SM.art Column: Food Water and Energy Part 3 of 4

Our previous two SMa,r,t, articles discussed the seismic risks to the city from the loss of the three necessities of survival: food, water, and energy, due to the coming inevitable major earthquake. Specifically, last week (https://smmirror.com/2024/07/food-water-and-energy-part-2-of-4//) we looked at the risk to our energy supply from the San Andreas Fault, which could sever the long-distance transmission lines that supply much of our external energy supply. That risk is exacerbated in this time of increasing energy demand, as the city attempts to accommodate the massive increase in energy demand from Sacramento’s required skyscrapers to accommodate an unnecessary and unrealistic nominal population growth of 20%.

The stark reality is that Sacramento has opened the floodgates to fill Santa Monica with skyscrapers, which developers are snapping up like crazy to feed the power supply frenzy as if there is an endless and uninterrupted supply of tenants and power available. Unlike their 2-3 story cousins, these skyscrapers will become uninhabitable upon their first of many blackouts and power outages. Skyscrapers only need to provide enough power to keep their hallway/staircase lights on for about 2 hours to allow for evacuation, plus a uselessly small amount of additional photovoltaic power, which as mentioned earlier, may not be accessible when the SCE power is shut off. Since there is no way with current technology to provide sufficient photovoltaic power to the roof of buildings higher than three stories, these skyscrapers cannot run all of their systems (lighting, air conditioning, elevators, etc.) during a power outage, leaving residents prisoners in these dark towers. Many elderly people cannot walk more than one or two flights of stairs. Even adults with small children or large shopping bags cannot climb the dozens of flights of stairs in skyscrapers. And then we have not even mentioned the problem of breathing for injured residents.

The city is trying to prepare:

The city has attempted to reduce its energy demand and increase its chances of surviving power outages by requiring all NEW single-family homes to be net zero, meaning that they generate all of their annual energy needs on-site, usually via rooftop photovoltaic solar arrays. This does not mean that these buildings do not draw power from the grid at night. It simply means that they generate enough power over the course of the year to both meet their immediate daytime needs and to return to the grid the same amount of power that they “borrowed” from the grid at night. That nighttime power usually comes from fossil fuels, but that is offset by the “clean” excess solar energy they generate during the day. So these net zero buildings are not a net burden on the city’s energy load or on the world’s pollution, especially if they can generate a little extra power to charge the increasingly common car batteries of their residents.

While this city requirement is an excellent first step, the problem is that these collectors, as discussed earlier, do not have to function when the power from SCE is interrupted. That problem will be solved in the near future with much needed switching improvements. But the real problem is that very few NEW single family homes are being built in our already built city. Conversely, we are faced with a tsunami of skyscrapers that will become a permanent energy and pollution millstone around our necks since they will not be net zero buildings. They will nominally increase our energy burden by 20% over the next 8 years without doing their fair share of renewable energy generation or storage.

Some skyscrapers may seek to purchase the approximately 10% more expensive power from the Clean Power Alliance (CPA) instead of SCE. That alliance uses renewable sources (primarily wind turbines and solar farms), most of which are located in remote deserts and thus subject to increased transmission losses, local environmental degradation, and also increased risk of seismic disruption since those sources lie east of the San Andreas Fault. The residents and businesses of future skyscrapers may willingly choose to purchase this more expensive, riskier, but cleaner power from the CPA, but they are currently not required to do so. Every new building in Santa Monica would be required to either purchase or produce its own power from renewable sources. Because of these restrictive technical and political realities, skyscrapers will be environmentally obsolete the moment they are permitted: they will forever symbolize the triumph of greed over sustainability.

Requirements of Net Zero:

The lesson here is that the city needs to require as many buildings as possible to be net zero. The state of California wants us to be fossil fuel free by 2045. This essentially means that we need to increase the supply and storage of renewable energy by at least 4% per year for the next 20 years. While this may seem like a trivial number, keep in mind that it needs to include all the expected increases in energy demand that will come from the purchase of new electric cars.

