Thirty Years of Solar Work

Steven V Szokolay
Department of Architecture, The University of Queensland
Brisbane 4072
AUSTRALIA
s.szokolay@mailbox.uq.edu.au

Abstract
This paper attempts to give a potted history of solar energy (and energy conservation) work over the
last 30 years in an obviously biased way: through the personal reminiscences of the writer. Objectivity
or completeness is not even implied.

1.

The Beginning

After I spent two years teaching in Nairobi I did my Masters thesis in Liverpool on the design of
buildings for equatorial highland climates (Nairobi is at latitude 1.1S, altitude 1800 m). The
interesting (in retrospect: obvious) fact I found was that the temperatures in Nairobi are quite mild,
humidity is not a problem, but solar radiation is extremely fierce. So, the control, the exclusion of
solar radiation is the main task.
In the miserable weather of Liverpool, where I was then teaching, I thought how nice it would be to
have some of that Nairobi sunshine. So, (in 1968) I started reading on the subject of solar energy . The
Proceedings of the 1955 World symposium on applied solar energy (held in Phoenix, Arizona) was
a good introduction and the new book of Farrington Daniels: Direct use of the suns energy (1964)
gave a solid physical basis. I read everything I could find, which wasnt much in those days.
I moved to London in 1969 and in the following year, after the Polytechnics Built Environment
departments moved to our new building in Marylebone Rd, I started tinkering with some home-made
collectors mounted on the roof. The best one turned out to be was a radiant ceiling heating panel used
as the absorber plate. In 1972 we started designing the first solar house for Milton Keynes new town
and discussions with some young and enthusiastic (but not very senior) architects of the Development
Corporation about actually building one. It turned out to be the conversion of one of their standard
terrace houses.

2.

The Turning Point

The real turning point for me was the ISES conference held in Paris, in the UNESCO building in 1973.
I am told that a big issue for the ISES Board meeting held there, was whether architects should be
admitted as members. ISES was then a society of engineers and scientists and many Board members
felt that this move would lead to a dilution of the Society, to a lowering of standards. However, at
the end the decision was to open up the Society not only to architects but also to other laymen, in
fact to anybody interested.
At the conference I was impressed by the many and diverse technologies for the utilisation of solar
energy and by the ongoing painstaking and meticulous detailed work in all these fields. The low
temperature thermal systems, using flat plate collectors were already well developed. George Lf (of
Denver) argued for solar air heater collectors, whilst the CSIRO team (notably Roger Morse and Wal
Read) reported on their water-based systems. Bill Charters was at that time on sabbatical, working in

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France, reported on their work at Melbourne Uni. on air heaters and on free convection in inclined
plates. I met Jacques Michell, who already built several houses (notably one for Felix Trombe at
Odeillo) incorporating the Trombe-Michell wall. Harold Hay gave a very interesting paper on his
Skytherm house at Atascadero (Cal).
There were papers on topics from home-made solar cookers to high temperature solar-thermal-electric
(STE) systems, the most sophisticated photovoltaic cells and the terrestrial use of PV (as opposed to
applications in Space, where it started). One of my compatriots, Polgr, working then for French
television, gave a paper on PV installations for educational television in village schools in French
West Africa. An interesting snippet I remember: Joseph Lindenmayer (another ex-Hungarian) working
then for COMSAT, who was later a founder of Solarex, reported that the cost of silicon PV cells came
down quite significantly, to some US$120 per peak watt (today it is around $5/Wp) and talked about
the new edge defined grown ribbon silicon technology.
A journalist (Evening Standard) buttonholed me in an interval, saying what a shame it is that there are
papers from all over the world, but no work is done in Britain. I told him that this is not quite so, that
we are to build a solar house in Milton Keynes, but asked him not to publish it as it is not yet approved
by the MK Development Corporation. Of course he did. The next day the chief architect was blasted
by the Corporation chairman: I hear we are to build a solar house You will let me know in due
course, wont you?, then he blasted the young architect I was liaising with, but after this publicity
they couldnt say NO, so the project went ahead.
After the conference Mary Archer, who was then working at the Royal Institution (on reversible
photochemical reactions and their potential for energy storage) came to see me at the Polytechnic to
suggest that we should set up the UK Section of ISES. So we did. We wanted a more senior and
recognised person as chairman, so we decided to invite Professor John Page (of Sheffield). I became
vice-chairman and Mary took on the job of Secretary. After advertising we received numerous
applications, among them one from Yehudi Menuhin. In our membership application form there was a
question relating to professional background/expertise. He crossed out this and wrote on it: None
joining for ideological reasons. We then organised and advertised the first meeting of ISES UK at
the Polytechnic (April 1974) in a small lecture theatre. As people started arriving we had to shift to the
largest one available, which seated 350, but even that was crowded, people also sitting on the floor in
the aisles and standing at the back.
I felt the need to interpret all these developments presented at the Paris conference for the average
architect and wrote the book Solar energy and building in about six months. At that stage it was still
possible for one person to understand all forms of solar energy conversion, at least in broad terms. I
would not dare to do it today, as over the intervening 27 years there has been an incredible amount of
differentiation, specialisation and sophistication in narrow areas of solar energy science and
technology. Those were pioneering times, almost an heroic age. We were brave and optimistic. The
book was completed in July 1974, just as I was to come back to Australia.
The Milton Keynes solar house was nearing completion then and after my departure it was finished by
my Polytechnic colleagues. Earlier, I reported on this project in the AJ (22 May, 1974). Subsequently
there was a comment in a letter published in the AJ by a Peter Morris (Herts) criticising my overcautious economic assessment. I wrote my reply already from Australia, which was also published.
Morris responded by saying that although he disagreed and argued with me, the transportation to
Australia was too severe a punishment.
A small private job I did at the same time in Anglesea turned out to be very successful: water-heater
collectors with an embedded coil floor warming system. This could make use of water temperatures as
low as 30C, so collection efficiencies were quite high.

