RFI Q3 2024 CC, post 13;
:Moderator: Our next question comes from John Nelson. Please state your question.
JN: Hi, Joe. I have a couple of questions just related to comments made earlier.
JH:: Sure.
JN: The Saudi study, related to the Saudi study, they are constructing a giant new city in the desert. Is this will this study help to market SPD to for potential use there?
JH: I think it will. I think that if you consider the whole Saudi Arabian market, they've built remarkable buildings there. And most of them use glass, and glass is very good and very bad in the desert. Very good that it withstands a lot of abuse, but it's very bad in that it brings in a lot of heat, light and glare.
So being able to control it becomes even more important. And if you look at the study, they were talking about schools, but the study really has applicability on any place that glass is used in a building, whether it's an atrium, which they have plenty of, skylights, conference rooms, entranceways, everything like that.
And what's really good about it is, I think that they've now put some traction underneath what the target should be for designing those buildings, which is very good. And if you have a choice of several ways of achieving those tint targets, well, one is the old fashioned way, if you need 30% tint, you put glass with a 30% tint and it doesn't switch, which means many times during the day it's wrong because the sun has moved or you have hard to shade areas like a glass atrium.
I mean, imagine trying to put a skylight shade 50 feet in the air, it's very hard to do or you could have the glass to it. So I think it's really going to be a layout not only in Saudi Arabia, but pretty much anywhere that people are either building corporate headquarters or museums or very very high profile installations.
And this city would be great when it happens. Okay. And one other thing, I think this is maybe a testament to the importance of the retrofit. So I was born in West Palm Beach, Florida and an architect friend of mine told me early on when we I first started asking him questions about SPD, now we're talking about the 1990s. He said, Joe, we always get the tint wrong when we design a building here in South Florida.
What do you mean? He said, well, we usually put too heavy a tint on the outside of the building. And because of that, we have to waste energy by putting more interior illumination, more lighting, or we put too less of a tint and we have to spend more money on air conditioning.
And if we spend more money on air conditioning, sometimes you could do it and sometimes you have to totally revamp your mechanical rooms to be bigger and have less rentable space. So what you're doing, this was even before we were commercial with this, what you're doing can be very, very important.
Now add to that, John, the layer of the ability to take that basic fact, which is architects, nothing wrong with them. They often get it wrong in terms of what tint to put on a building. They're not perfect. The ability to retrofit that building with SPD, they're going to tend to on the side of less tint in the glass because they know that if they're wrong, they could dial in the tint in those problem areas with SPD.
So, it really changes, I think, the dynamic and the risk profile of doing these majorly beautiful buildings.
Cont'd |
