A snake-like rubber tube floating in the ocean could prove that wave energy conversion is an economically viable solution to meet our power needs. At least that’s what the creators of the Anaconda device are hoping. Designed in the UK by Francis Farley and Rod Rainey, the Anaconda is a very simple giant rubber tube that generates energy by simply bobbing up and down in the water. We’ll bite our tongues and hold the inevitable dirty jokes on this one (but do check out the video below the fold).
Hidden Valley Cabins is Australia’s first carbon neutral resort and tour company. The solar powered getaway is located one and half hours northwest of Townsville, near Running River on the western slope of the Paluma range in Queensland, Australia. This is Australia’s first stand-alone resort that operates solely on solar power, and saves 78 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year!
Just as things were really heating up in the solar energy sector, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) pulled the plug on new solar power plants. Last week the New York Times reported that “the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.” Headlines like world’s largest solar array in California or world’s largest solar power plant in the Mojave desert promised to be few and far between as the BLM decided to take its time to assess the more than 130 proposals filed by solar companies in the past three years. Just days later, after an uproar of voiced concern, the moratorium was reversed. Not fast enough to avoid drops in stocks, but quick enough to avoid fatally derailing the renewable energy sector off the tracks.
Just north of I-80, between Toledo and Cleveland, is an unexpected educational facility that is setting a shining example of sustainable building for ecological and human health. Completed in 2000, the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies is an ongoing green build experiment, as its energy performance is studied and adjusted as green technologies continue to evolve. We wouldn’t expect less from Inhabitat favorite William McDonough + Partners, but were surprised to find that this particular PV-powered experiment was taking place in Ohio. It just goes to show that you don’t have to live in sunny California in order to efficiently harvest solar power.
Foster+Partners is making their mark in Amsterdam with their newly completed towers housing the headquarters for Ernst & Young. Standing 24 stories tall, the new tower has been dubbed the “gateway” to the Vivaldi Park area of a new Zuidas district development south of Amsterdam. While it is arguable that the new Ernst & Young headquarters is not nearly as highly designed of as some of our past Foster + Partners postings, there are at least two things that we can guarantee about this new design: the building is completed and it is exceeding targeted Dutch environmental standards.
The crowd was rapt this year at the 37th Annual Architectural Awards ceremony held June 14th in Beverly Hills where the Los Angeles Business Council recognized 25 project teams and seven entertainment studios for outstanding contributions to Los Angeles. The diverse projects spanned 12 different categories including mixed-use, preservation, public use, landscape architecture, renovation, and sustainability, and this year the urban fabric of LA featured several notable green threads.
A few months ago, prolific product design star Philippe Starck shocked the world with his proclamation ‘Design is Dead’, and the announcement of his pending retirement due to his frustration with the ethical/consumption issues inherent to product design. Sounds to us like Starck had some sort of a midlife crisis and came to a realization that everything he’s ever designed is totally useless:
Of course, we could have told him this awhile ago - but were still a bit surprised and frustrated about his pessimistic proclamation and subsequent retirement. One would think that the most helpful and sensible approach to the realization that one has been wasting one’s time producing useless crap (like uncomfortable see-through plastic chairs and scarily alien looking lemon-juicers that can’t actually be used) - would be to STOP producing useless crap and start putting one’s talent to use to try to make a positive difference in the world.
And despite the melodramatic announcement this spring, perhaps this is where Starck is headed after all, regardless of the threats of giving up entirely. Recently Philippe Starck has brought an amazing idea for renewable wind energy to life through a sleek new mini wind turbine called ‘Democratic Ecology’.
There’s nothing quite like renewable energy on-the-go, and Voltaic makes solar power a stylish accessory with a hot lineup of solar powered bags to charge your mobile gadgets. We’ve been impressed with Voltaic’s products from the get go, and with their ongoing efforts to amp up the sustainability factor in their bags like boosting the power in their Generator laptop bag and going to 100% post-consumer recycled PET plastic based fabrics. One of our all-time favorite bags is the durable Voltaic Backpack which just may be the ultimate sustainable summertime sidekick and a must have for the eco-geek on the go. And this week, you can win a free Voltaic solar backpack, just for reading Inhabitat!
The emergence of hot summer weather and sun-worshiping has inspired the latest and greatest Inhabitat contest: Summer Green Gadget Giveway. Over the next two weeks, we are giving away a bunch of great prizes to Inhabitat readers, all in the spirit of summer fun. And unlike some of the other competitions we’ve run in the past - this one is pretty easy to enter and open to everyone, regardless of design talent or time. All you need to do is register and signup to subscribe to Inhabitat through our weekly newsletter!
Earlier this week Cambridge, Canada welcomed a stunning new interactive sculpture that casts a shimmering set of lights against the night sky. Constructed atop a sun-dappled hill, Gorbet Design’s Solar Collector sweeps the skyline as a gracefully ascending corona of light-laced beams. The interactive installation serves as a conduit for both solar energy and creative input, soaking up sunlight and simple web-based controls throughout the day. Upon nightfall the installation synthesizes its stored reserves into a glimmering light show.
CherryPal is taking cloud computing mainstream in a big way with a soon to be released green personal computer. This green PC comes in a small, affordable package weighing just 10.5 ounces and consuming no more than two watts of power. The triple-core processor only has one fifth of the components of traditional computers, boots-up in 20 seconds, and promises to be faster than Vista and mac’s OS-X.
