight
is a lot easier when you don't have another normous
building casting a shadow on you. So that's that's generally
how it's done, and of course that's uh kind of
how all net zero buildings work in some to some extent.

(07:17):
There there's an effort of actual energy production as well
as energy conservation that's going on, so well, let's look
at some of those features individually and see what they take.
And now, I imagine everybody's heard of solar panels and
wind turbines. Probably a lot of people aren't familiar with
passive solar, right, yes, So, so like a solar panel

(07:37):
would be an active solar system because you're actually actively
grabbing that solar energy and converting it into electricity. What
is passive solar? Passive solar is uh it's a design issue.
It's hard to just added onto a building the way
you might be able to. So take your average skyscraper
that already exists, all right, you could stick solar panels

(08:00):
all over it if that's a feasible upgrade. The passive
solar is a design issue from the ground floor, and
it means that essentially the building is constructed in a
way to make perfect use of natural sunlight. Um And
a lot of this just comes down to heating and cooling. Uh.

(08:23):
I looked up the U. S Department of Energy says
that the average home's utility bill in America, fifty four
per cent of that is just heating and cooling. Heating
and cooling is a huge amount of the power we
use in our buildings and infrastructure because we like to
be comfortable, right, Um, But like I like my I

(08:45):
like my building cave cold, right well, you know, so
we can you know, wave our hands at that. But
I don't know, I don't know if I could sit
in an office sweaty and like get my work I have,
I don't. I don't recommend it. It's yeah, it's it's definitely,
you know. So we we like to be comfortable. We
keep our buildings at a nice temperature. Um. But this

(09:05):
is really really costly if you're constantly pumping in cold air,
pumping in hot air in order to do it. Passive
solar design allows you to do this with natural angles
of light from the sun. So what it has to
do with is um how you orient the building. For
one thing, the building is built in such a way
with the passage of the sun in different seasons in mind.

(09:29):
So it's built with side facing windows that are designed
to allow sunlight in in the winter to naturally heat
all the rooms, and designed so as to block the
sun in the summer. And this is because the sun
itself passes in a different arc depending upon the season,
because the tilt of the earth. Keeping in mind, of course,

(09:52):
we're talking about rotation of the earth and untilt of
the earth, not the actual passage of the sun. But
it doesn't important point. It does mean, however, or that
you know, there are times, like you've probably noticed this,
where there's certain times the year where at a particular
time of day, sunlight just streams in through a window
and blinds you, and you just you can't get anything done,
so they have to move to some other part of

(10:13):
the play house or or close a blind or something
like that. But other parts of the year, during that
same time of day, everything's fine. You don't have sunlight
coming in through that window. Same sort of thing, except
you're designing an entire building around that so that in
the winter, the sunlight comes in, it hits surfaces. They're
designed to absorb as much heat as possible and radiate
that heat out throughout the day, so that way on

(10:36):
during the winter months when it's cooler, the sunlight's actually
warming the interior of your house, and it's staying warm
longer than it would if it were made out of
some other material. So the material itself has to be
good at at absorbing that energy and then radiating it
out over time. Another issue is just simple insulation. Sure,

(10:58):
anybody who who if you've own to home or anything
like that, you know that installation makes a huge difference
in your energy costs, right, yeah, yeah, you know it's
all the glass panels, the floor to ceiling kind of
glass panels that we have on our current building actually
that we're sitting in right now are gorgeous. But how
energy efficient are they? Right? I don't know. They probably
lose a lot of heat. You definitely want your building

(11:19):
to be weather tight. That's kind of the way that
that it's industry talks about it, and that will allow
you to save a lot on your energy bills. So
that's a lot of these things we're talking about are
things that that, at least to some extent, existing buildings
can do. But you, like you were saying, Joe, you
can't take full advantage of it unless you're planning it

(11:40):
from the very beginning. And it's harder to rotate a
building after we've already set it up. Yeah, we put
it up on stilts. Sadly, it's not not quite like
some city where you just you know, pick this up
and move it over here. Um. Yeah. And also the
it's easier to do on a smaller scale than on
a large scale like a like a skyscraper, especially if

(12:02):
you're talking about the dense urban population where you've got
lots of skyscrapers together, that might mean that you don't
get even if you were to build it from the
ground up, you might not get full sunlight all day
long because of the way the other buildings are. You
might only be able to have you know, one of
these and every you know, three or four city blocks
or something for them all to be as efficient as possible. Right, Well,

(12:22):
you mentioned the Pearl River Tower. You said it was
the only building around that according to the pictures I've seen, Yeah,
there are no other skyscrapers that are immediately adjacent to it,
so it doesn't it looks like it gets the full
benefit of sunlight from where it is right now. So
that would automatically kind of cut back on some of
the advantages if you couldn't build it close to other buildings.

