Introduction The ongoing energy use of a building is one of the single greatest environmental impacts of a building. All the activities that take place in the building consume a lot of energy that demands lots of resources from the biosphere and the environment. However, the flow of energy into any network of activities cannot be made cyclical since the energy conversion is irreversible. This implies that unless we use renewable energy resources, sooner or later, we will have to face the problem of not having enough resources to produce sufficient energy as we continuously deplete the non-renewable energy resources. As a possible solution, the energy use of the university will preventively be designed with the soft-path energy policy as to contribute to the biosphere related sustainability by, 1) using renewable energy sources as much as possible, 2) extracting maximum energy efficient performance and as many services as possible before the energy source ultimately turned into waste[1], 3) increasing energy efficiency in most of the activities in the building by the use of an Energy Management System, 4) save energy by reducing energy consumption where possible.
© Guerito 2005
English: The campus of American Canyon High School...
Photovoltaic systemThe major energy requirement of the university can be identified as follows. The energy requirement for, - lighting - heating - running the laboratory, research appliances and equipments, office, library equipment and classroom equipments - running the Cafeteria - cleaning and maintenance - transportation Renewable Energy The traditional model of meeting the above energy requirement is to use electricity generated using fossil fuels. Despite that those are in a sense non-renewable resources they produce great amount of green house gasses that pollute the atmosphere. An alternate solution is to substitute the significant portion of the energy demand with the energy produced in the site-built facilities that use renewable energy sources. Some of the advantages...