Despite the typical cloudy weather, Germany has become a solar energy powerhouse fueled in part by government measures to reduce greenhouse gases and bring more renewable energy into the grid. Voluntary solar arrays are common throughout the country on barns, residences and in large solar plants, but a new law proposed in Marburg, Germany, is making solar a legal requirement on private and commercial buildings.
Solar photovoltaics are, depending on the day, between 8-15% efficient meaning much of the sun’s energy’s is lost as heat. While solar thermal systems offer a way to harvest this heat energy for heating water or interior spaces, this option has usually displaced the electricity generating PV on rooftops. A new system from SolarWall, the SolarDuct PV/T, offers a combination of solar photovoltaic and solar thermal in one assembly providing a means to heat and power from the sun with one product.
Summer is finally well under way and we are looking forward to getting a chance to appreciate the great outdoors and soaking up some summer rays. Any of you who have been reading Inhabitat for awhile probably know that we love to run contests here on this website, and now its time for a new one - in honor of summer!
Amid veritable fields of wind turbine options the Broadstar AeroCam stands out with an innovative design that packs a powerful turbine into a compact form factor. Constructed to spin on a horizontal axis, the micro-turbine’s multiple aerodynamic blades cut a profile similar to a water wheel and allow it to intuitively track the path of the wind as it rotates. The turbine is the industry’s first to shatter the $1/watt cost barrier, and Broadstar aims to make its AeroCam turbines a go-to option for rural, urban, and wind farm in-fill applications.
Imagine being able to collect the energy of every person walking up and down the stairs from the Spinnaker Tower viewing platform in Portsmouth, UK. That is the proposal being put forward by David Webb, from the British consultancy of Scott Wilson. His hope is to install miniature “heel-strike” generators underneath the stairs that would capture the power generated by a person as they walk down the tower. His ultimate goal is to install them in every rail station, shopping center and even in your shoes!
Passive homes heat and cool naturally without active mechanical heating and cooling systems. The low energy requirements are achieved through strategic building design which yields efficient and cost effective structures. Swedish architects Kjellgren Kaminsky are modern ‘passivists’, recently unveiling plans for the Ulricehamn Visitors Center in Southern Sweden which will maximize natural climate control, productivity, and wellbeing with a passive energy design strategy.
As the planet heats up and our resources stretch to accommodate a skyrocketing population, it has become clear that water will be a hotly contested commodity in the coming years - some are even calling it the “new oil”. Charles Paton has endeavored to meet this challenge with his Seawater Greenhouse which takes a low-cost, low-energy, carbon-neutral approach to desalination. Recently he’s been working with Eden Project and Grimshaw Architects to create a gorgeous sweeping Teatro Del Agua. The design will incorporate Paton’s remarkable desalination method with a publicly accessible venue for the performing arts, once again focusing our societies around the common element that sustains them.
San Francisco has made solar energy a top priority with the passage of the Solar Energy Initiative Program - the largest solar energy subsidy program of any city in the United States. An annual budget of $3 million dollars will help create incentives for individuals and businesses to install solar photovoltaics systems with a $3,000 to $6,000 rebate available to individuals and a $10,000 rebate for businesses. On par with statewide programs, San Francisco’s Solar Energy Initiative Program is poised to make solar installations permanent fixtures in the city’s more sustainable skyline.
In the Dead Sea region, control of water is a source of political friction and presents an ecological quandary that threatens the drinking supply for inhabitants. A research project from New York-based architect Phu Hoang Office seeks to address and solve these site specific issues with ‘No Man’s Land’, a series of artificial islands that would provide recreation, tourist attractions, renewable energy, and create fresh water.
If architect Sheila Kennedy gets her way, textiles will soon be able to take the sun’s energy and turn it into electricity. Kennedy is an expert in the integration of solar cell technology in architecture. And, her team from KVA Matx has designed the Soft House, a structure that can create close to 16,000 watt-hours of electricity by transforming household curtains into flexible, semi-transparent, solar collectors.
From costly installations to strict city ordinances, there’s a number of factors that have limited the growth of wind power in urban environments. Now, Aerovironment is ushering in an era of urban wind power with a sleek series of small, silent turbines that eschew the need for a tower. Dubbed ‘Architectural Wind’, the system seamlessly integrates into the parapets of buildings, taking advantage of aerodynamics to catch wind as its speed escalates up a structure’s side. The turbine’s innovative approach boasts up to a 30% increase in energy production, and their adaptable, modular assembly makes installation a snap.
Following the success of Ultra Motor’s Light Electric Vehicle (LEV) in India and China, this eco and economical form of urban transport is set to go on sale in the U.S. this summer, and in Europe later this year. The 2008 electric bike, the “A2B”, offers the style of a bike with the power of an electric motor, offering ‘unassisted power’ for up to 20miles, with a top speed of 20mph/33kmph.
Dubai has garnered much attention in recent years with a never-ending supply of architectural wonders being built, or proposed, at a head spinning pace. Mostly these towering structures are grand and tall, but some are also green. We’ve covered many an ambitious Dubai skyscraper scheme here at Inhabitat, including David Fisher’s Rotating Tower, but there is new news from Fisher’s Dynamic Architecture firm. This self-sufficient, sun and wind powered design is making headlines once again as the Italian-Israeli architect has just unveiled the latest design for his twirling tower, and construction is set to begin this month!
