Monthly Archives: June 2018

Affordable Clean Energy for Underprivileged Communities: A Case Study

Helping underprivileged communities gauge the affordability of clean energy technology is one step in the direction of empowering them to make the investment in it. Solar, in particular, has a lot of promise in certain Global South nations that have high solar availability, with dense populations that require spatial efficiency. It is a simple, elegant, and relatively low-maintenance technology that can serve the needs of many communities and offer exceptional long-term savings via a reduced or eliminated energy bill. Coupled with government subsidies and incentives, the solar market can be an effective solution to the problem of energy poverty for many communities in Global South nations.

This article by Meghna Patnaik, who specializes in Sustainable Environmental Design and is currently a Design Engineer at SunPower, describes a feasibility study she did for the development of solar power as an affordable clean energy technology for one such community—the Purkal Youth Development Society, a nonprofit organization located in Purkal, India, which serves low-income communities from the surrounding villages.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2018/SolarPowerAffordability.html

BIM-Integrated Issue Management

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In this Viewpoint article, Erik Pijnenburg, CEO of KUBUS BV, discusses the importance of integrated and centralized BIM issue management, not only to improve the quality of BIM data, but also of the design process in AEC.

Integrated issue management enables multi-disciplinary design teams to improve early design knowledge-sharing. In later phases, clash detection or advanced model checking is helpful for quality assurance, but being able to find clashes without a structured way to get them solved does not guarantee high quality model-data. Without integrated BIM issue management, projects will continue to deal with issues on an ad hoc basis and will never reach a point where the data has no defects anymore before construction starts. A dedicated issue-management tool that can organize and help to resolve the large number of issues in AEC projects is essential to creating the high-quality BIM data for successfully executing these projects.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2018/issue_87.html