Using The Weather To Go Green

Engineers And Meteorologists Catalogue Weather Activity To Devise Green Energy Plan

Researchers installed weather stations to track the best locations for taking advantage of renewable resources. Tracking sunlight exposure helps pinpoint the ideal location for solar panels, and measuring wind speed and other weather data highlights the preferred times to open windows or vents for temperature control.

If you’re looking for ways to bring your energy costs down you may want to take a look outside. The weather can save you big money if you learn how to work with it.

If professor Jan Kliessl is right this little computer will shave ten percent off University of California, San Diego’s energy bill.

From athletic fields to utility poles to a rooftop robot — Kleissl’s engineering students track climate conditions across campus. The cool coastal conditions on one side and hot inland conditions on the other side of campus make UCSD an ideal lab for using weather to cut energy costs.

“I live in the residence halls over there and they don’t have air conditioning so I kind of learned to use cross ventilation in the morning and in the evening to try to cool down the place,” Roger Huang, UCSD student, told Ivanhoe.

That’s one student anticipating the day’s weather. Imagine what a 12-hundred acre campus could do with detailed data on temperature, wind speed, solar radiation, and rainfall.

“If you know what the prevailing wind is, you can use that as a way of cooling the building on hot days. You can use how much solar radiation there is to figure out how much the sun will heat the building up,” Paul Linden, professor of Environmental Engineering at UCSD, told Ivanhoe.

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Tags: climate conditions, energy costs down, prevailing wind, solar radiation, sunlight exposure, using the weather to go green, weather stations

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 9:54 am and is filed under Consider This, Innovation, Innovation Needed, Project Energy, Science Digest / Science Daily, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.