(12:47):
And another challenge that we can think about UM with
with net zero or at least low energy skyscrapers or
high rises is um you've got to offset those costs
you you do incur, right, so you can use passive
solar to control your climate. But you still gotta turn
on the toaster and you know, run you plug in

(13:08):
your laptop and stuff like that. Where does that energy come? Right? So,
so you need to have some sort of energy Uh,
creation like generator is what you need. You need some
form of generation to create the electricity you need for
the to run the stuff in your building. So if
even if you don't have a fusion reactor in your building, right,
you're going to have Yeah, if you if you do

(13:29):
have a fusion reactor in your building, please let us
know because I would love to see that, but chances
are you don't. So how do you generate that electricity?
And uh, and really you're talking one of the other goals.
We didn't really mention it, but one of the other
goals for a net zero energy building is also to
reduce or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, which means that you know,

(13:49):
you can't just fill up generators full of gasoline and
crank them up and use that as the way to
generate electricity. You need to find a way to generate it.
That's that's clean and so uh, the that's where the
photo voltaic cells and the wind turbines come into play, uh,
to to harness the natural energies as much as possible.
But again, when you're talking about a building that's challenging,

(14:11):
right right, there's only so much you can do with
wind turbines. And and study in two thousand nine found
that by far, wind turbines are more efficient, uh costwise
than than photovoltaics for doing this kind of thing. Yeah, yeah,
they compared for for a mixed use community of about people.
This was a study done by the Pacific Northwest National

(14:31):
lab UM. They compared five different scenarios for this, and
they found that that even in even in a city
like Phoenix that has a relatively low amount of wind
in a relatively high amount of sunlight, that um that yeah,
wind farm would win. And and also you know, Joe
you were pointing out earlier when we were talking before
the podcast that uh that it really depends upon the

(14:53):
ratio between the sides of the building that faced the
sun and the top of the building. All right, well,
I mean both of these things, whether it's wind or solar,
they need some sort of freedom of access, right Like
especially solar needs a direct access to the sunline. Wind
I'd imagine. I actually don't know, and this would be
interesting to find out, But do you get more uh

(15:16):
wind if there's less other skyscraper around you, or if
you're within a city skyline? Is that cut down on
your access to it? Actually just depends upon the geography,
because you can you can have what becomes a wind
tunnel depending But there are certain parts of Atlanta, by
the way, this is incredibly obvious. You might you might
walk down one street and you think that's a nice breeze.

(15:38):
You walk between the buildings on Peachtree Street near the
Fox Theater, and then suddenly you are folding on for
dear life. Oh yeah, sometimes I'm driving home and I
think I'm gonna sucked up in a cyclone and my
car shakes, right, and then there's the ruby slippers that
you wear all the time. It explains a lot, Joe.
But but the point being that, yes, I mean the
idea that that even if you were to coat the

(15:59):
entire side of a building with some form of solar panel,
and you know, they've talked about films that could be
used to coat different services that could act as a
photovoltaic cl Let's say that we get to that point
where we can do that, you still are limited by
the fact that that side of the building is only
going to be exposed to the sun during part of
the day, right, so part of the day it's going

(16:21):
to have a lot of sunlight hitting it. The top
of the building is going to have sunlight hitting it
for most of the day. But if if you've built
a very tall but relatively skinny building in the in
the sense that when you get to the roof you
only have a small percentage of the square footage of
the roof is only a tiny fraction of what the
sides are. That's not an efficient way to generate energy.

(16:43):
The taller you go, you're increasing the ratio of your
energy needs to your ability to harvest solar energy exactly.
And you know, and tall buildings like you know, the
the HVAC system that we're talking about. Let's let's assuming that,
of course, the passive solar approach is not completely eliminate
the HVAC requirements. And really, and if we're talking about

(17:05):
a realistic skyscraper, I can't imagine a scenario where passive
soldier takes care of all of that. Then you could
force it to people. People are just gonna have to
to shiver and sweat depending upon the time of year,
or in Atlanta, depending upon the day, since we seem
to be going through winter, summer, and spring simultaneously this

(17:27):
year this week. So in that case, you know, you're
talking about the more floors you have, the greater the
amount of energy you need to maintain the climate as well.
So again, the bigger you get, the higher your footprints
going or the deeper your footprints going to go. I
guess we could say if we're gonna use that metaphor
so that that makes it a challenge. Also does it

(17:48):
depend on I mean, you know, you you mentioned that
this this Chinese building was an office space. Is it
going to take a lot more energy cost for a community,
for for a living community. I would imagine that it
probably would, because if you're talking on office space, one
of the things you could do to help limit the
energy is you essentially say, you know, at X time,
this office building is essentially closed and you can still

(18:10):
be here, but with the lights right right, you may
not have electricity or heat or or or air conditioning,
but you could still be here. Whereas, of course, if
it's residential oxygen now I don't think it's gotten quite
that bad. But yeah, if you for residential, clearly you
would need to have access to all of those things.

