Energy-Efficient Buildings, the National Tour of Solar Buildings of ASES, and the Energy Needs of the Future

Every October since 1996, ASES has organized a National Tour of Solar Buildings. Before 1996 the tour was organized by the Real Goods store of Ukiah and Hopland, California. This year the National Tour of Solar buildings will be held on Saturday, October 5, and will include many tours in different parts of the country. The Hidden Villa office building is sure to be on such a tour, and the Santa Cruz area has at least one tour. I am organizing such a tour in the San Luis Obispo area, as described below. Information on all of the ASES tours around the country can be found on the ASES website at http://www.ases.org, and also in the September/October issue of the ASES magazine Solar Today, that can be purchased at Bookshop Santa Cruz, and that will be handed out on all of the tours across the country.

I have known Ken Haggard and Polly Cooper for many years, and will be organizing a tour of a number of the homes and buildings they have designed and built in the San Luis Obispo, California area on October 5. I have done that every year since the ASES tours started in 1996, and did it several times before that for the students in the solar energy course I taught at Cabrillo.

The passive solar designs of Ken and Polly are much better than those of most other solar architects. They always do the final optimization of their designs with a computer program that uses the local weather (TMY) data, and change the design variables until the annual predicted utility bills are as low as possible. That is how they got the Hidden Villa results, involving both the thermal and the daylighting performance. Most of the other architects get nowhere near the comfort, the energy efficiency, or the lighting quality achieved routinely by Ken and Polly. Their buildings are very reasonable in cost, since good performance is achieved with intelligent design, and not with fancy features.

The last few years the San Luis Obispo tour has involved the local Mothers for Peace organization, which supplied docents at all of the buildings, handed out maps and programs and sold tickets to the 300 or so people who attended. This year the Mothers for Peace group was unable to participate due to other commitments. The tour attendance will be small, since there have been no newspaper, magazine, radio, or TV announcements. The whole tour will be guided by the architects, Ken and Polly, personally. The tour will include a very successful co-housing cluster of about 25 units built in a former avocado orchard, a winery involving a straw bale wine cellar, a single family home, and the housing and architectural office complex of Ken and Polly. The buildings use little or no energy for heating and cooling, some of them also have solar heated water, and one of them is off the grid, using photovoltaic panels and a small water turbine to charge the batteries of its electric power system. Good daylighting design makes artificial lighting necessary mostly at night. Some details on the tour follow.

The tour will start at the co-housing project in Arroyo Grande at 11:30 AM, and we can expect to be there until 12:30. To get to the co-housing project, take the Halcyon Road exit off Highway 101 in Arroyo Grande, and go all the way south until getting to the "T" intersection Halcyon Road makes with Highway 1. Turn right on Highway 1, and then turn right at the very next street, on Tierra Nueva. Go up about a long block's distance, with the Tierra Nueva Co-Housing cluster being the second possible left hand driveway. We will be meeting at the Common House, and then touring around the property, and if you get there between 11:30 and 12:30 you should have no trouble finding us. We will hand out a detailed map for the tour at the Co-Housing project, and will also hand out copies of the September/October issue of the Solar Today of the American Solar Energy Society (ASES), and some other material. The San Luis Obispo Tour map and Tour details will also be posted at http://www.ecotopia.com, under "ASES San Luis Obispo Tour."

The second stop will be the Claiborne & Churchill Winery, at 2649 Carpenter Canyon Road (halfway between Arroyo Grande and San Luis Obispo, north of Highway 101). We will be there about one hour for a visit, lunch break, straw-bale-winery-cellar-examination, wine-purchase (as needed), and people meeting session. There will be picnic tables and an unlimited amount of wine and running water. It is safest to bring a complete picnic lunch, for we will have (at best) only a limited selection of soft drinks.

The third stop will be the single family house of Dr. and Mrs. Oelker. Dr. and Mrs. Oelker live in a gated (locked gate) development, but will let us into the gate by being with us on the tour from the start. The tour group will have to arrive there as a more or less unified group of cars and people for this visit to work properly.

The fourth and final stop will be the home and architectural office and shop complex of Ken Haggard and Polly Cooper, at 16550 Oracle Oak Way, Santa Margarita. This is off Tassajara Creek Road. The Tassajara Creek Road exit is an exit going West off Highway 101, about 1 mile south of the Santa Margarita exit (Route 58) on Highway 101. Oracle Oak Way involves a left hand turn off Tassajara Creek Road after about 1.5 miles, just after a sign on the right hand side that says: "20 MPH," with the left hand roadway exit showing a sign that says: "SULLY SPRINGS TRAIL" and NOT "Oracle Oak Way." "Sully Springs Trail" turns into "Oracle Oak Way" a bit later, and the Ken and Polly place is at the end of Oracle Oak Way.

