Steven Chu Wants Everyone to Get a White Roof
White roofs sure do appear lovely in the hills of Greece or Spain. But it’s hard to imagine that same look working in Shaw, Capitol Hill, or (insert most other D.C. neighborhoods here.)
Nonetheless, US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was out yesterday in London extolling the virtues of white pavements, lighter car exteriors, and white roofs. Here’s a bit from his speech:
“Now you smile, but if you look at all the buildings and make all the roofs white, and if you make the pavement a more concrete-type of colour than a black-type of colour, and you do this uniformly… It’s the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years,” he said.
“It’s like you’ve just taken them off the road for 11 years. It’s actually geoengineering.”
Personally, I’m confused: All these years, we’ve been told about green roofs! But I guess if you can’t put a bunch of plants up there, and build a fancy drainage system, the white alternative does wonders too. And I’d like to see one of these things in real life, so if anyone’s ahead of the ball here, and managed to paint their roof white years—you know, on purpose, like on a slanted, townhouse roof— before Chu told us to do, please contact me. I already have got a listserv lead. For now, ponder this (which is again from The Independent, like the clip above):
Professor Chu said that his thinking had been influenced by Art Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission, who drove through tough new building rules in the state. Since 2005 California has required all flat roofs on commercial buildings to be white; the measure is being expanded to require cool colours on all residential and pitched roofs.
Dr Rosenfeld is also a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, of which Professor Chu was director. Last year Dr Rosenfeld and two colleagues from the laboratory, Hashem Akbari and Surabi Menon, calculated that changing surface colours in 100 of the world’s largest cities could save the equivalent of 44 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide — about as much as global carbon emissions are expected to rise by over the next decade.
Image by marcelgermain, Flickr Creative Commons
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5:10 pm
I don’t get it.
1:21 pm
I hear you about white roofs potentially looking silly, if what you have in mind is a single-family home with a sloped roof. On the other hand, DC has a pretty high percentage of buildings that have flat roofs (pretty much every office and apartment I can think of, and most townhouses). On a flat roof, the part that’s painted white should be 100% invisible from the street, so aesthetics aren’t as big a deal. Also, it’s not like it has to be gleaming white. A building owner would get most of the gains if they replace a tar or asphalt roof with light grey gravel, for example.
11:28 am
My neighbors in Shaw have already done this, and are reporting indoor temperature differences of at least 5 degrees. I’m hoping to get up on my roof soon and paint over the asphalt top that is currently there. White roofs and surfaces reflect most of the light that dark surfaces would absorb and radiate as heat. Try standing on a tar roof in the summer and you’ll understand quickly why a white roof will save you on your cooling bills.
6:06 pm
This is actually coming to the DC building code as a requirement for new (> 3-storey) buildings next year!