Solarc Energy Group

Galen Ohmart Architect When you work closely with someone for 20 years as business partner and professional collaborator, you cannot help but contribute to each other’s creative output.  Galen and I were mutually dependent on each other for our livelihood though not our hobbies.  Yet being one’s business partner is a unique intimate relationship.  We were each other’s creative mentors as well as foils.  Today, I’d like to share with you some of that creative output that was Galen the architect – at least through the filter of my experience. One of my mentors, prior to my partnership with Galen, would often say, “The only thing that is certain, is that we will live on in the creativity that we engender in others.”  For a creative design architect – and Galen was that – one can live on in the buildings that he or she has designed and that have been built.  For me, the qualities that stand out in Galen’s life as an architect are his practicality, ...

It may seem counter-intuitive for an energy modeling consultant to suggest that the real value proposition for energy modeling is not energy performance accounting.  But that is what I am suggesting.  The most significant value proposition for energy modeling is: The Use of Modeling to Inform the Integrated Design of a High Performance Building from Start to Completion This is my goal for all energy modeling and all projects.  It is also the motivation behind my efforts to encourage market-wide development of sophisticated modeling capabilities. Energy modeling is an extremely powerful design tool , when applied by the right practitioner.  A good model calculates heating and cooling loads for every hour of the year in every zone within a building design.  Further, it disaggregates loads into contributing components and allows detailed loads analysis associated with each building component (windows, walls, lighting, infiltration, etc.)  If we acc...