Author: Jason Livingston

ALEC On The Wrong Side Of History

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), with funding from fossil fuel producers and the utility industry, has turned its attention to renewable energy, and not in a good way. Their latest push is to levy a surcharge on homeowners who install solar panels and then feed electricity back into the grid when the panels generate more electricity than the home is using. The legislation has already passed in Oklahoma and Arizona. Known as net metering and required by 43 states, this practice reduces the homeowner’s utility bill and the amount of energy that the utilities have to produce. A win-win, right? Wrong! Because by reducing the homeowner’s bill it reduces the utility companies profits as outlined in a report by the Edison Electric Institute.

ALEC claims that reduced utility company income will prevent them from maintaining the electricity distribution system, and if large-scale adoption of solar takes place we as a society may indeed have to reconsider the way that we finance the maintenance of the system. However, discouraging adoption of renewable energy is not the way to go. We absolutely need more renewable sources of electricity and less reliance on fossil fuels, as made clear by several reports that have been released recently. Consider the following:

  • The latest work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that climate scientists have high confidence in:
    • Risk of severe ill-health and disrupted livelihoods for large urban populations due to inland flooding in some regions.
    • Systemic risks due to extreme weather events leading to breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services such as electricity, water supply, and health and emergency services.
    • Risk of food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes, particularly for poorer populations in urban and rural settings.
  • The Carbon Tracker Initiative has estimated that 60% to 80% of the coal, oil, and gas reserves of publicly traded companies are “unburnable” if we are to limit global warming to a somewhat manageable 2°C, as opposed to the catastrophic 9°C that would result from inaction on climate change.
  • The global concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has reached 400 parts per million for the first time in recorded history, as reported by NASA. According to NOAA, CO2 levels measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii have risen by 24% in just the past 56 years.

Clearly, protecting the profitability of utilities and fossil fuel companies shouldn’t be a consideration. Nor should the economic impact of addressing climate change. The IPCC finds that the cost of addressing climate change would result in an average reduction in economic growth of a mere 0.06% for the rest of this century.

Meanwhile, the cost per watt of solar modules is dropping with breathtaking speed. In 1980 the cost per watt was over $16. In 2012 it was $1, just a few cents more than the upper cost for coal and natural gas. From 2011 to 2013 the cost of installed solar systems fell by 50%. Projecting these downward curves forward it’s easy to see that in just a few years solar is likely to be less expensive than fossil fuels.

Of course, one of the biggest problems with renewables such as solar and wind is that they aren’t consistent. This means that to increase our dependence on them we need a way to store energy when it’s produced and retrieve it when it’s needed. Fortunately, brilliant (pun intended) people are working on the storage issue. The latest promising technology uses a recently discovered material, grapheme, to produce rechargeable batteries that can hold at least twice as much energy as lithium ion batteries. You can read about these advancements in The Guardian and Energy Harvesting Journal.

So it seems to me that ALEC and its backers may win another victory or two before the tide sweeps them aside because they are on the wrong side of history. First, science tells us that we as a society must make changes, including a massive conversion to renewable energy. Second, technology is making the adoption of renewable energy possible with ever increasing speed. Third, economics tells us that we as individuals will soon be able to save money by installing solar panels on our homes because we’ll be able to generate electricity cheaper than the utilities.

Lighting Up Pratt

Yesterday my students at Pratt presented custom built lighting fixtures inspired buy the work of a fashion designer.  Here are some of them.