Currently, solar photovoltaic collectors, our cleanest local energy source, are 20-25% efficient, meaning they convert about that low percentage of sunlight into electricity. Given typical power loads and roof areas, new 3-story buildings could be made net zero with existing off-the-shelf technology. As collector efficiency increases, say to a not-too-distant 30%, and as energy-harvesting windows and paint are invented and improved, four-story buildings could be made net zero. Alternatively, these potential new energy increases should first be used to charge the batteries of electric cars and bicycles, rather than making buildings taller. There is no clear height limit with existing technology or likely achievable technologies to reach net zero. But it is unlikely to be achieved in the next 20 years for buildings taller than 6 or 8 stories, as this would require an astonishing 200 to 300% improvement in photovoltaic production efficiency.

However, skyscrapers that are considered unavoidable for whatever misleading reason and that cannot be made net zero should be required to provide additional storage capacity (e.g. batteries) to mitigate peak loads and increase the grid’s chances of survival in the event of a blackout. This is the least we should ask if we are to suffer the already numerous devastating consequences of such buildings (congestion, shading, grid congestion, loss of views, wind and trees, etc.). This additional local energy storage, combined with improved switching options and protective solar access codes, would help the city buffer against a power outage caused by a major earthquake or by the increasingly frequent blackouts. So while skyscrapers increase our energy demand in an unsustainable way, they could still limit their damage by increasing our chances of survival through much-needed storage capacity. But without those solar access codes and possible battery requirements, skyscrapers thoughtlessly increase the power risks to our city, and become a clear and ever-present danger.

How close is the current danger?

Given our dependence on fossil fuels, it is very easy for cities to enter a kind of heat doom loop. As global warming from the greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels increases, more fuel must be burned to run the air conditioning that makes those cities habitable. That “extra” fossil fuel burned from power plants in turn increases both local and global temperatures, further increasing the need for air conditioning. This vicious cycle accelerates, especially without nighttime cooling (think Las Vegas), until the air conditioning is on all day and night, because the peak temperatures that the air conditioning eventually cannot scrape off begin to kill the vulnerable and those who can’t afford air conditioning. Many cities (e.g. Mumbai) and regions (e.g. the Middle East) are already close to this doom loop, and ours is not without risk. Our presence next to the thermally benign Pacific Ocean protects us somewhat, but perhaps not enough for the 50-100 year lifespan of the proposed skyscrapers. Therefore, every building, skyscraper or other thing that does not generate its own energy sustainably drags us closer to the doom loop the world is already experiencing. We should not willingly go along with it.

So here we are: in a global emergency: as global energy demand increases, burning more and more depleted fossil fuels will kill us, and kill more and more with both pollution and global warming. The global daily death toll and suffering from pollution and global warming is already significantly higher than that of periodic earthquakes. But our city faces both: known increasing seismic risks and enormous global warming risks. Meanwhile, our city blindly stumbles forward with skyscrapers as the only answer to housing problems (real and imagined), while completely ignoring the equally and more critical considerations of food, water, and energy.

None of this is rocket science. The average high school student could write this article, as could many of our regular readers. But now the energy environment has changed dramatically, as we begin to solve, if the city had the courage to confront, the significant energy problems and opportunities of renewables like wind and solar and their storage challenges. Next week’s article, the last in this series, will discuss those potential solutions.

By Mario Fonda-Bonardi AIA

SMart Santa Monica Architects for a responsible future

Thane Roberts, Architect, Mario Fonda-Bonardi AIA, Robert H. Taylor AIA, Architect, Dan Jansenson, Architect & Building and Fire-Life Safety Commission, Samuel Tolkin Architect & Planning Commissioner, Michael Jolly, AIR-CRE Marie Standing. Jack Hillbrand AIA

For previous articles, see www.santamonicaarch.wordpress.com/writing