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Thirty years of solar work

3.

Back to Australia

3.1.

Solar Air Conditioning

Szokolay

Getting ready to come back to Australia and looking at Brisbane from London, I thought that it had a
tropical climate (shivering over my first night in a cheap motel in Toowong I quickly changed my
mind). However, I decided to turn my attention to solar cooling. Norm Sheridan, then a reader in
mechanical engineering at the University of Queensland was a pioneer of solar operated absorption
chillers and had already built a solar air conditioned house at Moggill. For some years he was trying to
get funding to improve his chiller machine, with no success and in the meantime Yazaki in Japan
started marketing their LiBr/H2 O chillers. We bought one of those and I built an all-solar house for a
firm of developers at Mt. Cotton. Besides the solar air conditioning it had solar domestic hot water and
a swimming pool heating system, but the ambitious PV system was reduced to not much more than a
token: enough to drive a toy train-set. This was completed in 1978 and its performance was monitored
for a year. It worked, but as I said then I would not recommend it to any of my friends. (The
developers then went bust, but I think my house was not the reason.)
In the following years there were over a dozen such installations in Australia and in 1980 we (I mean
NERDDC * on which I served) funded a closed workshop, held in Perth, with only those invited who
worked in the field. The consensus emerged that this direction of development is a dead end, for three
reasons:
1) the efficiency of flat plate collectors is very low because of the high temperatures required
(80-90C)
2) the LiBr/H2 O absorption chiller, operated with small temperature differentials between hot
water for the generator and the cooling tower has an inherently low CoP (not more than 0.5)
3) as the system is complicated, with several pumps and fans, the parasitic power requirement is
very high
so it was felt by some, it may be better to use that power for driving a compression chiller with a CoP
well over 3. I suggested that it may be more feasible to have a PV system to drive a compression
chiller and perhaps navely I was talking about the use of a DC motor driven directly off the array
(saving the inverter and rectifier), which would run at a speed depending on irradiance, thus having an
automatic control (faster when the a/c load is greater).
In the 20 years since that workshop PV systems developed to a great degree, solar to electrical
efficiencies of almost 25% have been achieved, the cost of cells came down quite remarkably and
some work has been done overseas on PV-driven air conditioning, but - to my knowledge - not in
Australia.
3.2.

Solar Houses

In the meantime, in 1978, I toured Japan, the US and several European countries, doing research and
photography for my book on Solar architecture. I studied over 300 solar houses, although it was then
estimated that there were some 9000 such houses in existence. By that stage some disappointment set
in with active systems and passive systems became fashionable. Ed Mazrias Passive solar energy
book appeared in 1979 and had a great influence. Thousands of architects and builders got onto the
bandwagon and developed a quasi-religious fervour, where passive became almost synonymous
with virtue. One would be asked: Do you believe in passive solar? My answer would be that this
is not a question of belief. We deal in facts. (By the way: for me passive and solar are adjectives
of some noun, such as system, but in American usage they became nouns.)
It took another ten years for the feelings to settle down and for workers in the field to realise that it is
not a question of inventing new passive systems and components and stick them on any house, but the
*

National Energy Research Development and Demonstration Council

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house itself must be based on sound principles of solar and climatic design. At a conference in Athens
(1993) I said that a passive solar house, an energy conservative house and a climatically well
designed house are the same thing I would rather speak about good houses.
The ANZ Section of ISES used to have an annual publication: Solar energy progress, edited by Bob
Dunkle (of the CSIRO), the last issue of which was in 1979. When I served as chairman of the Section
(1978-81, two terms) I persuaded the Committee (with some skulduggery) to replace this by a
quarterly journal: Solar Progress, which I then edited for four years, from January 1980 to the end of
1983. In this I had a section giving detailed descriptions of solar houses built in Australia and New
Zealand (at least two in each issue). We reached solar house No. 45 by the time I handed over the
publication to our Melbourne head-office. Most of these house studies were later included in the book
we wrote with Jack Greenland: Passive solar design in Australia (1985).

