Sustainable Colorado

Landscape Architect's Office Fits In A Trailer, Follows His Work

2011-01-19T14:05:00.000-08:00

Image: XS/LA
Design used to take up a lot of space, with big draughting boards, huge drawings and interns to do all the repetitive and boring stuff. The computer changed everything and reduced the space and staff required to almost nothing. Andreas Stavropoulos of XS/LA tells Alex at Shedworking about his mobile office, built into a 2003 cargo trailer.

Image: XS/LA
The landscape architect writes:

The mobile studio is designed to unite the designer with the site. Equipped with a drafting table, small library, solar power, and wifi, the mobile studio doesn't just sit pretty, but it works hard. This original design and fabrication features an translucent skylight, which allows diffuse light to fully and shadowlessly illuminate the interior. The studio is particularly useful during the concept design stages, when clients are invited inside to provide initial feedback on conceptual design sketches.

It is a wonderful idea for a design professional, being up close and personal with the site and the trades. According to Sunset Magazine,

This isn't exactly the norm in the modern, virtual reality-driven world of landscape architecture. But Stavropoulos--who earned his MLA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007--is a back-to-the-land kind of guy. He wants to ground his garden plans in the realities of the site, and he retrofitted the 6- by 10-foot cargo trailer to help him do that.

Oh, and did I mention that he lives in an Airstream trailer.

Image: Lloyd Alter
It is a lot smaller than Robert Boltman and Alex Bartlett's BSQ shipping container office, but the principle is the same: Your office is where your work is. The trailer is also more mobile; the Bsq. Container is languishing on a dead construction site right now, while Andreas can tow his office behind his Honda. It is smaller, lighter and ultimately more flexible. More at Bsq. Office in a Shipping Container

Too bad Nissan never produced their NV200; It really made the office mobile.

ZenithSolar Creates Solar Generator with Incredible 72% Efficiency

2011-01-19T14:03:00.001-08:00

Israel-based energy company ZenithSolar has broken records with its 3rd generation CHP solar energy generator (Solar Z20) that combines heat and power systems to create an incredible 72% solar conversion efficiency. According to Ezri Tarazi at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and Head of Tarazi Studio, the generator has reached record levels by using a “semi-parabolic optical mirror for collecting solar energy” to power the local community’s electric and hot water use.


The difference between the new 3rd generation generators and the 2nd generation generators is that the new model is a combined heat and power, concentrated PV and solar thermal system. What this means is that not only does the system convert solar energy into electricity, it also converts any heat captured in the mirror collectors into electrical and thermal power.

The generators are installed in Kibbutz Yavne in Central Israel and provide hot water and power for the local community while also putting power back in to the back to the national grid. The system the most efficent in the world, and also produces the lowest cost per watt and best potential for energy system cost reduction as well as the highest efficiency in the field (+72%)

LEED Platinum Boulder House First in US to Use German System

2011-01-19T14:02:00.000-08:00

LEED Platinum Boulder House First in US to Use German System

While a relatively new concept in the US, the German company Weberhaus has long been developing prefab house construction technology for 50 years. Designed by Studio H:T Architects the 2002 Alpine House in Boulder CO, is the first to use the state-of-the-art German system in the US. This new LEED Platinum home shows how high-scale design, sustainable principles and prefab can come together to create an attractive home. Additionally, some of the home’s most impressive features include a super-low energy requirement, a 9kW solar array and a host of other low impact features able to assuage the environmentally aware owners who were looking for the perfect $3.5 million pad built to last a hundred years.

The upscale residence is two stories of modular walls and ceilings, complete with windows doors, and electrical and plumbing set on an ICF base. Overall construction reported only 5% in waste materials, compared to the national average of 17%. The shell of the home has reduced the energy demand by 1/5th of the average home, but air quality is improved by low toxic material and fresh air exchange.

The 4,340 square feet interior is heated with a high efficiency boiler, lit with LED lighting, and finished in Earth Clay plaster. Water is heated through a solar thermal system and reclaimed as grey water. Outdoor and indoor spaces blend together beautifully, and the overall effect is a clean, highly refined modernist feel with a naturalist bent.

MIT- solar cells and solar powered water desalination system

2011-01-19T13:58:00.001-08:00

MIT Unveils Portable Solar-Powered Water Desalination System

by Timon Singh

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Field and Space Robotic Laboratory (FSRL) has designed a new solar-powered water desalination system to provide drinking water to disaster zones and disadvantaged parts of the planet. The water desalination system can be easily packed up for delivery to emergency areas and is completely powered by solar energy, so it is able to function in arid and remote off-grid regions.

Desalination systems often require a lot of energy, as well as a large infrastructure, to support them but MIT’s compact system is able to cope due to its ingenious design. The system’s photovoltaic panel is able to generate power for the pump, which in turn pushes undrinkable seawater through a permeable membrane. Once the salt and other minerals are removed, the water can then be drunk. The system even has sensors that enable water purification even without high levels of sunlight.
MIT’s prototype can reportedly produce 80 gallons of drinking water per day, depending on weather conditions. A larger version is also being designed, which will cost $8,000 and will be able to provide 1,000 gallons of water daily. The design team also claim that two dozen desalination units could be transported in a single C-130 cargo airplane, providing water for more than 10,000 people.

MIT Introduces Paper-Thin Solar Cells

by Ariel Schwartz

Solar cells keep getting thinner and tinier, and thanks to MIT and their research sponsor Eni, we are already seeing cells that can be folded up into paper airplanes! Recently revealed, MIT’s paper solar cells feature five layers of solid material layered on a paper substrate. When combined, the materials and paper form a solar cell. Albeit weak – each cell has an efficiency level of of just 1%, while most commercial silicon solar cells maintain at least 15% efficiency – the potential for commercial application is incredible.

While still on the low end researchers are hoping to get the paper solar cells up to 4% efficiency. Once this happens, the cheap, flexible cells could be used in all sorts of applications, such as laptop covers, attached to shades or blinds, and even laminated onto roofs by non-professionals.
Although they won’t be hitting shelves tomorrow, certainly stay tuned – these cells could be ready for commercialization within the next five years.

water and water filtration

2011-01-19T13:57:00.002-08:00

The six ideas below my signature are all important and worth your additional research ... unclean water kills more people worldwide than anything else! Rotary International has made this a priority to provide clean water sources worldwide and save lives. Any ideas that can be implemented to provide healthy water are very worthwhile.

A few months ago I sent out a concept for water purification worth repeating:

"New Nanotech Purifier Filters Water 80,000 Times Faster

by Cameron Scott

A new water filter that employs cotton dipped in nano-sized silver wires and copper tubes works 80,000 times faster than filters that simply block bacteria from getting through. The filter, developed by Stanford University researchers for use in developing countries, efficiently conducts a tiny charge of electricity, zapping 98 percent of all bacteria.

Photo: Shai Kessel
Millions of people die in rural and undeveloped areas every year from exposure to contaminated drinking water. The challenge is to create processes that work cheaply and reliably and uses materials that are light enough to transport. The pass-through filter is less likely to fail due to clogging or becoming infested with the bacteria it’s intended to kill: if bacteria cling to it, the silver kills them. And because its nano-materials are especially efficient conductors of electricity, the filter can get the jolt it needs from a small solar panel, a hand crank or 12-volt car batteries.
Unfortunately, when it comes to drinking water, 98 percent isn’t an adequate kill rate, so water would have to be filtered more than once. But since the filter works 80,000 times faster, there’s plenty of time for that."
Thanks and pass it on,

Mike

Mike Fowler

P.O. Box 400

108 West Live Oak Street

Hutto, Texas 78634

512-736-2000 cell

512-759-2000 home

mfowler16@austin.rr.com

Top 6 Life-Saving Designs for Clean Drinking Water

by Bridgette Meinhold

Almost a billion people lack access to clean drinking water, which is the result of low water supplies and poor sanitation systems around the world. This shocking figure underscores the importance of affordable designs that filter water to make it safe enough to drink, as well as systems that improve sanitation for communities. In honor of this year's Blog Action Day, we've rounded up six innovative design solutions that provide clean drinking water - granted that one in eight people in the world don't have access to water, it's designs like these that help save lives.

Water has been prevailing theme this last year, especially in the wake of multiple natural disasters that involved polluting our oceans, flooding and access to clean water. Not only is it the stuff that makes the world go round, but every person needs access to clean drinking water and a number of designers around the world have been working to produce life-saving devices and designs that can filter or provide clean water for the world.
Architectural projects like this community toilet facility for India would go a long way to improving local water quality, sanitation and reducing disease. NGOs and governments should help invest in water filtration devices to disperse among families in third world countries. And we also need to crack down on business and factories polluting our rivers, lakes and oceans.

LifeStraw Water Purifier

The LifeStraw is a plastic cigar-sized water filter that purifies water by removing potential pathogens like typhoid, cholera, dysentery as well as the parasites. It works as soon as you suck up water from a source, rendering up to 1,000 liters of water fit to drink without electricity or additional attachments.

Play Pump Merry Go-Round Water Pump

Since kids always seem to be bustling with extra energy, why not put that energy to good use. The Play Pump Merry Go-Round was designed as a fun water pump for rural villages and schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. Kids can have fun while providing water for use in cooking, sanitation, drinking, and even growing food. So far over 1,000 pumps have been installed, and PlayPumps International hopes to increase that number to 4,000 by the end of 2010.

LifeSaver Water Filter

The LifeSaver bottle is a personal water filtration device that uses various filters to screen out even the smallest viruses as well as bacteria, contaminants, and pathogens. Over the course of the filter's life it can clean 4,000 liters of water, and it can filter 750 mL of water in less than a minute. The filter isn't cheap, however hopefully economies of scale and research and design will produce more affordable options in the future.

Ceramic Water Filters

This simple yet ingenious design for providing Cambodia with ceramic water filters won the 2008 Project Innovation Award Grand Prize. The design consists of a porous ceramic and fired clay pot that sits inside a barrel, collecting water and then relying on gravity filtration to remove microbes and other contaminants. Since 2002, when these filters were first distributed, the regions with the filters are reporting a 50% drop in diarrheal illnesses.

Life Sack

The Life Sack is a double-duty design that first is used as a grain sack for food transport, and once delivered it can be used to store and filter water. The Life Sack uses SODIS (Solar Water Disinfection Process) technology to purify contaminated water using UV-A radiation. On top of that, the sack can be worn as a backpack for easy transport.

Pitch:Africa

Pitch: Africa is a creative idea that use a soccer field (or pitch) to collect and filter rainwater. The field and accompanying stands, which seat up to 1,000, are permeable and collect rainwater in cisterns, estimated to be 1.8 million liters for many parts of Africa. That water can then be purified for drinking or used to irrigate nearby crops.

Ford Developing Biofuel From Algae for Use in Vehicles

2011-01-19T13:57:00.000-08:00

Ford Developing Biofuel From Algae for Use in Vehicles

by Timon Singh

When one of the biggest car manufacturers in the world invests their capital into algae biofuel research, you know that renewable energy will soon play a major role in the global economy. Ford Motor Company has recently hired scientists to look into algae as the major ingredient in their efforts towards bio-fuel production. The company has quickly realized that if their cars are to be relevant in the future, then they will need to find alternatives to gasoline and oil. The company has also been looking at ethanol and butanol biofuels, but at the moment, believe that algae may hold the greatest potential.

Working with scientists at Wayne State University’s National Biofuels Energy Laboratory, Ford has been researching the potential of algae as a major biomass ingredient in the production of fuel. To aid in their research, the team of scientists have been conducting assorted experiments on algae oil and its potential to power vehicles.

