 Good afternoon, Howard Wigg, Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm here on behalf of the Hawaii State Energy Office. And our ultimate goal is 100 percent clean energy by the year 2045. And whenever I speak to laypeople outside of the energy field, they say, oh, PV is photovoltaics. Oh, I have them. They get all excited, and then they go off on some other high-tech angle like that. And I have to very gently correct them and say before photovoltaics or any other renewable energy source, it is much quicker, much cleaner, much more cost-effective to go after energy efficiency, where you do more with the existing energy you have and even decrease the amount of electricity, say, a building or a home is using. And once that's done, it's in place. It's not there forever, but it's in there for 20, 30, 40 years. So that is what we really, really emphasize right up front. Case in point, my guest today, Mr. Mike Brogan, president of TNM Shading. Welcome to the program, Mike. It's always a pleasure to be here, Howard. And you heard me use the word shading, and boy, are we going to learn about some shading techniques. First and foremost, my own research and experience shows that in a building, if you have direct solar gain, direct sunlight radiation shining on, say, the wall of a building, it might be as much as 140 degrees. You shade that same wall and bloom. It drops like a rock, 40 degrees, even 50 degrees. So, Mike, why don't we get rolling here? Let's see what your first slide is all about. Well, I think you're 100% right, Howard. When we talk about energy savings and renewables and green energy, people forget the best savings there is is not to use the energy in the first place. Then you don't need renewables to power that energy. So, and this is important because, you know, all renewable energies still have a footprint. They have a carbon footprint. They cause pollution. They don't do it in your backyard, my backyard, because we have these nice clean panels. But go across the other side and go to where they're manufactured. And you can see, as in this slide, it's a wasteland. This is a one world environment. We all live here. We're all going to have to stay here. And something like that, it does not justify putting more panels on your roof to be green. You need to use fewer panels. I'm not saying they're bad. What I'm saying is, is we need to use fewer. We need to improve efficiency. Once we have efficiency improved, then we can move on to renewables. Absolutely. This is what the what you state energy office. That's the official policy because again, it's cleaner, leaner, faster. Yes, the best way is not to use the first place. Yeah. So why don't we move on to the next slide and get more specific about what you're all about, Mike? Well, you know, I've been, you know, as we've discussed this many years now, I've advocated for double skin facades, shading products. These can be as simple as a roller shade inside the building, not as efficient as a roller shade on the outside. And again, it's really simple to talk about shades. You put a roller shade or a curtain inside the building, the sun comes through the glass, strikes the fabric, radiates the heat inside. Yes, it reflects some back out and reduces the energy need. You put that on the outside, construct it on the outside and you'll transmit most 90% of that energy to the atmosphere. It never came in your building. So you never have to cool it and you never have to bring additional resources online to cool the building. Yeah, we I'm in the energy code world. And we give three times as much credit to exterior shading as we do to interior shading. And this is true because if you think about interior shading, it's at the hands of most human factor, I call it. This is when we get involved and we open it and then we don't close it when the sun's on it. Or we leave them down when we could light in natural light, which is as important to me as you know, controlling the sun for sun is getting in the natural light as well. Yeah, that's, that's kind of a soft benefit of exterior because I can't tell you the number of board rooms, meeting rooms that I've been in. And I know there's a beautiful view of vegetation or whatever outside there. But the curtains are all drawn. Why are the curtains drawn? Because at some point, the sun was directly striking in and you had glare, and you had heat gain. So people close the curtains and never open them back up again. Absolutely. And automation will get rid of that problem. People are afraid of the automation, but it really is important because it takes us out of the equation. We are the problem, not the products. But there's other ways to control it. There's a lot of great examples right here in our city, right here in Honolulu. Look at the Capitol Building, the glass does not get direct sun. Look at the Board of Water Supply Building. Look at which one is it? Howard Hughes Building has a honeycomb exterior. These are all exterior elements to protect the glass from direct sun. That solar irradiation that heats the building is now dispersed outside the building. This is key. And if we can get our designers, architects, people to realize that this is the key, then we're going to beat the battle on trying to get to less renewable resources, but also more green energy. Precisely. Yeah, in a given building, the main energy user now that lighting is becoming more and more efficient. The main energy user is the air conditioning system and on all the accoutrements that go with it. When you decrease the amount of heat coming into the building, you throttle that AC use way back. Or for new construction, when you know that the building is going to be very well protected, you can downsize that AC system. Absolutely. Anything you do to the exterior of the building to reduce the energy consumption for the AC, this is going to be paid back just in reducing the chillers on the building. These chillers are extremely