Yes, Virginia, photovoltaics do work

One of the headline snippets in today's in inhabitat news blog is that world installed solar photovoltaic generating capacity has surpassed 100 gigawatts.  Good news enough in its own right. Read about it here.

But for me, as an architect committed to buildings that gobble up less of that generated energy – or better still give back as much as they take – these big news always concentrate too much on the big items like fields of solar collectors working as centralised generators.

I personally think the real future is in building integrated photovoltaics, and the distributed generation which they make possible.  Quite frankly, I think that a building with good integrated photovoltaics is just much more sexy than a great big field of concentrating collectors.

Nevertheless, the central issue is how do all those dispersed BIPV integrate with the large-scale energy grid.  So I thought it was a good excuse to point interested readers at a surprisingly readable source of information, on how much progress has been made in the world's most committed and advanced market.

The European Photovoltaics Industry Association has put out a short version of 'Connecting the Sun'.  It is, as I say, a surprisingly readable report on the stuff that a normal architect, or possibly even a normal building engineer may dismiss as all too hard, all too big, and altogether too much somebody else's business.  This report is not specifically about buildings.  But if you want to bolster your faith in making the effort to integrate photovoltaics into a building that you design, it's well worth the added distraction to at least skim the eighteen pages or so.

Why the odd headline to this post?  Well, I live in hope that all those climate change skeptics try reading this little report, too.  At least then they would confine themselves to just arguing about the evidence of global warming, but would stop knocking the development of sustainable energy sources.  They are good for the planet, and good for us, regardless.

Download the short version of the report here.

Slow architecture

Not so much purposefully, but neither aimlessly surfing for solar and shading software, I came across Gnarly Architecture, a blog by Brian Lockyear of Slate Shingle Studio in Oregon, USA.  Brian describes himself as "a digital voyager with an artistic temperament and an eye for both the sublime and the quirky", and I'm happy to agree with his self-assessment.  For anyone who wants to turn a general fascination with the sometimes dangerous world of parametric architecture into something useful, Brian's blog is compulsory reading.

But the entry that stopped me in my tracks, made me smile inanely, and which I have immediately linked to my First Year coursework site for architecture students at UNSW, is Passive Aggressive Solar Design.  Brian describes it as:

Passive Aggressive Solar is about creating magical spaces by actively considering solar movement in the design. It’s about a window seat and a book at sunrise. It’s about a shady spot at noon. It’s about framing the perfect sunset. At its best, Passive Aggressive Solar is about moments no longer than the time it takes a rainbow to appear and disappear.

He argues convincingly for a healthy synergy between computational analysis now possible to predict exactly the complex geometries of sun movements, and the traditional craft sensibilities of a masterful architect.

Finally, he proposes "a “slow light” approach to solar design, in which we take the time to think about each opening in a space and how it contributes to the magic. Why not use the sun to incorporate movement into the design but on an architectural scale – somewhere between the speed of a waterfall and the stealth of a glacier."

How can you argue with that?  Read the full posting here, and savour the last paragraph.