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O P I N I O N
Embracing new technologies
T his must surely be the most interesting time to be designing and developing buildings. The new technologies that are zooming forward are truly changing the world of the built environment – and very much for the better. Things I could not have imagined just a few years ago are now coming to market, are affordable and practical, and are changing the world for the better.
Take, for instance, power sources, distribution, and consumption. Some of the technologies we’re exploring today, I hadn’t even imagined five to 10 years ago. Solar generation of electricity is with us today in a big way – not only solar panels (the cost of which continues to go down) on the top of office buildings, but in large arrays being built by utilities and incorporated into our power grids. Along with solar power (only available during sunlight hours), storage for non-sunlit times is advancing. When I first incorporated solar panels on the roof of a house I built in San Francisco in 2001, I wanted to have a battery backup. This consisted of a rack of 12-volt car batteries – expensive and high-maintenance. There were no Tesla Power Walls in 2001, nor other more efficient and less expensive storage systems. Today there are several, with others being designed and coming to market every day, reducing cost, increasing efficiency and improving maintenance. The only good thing 17 years ago
was that photovoltaic panels generated 12-volt DC current and that’s what batteries liked. Back then, I still needed an inverter to power the lighting in my home to inefficient incandescent lamps and, although a little more efficient, fluorescent lamps. “New and emerging technologies are among the reasons why I’m so excited about being a designer/ developer today.” Today, the world is being lighted increasingly by LED (light-emitting diode) lamps, with much longer lamp-lives and much reduced power consumption. And color technologies with LEDs have improved greatly, with many of them being manufactured to allow tuning to exactly the color temperature that you desire or continuously tunable to follow the circadian cycle of daylight.
Edward Friedrichs
See EDWARD FRIEDRICHS, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER November 26, 2018, ISSUE 1273
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