expensive. And we have multiple on these larger buildings, reducing the need, reduce the amount of equipment and it pays for itself. And this is the thing I think most people miss. Almost all the benefits of controlling your energy model are paid back in dividends and they pay back in much shorter than people think. The horizon people talk about is five to seven years. I like to think that it's actually less than five years, because they're forgetting about inflation. Inflation, you know, here we've seen our gas prices go from $2 to $5, you know, it fluctuates. So when we talk about inflation on top of that, you're actually looking at reducing our energy in the buildings actually, you know, paying off much sooner. We're maybe two to two and a half years. Yeah. And the thing is, is once even if it's five years, a building slated for 40 years, that's 35 years of savings. And that's what people don't want to take into account. They're worried about the entry budgets to buildings, but they don't think about the long term. And this is something has to change. Yeah, this is something I go through as a code guy and an efficiency guy all the time. And say a five year payback, that's 20% a year. If your bank hung a banner out in front saying 20% interest paid exclamation mark, you'd borrow all the money you could and go deposit that and reap your 20%. You're right. Yeah. So why don't we go to the the next slide here? So I think you can see by this slide. What we see is shaded and unshaded glass. I don't want to get into all the technicals, but this is two hemispheres. This is basically we're looking at on the top, the north and on the bottom the south. And if you just look at when the glass is not shaded versus the glass that is shaded, look at how much energy is being saved because those percentages add up to what we would consider heat if we're looking at solar heat gain on a building. And if you can, the difference between on the west side, let's say on the upper model, if it's fully shaded, it's only 20%. If we don't have anything on the exterior shading that glass, we're talking to 61%. So that's huge. That's a massive amount of energy we don't need to use. And if we don't use that energy, we don't have to figure out a resource that's green to offset it. Precisely. Again, the best best green energy there is is not to use it at all. Yep. And I'm proud to say that the Hawaii state energy code building energy code is alone in the nation in crediting shading on a wall in exchange for exterior insulation. When the mainland law that we were looking at first came in, the BIA Building Industry Association came running to me and said, Howard, if we have to put the exterior insulation on the wall, the way this code calls for, we would be adding about $8,000 a year, or $8,000 per home for the exterior shading. And we will save only 484 kilowatt hours per year. And I did a little calculation. And that came out to a 43 year payback. And I asked the mechanical engineer just to do me a favor, and without giving any background, had him run the numbers. And sure enough, exactly the same numbers. So we said, how can we fix this? And one fix was shade those walls at just a 0.3%. If it's a 10 foot high wall, put a three foot projection factor out there, and you have done the same energy savings as that exterior insulation, that's how powerful shading is. Oh, shading is so much more efficient than insulation. You know, and again, it's going to depend on the design. If it's all glass versus more wall, blank wall space, that's if it was just a solid wall, maybe the insulation is the answer. But if it's glass, you know, we have to also look at shading that glass differently. But bigger overhangs, they don't cost that much. Yeah, larger overhangs help. And they this is especially for residential. You'll see some high rises with extended decks over glass. This is tremendous otherwise called Linai. Linai, you're getting a you're getting to a twofer. Yeah, you're getting both the benefits of a Linai. But also, you're shading that glass. Yeah. And this is extremely important. And once we get this figured out, in our designs, and we actually bite the bullet and start to design that way, people become used to it and enjoy it. And they'll find benefits that they hadn't seen before. But more importantly, we're going to save that energy. Yep. And money whenever we save the energy. Energy is money here in Hawaii. So so let's go to the next slide here. Okay, so I see we have an open Linai space. And then on the right, we have a enclosed Linai space. What what's going on here? Well, I actually did this project for a client out of Waikai side. And I must say that they came to me because their Linai was unusable, too hot. Their AC could not keep up with the afternoon sun, even inside the house. And they said, what can we do? And I said, what you really need to do here is we need to shade this. And I, of course, showed them some of the alternatives. They chose a white shade, which, believe it or not, reflects a lot of solar energy, which means that we're not going to pick up that energy on the other side. Darker fabrics, of course, will absorb more energy, and you'll feel the heat off of them. I really recommend the lighter fabrics. From the inside, you can see out, no matter what color it is, depending on the openness of the fabric. So so that was a fabric? That was a fabric. So it can be easily rolled up and rolled out. Yeah. And they use them every evening. They have reported that the energy they're saving is is tremendous to them. But more importantly, they use the space. And they AC doesn't run all evening like it used to. So already they're seeing the benefits to benefits. Again, you know, the thing I always stress about energy products in whichever form they're in is that you see more benefits than just saving money, saving energy, you start to change your lifestyle, you start to enjoy spaces that were unusable before. And this