![]() |
||||||||||||
![]() ![]() |
||||||||||||
10/2004 | Going Solar Enhances Visibility in Newport Beach |
|||||||||||
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.
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.
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.
Location, location
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. Copyright 2004 The American Institute of Architects.
All rights reserved. Home Page |
|
|||||||||||
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
||||||||||||
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |