John Andrei D. Bonina.

Design 3

NET ZERO ENERGY

We know that our world is experiencing a rapid rise in global temperature and it is a challenge
for us to avoid and save our planet by design zero energy buildings as one of the solutions on the said
global crisis. In the webinar, Ar. Jorge Mission tackled about how this increase in global temperature is
affecting us, and how will we, as an architect, an engineer and students can prevent and lessen its effect.
Ar. Jorge, said that the world is in code red which means that the global temperature had increase 1.5
degree above the pre-industrial level. In addition to this, Ar. Jorge showed us a graphical presentation o
f the rising levels of global temperature throughout the past years, and we can see that the temperature
is constantly increasing compared to the past years.

After Ar. Jorge presented the problem, he then tackled about how the world is trying to deal
with the said crisis. As of now the goal of the world is to achieve carbon neutrality, climate positivity and
net zero environment around the world. The next topic is about zero energy, as Ar. Jorge presented,
zero energy means the grid of net for renewable resources, this includes; net zero site energy, net zero
source energy, net zero energy cost, net zero emission, all of this represent the one plus one and one
minus one or minus two logics that Ar. Jorge said. This means that we can achieve net zero by using or
consuming the energy equally to the energy we are paying. We can also achieve this by saving the
energy and giving it back to the grid, in this way the cost of the energy we are consuming will be lessen
and will not go to waste.

The next topic that Ar. Jorge tackled is how will we achieve this net zero energy by designing our
homes, buildings, and environment. We are lucky that we live on a tropical environment because we can
orient and design houses and such accordingly, and other harsh factors is not prominent in our
environment compared to other climates. According to Ar. Jorge, we can achieve this by integrating
passive design to houses, buildings, and etc. Furthermore, the factors that we should consider when
integrating passive design are the energy conservation, the energy efficiency and renewable energy. Ar.
Jorge also added that if we integrate passive design on our plan before hand, we can greatly increase
the flexibility of our design because net zero energy needs certain and specific design requirements
hence, net zero energy is integrated accordingly. In addition, using passive lighting and cooling are also
one of the factors that we need to comply in achieving less energy consumption. The use of modern and
energy efficient appliances, lightings and technologies also helps us to attain net zero energy and a cool
environment.

Ar. Jorge Mission ended the webinar by presenting what we can learn about this topic and
leaving two quotes such as, “buildings and structures are excellent when architectural designed are first
prepared as energy efficient to effectively achieve a net zero energy building” and “if the world dies,
humanities die, if humanities die, the world survives”.