is important because I think it brings out that we're doing more than just trying to save energy here. We're really trying to improve people's lives. Got the quality of life. I have two words that I love, comfort and quality of life. And on that very cheery note, we need to take a little break from cold greens and take a whey back in a minute. Aloha. This is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at three, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world, and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there. And we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics, you're going to learn a lot, you're going to come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at three o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Good afternoon again, Howard Wig for Code Green on behalf of the Hawaii State Energy Office. My distinguished guest today is Mike Brogan, president of TNNM Shading, and we have been talking about the absolute importance of shading a building's exterior to make it not just cooler, not just to reduce the A-C load and the, you know, the utility bill, but little thing called comfort, little thing called quality of life. So why don't we start off with the next slide here? Now, what in the world is this Mike? Well, it may confuse a lot of people, but this is actually a product that I've seen that's used in Europe. And we've seen it throughout Asia as well as the United States. Asia as well as other places around the world where they're actually using products to control the light. And now they're working with Mother Nature, they're not fighting it. And in this case, the louvers have a profile. So when the sun strikes the louvers, it's going to reflect the light, and it's going to reflect it as light back off of the louvers to the atmosphere, and it's going to dissipate. And when it does this, that means that light is not being converted to energy and coming in your building or your home. And this is really an important factor. We've talked about exterior shading, we've talked about interior shades. And now we're looking at something that can remain open all the time, reflect the light, give us daylight, because remember, it's not happened to be closed to do this. So now we can get the daylight in. And, you know, the second largest factor in people's happiness is daylight. If you can bring people daylight, you can bring them happiness. It stimulates their cicadia rhythms, it makes them more alert, children will learn more. This is proven in many studies that once you bring daylight to any office, any classroom, even in your own home, you're going to be in a happier space. Yeah, and it's not for nothing that seasonal affective disorder in the northern climates, it has the acronym S-A-D. Sad. And I've seen the original studies, Heshong Mahon studies of California schools, if you give school kids access to daylighting without the heat, without the glare, their test scores go up by as much as 20% and the sickness rates of both teachers and students drops. Also daylighting, we evolved over 200,000 years in daylighting. It's only the last couple hundred years that we've been enclosed. Yes, we've done this to ourselves and this is not the way we were designed by nature. And I will point out that on the louver glass, you know, the objections we get in and I've heard through the years, we don't like roller shades because they block our view. This is true. When they're down, they block your view, automate them. When the sun moves on, the shades can come up and we can bring that visibility out back. We can bring that daylight back in as well without the energy of the sun. So the sun moves to the, you know, from around the side of the building, we can open up the other side and let the sun in. So that's one of the objections you get with exterior shading. Overhangs, well, they're costly. We hear that a lot. Double skin facades where we're designing an element into the facade of the building. We get, oh, it's too expensive. We can't afford that. But this is a product I saw. I was at Glass Build and before that I was at Glass Conference, GlassCon, they call it. And it was very interesting to talk and listen to them talk about this product. And this was the visual we saw earlier. But you can see the louvers here. We can see right through them. It gives us a 96% opening on the glass. This means you're viewing out and you're still blocking the sun because the sun is always above the horizon. It's going to strike the glass and reflect back. But because it's open, we're going to let the daylight in. So now we're getting two functions out of one product. We're daylighting for happiness and we're controlling the sun for the solar heat gain that we need to get rid of in these buildings. This product will save and cool a building by as much as 40, 50 or 60% depending on what its climate is. If anybody told you they'd give you 60% savings, would you jump at it? Yes, you would. And that's that's the miracle of shading. And why we try to get people to think shading number one, green energy second because it just don't use the energy. You don't need as much green energy. And actually it produces more energy from within because we are more comfortable and we have in a sense returned back to our 200,000 year old roots when our Homo sapiens first emerged on the planet. Yeah. And I believe this, I think it's the next slide shows the what we were talking about. No, this is the schools, but this is good. And it does talk about it here. 25, 20 to 25% increase in learning. This is nothing to sneeze at. We have some of the lower scores in the nation. We'd like to up those. We can do that. What we need to do is change our classrooms. I hate to say it, but it's a travesty that we don't have natural lighting in our schools. This has to change. It should change. We wouldn't put people in a prison in these kind of conditions. Why do we put our children in them? They need to have