4.

Government Actions

From the mid-80s onwards we were increasingly concerned with popularising and commercialising
solar and energy conservation technologies, with making them the norm, rather than the exception. A
private initiative in this direction (by the Brick Development Association) was the establishment of the
GMI (Glass, Mass and Insulation) Council, with the aim to promote energy-efficient housing. They
proposed a project and received a grant from NERDDC, to develop a house energy rating scheme
(HERS). We suggested John Ballinger (then of the University of NSW) as consultant and with the
involvement of CSIRO and based on the CSIRO simulation program ZSTEP3 they developed the
FSDR, the Five Star Design Rating scheme, which was launched by Prime Minister Hawke in 1984. It
was supported by the state governments of Victoria, NSW and South Australia, but as it was a totally
voluntary scheme and apparently ahead of its time, it died a slow death.
One aspect of our concern was the need for energy-related building and planning legislation. Our pleas
fell on deaf ears with successive governments. It was the Rio conference in 1992 and Australias
signing of the UN FCCC (Framework Convention on Climate Change) that triggered the setting up of
a Greenhouse Steering Committee which then created the National Greenhouse Response Strategy,
agreed by all governments, state and commonwealth. Senator Collins, then Minister for Primary
Industries and Energy launched the National Sustainable Energy Policy in 1995. Sustainability
became the buzz-word.
ANZMEC (the ANZ Minerals and Energy Council) made a commitment to develop energy efficiency
standards. For buildings this was tackled at two levels: commercial buildings and housing.
1) EMTF (the Energy Management Task Force) appointed the Department of Energy and Minerals of
Victoria as project managers for the creation of CBEC, the Commercial Building Energy Code. After
several commissioned studies the Advisory Panel met a number of times during 1993 and 94 and then
the task of writing the Code was given to Standards Australia, committee EN/3. Subcommittee EN/3/3
was set up for the purpose and they changed the name CBEC to BECA, or Building Energy Code of
Australia. A draft was produced by July 1995, but the final version has not yet seen the light of day.
2) In January 1992 DPIE* (G.Wathen) prepared a Draft strategy for a Nationwide HERS, which he
also presented at the Heating and Cooling Workshop organised jointly by ERDC (Energy Research
and Development Corporation) and ANZSES, held at Manly (NSW), August 1992. At this workshop I
proposed a technical structure for such a HERS. Later that year Solarch of the Uni. of NSW
received funding from ANZMEC (through DPIE) to create a Nationwide House Energy Rating
Scheme (NatHERS). CSIRO was subcontracted to revise their simulation program
ZSTEP3/CHEETAH, which became CheeNath, the core (the simulation engine) of NatHERS. The
NatHERS package was released late 1995 and version 2 in 1996. It was then passed on to Standards
*

Department of Primary Industries and Energy

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Australia, where it became the responsibility of the newly established subcommittee EN/3/5. It is now
in use in NSW and Victoria on a voluntary basis. In the ACT the rating of a house (new or old) must
be declared at any point of sale. The tropical version of NatHERS is still being argued. In the
meantime Holger Wilrath released his BERS (Building Energy Rating System) package in Brisbane,
which is also based on CheeNath, but it can simulate a free-running building, measuring its
performance in terms of indoor over-(or under-) heated degree hours.
Many local authorities and some state governments became frustrated by the delays and decided to
introduce their own regulatory schemes. This they were able to do under planning legislation. Energy
performance thus became an issue for the local town plan. In 1992 Energy Victoria developed a
computerised point-scoring method for house energy rating (VicHERS) on the basis of several
commissioned studies by SRC Australia Pty Ltd and the Gas and Fuel Corporation of Victoria. In
NSW there are now some 60 local authorities having set energy performance requirements. In
Queensland Premier Beattie launched a new energy policy in May this year and the Building Codes
division of the Dept. of Communication, Information, Local Government and Sport (!) is working on a
code for energy efficiency in housing. The Maroochy Shire and Brisbane City Councils are the first to
set building energy performance requirements as part of their town plan.
There are also various renewable energy support schemes in operation by various levels of
government. Queensland introduced such a scheme in 1995, which included a cash grant of $500 for a
domestic solar hot water system as well as up to $7500 contribution to a renewable energy based
RAPS (remote area power system). The latter also attracts a Commonwealth grant. In this years
energy policy statement the solar hot water rebate has been increased to $750. The Queensland
Sustainable Energy Innovation Fund (QSEIF), created last year, has been extended to 2005. The
governments green energy purchases have been increased to 5% of the total.
In 1997 a revised National Greenhouse Strategy was accepted and the Australian Greenhouse Office
(AGO) was established. In 1998 Australia signed the Kyoto Protocol for the limitation of greenhouse
gas emissions. As 98% of our CO 2 emissions are due to energy generation and use, the limitation of
such emissions was almost synonymous with energy conservation. It is no coincidence that AGO
became a prime mover for energy conservation and the use of renewable energy.
Moves towards regulatory controls started also at the federal level. The ABCB (Australian Building
Codes Board) started the process, which is funded by the AGO. They commissioned CSIRO Division
of Building, Construction and Engineering to prepare a Scoping study for the minimum energy
performance requirements to be included in the Building Code of Australia (BCA). This was
completed and published by the AGO in November 99. The CSIRO then won a contract to carry out a
detailed feasibility study (in which I also took part) to examine what can be regulated and how. This
was completed in August this year. It may take another three or four years to have a BCA in operation
that includes energy related matters.