And this may come as a shock to many, but this isn’t Ford’s first attempt at using alternative fuels to run their products. According to Tim Wallington, technical leader with the Ford Systems Analytics and Environmental Sciences Department, “Ford has a long history of developing vehicles that run on renewable fuels; and the increased use of biofuels is an important element of our sustainability strategy now and moving forward.”
Sherry Mueller, Research Scientist, Ford Motor Company added, “Algae have some very desirable characteristics as a potential biofuel feedstock and Ford wants to show its support for any efforts that could lead to a viable, commercial-scale application of this technology.” Furthermore stating, “At this point, algae researchers are still challenged to find economical and sustainable ways for commercial-scale controlled production and culturing of high oil-producing algae.”

SolarPrint Develops Ready-To-Print Solar Cells

2011-01-19T13:56:00.000-08:00

SolarPrint Develops Ready-To-Print Solar Cells

by Timon Singh

Irish company SolarPrint has developed a new type of printable solar cells that can be produced quickly and easily and can even generate energy from fading sunlight. Since the dye-sensitized cells use less raw materials than traditional solar cells, costs can be kept down, and it is hoped that the simple-to-produce solar cells will transform how the world uses energy.

Speaking to GreenTechMedia, SolarPrint co-founder and CEO Mazhar Bari said, “When you are travelling around the world you suddenly realize, ‘Where are the bloody solar panels?’” With that in mind Bari, an Irish citizen with Pakistani roots and a physics degree from Cambridge, sent out to explore dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) technology, that is “part printable, part liquid.”
SolarPrint effectively has eliminated the liquid part of DSSC and replaced it with nanomaterials, so that all of the active elements of SolarPrint’s cells can be applied in the printing process. The SolarPrint cells are also more efficient because they are based on a rounded nanotech structure instead of the traditional angular crystalline structure of silicon materials. Electrons have to hit the crystalline structures “at the right angle” to generate electricity, however in nanostructure cells a curved surface makes the angle of absorption much larger.
“There are many components in the cell. One layer is called the electrolyte layer.” As a liquid, that layer is “terrible,” Bari said, who is not one to mince his words. The efficiencies are adequate, he said, but “lab time is crap and it cannibalizes the materials in the cell.” The SolarPrint process replaces that liquid with a printable electrolyte paste made of smart nanomaterials, carbon nanotubes, graphene and ionic salts. “And it’s a fully printable device.”
However there is a drawback with the mass manufacturing of dye-sensitized solar cells. More and more consumers demand reliability from solar cells, with lifespans of up to 30 years, so there is concern when the cells can be produced cheaply and easily, especially as many seem to break down in due course.
However Bari believes that SolarPrint’s ability to capture low and overcast light levels both indoors and outside will give his company an edge in the market. “Dye solar cells work very well indoors,” Bari said. “The voltage doesn’t drop like crazy (like silicon) and it is able to produce reasonable power in indoor light — four or five times higher than silicon.” “One day, the whole world will be covered in dye solar cells. That’s our vision,” said B

8 Facts You Might Not Know About Water

2011-01-19T13:55:00.000-08:00

8 Facts You Might Not Know About Water

Image credit: Charity: Water

Every week, 42,000 people die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions.

Students in developing countries lose 443 million school days each year due to diseases associated with the lack of water, sanitation and hygiene. Repeated episodes of diarrhea and worm infestations diminish a child's ability to learn and impair cognitive development.
More people have access to cell phones than to toilets. As a result, tons of untreated human waste make their way to water sources causing a litany of diseases, and even death.
The US, Mexico and China lead the world in bottled water consumption, with people in the US drinking an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year. Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 percent of which will never be recycled.

These facts are disheartening, but they don't have to be the norm. Even in the darkest depths of the water crisis, we found positive solutions that are already being put in place.

Organizations like Water.org and charity: water are leading the charge in bringing fresh water to communities in the developing world by not only building wells in remote villages but also creating sustainable infrastructure to maintain those wells.
The average person uses 465 liters of water per day. But by educating yourself about where you are most wasteful in your water use, you can begin to reduce that waste.
There are small steps we can all take to help keep pollution out of our rivers and streams, like correctly disposing of household wastes.
Communities around the world are saying no to bottled water. Doing so not only drastically reduces water bottle waste, but also saves taxpayers a pretty penny. For example, the city of San Francisco saved $500,000 per year by terminating all of its bottled water contracts.

While the realities of water issues around the world are grim, the organizations and individuals driving positive solutions show us that it doesn't have to be that way. By using Blog Action Day as a unique chance to raise awareness, we are moving toward a world with more and more people committed to ensuring clean water supplies and a more sustainable future for all.

PHATport Solar Awning Provides Outdoor Shade and Solar Power

2011-01-19T13:54:00.001-08:00

by Diane Pham

PHAT Energy recently unveiled the PHATport 350, an outdoor solar structure that can serve as everything from a cozy, sun-sheltering patio to an energy-generating car port (imagine plugging your EV into one of these!). The self-contained solar shade will be on display at this year’s Solar Power International in Los Angeles(which runs today and tomorrow!), and the company has rolled out a quirky ad campaign that features a series of solar power fables sure to Flip Your Switch. Check out their hilarious videos after the jump!

We couldn’t think of a better place for a solar awning than perpetually sunny Los Angeles. The videos depict a mythical mermaid who, upon observing the misery of various people in their drab backyards, conjures up the solar gods to bring them a PHATport. The campaign was created to bring a jolt of excitement to the drab world of solar marketing.

As the reps of PHAT Energy state, “This is a fun campaign about a product that needs to be de-mystified. Let’s get away from product performance specs and have fun with the life benefits. So we show people kissing, dancing, and celebrating after being touched by solar energy. We have a beautiful spiritual mermaid who alters bad situations that are allegories for confusion, pollution and apathy. It seems completely appropriate to celebrate this fantastic technology with natural and common human emotions of celebration, especially when they occur under a PHATport.”

Shooting for the Sun

2011-01-19T13:53:00.001-08:00

My first cousin, Michael Lidell, sent me a link to this fascinating article that appeared in The Atlantic magazine. It is incredible what the human mind will come up with ... and I'm not speaking of the Super Soaker squirt gun.

What Lonnie Johnson is on to is a perpetual motion/energy device that only needs solar heat to function. This could be incredible. A good article!

Shooting for the Sun

From his childhood in segregated Mobile, Alabama, to his run-ins with a nay-saying scientific establishment, the engineer Lonnie Johnson has never paid much heed to those who told him what he could and couldn’t accomplish. Best known for creating the state-of-the-art Super Soaker squirt gun, Johnson believes he now holds the key to affordable solar power.

By Logan Ward

IMAGE CREDIT: BEN BAKER/REDUX

IN MARCH 2003, the independent inventor Lonnie Johnson faced a roomful of high-level military scientists at the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia. Johnson had traveled there from his home in Atlanta, seeking research funding for an advanced heat engine he calls the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter, or JTEC (pronounced “jay-tek”). At the time, the JTEC was only a set of mathematical equations and the beginnings of a prototype, but Johnson had made the tantalizing claim that his device would be able to turn solar heat into electricity with twice the efficiency of a photovoltaic cell, and the Office of Naval Research wanted to hear more.

Projected onto the wall was a PowerPoint collage summing up some highlights of Johnson’s career: risk assessment he’d done for the space shuttle Atlantis; work on the nuclear power source for NASA’s Galileo spacecraft; engineering help on the tests that led to the first flight of the B-2 stealth bomber; the development of an energy-dense ceramic battery; and the invention of a remarkable, game-changing weapon that had made him millions of dollars—a weapon that at least one of the men in the room, the father of two small children, recognized immediately as the Super Soaker squirt gun.
Mild-mannered and bespectacled, Johnson opened his presentation by describing the idea behind the JTEC. The device, he explained, would split hydrogen atoms into protons and electrons, and in so doing would convert heat into electricity. Most radically, it would do so without the help of any moving parts. Johnson planned to tell his audience that the JTEC could produce electricity so efficiently that it might make solar power competitive with coal, and perhaps at last fulfill the promise of renewable solar energy. But before he reached that part of his presentation, Richard Carlin, then the head of the Office of Naval Research’s mechanics and energy conversion division, rose from his chair and dismissed Johnson’s brainchild outright. The whole premise for the device relied on a concept that had proven impractical, Carlin claimed, citing a 1981 report co-written by his mentor, the highly regarded electrochemist Robert Osteryoung. Go read the Osteryoung report, Carlin said, and you will see.
End of meeting.
Concerned about what he might have missed in the literature, Johnson returned home and read the inch-thick report, concluding that it addressed an approach quite different from his own. Carlin, it seems, had rejected the concept before fully comprehending it. (When I reached Carlin by phone recently, he said he did not remember the meeting, but he is familiar with the JTEC concept and now thinks that the “principles are fine.”) Nor was Carlin alone at the time. Wherever Johnson pitched the JTEC, the reaction seemed to be the same: no engine could convert heat to electricity at such high efficiency rates without the use of moving parts.
Johnson believed otherwise. He felt that what had doomed his presentation to the Office of Naval Research—and others as well—was a collective failure of imagination. It didn’t help that he was best known as a toy inventor, nor that he was working outside the usual channels of the scientific establishment. Johnson was stuck in a Catch-22: to prove his idea would work, he needed a more robust prototype, one able to withstand the extreme heat of concentrated sunlight. But he couldn’t build such a prototype without research funding. What he needed was a new pitch. Instead of presenting the JTEC as an engine, he would frame it as a high-temperature hydrogen fuel cell, a device that produces electricity chemically rather than mechanically, by stripping hydrogen atoms of their electrons. The description was only partially apt: though both devices use similar components, fuel cells require a constant supply of hydrogen; the JTEC, by contrast, contains a fixed amount of hydrogen sealed in a chamber, and needs only heat to operate. Still, in the fuel-cell context, the device’s lack of moving parts would no longer be a conceptual stumbling block.
Indeed, Johnson had begun trying out this new pitch two months before his naval presentation, in a written proposal he submitted to the Air Force Research Laboratory’s peer-review panel. The reaction, when it came that May, couldn’t have been more different. “Funded just like that,” he told me, snapping his fingers, “because they understood fuel cells—the technology, the references, the literature. The others couldn’t get past this new engine concept.” The Air Force gave Johnson $100,000 for membrane research, and in August 2003 sent a program manager to Johnson’s Atlanta laboratory. “We make a presentation about the JTEC, and he says”—here Johnson, who is black, puts on a Bill-Cosby-doing-a-white-guy voice—“‘Wow, this is exciting!’” A year later, after Johnson had proved he could make a ceramic membrane capable of withstanding temperatures above 400 degrees Celsius, the Air Force gave him an additional $750,000 in funding.
The key to the JTEC is the second law of thermodynamics. Simply put, the law says that temperature differences tend to even out—for instance, when a hot mug of coffee disperses its heat into the cool air of a room. As the heat levels of the mug and the room come into balance, there is a transfer of energy.
Work can be extracted from that transfer. The most common way of doing this is with some form of heat engine. A steam engine, for example, converts heat into electricity by using steam to spin a turbine. Steam engines—powered predominantly by coal, but also by natural gas, nuclear materials, and other fuels—generate 90 percent of all U.S. electricity. But though they have been refined over the centuries, most are still clanking, hissing, exhaust-spewing machines that rely on moving parts, and so are relatively inefficient and prone to mechanical breakdown.
Johnson’s latest JTEC prototype, which looks like a desktop model for a next-generation moonshine still, features two fuel-cell-like stacks, or chambers, filled with hydrogen gas and connected by steel tubes with round pressure gauges. Where a steam engine uses the heat generated by burning coal to create steam pressure and move mechanical elements, the JTEC uses heat (from the sun, for instance) to expand hydrogen atoms in one stack. The expanding atoms, each made up of a proton and an electron, split apart, and the freed electrons travel through an external circuit as electric current, charging a battery or performing some other useful work. Meanwhile the positively charged protons, also known as ions, squeeze through a specially designed proton-exchange membrane (one of the JTEC elements borrowed from fuel cells) and combine with the electrons on the other side, reconstituting the hydrogen, which is compressed and pumped back into the hot stack. As long as heat is supplied, the cycle continues indefinitely.
“Lonnie’s using temperature differences to create pressure gradients,” says Paul Werbos, an energy expert and program director of the National Science Foundation. “Only instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or a wheel, he’s forcing ions through a membrane.” Werbos, who spent months vetting the JTECand eventually awarded Johnson’s team a $75,000 research grant in 2006, describes the JTEC as “a fundamentally new way, a fundamentally well-grounded way, to convert heat to electricity.” Regarding its potential to revolutionize energy production on a global scale, he says, “It has a darn good chance of being the best thing on Earth.”
JOHNSON IS A MEMBER of what seems to be a vanishing breed: the self-invented inventor. Born the third of six children in Mobile, Alabama, in 1949, he came into the world a black male in the Deep South during the days of lawful segregation. His father, David, who died in 1984, was a World War II veteran and a civilian driver for nearby Air Force bases. According to his mother, Arline, who is 86 and still lives in Mobile (in a house remodeled with Super Soaker profits), the family was poor but happy. All eight lived in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house near Mobile Bay, in a neighborhood then being bisected by the construction of Interstate 10.
As a boy, Johnson was quiet and curious, and early on, he developed a fascination with how things worked. “Lonnie tore up his sister’s baby doll to see what made the eyes close,” his mother recalls. As he grew older, he began making things, including rockets powered by fuel cooked up in his mother’s saucepans. At 13, he bolted a discarded lawn-mower engine onto a homemade go-cart and took it atop the I-10 construction site—only to have a bemused policeman escort him back down. It was around then that Johnson learned that “engineers were the people who did the kind of things that I wanted to do.”
It was hardly an obvious career path: then, as now, the profession was dominated by whites. (As recently as 2004, only 1.6 percent of the engineering doctorates awarded in the United States went to blacks.) In high school, a standardized test from the Junior Engineering Technical Society informed Johnson that he had little aptitude for engineering; but he persevered and, as a senior, became the first student from his all-black high school ever to enter the society’s regional engineering fair. The fair was held at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, just five years after then-Governor George Wallace had tried, in 1963, to physically block two black students from enrolling there. Johnson’s entry in the competition was a creation he called Linex: a compressed-air-powered robot assembled from electromagnetic switches he’d salvaged from an old jukebox, and solenoid valves he’d fashioned out of copper tubing and rubber stoppers. The finished product wowed the judges, who awarded him first prize: $250 and a plaque. Unsurprisingly, university officials didn’t trumpet the news that a black boy had won top honors. “The only thing anybody from the university said to us during the entire competition,” Johnson remembers, “was ‘Goodbye, and y’all drive safe, now.’”

