One of the biggest expenses of new home construction in locations more than a few hundred yards away from existing energy infrastructure is the cost of connecting electricity and gas. Electric power distribution wires can cost up to a million dollars a mile for underground service and up to $100,000 a mile for above-ground. New gas lines use less expensive materials, but still require mobilization of construction equipment and installation labor.
Upstream of the vicinity of the new building(s), more infrastructure may be required. For instance, substations and transformers, used to convert grid power to a voltage that’s usable in houses, add to total construction costs when entirely new areas are being developed.
The total cost of remote buildings, including construction costs and lifetime energy costs, can be minimized by designing to take advantage of innovative energy efficiency, renewable energy and energy management technologies like those written about here the last few months. Holistic building design for energy optimization considers opportunities to minimize energy use and maximize the use of local resources. Designing in the use of multiple advanced energy technologies simultaneously makes it possible to pursue development of affordable housing and vacation homes in locations that couldn’t have been considered before.
Such a design approach considers questions such as:
1. How much energy is required for uses that have to be electric, such as computers, lighting and electric vehicle charging? How can that total amount be reduced? For instance, can lighting energy be reduced via the use of efficient systems like LED lighting and daylight harvesting through windows and skylights?
2. How much energy is required for heating (both space heating and water heating), ventilation and cooling? How can that be reduced by installing and using systems like multi-pane windows, state-of-the-art insulation and smart thermostats? For instance, energy use in vacation homes can be reduced by enabling their owners to turn off appliances and set thermostats remotely, so that energy isn’t wasted heating empty space when they’re away.
3. Can local sources of electric energy be developed? Usually, these sources include solar or small-scale wind generation, although some select properties may have the potential for small-scale hydroelectric generation.
4. Can local sources of thermal energy be developed? Can the building(s) make use of economizers, or water-source heat pumps or even direct piping of hot or cold water into a hydronic heating/cooling loop from a geothermally-heated or naturally-cooled water source?
5. If surplus energy can be produced, can it be recycled, or stored for use when renewable sources aren’t available or when demand is higher than they can supply? Can solar energy be stored in batteries for nighttime use? Can the heat in water discharged from washing machines, dishwashers and hot baths be diverted, via a heat exchanger, back into the hot water storage system?
6. For particularly remote locations, can combustible garbage be converted to electricity or heat? In single homes, this may not be viable or even particularly useful, but at the scale of a small village, it may well make more sense to install a small-scale waste-to-energy system than to dispose of garbage in a surface landfill that would attract pests and possibly contaminate surface water.
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