Designed by Connie Chen Inspired by Calla Haynes
Designed by Connie Chen
Inspired by Calla Haynes

 

Designed by Devon Aerts Inspired by Jil Sander
Designed by Devon Aerts
Inspired by Jil Sander
Designed by Kelsey Birchenall Inspired by Jolka Wiens
Designed by Kelsey Birchenall
Inspired by Jolka Wiens

 

Designed by Marianne Kim Inspired by Philip Lim
Designed by Marianne Kim
Inspired by Philip Lim

 

Designed by Sonya Jeong Inspired by Choe
Designed by Sonya Jeong
Inspired by Choe

 

Designed by YG Jeong Inspired by Longchamp
Designed by YG Jeong
Inspired by Longchamp

 

DOE Presents LED Color Stability Webinar

On Tuesday, April 15, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Solid-State Lighting Program will host a 60-minute live webinar entitled LED Color Stability: 10 Important Questions. The webinar will begin at 1:00 p.m. ET (10:00 a.m. PT) and will include a 45-minute presentation followed by a 15-minute question-and-answer session with attendees. IES continuing education credits will be offered.

The lumen maintenance lifetime of many LED products is 25,000 hours or more, but that doesn’t mean products are guaranteed to perform the same over that time. One thing that could change is the color of the light, or chromaticity. This webinar will examine the causes of color shift, and look at existing metrics used to describe color shift/color stability in LED lighting. Are there established tolerances for color shift? What current standards apply to the measurement of color shift, and are there plans for new methods and/or standards for projecting color shift in the future? Presenters Michael Royer of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Ralph Tuttle of Cree, and Chad Stalker of Philips Lighting will answer these questions and many others.

Click here to register.

March 21st Event

Next Friday, the 21st, I’ll be speaking at the 24th Annual Symposium on Public Monuments in New York City.  The symposium is on the legacy of the 19th century architect Patrick Charles Keely.  I’ll be speaking on my relighting of his Church of the Holy Innocents on 37th Street in Manhattan.  For more information, go to www.monumentsconservancy.org.

Here’s what the church looks like today.

Church of the Holy Innocents
Church of the Holy Innocents

Let’s Not Try So That We Don’t Succeed

Two frustrating items came across my desk this morning.  The first is an attempt by two Ohio state senators (both Republicans) to pass a law (SRC25) prohibiting the use of LEED in all Ohio state buildings, including schools.  This despite the fact that Ohio already has 100+ LEED school buildings that are saving  tax payers tens of thousands of dollars on energy bills every year.  What’s the rationale for the new bill?  You can read the full text here, but essentially it claims that LEED v4 “fails to conform to recognized voluntary standard development procedures.”

Why is LEED, the largest and most successful green program in the world, being singled out?  This is really just a smokescreen for an attempt to protect certain industries and manufacturers from divulging the contents of their building materials, which is new under LEED v4.  The reason favoring disclosure is simple.  Some building materials have chemical components that seep out of the product and into the indoor environment, a process called off-gassing.  Without disclosure from manufacturers the architects and owners have no way of knowing what chemicals workers, students, patients, etc. are being exposed to.  With disclosure they can make better choices that minimize any possible effects on building occupants.  Some manufacturers have been very pro-active about reformulating their products to limit or eliminate off-gassing.  Apparently some have decided that ignorance (on the part of architects, owners, and occupants) is bliss (for the manufacturer).

The second news item concerns an amendment to a bill working its way through the U.S. Senate.  The Energy Savings and Industrial Competitive Act (ESICA), if passed, would be the first new energy efficiency related legislation passed in seven years.  The problem?  The “All-Of-The-Above Federal Building Energy Conservation Act of 2013” failed to pass last year, but is now part of ESICA.   It calls for the repeal of Section 433 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), which mandates that the federal government eliminate fossil fuel-generated energy from new and renovated federal buildings by 2030. In other words, it would repeal the government’s commitment to the 2030 Challenge for carbon reduction.   The AIAs response can be found here.  Other organizations opposing the amendment include Architecture 2030 and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Not surprisingly, the sponsors of the amendment are from states where fossil fuel production is a major industry.  It’s true that the U.S has enormous reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas that can supply our energy needs for many years to come.  It’s also true that we’re changing the global environment by burning these fuels.  We can decide to wait until our reserves are used up before we entertain making a change.  However, in doing so, we are also deciding to allow Germany, Japan, South Korea, China etc. to develop the technologies that will power the future.  Alternatively, we can decide to lead the energy revolution by developing the technologies, and the markets for them, here at home.  Contact your senator and let him/her know which path you’d prefer to take.