daylight. They need to have the ability to look out. And you'll see tremendous changes in behavior in the classroom. You'll be happier teachers fewer sick days. Your children will come to school and they'll come home happier. They'll have more energy. They'll learn better. It's it's very rounded and it's very well studied and documented all over the world. This is not unique to any one place. Give the children light. You'll give them life. And this is important. And we don't do that here. Yeah, they in Europe. I have some friends who are European architectures. And even though they're in cold climates, they have big windows to give for schools. They have to give the kids access to the outdoors, their visual access. Absolutely. They're not using less glass. They're using more glass, but they're using it smart and they're shading that glass and that's allowing them to get both benefits of both the daylighting as well as the you know being able to shade that glass to get energy control. And of course they use more exterior products than we do. And again, this is proven in study after study after study after study. It was first the first papers came out in the early 1980s. That was 30 something years ago. Yeah. And people continue to study it and get the same results. Well, the newer one out of Cornell, what shows that hospitals. Think of this, people on the north side of the building have more days in the hospital than the people on the south side of the building. What's the difference between those two locations on the same floor doing the same thing? It's the amount of light they get. The daylight actually improves the health of the patient. They go home earlier. I was once doing an energy audit of a rural hospital on another island, which shall remain anonymous. And we walked into the ICU, the intensive care unit. We're really, really sick people are housed and there was a window and the supervisor said, Mr. Wigg meet the most expensive hardware store window in the world because the state government in its wisdom had somehow figured out how to spend $20,000 on installing a window on what was an opaque wall. And he said, this is a federal requirement. ACU patients must have access to a view of the outdoors because they recover more quickly and it's expensive as anything to keep an intensive care patient in that facility. Absolutely. I think I've spoke at this at many of my lectures that I've given in talks and I talk about hospitals, how important it is. You never want to disconnect the patient with the outside world. This is their desire to move on and get better. You disconnect them, you lock them down and they lose that hope. You need to keep them connected. You need to give them visibility out. You need to get the natural light in. These things are going to change how they recover, how they feel, and it's extremely important. In fact, the rest of the world designs their hospitals around daylighting. We haven't got there, though I've done a lot of conferences that are talking about it and improving. So we're on the way. We're not there yet, but it's an important fact. Same for nursing homes. Yes, nursing homes as well. Do we have any more slides left? We've seen that one, but again, it doesn't matter if it's commercial or residential. When you have a next year slide, a shade like this, you're actually starting to improve the environment indoors tremendously as well as outdoors. So they're getting the benefit of both in that one. And as you can see when it's closed. Now don't get me wrong, you can see out of this from the interior. Remember the white reflects light back at your eyes, so you're not going to see through it until nighttime when the light's on the opposite side. And again, that first shot was when the interior was shaded and that second shot was when there was direct solar radiation at which point the shading comes down. It's gone and they're reaping the benefits of that energy savings. The second one was a very large project here. You can see it in Waikiki. It's at a restaurant right down on Waikiki. Very large shades. Now they're using these for wind in solar control but can you imagine sitting in a restaurant and of course your clients or your customers are out there baking. Now you can put down a shade. They still have that beautiful Waikiki view from inside but they're not suffering from the heat and you know makes it much more comfortable. Absolutely. And if a little rain comes it helps there too. And I think we have a couple more slides. We need to zip through that. We've kind of seen that. So these are, this is an exterior product. This is a pergola so I guess you could say. A pergola would be closed. I guess a trellis would be open. This particular product will do both. It'll automate and close. But look at the shading it provides on that large 16 foot sliding door. Now this nice lady in this house has said that she would open those doors because it was so hot in the house because the sun would hit the glass and it would just overheat their house. And by adding this element now they have the beauty of having the doors open and actually having the cool breeze come in instead of that heat that they're so used to and they're really enjoying it. And of course now they have what it's an added benefit. They can enjoy it outside in the evenings. I believe this one has lighting. It also has the ability to close and be water tight. So now they have extended not just shading for the interior comfort but now they have something outside they can enjoy. This is what I keep coming back to. All the things that we do to improve the interior usually improve our lives in other ways. Yep it's called quality of life especially in Hawaii and on that very cheery note we do need to wrap up thank you so much Mike Brogan president of TNN shading. Well thank you Howard it's always a pleasure to be here. It was a lot of fun here. I always enjoyed it. Next time Howard Wig cold green see you soon.