Nano Ink Allows Simple Office Paper to Conduct Electricity

2011-01-19T13:50:00.001-08:00

Nano Ink Allows Simple Office Paper to Conduct Electricity

by Bridgette Meinhold

Decker Yeadon is back at it, inventing incredible materials with architectural applications. This time they’ve made simple office paper capable of conducting electricity with ink made out of nanoparticles. Their amazing discovery, which also works with cotton fabric, has the potential to revolutionize buildings, design, textiles and medical applications. The design firm recently demonstrated how they could power an LED bulb with a mere strip of the conductive office paper.

The New York design firm is known for coming up with innovative and novel applications for advanced materials, including nano materials and even architectural Buckypaper. For their latest project, they made a nano solution that they’re calling NanoINK, which consists of carbon nanotubes, deionized water, and a chemical surfactant that helps the nanotubes disperse in the water. The nanotubes are only 1.5 nm in diameter, which is smaller than a DNA molecule.
Then the ink was applied to a number of different surfaces, including regular office paper (Decker Yeadon letterhead), cotton fabric and cotton pads, resulting in the areas with ink having electrical properties. First they tested each material with a voltage meter to see if the paper or cotton was conductive, which the video clearly shows to be the case. Afterwards the tester also showed how a single strip of office paper coated in the NanoInk could conduct electricity from batteries to power an LED light.
Decker Yeadon’s discovery could have a wide range of applications from architecture to electronics, textiles, even medicine. If the ink could be controlled properly, it could even be applied by printers in a specific pattern to yield exact and predetermine electrical circuits.

Researchers Transform Sewage Sludge Into Power

2011-01-19T13:49:00.001-08:00

Researchers Transform Sewage Sludge Into Power

by Ariel Schwartz

Waste treatment plants have to get rid of sludge somehow, so why not try to find a way to turn all that muck into energy? That’s what researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno are attempting to do at the Truckee Meadows Water Reclamation Facility. If all goes well in Truckee, the system could be expanded to other reclamation facilities in the state. And with 700,000 metric tons of dried sludge generated each year in California alone, there’s a huge opportunity to generate low-cost, low-impact energy for widespread use.


The gasification process developed by the researchers sticks the sludge in a low-temperature bed of sand and salts, as waste heat from the facility drives the dryer’s electricity and the unsavory mix dries out into a powdered biomass fuel and . So far, researchers have been able to produce three pounds dried powder from 20 pounds sludge each hour. Eventually, they hope to develop a full-scale system that could generate 25,000 kilowatt-hours per day–enough to completely power the reclamation facility.

Wind Turbines on Garage

2011-01-19T13:47:00.000-08:00

Windy City Wind Turbine Greenway Parking Garage's wind turbine system, viewed from below. via Fast Company

Chicago was nicknamed the Windy City because of its blowhard politicians, not the powerful gusts off Lake Michigan. But a new parking garage took the name to heart regardless and installed this amazing helix-shaped wind turbine system inside the building, making urban turbines not only cool, but functional.
This summer, 12 turbines started spinning at Greenway Self-Park, which bills itself, somewhat oxymoronically, as Chicago's first Earth-friendly parking garage.

Open-screen walls on the 11-story garage provide ventilation and reveal the cars inside, but also let passersby marvel at the turbines. The garage also has a cistern rain-collection system, sustainable building materials, a recycling program and an electric car charging station.Lobbies on each floor include information about how to live more sustainably, and the garage has energy-efficient lighting. The garage is pursuing pursuing LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. It even has a reversible meter that can measure and return power to Chicago's grid throughout the year.
Architect Todd Halamka, director of design at the Chicago office of HOK, tells Fast Company he wanted to celebrate the building's function, not hide it.
One wonders how green a parking garage can really be, but it's not like cars are going away anytime soon, so garages might as well aim to ameliorate their impact.
And at the very least, it adds to the architecturally interesting experience of parking in downtown Chicago -- you can go underneath trains, curl up through Marina City, and now this.

Urban Wind Turbines: via Fast Company

Lumber Made from Newspaper Looks Like Real Wood

2011-01-19T13:45:00.000-08:00

The "newspaper lumber" might be a real possibility for those highly involved in single stream recycling and its by-products by mixing in recycled plastic and even adding a high tech insulation layer. The result could be a very viable alternative to wood stud construction. With the right additives this could be a very strong, termite resistant and fire resistant product.

Some of you may also recall articles on aerogel, papercrete and other very interesting and innovative products that can also be adapted to the building industry.

Doesn’t the material in the photo above look just like real wood at first glance? Upon further inspection, the text on the top plank gives away the “lumber’s” true origin – newspapers! Developed by Mieke Meijer for design firm vij5, Kranthout (Dutch for “newspaper wood”) is a new material made of old newspapers that are rolled together and milled into planks. The versatile product even mimics the appearance of wood crain and can be drilled and sanded just like real wood.

xtreme Origami: An Upcycled Gown Made From 1,000 Newspaper Cranes

by Yuka Yoneda, 07/18/10

Hear ye, hear ye, read all about this expertly crafted newspaper gown by Yuliya Kyrpo, now on display at London’s Science Museum. Krypo assembled her headlining bustier dress—complete with a flowing peacock train—from 1,000 paper cranes, which she painstakingly hand-folded from old Metro newspapers.

The House that One Man Can Lift. Sanctuary Magazine Showcases This and More.

2010-10-05T05:53:00.001-07:00

The House that One Man Can Lift. Sanctuary Magazine Showcases This and More.

by Warren McLaren

Magnetic Island house exterior Photo: Robin Gauld for Sanctuary magazine issue 12
When it came time for our architecture writer, Lloyd, to select the Best Shelter Magazine for TreeHugger's 2010 Best of Green Awards in Design and Architecture he quickly made his choice: Sanctuary Magazine, from Australia's Alternative Technology Association (ATA). Indeed he gushed, "so much beautiful stuff -- stunningly photographed and presented I just want to pack up and move to Australia. [...] The magazine's website is full of excerpts and info, but the magazine is a joy to hold."
And it is no accident that Lloyd is so enamoured. For TreeHugger was conceived as a vehicle to make green design and sustainable lifestyles attractive to a mainstream audience. Sanctuary magazine does that so effectively for eco-architecture. It's twelveth issue recently hit the news stands, continuing the thread of lush photography and green residential design. We look at some of the highlights below.

Images: Sanctuary magazine
Six houses are profiled, with sumptuous imagery, informative descriptions and backed up with a simple list of their 'sustainable features' such as the material used, the type of glazing, rainwater harvesting systems, lighting, landscaping, etc.
But probably the nub of info that most intrigues me is that the respective home owners have, in most cases, been trusting enough to provide Sanctuary magazine with project costings. I think this is an important consideration, for it is very easy to throw a barrowload of money at a home, and say "there, look it's 'green.'" It's another matter entirely to achieve sound environmental results on a tight budget. Thus Sanctuary's published costings keep the eye candy honest.

Photo: Christopher Federick Jones for Sanctuary magazine issue 11
Similarly, new houses tend to get the lion's share of attention when it comes for green housing media coverage. But Sanctuary consistently has a collection of renovations to show what clever eco thinking can impart to existing dwellings.
And the most recent issues of the magazine have also stepped outside of the pure green house reviews and covered related information. In the current edition you can get up to speed on energy ratings, reupholstering furniture, thermal window blinds, ceiling fans and landscaping. In the previous issue, the focus was on how to make a cool pantry that would give a fridge a run for its money, along with discussions of greener concrete, lawns, how to buy recycled kitchens and understanding housing ventilation.
But all this wonderful information is really just the backdrop to the reviewed houses.
Issue 12 showcases half a dozen homes, but the one that most captured my imagination was a Magnetic Island residence, with corrugated iron cladding, a material so ubiquitous in early Australian buildings. Here it is used in a tropic dwelling that has won a bunch of awards, including from the Australian Institute of Architects. In fact, the team behind its design, Troppo Architects, were this year, the first Australian firm to win the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture.

Magnetic Island house interior Photo: Robin Gauld for Sanctuary magazine issue 12
Although sited in the humid tropics, the house avoids need of any air conditioning, through the judicious placement of three separate buildings connected by passive venting outdoor breezeways and backed up with insect screened adjustable louvre windows, and ceiling fans. Large eaves help keep direct sun at bay, while a lap pool also adds a cooling feature.
There is almost as much outside deck area as there is enclosed house, allowing the dwelling to appear larger than its 107 square metres (1,151 sq ft) suggest.
This three bedroom, two bathroom house was constructed by one man. All the materials are therefore relatively lightweight and easily transportable and managed. The exposed steel frame was bolted together rather than welded, so it can all be disassembled at the end of a useful life. The house itself is raised off the ground to minimise site disturbance (although we're not sure how this design feature applies to the lap pool). The builder used leftover construction materials to create furniture for the house.
The lighting is LED and this is powered via a grid connected 3kW Kyocera polycrystalline photovoltaic solar array. (See more pix on the Troppo Architect's website.)
The other homes highlighted in the twelveth issue of Sanctuary magazine each have their own unique green design features. Like sliding walls that convert otherwise private rooms into expansive open space. An idea similarly explored by another house whose entire eastern wall swings open like a massive door to turn a room into an open air pavilion. Or the house whose internal thermal mass uses rammed earth construction, with the twist of employing recycled concrete aggregate.
Sanctuary magazine is a print magazine, not available online, although excerpts of articles from back issues do appear on the magazine's website.