“Design Guidelines for the Visual Environment” Comment Period

The Low Vision Design Committee of the New Buildings Institute has release a draft of its new “Design Guidelines for the Visual Environment” for public review and comment.  The intent of the guidelines is to offer assistance to design professionals and others in accommodating those  with a variety of vision disorders.  Click here to visit the NBI site to download the draft.

Basking in a New Glow

The New York times has an “I Heart LEDs” article in today’s paper that leaves out some important information about evaluating them.  Here are some additional thoughts.

The government hasn’t done a very good job of publicizing or explaining that the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) set minimum efficiency requirements for general use light bulbs (the act excluded decorative and colored products).  The incandescent lamp that’s been around for over 100 years doesn’t meet the energy efficiency standard.  Rather than re-engineer incandescent lamps, the lamp manufacturers have focused on expanding and emphasizing compact fluorescent (CFL) and light emitting diode (LED) technologies.  Again, you can still purchase 40 – 100 watt decorative incandescent lamps but not A-lamps, the most common shape in use.

The easiest substitution, one that requires no thinking about rewiring, dimming, etc., is the halogen lamp.  Halogen lamps are an improvement on standard incandescent lamps, and many of them meet the EISA energy efficiency requirements.

If you’re looking for higher energy efficiency, and are willing to pay a higher price up front to get it, CFL and LED lamps are available in a wide range of wattages and shapes.  However, they  need to be approached with caution.  Both technologies can be difficult to dim, especially with older dimmers that were designed with incandescent lamps in mind, so your existing dimmers may need to be replaced.  They can also produce unsatisfactory tints of white light.  LEDs are especially notorious for not matching the information provided on the packaging, as demonstrated through the Department of Energy’s CALiPER program.

Here’s what to look for.  Every light bulb package should have a Lighting Facts Label that looks like this.

Lighting Facts Label
Lighting Facts Label

The orange/yellow/white/blue color bar is where you’ll find information about the warmth or coolness of the light, both with an arrow on the color bar and with a number.  The number is called the Color Temperature (actually the correlated color temperature) and measures the warmth or coolness in Kelvin.  The important thing to know is that a lower number (2700 to 3000 K) is roughly equal to an incandescent light bulb.  As the number gets higher the light gets cooler.

Warmth/coolness isn’t the only measurement of the quality of light.  Another consideration is how well the light source allows us to see the colors of objects.  This is called Color Rendering (Color Accuracy on the Lighting Facts Label) and is indicated by a Color Rendering Index number.  Higher numbers (with a maximum of 100) indicate better color rendering, so a light with a Color Accuracy of 95 should be visibly better than one of 80.

The Color Rendering Index is not very specific, however, and is known to misrepresent LEDs.  Therefore you are the best, final test of whether or not a given light bulb is appropriate.  I recommend purchasing only one or two and trying them out for a few days before committing to changing over your entire house.

My other recommendation is to stick with the major manufacturers (GE, Philips, Sylvania) for most lamps that you test.  These companies have a track record of product consistency and quality that many of the newer manufacturers don’t.  I can almost guarantee that with an off-brand 5-pack of lamps for $10 you’ll get what you pay for and hate the results.  It’s not the technology that you’ll hate, but the manufacturer’s poor execution of the technology.

I hope this helps.

Great Concert Lighting, Times Two

Whatever you thought of Bruno Mars last night (I thought he was terrific), you have to admit that the lighting for last night’s Super Bowl Halftime Show was outstanding!  And it should have been – we would have expected nothing less.  The light, color, movement, and video were clear, supportive of the music and the performances (more so for Mars than for RHCP), and scaled to fill the television screen, the staging area, and the stadium.  We’ll see statistics in the entertainment industry magazines next month, but there were obviously several hundred moving lights and twice as many LED lights and display panels.  It was an appropriately huge rig for a huge show, and it looked great.

