For a hundred years or more we've designed our roofs wrong! For stores and warehouses we made the mistake of creating a thick envelope with no natural light that traps the heat, and then we spend large amounts of money in lighting and cooling! That's the equivalent of sitting in our sofas, bundling up in jackets and blankets and then turning the AC to the maximum.

This new design works better on dry and sunny areas with little rain. It consists of a series of semi-transparent layers one on top of the other leaving at least 2 sides open, the material can be rigid or flexible like a tarp as long as is translucid. The layers are built with an empty area aprox. 6 feet as well as open on at least 2 sides, this allow air to circulate and dissipate the heat, and then adding another layer of the same material. The idea is that the intense sun rays hit the first layer and then get diminished, then the hot air below that was heated by radiation from the first layer is then ventilated to the sides, then the sun rays that hit the next layer are quite weakened when the process repeats.

When the sun rays reach the floor, most of the heat has dissipated, however a large amount of visible light still reaches the floor, this makes unnecesary the use of articial illumination as well as AC! As long as the ceiling is relatively high, a limited number of fans on the walls will eliminate most of the remainig heat to make the area at a comfortable temperature and well lit.

This design is especially well utilized in stores, warehouses, and offices that are one story high and preferably with relatively tall ceilings. This design has also lower costs to build an operate because there's no need to waterproof, install shingles or other material, or structuraly reinforce in any way since the roof is not heavy and instead very lite.

I believe if this design was used in every warehouse, big box store and one storey office building in areas like California, Utah, Texas, Arizona, etc, we would use less than HALF the energy in those areas since there'd be no use for AC, artificial lighting.