City Likes to Blow

Toronto is looking to green their buildings, and what better place to start than city hall?

Putting small wind turbines on the roof at city hall was one of several ideas presented yesterday to reduce the building’s $3 million annual energy bill.

“Personally, I think it’s a really neat way of increasing the renewable energy footprint for the city hall,” consultant Paul Leitch told about 50 experts meeting yesterday to ponder ways of greening the 42-year-old twin towers.

Leitch said it would cost about $125,000 to install six of the devices – three on each tower – to produce enough electricity to power about nine homes.

Thanks, Lindsay!

Another Good Use for Beer

In Australia these days scientists and Foster’s beer producers are finding other ways to use beer, or what’s left of it.  The waste water from the beer has recently been used to make a fuel cell. 

“The fuel cell is essentially a battery in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol.”  The byproduct is clean water!

What will people discover next?

You can check out the story at the CBC.

Try Living Without Oil Before You Have To

Peak oil is coming, probably soon than you think. We sort of all know this, but we never really talk about it. What are we going to do when it actually happens? Will we be caught totally unawares?

A new alternate reality game (read: online story-driven community-based game) aims to make people think about this unthinkable topic. World Without Oil is being funded by a number of media companies and being produced by a team of experienced game makers. Their goal? To simulate a global oil shock, applying “collective intelligence” to the problem in advance, and create a record that can help people anticipate the future. The means to accomplish all this is player-contributed blogs, videos, etc.

Tell us your story. Fuel prices are sky high and the ripple effects are pulling at the seams of our society. Everyone’s life has taken a hit – but how much of a hit are you taking? How much pain are you in? No one will know if you don’t add your voice to the collective shout. And who knows? If enough people speak up, maybe the force of collective truth will help prevent this crisis from ever happening again.

For more information, start at the official homepage.

Highways Have Potential for Wind Energy Generation

highway Over at Inhabitat, there are two posts on using wind created by traffic on highways to generate electricity. A student proposes horizontally placed wind generators over highways, much like road signs are placed now (pictured).

A proposal coming from New Jersey has the generators built into the highway that powers a light rail system. Awesome!

The design, a runner-up in the 2006 Metropolis Mag Next Generation Design Competition proposed the integration of wind-turbines into the highway barriers that divide the traffic. These turbines would generate power from the wind created by the vehicles that drive past them in opposite directions. Originally conceived as a single row of vertical-axis rotary turbines, it has now been redesigned to include two rows, one stacked on top of each other, with the end power being used to power a light rail system.

Ontario Goes Solar

After recently banning old light bulbs, the province of Ontario has permitted a Californian company permission to build a rather large solar power facility.

The Ontario government has approved a California company’s plan to build North America’s largest photovoltaic solar farm, the provincial energy ministry announced Thursday.

OptiSolar Farms Canada Inc. of Arthur, Ont. — a subsidiary of California-based OptiSolar Inc. — will install more than one million solar panels at four farms outside Sarnia, Ont., providing the province with 40 megawatts of power by 2010. Ontario Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said that’s enough to power 6,000 homes.

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