There’s an interesting and exciting contrast between the 12 minutes last night and the 90 minutes of Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads, which I happen to watch on Saturday (and is available on YouTube here). What’s interesting is that this concert has all of the energy of last night’s performance, but rather than back up the music with nearly overwhelming visuals, David Byrne and Beverly Emmons, who are both credited for the lighting design, created a show in which the lighting of the first 1/3 of the concert appears to be accidental, and the rest is still so stripped down that it seems like something must be wrong, especially when compared to today’s visual smorgasbord of color, video and light on contemporary tours.  I’m not knocking big tours at all, I love them, but the contrast between the two shows, and the fact that they’re each successful, is astonishing.

In the film, we open on a slightly cluttered stage with two visible worklights hanging overhead.  An impossibly young Byrne walks on with a boom box and a guitar, and appears to sing Psycho Killer in little more than white worklight.  Of course, the trained eye can see that there’s a lot more going on, but that’s the look they’ve created.  Over the next five songs more musicians are added, and the lighting becomes somewhat more theatrical, with higher contrast and increased intensity on the performers. Yet, it’s not until the fifth song (Slippery People) that a backdrop flies in and it looks like a staged performance instead of a rehearsal in a warehouse.  20 minutes in we get our first taste of “rock” lighting – there’s finally enough haze in the air to outline some beams of light – but it still seems like there’s only one cue per song!  Although I’m sure that there’s color correction used, the entire concert appears to be performed in white light.  In fact, we don’t see any color until the 8th song (Making Flippy Floppy ) a full 30 minutes into the show, and that’s only on the projection screens behind the band!

I could go on, but I won’t.  If you haven’t seen this movie, or haven’t seen it in a while, watch it now.  Between the bold, strong, yet spare lighting and Byrne’s unique performance style, you won’t be bored.  Let everyone else talk about the Super Bowl while you go see one of the best concert films ever made.

The Best Light?

In class yesterday one of my students, thinking about a project she had recently completed, asked, “What’s the best light for a hair salon?”  I’m certain she was hoping I would tell her exactly what lamp technology and/or lamp style to use.  Of course, it’s not that simple.

So the class took a detour to talk about the important aspects of light in a hair salon.  We narrowed it down to two critical considerations – intensity and color rendering.  Intensity is important because the stylist needs to be able to see the details of a head of black hair as well as a head of blonde hair.  Intensity is relatively easy to achieve, and the designer has a wide range of lamp technologies, lamp shapes, and fixture types to choose from.  Finally, everyone intuitively understands how intensity affects vision.  If there’s not enough light one can’t see well enough to work.

Color Rendering is more complicated.  All of my students had heard of color rendering, but few of them understood its meaning or use.  Color rendering is the ability of a light source to enable us to see object colors.  For instance, a light source that produced no red light would do a terrible job of allowing us to judge red apples and we would say it has poor color rendering.  Color rendering is measured on the Color Rendering Index (CRI) which compares the light source being tested to incandescent light (for warm light) or to daylight (for cool light).  The higher the result, on a range that peaks at 100, the more a light source simulates incandescent or daylight in enabling us to see the colors of illuminated objects.

The best light source, then, is one that produces the desired intensity and has a high CRI.  Of course, there’s much, much more to color rendering and to the topic of color in light.  The color chapter in Designing Light is about 40 pages, and the IES DG-1 Color and Illumination looks like it will be about 100 pages.  It’s critical that lighting designers understand color because it has such a strong affect on people.  Color rendering is just one aspect.  Color also affects things such as our impressions and perception of a space, circadian rhythms, visual acuity, and the interior designer’s color palette.  Those are topics for another post.