Stanford Unveils Solar Cells Thinner Than Light Wavelengths

2010-10-05T05:51:00.001-07:00

Stanford Unveils Solar Cells Thinner Than Light Wavelengths

by Timon Singh

One problem with solar cells is that the thicker and more powerful they are, the more expensive they are to make. However engineers at Stanford recently announced that they have developed a new type of solar cell thinner than the wavelengths of light that could absorb 10 times the amount of sunlight that current cells do. The engineers believe that by configuring the thicknesses of several thin layers of films, an organic polymer cell could transform the solar energy industry.


Stanford’s new ultra-thin solar cell stops the lights from bouncing around as it would in a conventional cell, allowing it to be absorbed more easily. This technique is called “light trapping”, and it works best in nano-thin cells. Speaking to PhysOrg.com, Shanhui Fan, associate professor of electrical engineering said, “It’s the same as if you were using hamsters running on little wheels to generate your electricity – you’d want each hamster to log as many miles as possible before it jumped off and ran away.”

“The longer a photon of light is in the solar cell, the better chance the photon can get absorbed,” Fan added, who is also senior author of the paper describing the work called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We all used to think of light as going in a straight line,” Fan said. “For example, a ray of light hits a mirror, it bounces and you see another light ray. That is the typical way we think about light in the macroscopic world. But if you go down to the nanoscales that we are interested in, hundreds of millionths of a millimeter in scale, it turns out the wave characteristic really becomes important.”
With that in mind, if a solar cell can be made that is around 400 to 700 nanometers thin (billionths of a meter), it can produce a remarkable amount of energy. The potential for this technology is enormous — not only would nano-thin solar cells save money in materials, but by using organic polymers over silicon they make the cells cheaper to buy and easier to install due to their thickness.

Wave Power Lights Up U.S. Electrical Grid For First Time

2010-10-05T05:50:00.001-07:00

Wave Power Lights Up U.S. Electrical Grid For First Time

by Ariel Schwartz

We write a lot about wave power here at Inhabitat, but functional wave farms are few and far between. Now Ocean Power Technologies has hooked up its PB40 PowerBuoy to the grid at the Marine Corps Base in Hawaii, marking the first time waves have provided energy to the U.S. electrical grid.

Unlike many tidal power devices, the PowerBuoy generates energy from the rising and falling of the waves. A 10 MW PowerBuoy station occupies 12.5 hectares of ocean.
The Hawaii-based PowerBuoy was first deployed three-quarters of a mile off the Oahu coast in December 2009. With the new Marine Corps hookup, OPT hopes to prove that the PowerBuoy can produce utility-grade renewable energy. If all goes well with the Marine Corps station, we can expect more wave power to hit the U.S. soon — OPT already signed a stakeholder agreement for a utility-scale wave energy project in Oregon.

Magnetic Energy Device Could Mean 40% Power Savings

2010-10-05T05:49:00.003-07:00

Magnetic Energy Device Could Mean 40% Power Savings

by Brit Liggett

The US Navy is on their way to having 40% of their power come from renewable sources by 2020 and a big part of that move is helping their buildings save energy. They’ve got their researchers hard at work devising new technology and one solution that recently emerged from the U.S. Office of Naval Research Global has us marveling at its ingenuity. It is a magnetic energy regulation device that controls the flow of energy to lighting sources. The device also captures residual magnetic energy given off by energy transmitters which it redirects back into the lighting — total savings can be up to 40% at peak times.

“The device not only conserves electricity, but produces far less heat and produces less electromagnetic interference than conventional technologies” said Dr. Chandra Curtis, program officer in ONR Global’s Tokyo office. She noted that she was excited about this device providing savings across the power grid. In practice in barracks at a Navy base in Tokyo, Japan the device proved to work wonderfully in all intended aspects and significantly reduced power consumption over time.
Curtis and her team are working on a proposal for a larger test installation at the same barracks in Tokyo that would include a break room, printing press room, laundry room, gymnasium and several offices. The device was originally tested in an area that required 24 hour lighting, but using it in these varied spaces would show its efficacy in different situations. The tests should run into 2011 if approved.

Canada Becomes First Country to Ban Toxic BPA

2010-10-05T05:49:00.001-07:00

Canada Becomes First Country to Ban Toxic BPA

by Ariel Schwartz

Photo by Steven Depolo
As avid Inhabitat readers know, BPA is a nasty substance. The organic compound, found in everything from reusable water bottles to soup cans, is thought to cause both hormonal and neurological issues. But the anti-BPA movement is growing strong — so strong, in fact, that Canada just moved to ban the substance altogether.

Canada banned BPA-containing plastic baby bottles in 2008, but the new move will see BPA removed from all products on store shelves. As a result, Canada will become the first country in the world to declare BPA as a toxic substance. There’s no word on when the ban will take effect, but the North American chemical industry is reportedly angry with Environment Canada’s decision to abolish the stuff.
Even though the U.S. hasn’t made any moves to ban BPA outright, the Canadian ban could reverberate across the border — and that’s a good thing for anyone concerned about their health.

Liquid Energy: New Microbe Tech Turns Sun and CO2 Into Fuel

2010-10-05T05:48:00.001-07:00

Liquid Energy: New Microbe Tech Turns Sun and CO2 Into Fuel

by Timon Singh

Biofuel startup Joule Unlimited has announced that it has engineered microbes that require only sunlight and CO2 to produce ethanol, diesel, or other hydrocarbons. The company formally announced that it has obtained a patent for a genetically modified version of cyanobacteria that converts carbon dioxide, dirty water and sunlight into a liquid hydrocarbon that is functionally equivalent to regular diesel.

According to the patent, the engineered cyanobacteria contains “a recombinant acyl ACP reductase (AAR) enzyme and a recombinant alkanal decarboxylative monooxygenase (ADM) enzyme.” What this concoction of cyanobacteria and enzymes does is allow for hydrocarbon production in a single step, converting captured sunlight into ‘liquid energy’, that can be either ethanol or diesel.

“This patent award represents a critical milestone for our IP strategy and validates the truly revolutionary nature of our process, which has the potential to yield infrastructure-compatible replacements for fossil fuels at meaningful scale and highly-competitive costs, even before subsidies,” said Bill Sims, President and CEO, Joule. “Our vision since inception has been to overcome the limitations of biomass-based technologies, from feedstock costs and logistics to inefficient, energy-intensive processing. The result is the world’s first platform for converting sunlight and waste CO₂ directly into diesel, requiring no costly intermediates, no use of agricultural land or fresh water, and no downstream processing.”
Formerly known as Joule Biotechnologies, the company, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced late last year that it had developed technology which could produce the equivalent of 25,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year and 15,000 gallons of diesel per acre per year of drop-in hydrocarbon fuels, using only sunlight, CO₂ and water as inputs. The Solar Converter along with the new bacteria and a technology known as helioculture is the basis of this claim. Pilot production on diesel begins later this year.
While the project is still in its pilot testing phase, it’s already producing 10,000 gallons of ethanol a year, or 40 percent of its goal, on its pilot lines in Leander, Texas. It is expected that production will begin by the end of the year with commercial production commencing in 2012. If it is successful, not only could it mean cheap biofuel (selling at $30 a barrel, compared to $70 for oil), but it could mean a fully sustainable form of fuel that doesn’t need food crops to create it. Fuel could literally be created out of thin air!

House-in-a-Can Recycles Grain Silos Into Housing

2010-10-05T05:47:00.001-07:00

House-in-a-Can Recycles Grain Silos Into Housing

by Lloyd Alter

All images via Austin-Mergold
Grain silos, made from corrugated and galvanized steel, are among the cheapest and most efficient enclosures one can buy; that's why Bucky Fuller played with them during World War II, with his Dymaxion Deployment Units.
Updating the idea, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG brings us Austin + Mergold's House-In-A-Can, recycling these grain silos into housing, from single family to condo.

The architects describe them with some marketing flair:

36-foot in diameter American grain dryer with 2000 SF single family starter home inside. Instantly assembled off-the-shelf 14 GA galvanized corrugated steel exterior a 2000 SF developer house inside. Optional greenhouse. Buy 5 get one free!!!

They can be arranged in a number of configurations.

Manaugh calls the models "delightfully absurd and inspiring" and suggests further iterations:

A thesis presentation performed as a series of metal cans extruded outward into models of inhabitable architecture... Cinema-In-A-Can. Library-In-A-Can. Gym-In-A-Can. Dome-In-A-Can Republic.

More at House-in-a-can via BLDGBLOG

6 Inspiring Examples of Groundbreaking Green Technology

2010-10-05T05:46:00.003-07:00

6 Inspiring Examples of Groundbreaking Green Technology

by Yuka Yoneda

Green technology isn’t just about wind turbines, solar panels and alternative fuel anymore. A few inspiring individuals out there are breaking new ground with innovative ideas that no one’s ever explored before. From a printer that can spit out whole buildings made of stone to an entire city that flips the discomfort of the summer heat into an energy-saving advantage for the wintertime to a company that decided solar panels don’t have to be ugly, heavy or even rectangular. Read on to check out some of our favorite examples of emerging technology in the field of green!

3-D Printer Creates Entire Buildings From Solid Rock

3D printers are nothing new – but how about a printer that can whip up entire life-size stone buildings?! That’s exactly what designer Enrico Dini’s prototype D-Shape printer does. Instead of ink, the device uses layers of sand, and Dini reports that the process is four times faster than conventional building, costs about one-third to one-half the price of Portland cement, and creates much less waste.

Transparent Solar Spray Transforms Windows Into Watts

Photovoltaic panels transform the sun’s rays into energy we can use, but they’re bulky and not the most attractive in terms of design. Well one Norwegian company called EnSol AS has cast aside the notion that PVs need to take up extra space — or even be in a solid state. They’ve developed a remarkable new spray-on solar film consisting of metal nanoparticles embedded in a transparent composite matrix that allows you to turn ordinary windows into solar panels. The best part? The spray is clear so you can still see right through your windows!

POWERleap Harnesses Energy From Foot Steps!

While other green tech companies look to outside sources like the sun and wind when they think about alternative power, POWERleap decided to completely flip the script by tapping the energy inside – of ourselves! Their piezoelectric floor tiling system that converts the energy from human foot traffic into electricity could be applied to train stations, sidewalks or even inside homes to harness the wasted energy from our footsteps into power for the grid.

‘Solar Ivy’ Photovoltaic Leaves Climb to New Heights

Who says photovoltaic panels have to be an eyesore? After all, if they could somehow be integrated as a decorative element on homes and buildings, more people might be willing to install them on more surface area. Well, that’s exactly the approach that Brooklyn-based SMIT (Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology) took with their “Solar Ivy”, a system of paper-thin, leaf-shaped solar panels that generate energy by sparkling in the sunlight. These pretty PVs consist of layers of thin-film material on top of polyethylene with a piezoelectric generator attached to each one, and are definitely miles away from the big, boxy panels we’re used to seeing.

Shoe Generator Harvests Power from Walking

Walking is already one of the greenest forms of transportation but one researcher at Louisiana Tech University thought it could be made even more eco-friendly — so he designed a shoe that converts the wearer’s footsteps into electricity. The piezo power shoe contains a small generator in its sole that can charge batteries or power small electronics. Bet your Nikes can’t do that.

