As renewable technologies make their way into our lives, we wonder how we will integrate the newly available technologies with our older technology that we still use to power our homes, our electronics and much more. Ir's hard to imagine calling some sort of firm and asking them to strip your house of its electricity and replace everything with solar cells tomorrow. So what we are left with is buying home energy storage units and saving ourselves some money by using less energy from the old grid in peak times.
Enter, the passive solar building. A building designed with solar energy in mind. A guest blogger for Sturdy Structural defines the passive solar building as a building designed with energy saving elements. We're talking the entire building. From the roof to the walls, to the floors. Solar passive buildings take the climate into consideration, using energy-saving applications to collect any and all energy that the sun is giving to the units.
To see the engineering design principles behind passive solar buildings, check this video out. This uses a house as an example, however, more and more business complexes are building with passive solar technologies in mind:
Cornell University has also gotten wind of further development in passive solar buildings. The university has seen designs that could make their next dormitories the most energy-efficient dorms in the world. The dorms will be a $115 million project and stand at 26-stories high. The passive solar design will ensure that the building uses 70 to 90 percent less energy than buildings of equal size. The engineers behind the building say it will be the largest passive-house building in the world once it is completed. The building will have 550 solar panels on the roof that will power the building. The dorms will be air-tight and will prevent any outside air of making its way in requiring more energy to be used. Special vents will be used to funnel and filter fresh into air into the dorms.