More details and a map on the San Luis Obispo tour will be posted in the near future on the http://www.ecotopia.com website, under "ASES San Luis Obispo Tour." You can also get more details from me (or from Ken and Polly) by phone or e-mail. The tour is particularly relevant at this time, since one or more co-housing clusters are planned for the ecovillage to be built on the 10 acre Swenson parcel next to Antonelli Pond (close to Natural Bridges), and Ken Haggard and Polly Cooper will be the architects involved. Come, and bring your friends!

Incidentally, this tour will be completely free, but we may have a nominal charge for those who want to have a soft drink at the winery. Those who feel terribly guilty about this might want to become a member of ASES. Those who do not feel terribly guilty about this may want to become a member of ASES anyway, for this can almost be guaranteed to make them feel more environmentally sensitive, more up to date and highly educated, etc., etc.

My involvement in solar energy has led to a long term interest in petroleum and natural gas, for I have long felt that renewable energy will never become popular until petroleum and natural gas become scarce and expensive. This age of shortages and high prices will start when the petroleum (or natural gas) industry reaches the "Hubbert Peak," the point at which resource depletion makes it impossible to make the petroleum (or natural gas) "production" (i.e. the extraction) increase any further. The production then peaks, and starts on its permanent and inexorable decline. I have helped Ron Swenson (the webmaster) develop a website on this, which can be reached at http://www.hubbertpeak.com or http://www.oilcrisis.com or http://www.energycrisis.com. This Hubbert Peak website has contributions of many highly respected petroleum geologists.

The USA reached its Hubbert Peak in petroleum in 1970, and is apparently at its Hubbert Peak in natural gas now. The world Hubbert Peak in petroleum is expected to arrive this decade, and by the year 2050 the world supply of petroleum will only be only about 25% of what it is now. This makes the ASES National Tour of Solar Buildings extra relevant. Buildings without the energy efficiency features shown on the ASES tour are likely to be painfully expensive (or uncomfortable) for decades to come.

I am attaching a copy of a recent talk by Mr. Matthew Simmons. Simmons is a very prominent oil and gas investment banker in Houston, whose website is http://www.simmonsco-intl.com. Simmons is apparently very well connected in the Bush administration, and has also been in close contact with the petroleum geologists (Campbell, LaHerrere, and others) featured at our Hubbert Peak website. He gave this talk on energy prospects and US government energy policy at a workshop organized by these petroleum geologists, held earlier this year in Uppsala, Sweden. In it, he mentioned that he expects the US production of natural gas to drop by 10% in the next 6 month, and to drop another 10% before it bottoms out. He does not expect enough of a production increase after that to get us back to where we are now. He thinks that we are about to start on the final and permanent period of natural gas scarcity and high prices in the North American continent: that we are already at the Hubbert Peak in natural gas.

The overseas resources of natural gas may well be vast, but they are pretty irrelevant. Natural gas cannot be piped across an ocean. The use of LNG tankers involves very high costs, very high terrorist vulnerability, extreme dangers, and very long lead times. The USA can only count on US, Mexican, and Canadian gas supplies, and it is those in which the new production sources are now beginning to be unable to keep up with the depletion of the existing sources.

Dr. Colin J. Campbell (an important contributor to our hubbertpeak.com website), has now started an organization called "Association for Peak Oil" in England that tracks the impending petroleum (and natural gas) shortages. The newsletters of that group can be found at:
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/aspo/

You might be interested in a passive solar office building of the Hidden Villa organization, designed by the architectural team of Polly Cooper and Ken Haggard. The energy performance of the building is quite amazing, far better than the normal "Title 24" construction. The building is essentially self sufficient in energy. It uses no energy for cooling, and very little for heating. The electric power consumption is about the same as the output of the solar photovoltaic (PV) panels. The PV panels feed the PG&E grid, with the average power consumption being close to zero. Hidden Villa is well worth a visit, and the Hidden Villa people are happy to show it to visitors who make an appointment.

Hidden Villa is a non-profit organization located at:
26870 Moody Road
Los Altos Hills, CA 94022
The grounds of Hidden Villa cover about 1,500 acres, half of an earlier estate (called "Hidden Villa") owned by a Stanford University professor since the early part of the 20th century. The house of the professor was built in a very remote part of the parcel, which is where the name "Hidden Villa" comes from. Hidden Villa grows organic crops, organizes workshops and courses in organic agriculture and environmental topics (including sustainability), and offers summer courses for children.