Science City Stores Warm Air from Summer to Heat Buildings in Winter

Isn’t it sad that in many parts of the world people use a ton of energy cooling buildings in the summer and then use almost as much power heating up the same spaces just a few months later? It may sound crazy but what if there was a way to save the summer’s hot air and use it to warm buildings throughout the winter? Well some smart thinkers at Honggerberg Campus in Switzerland are doing just that. Their campus, called Science City is installing systems that will allow it to harness natural heat during the warmer months, pump it underground and store it until the winter when it be pushed back up into buildings and act as a heating system. The system is the first of its kind.

World’s Largest Wave Energy Site Now Installed in UK

2010-10-05T05:46:00.001-07:00

World’s Largest Wave Energy Site Now Installed in UK
by Timon Singh

The Wave Hub, a groundbreaking renewable energy project that is set to become the UK’s first offshore facility dedicated to wave energy, has been installed off the North Coast of Cornwall. Four wave energy generation devices will connect their arrays into the Hub, allowing developers to transmit and then sell their renewable energy to the UK’s electricity distribution grid. The total capacity of the hub will be 20 MWe (megawatt electrical).
The project that has cost £42 million ($64 million) will essentially be a ’socket’ sitting on the seabed for wave energy converters to be plugged into. It is hoped Wave Hub’s construction will make the South West of England a leading player in the global marine energy industry. Wave Hub will also see the construction 0f a sub-station built at Hayle 10 miles away. It will be situated adjacent to a connection point on the distribution network. From there, a cable will be taken through a 200m duct beneath the sand dunes and then across the sea bed to an eight square kilometre area within which the devices will be moored.

The South West Regional Development Agency (RDA) has put £12.5 million into the project with £20 million coming from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Convergence Programme. Another £9.5 million will come from the UK government. The scheme is expected to be operational next year and has already signed up its first wave device developer – Ocean Power Technologies Limited. Fred Olsen Limited, WestWave and Oceanlinx are said to be the other three companies.

Stephen Peacock, executive director of Enterprise and Innovation at the South West Regional Development Agency (RDA), said, “This milestone is the culmination of more than six years’ work by the RDA and its partners and will catapult south-west England and the UK to the forefront of wave energy development. Our aim is to create an entirely new low-carbon industry in the south west and hundreds of quality jobs.”
Energy and climate change minister, Lord Hunt, welcomed news of the construction and said that it demonstrated huge scope for wave and tidal energy around the UK’s shores. ”The south west is the UK’s first low-carbon economic area, building on its regional business opportunities and skills,” he said. “The combination of its wealth of natural marine resource and its high level of expertise in marine technology makes it an ideal location for the Wave Hub.”
However while Wave Hub may be a source of national pride as well as renewable power, no-one is more proud than the RDA’s Wave Hub General Manager Guy Lavender who said, “Seeing Wave Hub lowered into the water was the culmination of more than seven years’ hard work by hundreds of people and the fact that it was designed and built in this country is testimony to the skills and experience that the UK already has in the fledgling marine renewables industry.”

Bürstner Trailer Has Lessons For Living In Smaller Spaces

2010-10-05T05:45:00.001-07:00

Bürstner Trailer Has Lessons For Living In Smaller Spaces

by Lloyd Alter

Those designing for small spaces can learn a lot from boats and travel trailers, particularly from European designs. Caravanning is a high-end luxury activity in Europe and some of the models put luxury yachts to shame. This Bürstner Averso Plus is pretty luxe, and has is advertised as the first ever with a drop-down bed. The image above is set up for dining, with the bed pulled up to the ceiling and the "chic starry sky" of LEDs visible.

Here is is dropped down over the table, which is also on a telescoping base.

A lot of boats and travel trailers have drop-down tables where the cushions from the back of the seating are put on the table, becoming a bed, but this looks a lot more comfortable and faster, too.

it is all rather nicely fitted out with lots of storage;

There are lessons in the bathroom as well, where the entire room becomes the shower stall, saving a lot of space. No idea what the thing costs, but it's on Born Rich, so it is probably expensive. More at Bürstner

Inspiring Green Technology That Has the Power to Heal

2010-10-05T05:44:00.002-07:00

Inspiring Green Technology That Has the Power to Heal

by Rebecca Paul

One can’t deny the ever-increasing role that technology plays in our lives. While some people are averse to the spread of technology, many of us recognize the positive impact that it can have on our future and the quality of our lives. In the field of medicine, there are many scientists, doctors, engineers, and designers that are constantly pushing the bounds of what’s possible in terms of human health — and the results are inspiring. Read on for some of our favorite examples of awe-inspiring and green medical revelations!

Photovoltaic Device Gives Sight to the Blind

There is no better example of how we can use technology to create a brighter future than using photovoltaics to help the blind see. Researchers at Stanford University recently developed a new artificial retina implant that actually uses the power of the sun to help give sight to the blind. Previous implants were problematic because of the challenges associated with providing enough electricity to the chip. Fortunately, with the development of miniature photovoltaic cells, these new implants now have the power to get the job done.

LCD Televisions Transformed into Infection Fighting Medicine

One downfall to adopting new technology is the issue of “disposing” or “not disposing” of the old stuff — e-waste has become a real problem that needs a real solution. Scientists at the University of York have gone above and beyond finding a way to properly dispose of this waste — they’ve discovered how to recycle discarded LCD televisions into an amazing infection-fighting substance. York’s Department of Chemistry and its team of researchers successfully transformed the key element of LCD television sets – polyvinyl-alcohol (PVA) – into an anti-microbial material that can fight infections – now that’s what e-waste recycling should be.

Implantable Solar-powered Chip Monitors Blood Sugar Levels

Most diabetics have forever had to deal with the uncomfortable, but unavoidable need to monitor their own glucose levels by drawing blood. Lucky for them, the Glucowizzard may have eliminated much of the discomfort associated with the finger pricking ritual. This solar-powered device is a rice-sized implantable glucose sensor that is inserted under the patient’s skin. The device continuously monitors glucose levels and only needs to be replaced once each year.

Medical Dressing Uses Nanotechnology to Treat Infection

Researchers at the University of Bath and the Southwest UK Paediatric Burns Center have redefined the future of wound dressing. Their amazing dressing not only stops you from bleeding…. it can also detect disease-causing pathogens. As soon as these pathogens are detected, nano-capsules in the dressing release antibiotics and change color to indicate that the medicine has been released

Living, Breathing “Lung Chip” Provides Alternative to Animal Testing

Testing chemicals to determine how safe or unsafe they are for the human body is an important part of ensuring our health. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to go about this, and animal testing is a horrific endeavor altogether. Seeking to provide a solution to this quandary, researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have developed a synthetic human lung-on-a-chip. Their transparent bite-sized device cleverly mimics how a real lung breathes, and how it allows pathogens into the blood stream. With access to inspiring gadgets like this one, the ethically dubious practice of animal testing could soon be history.

America’s First Zero Energy School to Open

2010-10-05T05:44:00.000-07:00

America’s First Zero Energy School to Open

by Andrew Michler

Richardsville Elementary, a new LEED Platinum School in Kentucky, is getting extra credit by being the first zero energy school in the nation! Opening this month to much anticipation, the facility is a cornucopia of green building strategies and efficient technologies. The bread and butter of the school’s success are tremendous efficiency gains coupled with a 300 kW thin-film solar array. Sherman Carter Barnhart Architects have done and astonishing job of reducing the building’s energy consumption to one fourth of a typical school without breaking the bank.

The 72,000 square-foot school uses insulating concrete forms (ICF) with a highly insulated roof to reduce reliance upon heating and cooling equipment. The windows are shaded by light shelves that reflect sun into the celestry windows, providing ample daylighting. Nanogel translucent panels line the celestry window in the main hall. Their ability to provide lots of glare free daylight is paired with super-insulated performance. A ground-source heat-pump helps provide for the building’s heating and cooling needs, and exposed pipes, meters and a floor motif teach the students about the system. In fact, each hallway showcases an environmental theme or technology — solar panels, heat pumps, recycling, and water conservation.

The energy production comes from a huge thin film solar array that is glued to the roof top. The array was chosen for its simplified installation and because it could easily conform to the radius of the roof. Green construction materials used include a bamboo floor in the gym and reused building materials from the deconstructed school that was replaced. The kitchen uses new technologies that eliminate the need for a hood. The entire project breaks down to less than $200 a square foot, proving that great design and green building don’t require a huge cost burden. In fact, with all said and done, this could be the cheapest school to run in America!

Pop-Up Village for Haiti Made From 900 Shipping Containers

2010-10-05T05:43:00.001-07:00

Pop-Up Village for Haiti Made From 900 Shipping Containers

by Bridgette Meinhold

Haitian Canadian musician Luck Mervil is leading the charge to help rebuild Haiti with houses made from repurposed shipping containers. Mervil is behind the Montreal organization Vilaj Vilaj, which wants to use 900 shipping containers to build an entirely new village west of Port-au-Prince fit for 5,000 people. The organization aims to build sustainable and long-term housing in Haiti — and eventually elsewhere — with the help of local Haitians.

Mervil, who has put his own career aside to work on this important project, expects the entire community to cost around $25 million and has been ardently working to raise the funds. The new village will be built on a parcel of previously uninhabited land near Leogane, a coastal city west of Port-au-Prince. A prototype shipping container house was built in Canada in 10 days for between $8,000 and $10,000, and Mervil expects the costs to be much lower in Haiti.
The village will consist of a series of 900 shipping containers grouped together in a grid and separated by open space, parks, and playing fields. Both 40 and 20-foot containers will be used to construct durable, long-term and hurricane and earthquake resistant homes. Each home will offer roughly 320 sq feet of living space with running water and bathrooms. The village will also be self-sufficient, with space for companies to set up shop so that villagers can work and support themselves.

MIT’s Solar Funnel Concentrates Solar Energy 100 Times

2010-10-05T05:42:00.003-07:00

MIT’s Solar Funnel Concentrates Solar Energy 100 Times

by Timon Singh

A group of chemical engineers at MIT have devised a way to collect solar energy 100 times more concentrated than a traditional photovoltaic cell. If their ’solar funnel’ venture proves to be a success, it could drastically alter how solar energy is collected in the future — there will no longer be a need for massive solar arrays or extensive space to generate significant and sufficient amounts of power. The engineers’ research has determined that carbon nanotubes – hollow tubes made up of carbon atoms — will be the primary instrument in capturing and focusing light energy, allowing for not just smaller, but more powerful solar arrays.


In the Sept. 12 online edition of the journal Nature Materials, Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and leader of the research team said, “Instead of having your whole roof be a photovoltaic cell, you could have little spots that were tiny photovoltaic cells, with antennas that would drive photons into them.” Their work is being funded by a National Science Foundation Career Award, a Sloan Fellowship, the MIT-Dupont Alliance and the Korea Research Foundation.

The antenna itself is incredibly small – it consists of a fibrous rope about 10 micrometers (millionths of a meter) long and four micrometers thick, containing about 30 million carbon nanotubes. The prototype made by Strano’s team consisted of a fiber made of two layers of nanotubes, each with different electrical properties.
When a photon strikes the surface of the solar funnel, it excites an electron to a higher energy level, which is specific to the material. The relationship between the energized electron and the hole it leaves behind is called an exciton, and the difference in energy levels between the hole and the electron is known as the bandgap.
The inner layer of the antenna contains nanotubes with a small bandgap, and nanotubes in the outer layer have a higher bandgap. Excitons like to flow from high to low energy, and in the solar funnel’s case means they can flow from the outer layer to the inner layer where they can exist in a lower energy state. When light strikes the antenna, all of the excitons flow to the center of the antenna where they are concentrated and the photons are converted to an electrical current. Like with all solar cells however, its efficiency depends on the materials utilized for the electrode.