(18:31):
More people shower, I would say, at home than they
do in their offices. So well maybe you probably you
have obviously not seen the shower on this floor, um,
or the shower at my home for that man, it's
a talent only shower. We have, you know, their benefits
to go with the job. But yeah, so there are

(18:52):
some challenges here. In fact, we cannot really say for
certain if if a high rise like a skyscraper could
really be a net zero energy building, if we're talking
about in the middle of an urban space, it would
be an incredible challenge. Um. Maybe we could find more
efficient ways to generate electricity through things like wind power
or solar power, and that would help, but you're still

(19:15):
talking about a huge energy need. Another thing we could
do is looking at energy conservation, so cutting down on
things like vampire power UH standby power. So essentially that's
when you know you have your computer turned off, but
it's plugged in and it's still pulling some power from
the UH from the building. If you were able to
eliminate that and have you know the switches where when

(19:38):
you turn the switch off, that's it. No more powers
going through there. That would help. Or or you know,
the per capita water use in America something like six
hundred and sixty thousand gallons per per family per year,
and that's that's an enormous amount. That's almost twice the
global average. So yeah, so so cutting down that would
help a great deal as well. So I think it

(19:59):
definitely would be a huge challenge and possibly even an
impossible one right now with today's technology. That that's not
to say that we would not someday find a way
to achieve this, but uh and and if any at
any rate, going through this would mean reducing our energy consumption,
which is a good thing. I mean, whether or not
we believe the claims about this building in China, we

(20:21):
do know that now we can create what are called
low energy building that you know, that's it's definitely feasible
to create a building that, though it might not completely
break even it uses very little. Even even less is
a pretty terrific amount when you go for a couple
of years. So and there are some buildings out there,

(20:42):
and they're usually smaller ones that you know, they take
some energy from the grid, but then they may generate
energy throughout parts of the year and actually sell energy
back to the grid. So ultimately, if you look at
you know, if you look at the receipt at the
end of the year, you might say, oh, well, this
building ultimately breaks even even though during parts of the

(21:02):
year it has to consume energy from the grid. Um,
So there are those options as well. And of course,
maybe one day we'll reach a point where this won't
be as big a a priority. For instance, maybe if
we somehow crack that fusion problem, then in k yeah,
we've got an energy surplus at that point. And if

(21:23):
you have an energy surplus, then these considerations are no
longer really important. Now, I would stress that a lot
of the things that go into this this design process
are beneficial in other ways. Besides the fact that they
help cut down our energy consumption, they also cut down
on greenhouse gas emissions, which also then means that we

(21:44):
have less of an impact on on climate change. So
there are other reasons to pursue these technologies besides just
right right right. But I'm saying that even if we
get to the day where where fusion is completely possible,
which you know, I hope that day comes. I just
I just don't you know, I don't see it happening tomorrow,

(22:07):
but if it, if it happens, maybe ten years from
now or twenty years from now, I still think that
the design principles of the net zero energy buildings are
important for us to consider for the other benefits besides
energy consumption. So uh, that's the answer I give to
people who who think that. You know, they say, oh, well,

(22:29):
don't worry because technology is going to solve our energy problems,
so we shouldn't have to worry about this at all.
My response is, no, we should definitely look into this
because it means that we come up with new ideas
that help the world, even if it even if the
energy consumption angle goes out the window. Well, I love
to speculate about technology as much as anybody, but you know,
it's really easy when you're not the one making it. Yeah. Sure, no,

(22:56):
I'm working I'm working on to keep our feet on
the ground. Yes, yes, yes. The only reason I say
all that is because I know people. I actually know
people in my life who have the attitude of that's
not worth worrying about because someone smarter than I am
is working on it. Just just throw that McDonald's rapper

(23:18):
right at that baby dear's head and technology a robot
will come along and pick up both the baby deer
and the rapper, use plasmification to turn them into useful energy,
and Bambi and your fast food will power your home
for the next three hours. I know people who think

(23:38):
you want there are people who think like that, and my, my,
my perspective is that that is not necessarily a responsible philosophy.
The idea that oh, we don't have to worry about
it today because tomorrow will solve the problem. Well, the
only way that works is if we actually work on
solving the problem. That's my point. I know that we

(24:00):
talk a lot, and especially in this episode, about the
challenges that we face, but honestly, if there's one thing
I think human beings have proven themselves capable of doing,
it's meeting challenges that previous generations thought as being impassable.
There was just no way we're going to get around it,
get over it, get through it. And yet time and
time again we have found ways to fix problems that

(24:23):
people thought were unsolvable. Oh, of course, I mean, like
every cool thing we've ever done was deemed impossible, right
and so and so I really do think that you know,
knowing that what what the challenges are, that's definitely important.
But don't give up thinking that those challenges are are
are hard barriers that will never get through. That just

(24:44):
means that we need to rise to the occasion is
ultimately what I think. Um So, guys, if you are
interested in these sort of topics, these futuristic topics, then
we highly recommend you get in touch with us and
you can follow us on Facebook. You can follow us
on Twitter, you can follow us on good goal plus. Uh.
You can go to the blogs fw thinking dot com

(25:05):
that actually has links to all the things I mentioned.
You can find me the various links to the videos
the podcast that you're listening to. Now, if you want
to listen to some older podcasts and you don't have
time to download them, you can listen to them directly
on the website. We have lots of information there and
we want you to be part of this conversation. Let
us know what what's exciting to you, and we will

(25:26):
make sure that we incorporate that into our future discussions.
We really look forward to hearing from you. And we
will talk to you again really soon. For more on
this topic and the future of technology, visit forward Thinking
dot com. H brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,