Last week, I was fortunate to attend a meeting with Amory Lovins, the co-founder and chief scientist from Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). For decades, Amory Lovins has been influencing governments and corporations around the world on energy efficiency. We were meeting with him to review some tools that Autodesk offers for Sustainable Design Analysis. I have to admit I was not aware of options on the “Building” side of the house for green design. Green Building Studio, for example, is an analysis tool that enables architects and designers to evaluate how building elements like window sizes, glazing types, lighting, and roof treatments impact energy consumption. It even takes into account local climate and power production data. Green Building Studio has this cool “Large SUV” stat, showing a building’s carbon footprint in units of large SUVs.
Amory talked about a number of projects that he has been involved with over the years. The overarching theme was that Green pays for itself if you do it correctly. He offered an example of retrofitting an existing 20-year old Chicago building – the glass wall windows were failing and needed replacement. They chose to replace the windows with higher rated ones. Though the better windows cost more, this cost was quickly recouped and now the building required smaller HVAC units that also ran less often. He also talked about the retrofit of New York City’s iconic Empire State Building, which will become 38% more energy efficient. Those were just two of the many examples he offered of “Whole System Design”, in which you may pay more for some parts but you will recover that cost in other systems and in operating costs.
On the Plant side, one point he made was to consider big fat short pipes and small pumps to get desired flow instead of our more traditional large pumps coupled with smaller but longer pipe runs. Sure, the big fat pipes cost more per unit, but you make up for that in pump costs. He was similarly advocating laying out the pipes first and the equipment second. If you are interested in the details, check out “Tunneling through the Cost Barrier”.
We at Autodesk are still very new to the Plant Design field – but I can see us in the future developing tools similar to Green Building Studio – tools that allow plant designers to quickly and easily do case studies on efficiencies of different plant design options.
The whole system design idea is not rocket science. And yet, it is not what we are traditionally taught in engineering school. It’s exciting to see a movement that challenges traditional thought and gives some framework for thinking about sustainable design of plants. In fact this summer, RMI is undertaking a project they termed 10xE for Factor Ten Engineering. 10xE is an effort to accelerate the adoption of whole system design by, among other things, creating a casebook documenting whole system design results versus standard practice results. The goal is to show 10-fold increase in resource productivity.
RMI is actively seeking engineers and teachers to join them in 10xE, and they’re looking for existing designs that can be redone by the whole-system approach. If you are interested, I urge you to check out 10xE and get involved!