Strano’s team is the first to construct nanotube fibers in which the properties of different layers can be controlled — an achievement made possible by recent advances in separating nanotubes with different properties. It is not just the higher rate of concentrated energy that makes the solar funnels a breakthrough — by utilizing carbon nanotubes, solar cells can be constructed at a lower-cost than traditional silicon-based solar cells.
While the cost of carbon nanotubes was once prohibitive, it has come down in recent years as chemical companies build up their manufacturing capacity. “At some point in the near future, carbon nanotubes will likely be sold for pennies per pound, as polymers are sold,” says Strano. “With this cost, the addition to a solar cell might be negligible compared to the fabrication and raw material cost of the cell itself, just as coatings and polymer components are small parts of the cost of a photovoltaic cell.”
In theory, with this new technology, not only could the solar funnels be used to generate power, but they could be used in applications where light needs to be concentrated — such as telescopes or night-vision goggles. The design behind the solar funnel is quite innovative, by capturing the light in a tube, Strano’s solar funnel, also know as an nanotube antenna, boosts the number of photons that can be transformed into energy, but in a similar process to that of tradition solar cells.
Strano’s team is now reportedly working on ways to minimize the energy lost as excitons flow through the fiber, as well as new antennas that would lose only 1 percent of the energy they absorb versus the standard 13 percent.

Cambridge University Produces Cheap Plastic Organic Solar Cell

2010-10-05T05:41:00.001-07:00

Cambridge University Produces Cheap Plastic Organic Solar Cell

by Timon Singh

The University of Cambridge has developed a low cost organic solar cell that has the potential to transform solar production. This new material is made of organic plastic and could be used on awnings, umbrellas and other plastic devices to generate energy.


By placing organic polymers (long chains of carbon-based molecules) in plastic you create an organic photovoltaic cell, that until now have not had much commercial success. With an operating principle similar to photosynthesis in green plants, organic photovoltaic cells are cheap to produce when compared to silicon solar cells, but have quite a low efficiency. This is something which the University of Cambridge is aiming to change.

The university team has reportedly come up with a commercial model that combines efficiency improvements, a longer lifespan, low-cost (and low-toxicity) raw materials, a cost-effective manufacturing process, and a product line that focuses on economies of scale and ease of installation. If this can be done, then cheaply produced solar cells have the ability to transform poorer countries and their energy demands.

The university’s Cavendish Laboratory and the Carbon Trust have formed a joint venture company to develop organic solar PV technology, which has been financed with a £4.5 million initial investment from the Trust and specialty chemicals firm Rhodia. Cavendish Labs have reportedly fine-tuned the capability for fabricating large-scale plastic electronic devices on flexible materials using roll-to-roll processes. The new company will be able to focus on developing organic photovoltaics (OPV) on flexible rolls, enabling them to be used more readily and discretely on buildings – and potentially other objects – than conventional rigid photovoltaic panels.
Not only can organic photovoltaic plastic be molded for any purpose, but it can be spray-painted on objects, be it buildings, cars or otherwise. There are also investigations in to creating a silicon-based solar paint, but if organic photovoltaic paint can be produced first, and more cheaply, then it could transform the solar market. Instead of acres of solar cells, cities could be transformed using solar plastics, not to mention the more environmental alternative – bioplastics, which are made from waste-water instead of petroleum.

Water and water filtration

2010-10-05T05:38:00.001-07:00

New Nanotech Purifier Filters Water 80,000 Times Faster

by Cameron Scott

A new water filter that employs cotton dipped in nano-sized silver wires and copper tubes works 80,000 times faster than filters that simply block bacteria from getting through. The filter, developed by Stanford University researchers for use in developing countries, efficiently conducts a tiny charge of electricity, zapping 98 percent of all bacteria.


Photo: Shai Kessel

Millions of people die in rural and undeveloped areas every year from exposure to contaminated drinking water. The challenge is to create processes that work cheaply and reliably and uses materials that are light enough to transport. The pass-through filter is less likely to fail due to clogging or becoming infested with the bacteria it’s intended to kill: if bacteria cling to it, the silver kills them. And because its nano-materials are especially efficient conductors of electricity, the filter can get the jolt it needs from a small solar panel, a hand crank or 12-volt car batteries.
Unfortunately, when it comes to drinking water, 98 percent isn’t an adequate kill rate, so water would have to be filtered more than once. But since the filter works 80,000 times faster, there’s plenty of time for that.

Environmental Health Issues
Water
Cancer & Chlorine
Is the chlorine in our drinking water acting as catalyst triggering tumor development both in atherosclerosis and cancer? The addition of chlorine to our drinking water started in the late 1890’s and had wide acceptance in the United States by 1920. Joseph Price, M. D, wrote a fascinating yet largely ignored book in the late 1960’s, entitled Coronaries Cholesterol. Chlorine, Dr Price believes, is the primary and essential cause of atherosclerosis is chlorine. "Nothing can negate the incontrovertible fact the basic cause of atherosclerosis and resulting entities, such as heart attacks and most common forms of stokes is chlorine. The chlorine contained in processed drinking water." (1)
This conclusion is based on experiments using chlorine in the drinking water of chickens. The results: 95% of the chickens given chlorine added to distilled water developed atherosclerosis within a few months.
Atherosclerosis, heart attacks and the resulting problems of hardening of the arteries and plaque formation is really the last step in a series of biochemical malfunctions. Price points out it takes ten to twenty years before symptoms in humans become evident In many ways, this is reminiscent of cancer which can take twenty to thirty years to develop.
Can chlorine be linked to cancer too? In the chlorination process itself, chlorine combines with natural organic matter decaying vegetation to form potent cancer causing trihalomethanes (THM’s) or haloforms. Trihalomethanes collectively include such carcinogens as chloroforms, bromoforms carbon tectachloride, bischlorothane and others. The amount of THM’s in our drinking water is theoretically regulated by the EPA. Although the maximum amount allowed by law is 100 ppb, a 1976 study showed 31 of 112 municipal water systems exceeded this limit. (2)
According to some studies by 1975, the number of chemical contaminants found in finished drinking water exceeded 300. (3) In 1984 over 700 chemicals had been found in our drinking water The EPA has targeted 129 as posing the greatest threat to our health, Currently the EPA enforces federal standards for 34 drinking water contaminants. In July, 1990 they proposed adding 23 new ones and expects this list increasing to 85 in 1992. (4)
Another report claims the picture is much worse. According to Troubled Waters on Tap "over 2100 contaminants have been detected in U. S. drinking water since 1974 with 190 known or suspected to cause adverse health effects at certain concentration levels. In total, 97 carcinogens and suspected carcinogens, 82 mutagens and suspected mutagens, 28 acute and chronic toxic contaminants and 23 tumor promoters have been detected in U. S. drinking water since 1974. The remaining 90% of the organic matter present in drinking water has not been identified by testing to-date.
Compounds in these concentration could pose serious toxic effects, either alone or in combination with other chemicals found in drinking water. Overall, available scientific evidence continues to substantiate the link between consumption of toxins in drinking water and serious public health concerns, Studies have strengthened the association between ingestion of toxins and elevated cancer mortality risks"(5)
Studies in New Orleans, Louisiana; Eric County, New York, Washington County Maryland, Ohio County, Ohio reveal high levels of haloforms or THM ‘s in drinking water The result – higher levels of cancer. (6) (7) (8) (9)
‘The continued use of chlorine as the main drinking water disinfectant in the United States only adds to the organic chemical contamination of drinking water supplies. The current federal standard regulation of trihalomethanes do not adequately protect water consumers from the multitude of other organic chlorination by-products that have been shown in many studies to be mutagenic and toxic’(5)
"Chlorine is so dangerous" according to biologist/chemist Dr. Herbert Schwartz," that Is should be banned. Putting chlorine In the water is like starting a time bomb. Cancer heart trouble, premature senility, both mental and physical are conditions attributable to chlorine, treated water supplies. It is making us grow old before our time by producing symptoms of ageing such as hardening of the arteries. I believe if chlorine were now proposed for the first time to be used in drinking water it would be banned by the Food and Drug Administration."(10)
Many municipalities are experimenting with a variety of disinfectants to either take the place of chlorine or to be used in addition, as a way of cutting down on the amount of chlorine added to the water However these alternatives such as chlorine dioxide, bromine chloride, chloromines, etc., are just as dangerous as chlorine. We’ re replacing one toxic chemical with another.
On the positive side, some cities are starting to use aeration carbon filtration, ultraviolet light and ozone as safe alternatives to chemical disinfectants. But the number of cities and the number of people getting water from these methods is minimal.
How can chlorination be linked to heart disease and cancer? In Super Nutrition for Healthy Hearts Dr Richard Passwater shows how "the origin of heart disease is akin to the origin of cancer" Chlorination could very well be a key factor linking these two major diseases Chlorine creates THM's and haloforms. These potent chemical pollutants can trigger the production of excess free radicals in our bodies. Free radicals cause cell damage. Excess free radicals can cause normal smooth muscle cells in the arterial wall to go haywire, to mutate. The fibrous plaque consequently formed is essentially a benign tumor. (11) Unfortunately, this tumor is linked with the origin of heart disease.
If your drinking water is chlorinated, don’t drink it You can purchase very effective filters which will remove 99% of the THM’s or purchase proper bottled spring water. Just this simple safeguard may save thousands from heart disease and cancer - the two major degenerative killers in the United States.

Price JM. Coronaries Cholesterol/Chlorine. NY: Pyramid, 1969.

Maugh TH. New Study Links Chlorination and Cancer Science 1983; 211 (February 13): 694.

Wilkins JR, Reiches NA, Kruse CW. Organic Chemical Contaminants in Drinking Water and Cancer AM. J. Epidemology 1979; 114: 179-190.

U.S Water News. EPA Seeking to Expand Number of Drinking Water Contaminants to 34. August 1990: 8

Conacher D. Troubled Waters on Tap Organic Chemicals in Public Drinking Water Systems and the Failure of Regulation. Wash D. C: Center for Study of Responsive Law, 1988: 114.

Page T, Harris RH, Epstein SS. Drinking Water and Cancer Morality in Louisiana. Science 1976; 193: 55-57.

Gottlieb DG, Osborne RH. Premiminary Report on Nationwide Study of Drinking Water and Cardiovascular Diseases. J. Environmental Pathology and Toxicology. 1980; 3: 65-76.

Carlo GL, Mettlin CJ. Cancer Incidence and Trihalomethane Concentrations in a Public Water System. AM. J. Public Health 1980; 70 (May): 523-525

Wilkins JR, Comstock GW. Source of Drinking Water at Home and Site-Specific Cancer Incidence in Washington County, Maryland. AM J. Epidemology. 1981; 114: 178-190.

Dons Bach KW, Walker M. Drinking Water. Huntingdon Beach, CA: Int’l Institute of Natural Health Sciences, 1981.

Passwater R. Supernutrition for Healthy Hearts. NY: Jova 1978.

Source: - Healthy Water, Martin Fox, PH.d.

More Solar

2010-10-05T05:37:00.001-07:00

MIT Creates Self-Assembling Solar Cells That Repair Themselves

by Jaymi Heimbuch

MIT's Test Cell Patrick Gillooly, MIT
Solar cells are intended to mimic the photosynthesis of plants -- converting light into energy in the most efficient manner possible. But what other characteristics of plants could be handy for the renewable energy sector to mimic? How about the self-assembly of chloroplast, the component of plants that do all the vital photosynthesis. Leaves repair themselves after sun damage again and again to keep up their ability to convert light into energy. Now, MIT researchers believe they've discovered how to use this self-assembly to restore solar cells damaged by the sun.