5.

Retirement

Since I retired in 1992 from my full-time teaching job (they kick you out when you are 65), solar and
renewable energy applications show a rapid growth (no causal relationship is implied). Most
developed countries have very significant renewable energy programmes, offering quite substantial
subsidies. Various green power programmes are also in operation, where consumers volunteer to
pay a small surcharge on their electricity bills, which is then used to create renewable energy based
generating plants. Thus wind, photovoltaics and solar-thermal-electric (STE) power stations operate
on a scale increasingly significant for electricity supply companies. Thousands of building-integrated
photovoltaic (BIPV) systems are also in operation.
It is of some interest to note that, whilst 30 years ago the cause of solar and renewable energy was
best promoted by scientists, engineers and designers, today it is the managers, marketing experts,

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public servants and politicians who are most influential in producing some degree of success. And this
is happening also within our Society (and I am not sure I like it). It reminds me that years ago, when I
was head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Queensland, the pro-Vice Chancellor
suggested that perhaps we should have a non-architect, a manager as the HoD. All my colleagues as
well as I were absolutely horrified.
Energy conservation and passive solar systems are gaining acceptance, due to regulatory measures, to
the persuasive power of rating systems and because sustainability is becoming fashionable among
architects and designers. Unfortunately even the best regulations can be satisfied by very bad
buildings. Celebrated buildings labelled solar, sustainable or environment-friendly are not
necessarily so. I would not go as far as accusing designers of fraudulent behaviour, but I suggest that
many lack the essential understanding of physical principles, of how heat and fluids flow. As a friend
of mine said in a paper at the Kobe ISES congress the air cannot read the arrows: nice bold arrows
drawn on a cross-sectional drawing do not necessarily mean that the natural ventilation will work as
intended. I do maintain that enthusiasm is important, but competence is essential.
As Cicero finished all his speeches at the Roman Senate by saying Ceterum censeo Cartaginem esse
delendam, (otherwise my view is that Carthage must be destroyed) perhaps I can be permitted to hark
back to my often expressed view that architectural and designer education is badly lacking in scientific
content. I recognise that buildings have a cultural significance, may have a philosophical or even
spiritual meaning, that they have both conscious and subconscious, even emotional effects on users,
but before all these, they must work.
I am convinced that the thermal and energy-behaviour of a building is just as basic as its functional
planning, its structural strength, stability and durability. As the structural engineer is responsible to
ensure that the building will stand up, so the architect must be responsible for the energy efficiency
and climatic suitability of his or her product. Beyond lip service, this social responsibility should be
accepted by the profession as a whole, as well as by each and every practising designer. We must
create a paradigm shift, a change in the architectural ethos, away from the photogenic qualities of the
product, from the culture of the glossies and that can only start with education.

References
Daniels, Farrington (1964): Direct use of the suns energy. Yale University Press, New Haven &
London
Greenland, Jack & Szokolay, Steve (1985): Passive solar design in Australia. RAIA Education
Division, Canberra
Mazria, Edward (1979): The passive solar energy book. Rodale Press, Emmaus, Pa.
Szokolay, S V (1974): Solar heated house, Architects Journal, 22 May, p. 1127
(1975): Solar energy and building. The Architectural Press, London
(1980): World solar architecture. The Architectural Press, London
(1993): Solar energy: lessons learnt, future prospects. Proc. Solar energy and
buildings. Academy of Athens.
The Association for Applied Solar Energy (1956): Proc. World Symposium on Applied Solar Energy,
Phoenix, 1955. Johnson Reprint Corp. New York 1964

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