by Michael Boudreaux, AIA

A year ago, my partner Ted Morse, AIA, and I decided to establish our four-year-old firm in our own offices on the rapidly developing edges of Newport Beach, Calif. With investment partners, we purchased an 8,000-square-foot, 1950s-era former warehouse. We renovated the building into offices for ourselves—taking up about a third of the building—and other designers. We worked within the industrial aesthetic of the 80-foot-long bow-string-trussed shell with a 24-foot-high ceiling and created a building that has drawn considerable attention on our heavily trafficked section of Newport Boulevard in Costa Mesa.

Our building, which is oriented north-south, seemed a good candidate for a solar installation. About six months ago, after extensive research, we installed a photovoltaic system. We looked at a lot of different designs, and pv installers told us that they would install the panels right on the curved roof. We didn’t like that idea aesthetically, however, so we started playing with the concept of a freestanding cantilevered structure.

We wanted to demonstrate integration of this technology into the building architecture, rather than hiding the system behind screen walls and parapets, as is often done. We also felt strongly about continuing the building’s industrial aesthetic. We repeated the steel wide-flange columns and beams we had used for the property’s existing billboard structure and designed steel framework based on the specs New Vision Technologies, our pv designer and installer, gave us for the panel modules.

In addition to shading the roof, our freestanding system provides some covered parking, an added tenant perquisite, which is reflected in the rental rates. It also has the extra advantage of increasing the slope of the array to 24 degrees, a more advantageous angle for greater power production.

Crunching the numbers
New Visions’ engineer did the structural design work while we controlled the aesthetic appearance to mesh with the rest of the building. The array itself consists of 243 2'-6" x 5'-0" panels, each weighing 34 pounds and producing up to 160 watts of power. The entire array has a maximum capacity of 33 kW AC power output. (The panels themselves produce DC power, which is routed through a converter that changes it to AC power compatible with the Edison power grid.) We don’t use battery storage—any excess power is routed through our electric meter and sold back to Edison. The panels, manufactured by BP Solar, have a 25-year limited warranty of 80-percent power output.

Our feasibility study also included economic viability. The system qualified for both state and federal tax incentive programs, as well as a subsidy from Edison, which amounts to about 50 percent of the system cost. New Vision has a computer program to model what the output and the costs would be. The numbers came out slightly better than design projections, and so far the numbers have been relatively accurate.

We are currently producing almost all of the power we are consuming. With our eight-inch thick concrete walls, the engineer decided we probably didn’t need roof insulation, although we might reconsider that now to save on cooling costs. If we had insulation, we’d probably be selling power back to the utility.

Location, location
Our system, however, currently is operating above design capacity, and we anticipate that our investment will be returned in six years, depending on the amount of increase in electrical costs during the coming years. Our business will have fixed energy costs for the next 25 years while our competitors’ prices will continue to rise, potentially increasing our profitability.

Our building sits at the end of a freeway in an extremely high-traffic area, so the visibility is huge for us. The adjoining area is a hodge-podge transitional area. We’re also right on the edge of Newport Beach, an extremely expensive area, so there’s a lot of pressure to develop into a higher end development. We’re only two miles from the ocean, so it’s a real desirable place.

Finally, the array has netted us yet another benefit: We’ve gotten a lot of walk-in traffic from neighborhood people considering solar panels for their houses. Our firm also is doing another project right now with a woodworking shop, for which the owners want to install roof panels to help offset the cost of electricity for their machines. What started as a utilities-saving concept, through research and a good partnership with our suppliers and installers, has the potential of becoming an expanded service for our firm.

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