Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 12
Renewable Energy and Sum-Zero
Energy Buildings
In the past few decades the diminishing resources and consequently the higher
prices of fossil-based energy, and also increasing public awareness and understand-
ing of the massive damages that utilizing the common fossil-based energy resources
such as coal and gas impose to the environment have made the engineers to inves-
tigate new and clean resources of energy. These new and clean resources mainly are
known as renewable energy. The renewable energy (sustainable energy) is com-
monly defi ned as resources of energy that can be reused time after time without
short changing the future generations from reliable resource of energy and would
not create harmful residuals that can threat the people health and the environment
cleanness.
At the same time architects and engineers attentions have moved towards design-
ing such buildings that from the energy consumption stance are more effi cient, and
since building industry counts for a very large portion of energy consumption in the
USA and also the rest of the world, attention has been paid towards designing build-
ings which are even energy self-suffi cient as well. These buildings when are respon-
sible for producing hundred percent of their daily (yearly) energy usage, would be
called sum-zero energy buildings.
In the following section I will briefl y review some of the different available
types of renewable energy and also some techniques for designing a so called sum-
zero energy building. One of the most valuable resources of information about
renewable energy types can be found in the US Department of Energy website
“http://energy.gov/”, that I referred to that when developing the following section.
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