Month: April 2013

Algae-Powered Building Opens This Week

- Adam Clare

Algae can be used for all sorts of wonderful things from cleaning up oil to producing energy. Architects in Hamburg have built a building that uses algae to power the complex and it opens this week. The building is meant to be a demonstration of cutting-edge sustainable architecture.

“Using bio-chemical processes in the façade of a building to create shade and energy is a really innovative concept.” says Arup’s research lead for Europe, Jan Wurm. “It might well become a sustainable solution for energy production in urban areas, so it is great to see it being tested in a real-life scenario.”

Arup led the design project, which also included work by Splitterwerks Architects from Austria and Germany’s SSC Strategic Scientific Consult. It was funded by the German government’s “Zukunft Bau” (“Future Construction”) subsidy, which looks to support innovation in the construction industry when it comes to renewable and zero-energy design.

The BIQ building itself contains 15 apartments, of which two apparently don’t have rigid interior layouts. Instead, the “individual functions of the apartment — bathroom, kitchen, sleeping area — can be swapped about or combined to form a ‘neutral zone’” by residents as and when they need to. According to the International Building Exhibition, an “increased demand for adaptable housing spaces” means this is how we’re going to live in the future.

Read more at Wired.

Band of the Month: Patrick Watson

- Greg

Hello readers!
This time I’ve decided to feature a band not so unheard of, but one that has owned so much play time in my headphones over the last several days. Montreal’s Patrick Watson has a prolifically beautiful and articulate way of musically flirting with a marriage of classical and contemporary. The band has toured with the likes of The Cinematic Orchestra, Feist, and James Brown, showing a versatile yet accessible sound that can persuade everyone from babies to bubbies to sing and sway along.
Check them out below!

Band of the Month by Greg O’Toole

New Homes in Lancaster, California Required to Produce Solar Energy

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Lancaster, California has nearly half a million citizens and they want to reduce their carbon footprint. Their most recent step to being a green city is a world’s first as far as I know: every new residential development in the city is required to produce energy using the sun.

“However, to truly establish ourselves as the Alternative Energy Capital of the World, we must continue to take a progressive approach. I would like to commend our Planning Commission for this innovative revision of the Residential Zones, which will rapidly advance us towards becoming a net-zero City in record time.”

Read more at Solar Tribune.

A Solar Structure That Cools in the Sun

- Adam Clare

Keeping buildings cool in the summer is hard enough as it is and we have access to air conditioning technologies. Now, there’s a better way to keep buildings, cars, and whatnot thanks to some research out of Stanford University. Their new approach to cooling entire structures doesn’t require electricity and means that air conditioners won’t be needed and thus a huge decrease in energy consumption can be achieved.

A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.
…
“We’ve taken a very different approach compared to previous efforts in this field,” said Aaswath Raman, a doctoral candidate in Fan’s lab and a co-first-author of the paper. “We combine the thermal emitter and solar reflector into one device, making it both higher performance and much more robust and practically relevant. In particular, we’re very excited because this design makes viable both industrial-scale and off-grid applications.”

Read more from the press release.

2012 Was a Record Breaking Year for US Wind Industry

- Adam Clare

2012 was a very successful year for the young wind-power energy industry in the United States. Throughout last year over 6,700 were installed around the country with the industry benefiting overall from new investments into the sector.

Let’s hope this is a sign of the future of what;s to come in sustainable energy in the world’s largest economy!

Overall, America ended the year with 45,100 turbines, producing enough electricity to power around 15.2 million households. Wind power added 42% of all new capacity to the grid last year, beating other sources of energy generation.
Rob Gramlich, AWEA’s Interim CEO said: “We had an incredibly productive year in 2012. It really showed what this industry could do and the impact we can have with a continued national commitment to renewable energy. We’re doing what Americans overwhelmingly say they want: making more clean, renewable energy and creating good jobs in US factories.”

From Energy Live News.

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