Popular Science writes, "To recreate this unique regenerative ability, the MIT team devised a novel set of self-assembling molecules that use photons to shake electrons loose in the form of electricity. The system contains seven different compounds, including carbon nanotubes that provide structure and a means to conduct the electricity away from the cells, synthetic phospholipids that form discs that also provide structural support, and other molecules that self-assemble into "reaction centers" that actually interact with the incoming photons to release electrons."
These compounds can assemble themselves into structures able to harvest solar energy at an efficiency of about 40%. As they loose efficiency from damage, a surfacant can be spread across them to break down the compounds, then when it is filtered out, the cells reassemble good as new. The researchers think they can eventually boost the efficiency even higher, and perhaps provide solar cells that are virtually indestructible.
MIT is constantly coming out with new possibilities for the solar industry, from solar concentrators that improve both efficiency and designs, to printing thin film solar cells on paper. And now, perhaps, solar cells that bring us even closer to completely mimicking leaves.

SkyFuel’s SkyTrough is World’s Most Efficient Solar Concentrator

by Timon Singh

When it comes to producing solar power, efficiency is the key – efficiency of the panels, efficiency of the system’s collectors and, according to SkyFuel, efficiency of the solar concentrator technology. Solar concentrators are increasingly being used in the industry, due to their efficiency in providing cheap solar energy. By harnessing the sun’s energy, a solar concentrator can provide the necessary heat for dozens of homes and thus save electricity. As such, the systems are more efficient than regular solar generators as captured power is not just converted into electricity. But according to SkyFuel, a U.S.-based company, their SkyTrough solar concentrator technology has a thermal efficiency of 73% at 350˚C (662˚F). More than just a shallow claim, their statement has been confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which has certified the SkyTrough solar concentrator technology to have the highest efficiency in its class!

Performance of the optical elements of the SkyTrough was measured at the Optical Efficiency Test Loop in Golden, Colorado. The test facility was designed to allowed the study of the optical performance independent of the receiver’s heat loss characteristics. Optical efficiency is a direct gauge of the design elements unique to the SkyTrough’s mirror reflectance, parabolic accuracy, receiver alignment to the focal line of the trough, and the system’s tracking precision. ”The SkyTrough solar collector is a new, low-weight design that takes advantage of the patented reflector film jointly developed by SkyFuel and NREL,” said Chuck Kutscher, Principal Engineer and Manager of NREL’s Thermal Systems Group.
In a statement from SkyFuel, the company’s Chief Technology Officer Randy Gee said, “A lot of thoughtful engineering went into the SkyTrough, so we were confident our efficiency would be high, but NREL’s confirmation really validates our technology. We couldn’t be more pleased with NREL’s assessment.”
Parabolic trough solar concentrators, such as the SkyTrough, are designed to harness the sun’s energy to make steam for electricity generation. The more efficiently that a trough can harness the sun’s energy and convert it to steam, the more electricity it will be able to make. In the SkyTrough’s case, nearly three quarters of the solar radiation is thus converted into thermal energy, and then into electricity – a very high figure for solar power production. The fact that the thermal-to-electricity loss is only 27% is quite remarkable considering the large losses of efficiency that occur within the industry.

Global Solar rolls out stick-on solar panels

by Martin LaMonica

Glue may be the magic ingredient to making solar power cheaper.
Solar company Global Solar introduced a line of flexible solar modules which are designed for flat commercial rooftop buildings.
Rather than install racking systems to hold heavy glass-covered solar panels, the company's PowerFlex BIPV modules can be adhered onto a roof or built right into roofing materials. The modules are quicker to installer, lighter, and don't require any penetrations into the roof, according to the company.
The installed cost of Global Solar modules is about the same as traditional polycrystalline silicon panels with racks, said Jean-Noel Poirier, the vice president of marketing and business development. But because there is no need for spacing between racks, the flexible thin-film modules can cover more roof space and generate more power, he said.
The company plans to sell its solar modules--long strips of solar panels which almost 19 feet long and one and a half feet wide--through roof membrane manufacturers. The solar cells are made from a combination of copper, indium, selenium, and gallium (CIGS) and perform comparatively well in areas that don't have direct sun, Poirier said.
The company plans to get certification for the modules, which are being evaluated by roofing membrane companies now, by the end of the year and start production early next year.
Global Solar, one of many solar companies developing CIGS solar cells and modules, now has 75 megawatts worth of production capacity at two plants in Tucson, Arizona and Berlin, Germany. Until now, the company has supplied solar cells to panel manufacturers, but the company is now manufacturing its own modules for building-integrated photovoltaics, said CEO Jeff Britt.

New Black Silicon Solar Cells are Cheap and Absorb More Sun

by Brit Liggett

While the reflective and shiny solar panels that researchers have been making thus far look pretty, they’re no match for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) recently discovered black silicon solar cell. The scientists at NREL discovered that etching thousands of tiny holes into a silicon wafer causes it to be almost black and thus able to absorb almost all of the sun’s rays, and more absorbent solar cells mean more efficient panels.

We recently reported on researchers that are using off the shelf dyes to help solar cells absorb a wider range of light but this experiment goes even further. No color can stand up to black when it comes to absorbing . Black doesn’t bounce anything back – it hoards all photons for itself. The researchers got the idea from a team in Munich that had carefully placed a thin layer of gold and some fancy chemicals on their silicon to turn it black.
By mixing gold and chemicals into a cocktail and spraying it on silicon, they were able to create a black silicon wafer in under 3 minutes at room temperature. At 100 degrees Fahrenheit they can do it in less than a minute — this bodes well for mass manufacturing. They call their black silicon wet-etched, because the chemical and gold mixture is wet when applied and etches holes into the substance. Their next effort — and its a big one — is engineering a workable solar panel around their etched silicon.

Eddy GT Wind Turbine Is Sleek, Silent and Designed for the City

2010-09-17T14:25:00.001-07:00

Eddy GT Wind Turbine Is Sleek, Silent and Designed for the City

by Cameron Scott

If you launch a clean energy business in Manhattan it’s almost a given you’ll be inspired to start designing products specifically for the urban environment. Urban Green Energy has just launched a new, one-kilowatt wind turbine designed specifically for city rooftop use! A machine certainly made for the modern dweller, the near silent Eddy GT turbine is a chic piece of wind technology that rotates on a vertical axis, optimizing wind capture, even as the air stream shifts within the dynamic city landscape.

The Eddy GT takes up just 40 square feet to generate its kilowatt — to get that much juice from a solar array, you would need up to 400 square feet, which is a tough sell in major cities like New York and San Francisco. While not a light investment at $7,000 per turbine, Urban Green Energy CEO Nick Blitterswyk estimates that in California, which offers a rebate, you could break even in 10 years, and without the $3,000 rebate, it could take 20 years.
If you’re in San Francisco, look for some turbines in action atop Blitterswyk’s company, amongst other products like the Sanya Solar- and Wind-Powered Streetlamp, in front of Civc Center come mid-October. The turbines have scored some other less predictable placements as well, including a position atop the National Guard building in Cleveland, Ohio, and just about every house in a new middle-class subdivision outside St. Louis!

Sleek Solar and Wind Powered Hybrid Street Lamps

by Bridgette Meinhold

As designers strive to create a more sustainable future, we’re thrilled to see designs that integrate a variety of renewable energy technologies into objects we encounter in everyday life. This innovative hybrid wind and solar powered street lamp is just such a solution – not only does it use renewable energy to provide light, it’s a stylish update to an everyday object that is capable of operating completely off-grid. The hybrid streetlamps consist of a solar array topped with a wind turbine, and they are capable of generating up to 380 W of power.

Designed and manufactured by Urban Green Energy, these solar/wind powered street lamps are mounted to a standard galvanized steel pole that can be made locally and easily swapped with older street lamps. The turbine on top can be either a 300 W 2nd Generation vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) or a horizontal axis wind turbine. Mounted on the side of the pole are 2 solar panels made by F3 Solar that are capable of generating up to 80 W of power.
The street lamp is capable of producing up to 380 W of power if the sun was shining and the wind were blowing, and the street lamps save excess energy generated in a battery that powers their high efficiency LEDs through the night. Since every location and project is different, Urban Green Energy is taking a component-focused approach to the street lamps’ design – the LED lights, solar panels, wind turbine, tower height, and battery storage are all easily scaled to best fit a particular project.
Decorations on the pole compliment the sweeping lines of the wind turbine and can be customized to whatever color the buyer wants. The hybrid LED lamps seem more like an commissioned art piece rather than a standard industrial looking street lamp.
Urban Green Energy’s Hybrid Wind/Solar Lamps are already gaining attention around the world – they just signed an agreement with an undisclosed city in China to outfit their streets with these street lamps. The company also offers wind turbines ranging from 300 W up to 10 kW, and we recently got a sneak peak at their new 2nd generation 4kW VAWT. We think this new company is on the right track, and we can’t wait to see their hybrid turbines hit the streets.

Architecture: rain collector skyscraper

2010-09-16T15:18:00.000-07:00

rain collector skyscraper

'capture the rain' skyscraper by ryszard rychlicki and agnieszka nowak

polish architectural students ryszard rychlicki and agnieszka nowak of H3AR received
a special mention for their proposal in the 2010 skyscraper competition.

'capture the rain' skyscraper is a building whose roof and external shell, which consists
systems of gutters, are aimed at capturing as much rainfall as possible to meet the daily
needs of its inhabitants. average daily consumption of water per person is 150 liters,
out of which 85 liters may be replaced by rain water. within the last thirty years water
consumption has significantly increased. there are lots of factors that contribute to such
an increase such as increasing number washing machines and dish washers, increasing
popularity of garden showering devices and flushing toilets. a third of water being used
in households in western countries is flushed in toilets. since 1900 the total water
consumption in the US has increased by 1000%. at present, an average american uses
five times more water that a citizen of developing countries. such an increase is related
to among others improved living standards. on the other hand, a national hobby of
the danes is collecting rain water for washing and watering plants. within the last ten years
average use of pure water in denmark dropped by 40% and inhabitants of the so called
eco-villages use a third part of the national average.

in view of this data, they decided to design a tower, whose structure will allow for capturing
and processing as much rainfall as possible to provide with water for its inhabitants.
millennia plants have been developing systems of capturing and processing rainfall.
such systems helped them to deal with water deficits or surpluses. similarly, they wanted
to copy their simple mechanisms of rainfall capturing and processing. initially, in designing
the tower, we focused at shaping and modeling the surface of the roof to capture as much
rainfall as possible. under a roof's surface, there are water reservoirs in the form of a large
funnel and reed fields, which serve as a hydro botanic water treatment unit. the unit processes
water into usable water that is further transmitted to apartments. a network of gutters on
the external surfaces of the building is designed to capture rainfall flowing down the building.
such flowing rainfall is transmitted to floors and its surplus is stored in a reservoir under
the building. water captured and processed by the building may be used for flushing toilets,
feeding washing machines, watering plants, cleaning floors and other domestic applications.
having analyzed rainfall in several large cities in developed countries, we obtained a formula
that shows what percentage of daily pure water consumption may be replaced with rainfall
thanks to the technology applied in their building.

top section of 'capture the rain'

detail of balcony

how the rain contributes to the rest of the building

the funnel which is at the core of the building

water consumption table

the water is reused and circulated around the building

project info:
rain collector and skyscraper
design- ryszard rychlicki, agnieszka nowak ( www.h3ar.pl)
4th year students of architecture academy of fine arts in poznan poland
special mention-2010 skyscraper competition evolo

UPCYCLING: Stunning Bowls Made From Plastic Water Bottles.

2010-09-09T22:19:00.000-07:00

UPCYCLING: Stunning Bowls Made From Plastic Water Bottles.

ShareThis

Artist Gülnur Özdağlar creates elegant and unusual looking bowls transformed from PET bottles. She calls this process "upcycling". Her aim is to substitute with labor and artistic value the characteristics that the material loses during transformation, thereby obtaining a product of higher value. The collection is named Tertium Non Data (translated from Latin means: the third is not given) and is an alchemic term which refers to the process of combining two disparate elements to create a new, third element.

In this case the new, third element is a collection of diaphanous, attractive tabletop bowls that resemble organic creatures like jellyfish and sea anemones.

The elegant perforated and ornate bowls are created from a regular PET* water bottles. What looks like a flower at the base of the bowls, is the indent from the base of the bottle. If the bottles have a bluish tine, the formed bowls do as well.

Gulnar delicately heats and forms the edges of the bowl to create undulating forms and embellishments like flowers and petals.

With various perforations, cut shapes and added petals, she has managed to create numerous variations, like the ones shown below.

The artist's tools:

The bowls can be used as pet bowls, storage containers, jewelry holders or just as lovely objet d'art. She also makes upcycled jewelry as well.

*PET is Polyethylene Terephthalate, which is a thermoplastic polymer. It can be re-formed by heating. After heating process, it becomes more stiff, rigid, durable and glassy. It becomes even stronger and crystallized when perforated.

above: artist Gülnur Özdağlar with her daughters.

Gülnur Özdağlar studied architecture at the Middle East Technical University and has been active as an architect since she graduated in 1986. She has participated in architectural design competitions, together with various groups, and many of her designs have been recognized with prizes.In addition to being active as an architect, she has also worked in the graphic design and photography fields, and many of these projects have been published in foreign countries in magazines and books. She has received prizes in international competitions of digital art.

•Her website
•Her blog
•Learn to make your own bowls from PET bottles with her "how to guide" on Instructables
•Buy her jewelry or bowls and more at her etsy store

Curved plank flooring

2010-08-30T11:15:00.002-07:00

Against the Grain

Your eyes do not deceive you—these planks are anything but straight and narrow. Contoured to capture the irregularities of wood, I find the design intriguing and appealing in a universe of sameness. The flooring is available in five species; fumed oak is featured here. waldilla.eu

Sustainable Bowen Mountain House by CplusC Architecture

2010-08-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

The Bowen Mountain House located in New South Wales, designed by Sidney architecture practice CplusC Architecture. The structure seems to almost hover over the site and indoor and outdoor spaces merge seamlessly. Conceived as a simple weekender, this pavilion house grew into something a lot more substantial. Landscaping, a pool, pool house and sauna were added to the original brief, with spectacular results. The house has a steel frame that was welded on-site prior to being shot-blasted and finished with a two-part epoxy paint system. This is one of the longest lasting corrosion protection systems available today. – [CplusC Architecture]

Related posts:

America’s First Geothermal-Powered IKEA Coming to Denver

2010-08-30T11:11:00.001-07:00

America’s First Geothermal-Powered IKEA Coming to Denver
by Timon Singh

More and more retail chains are embracing renewable energy in a bid to cut costs and reduce their carbon footprint. Examples include Wal-Mart installing close to 5300 solar panels at its Apple Valley distribution center in California and Green Depot making their stores LEED-certified. Now IKEA has joined the renewable retail ranks by announcing that a store near Centennial in Denver will be powered by geothermal energy. Thanks to a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Denver IKEA store will be the first IKEA store in the United States to be built with geothermal heating and cooling, saving both energy and money.
Photo by Pat Corkery
Douglas Wolfe, IKEA project construction manager for the store, said that he expected the site to be open in the fall of 2011. The project will see 130 holes dug 500 feet deep into the ground, where the temperature is 55 degrees all year round. The holes will be situated under the store’s parking garage, which will be below the store. When operational, the geothermal pumps will use 25 percent to 50 percent less electricity than conventional heating or cooling systems and could potentially save thousands of dollars each year.
Although geothermal power has not seen the publicity that wind and solar energy receives, the tech has seen something of a resurgence in recent months with the Environmental Protection Agency stating that geothermal heat pumps can reduce energy consumption (and corresponding emissions) by up to 72 percent compared to traditional electric resistance heating and standard air-conditioning equipment.

Photo by The Consumerist
Denver is known for its harsh winters, but it is hoped that the geothermal pumps will set a standard for retail stores in less temperate states. The depth of 500ft for the holes was chosen because the temperature beneath the earth’s surface is suprisingly moderate. This has been noticed by miners in the state before and is due to thermal inertia — the propensity for soil to heat up or cool down much slower than air or water. Using thermal heat has is a practice that has been around for centuries, and some archaeologists even believe that primitive man chose deeper caves as shelter due to their warmth.
The geothermal heating and cooling system “is something that globally IKEA has been considering for a number of years,” Wolfe added. “We’re very excited about working with NREL. The partnership has turned out to be very beneficial for both of us. It is providing both of us with useful information about operating such programs.” Seeing the information in real time “will allow us to determine and manage the efficiency of the geothermal system in Centennial” as well as planning for “future operations at this location as well as at other IKEA stores.
In the American West, geothermal projects are catching on and increased 46% in 2009 from the previous year. Then, about 3100 megawatts of capacity were built, with another 6400 megawatts slated for construction in the coming months.

Power: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now

2010-08-30T11:10:00.001-07:00

Power to the People: 7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now

By Brendan I. Koerner

Photo: James Day

7 Ways to Fix the Grid, Now:

Generate Electricity Everywhere

Deliver Clean Energy to Distant Cities

Store Power in Super Batteries

Monitor the Electrons in Real Time

Trade Electricity Like Pork Bellies

Think Negawatts, Not Megawatts

Make Conservation Simple (and Easy)

Filthy coal-fired power plants spew carbon into the air. A mish-mash of 9,200 generators streams vital electrons along 300,000 miles of aging, inefficient transmission lines and one untrimmed tree in the wrong place could plunge a quarter of the country into darkness. This is our electric grid. A whopping 40 percent of all the energy used in the US—be it oil, gas, wind, or solar—is converted into electrons that travel over these wires. Any attempt at energy reform must begin here.
But this keystone of our 21st-century economy has yet to advance much beyond its 19th-century roots. Considering how wasteful, unresponsive, and just plain dumb the grid is, it isn't surprising that outages—which have been increasing steadily over the past quarter century—cost us $150 billion a year. The real shock is that the damn thing works at all.
Now consider what we will ask the grid to handle in the near future: Demand for electricity is expected to increase by as much as 40 percent in the next two decades—more than twice the population growth rate. To meet that need, we will have to generate an additional 214 gigawatts, a feat that would require the construction of more than 357 large coal plants. We also want to plug in dozens, if not hundreds, of gigawatts of wind and solar power harvested from the most remote corners of the country. And we will want to recharge millions of electric vehicles every night, without fail.
That is why we must fix the grid—reinvent it to be reliable, efficient, responsive, and smart. Washington is already on the case: President Obama has called a new energy agenda "absolutely critical to our economic future," and his stimulus package directs more than $40 billion toward that goal—the largest single infusion of government capital to the energy sector in US history, more than half of which will go to grid-related projects. In the short term, this bonanza aims simply to create jobs. But in the long term, it lays the groundwork for the grid of the future. (About $400 million will go to fund ARPA-E, a sort of Darpa for energy research.) And this is just the beginning: Congress is considering additional legislation in the hope of remaking our energy infrastructure.
Private enterprise is on board as well. Just take a spin through General Electric's Smart Grid Lab in Niskayuna, New York, which will simulate an entire electric system—complete with the kind of state-of-the-art meters, software, and communication tech that will enable a smarter grid. Or check out Google's new PowerMeter, a Web app designed to give consumers instant information about their energy usage.
But technology alone won't solve this mess, because fixing the grid is not a technology problem—it's a system problem on the broadest scale. Political gridlock, broken markets, and shortsighted planning have created a slew of bottlenecks that can't be solved with a bunch of smart meters and fancy routers.
Here, we show how utilities and businesses have begun to tackle those obstacles—from installing new transmission lines to empowering consumers. If we're serious about remaking our energy infrastructure, we'll need to encourage these kinds of fixes and replace our current system of misplaced incentives. Right now, that system encourages everyone involved—customers, utilities, and private industry—to neglect the grid. We have to give those stakeholders new reasons to turn on, engage, and transform.
Go ahead, blame Edison. He's the guy who invented the business model that got us into this mess. Edison Electric Light, founded in 1880, was a vertically integrated monopoly that controlled everything from generation to distribution. (It even owned the bulbs in customers' homes.) As utilities sprouted across the country, they saw no reason to deviate from Edison's successful blueprint.
For its first century, then, the electricity industry was a simple affair. Most states anointed a single utility to provide all the power to its citizens. These utilities owned the plants that generated the electricity, the transmission lines that carried it to substations, and the wires that distributed it to customers. When more power was needed, they simply built another coal-fired plant and spliced it onto the grid. Rates had to be approved by a public-service commission, but otherwise the utilities were autonomous. (They linked their systems to neighboring grids, but mostly for backup.) Electricity was inexpensive and abundant, and the system's reliability was the envy of the world.
What it wasn't? Efficient. Since the utilities had a captive market and seemingly unlimited access to cheap fossil fuels, they had no incentive to upgrade their leaky old plants. No one complained as long as energy was seen as plentiful and harmless. Then came the fuel crisis of the 1970s, along with the rise of environmentalism. In 1978, Congress began chipping away at the utilities' dominance by forcing them to buy electricity from independent generation companies that met efficiency goals. Fourteen years later, the government went much further, ordering the utilities to open their transmission lines to all comers.
The result was utter chaos. Many utilities got out of the generation business and morphed into middlemen, shopping for the cheapest power—often from areas with low labor costs and lax environmental oversight—and transporting it hundreds, even thousands, of miles to their customers. This meant using the links between grids, which hadn't been designed to accommodate such heavy traffic. The grids of distant states thus became closely intertwined, so that an outage in one rural county could affect millions of far-flung customers.

Read More http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-04/gp_intro#ixzz0xfq1hjpA

Though power companies were demanding more from the grid, they had no incentive to upgrade it. Every penny a utility spent on grid improvement would potentially benefit plants owned by rivals. And states that exported cheap energy resisted plans for costly new transmission projects, fearing they would lead to higher in-state rates—and angry voters.

As a consequence, the grid has fallen into disrepair, with few major efforts to fix it. Today, utilities allocate just 2 percent of revenue to research. "For God's sake, we contribute less to R&D than the pet food industry does," says Jeffrey Byronof the California Energy Commission. So the grid remains hobbled by unreliable electromechanical switches and analog controllers. During the early minutes of the Northeast blackout of 2003, the Ohio utility whose damaged hardware started the cascade couldn't even monitor its own wires; employees had to phone a regional overseer and beg for updates. By that time, it was too late.
Regulators, meanwhile, have done a terrible job of mandating grid upgrades. Maybe that's because nobody is really in charge. The industry-run North American Electric Reliability Council appoints eight regional agencies to manage grid standards, but they clash with state agencies, which constantly angle for more authority. Adding to the muddle are the quasi-governmental independent system operators and the regional organizations responsible for ensuring open access to transmission lines. Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, created in 1977 to supervise regional and national electricity sales, has proven inept at mediating interstate disputes. This thicket of regulation and competing interests strangles any ambitious initiative. As a result, despite ever-increasing electricity demand, fewer than 700 miles of interstate transmission lines have been built since 2000.
To fix the grid, then, we don't need another layer of oversight. We need to tweak the system so that companies are rewarded—not punished—for investing in the grid. Take the case of Duke Energy. Like most utilities, the North Carolina company is not known for its environmentalism. (It has been accused of flouting the Clean Air Act, for instance.) But in 2006, Duke announced its Utility of the Future initiative. This billion-dollar program is designed to smarten up Duke's portion of the grid by deploying customer meters and network-level gizmos that facilitate speedy, two-way communication. It's exactly the sort of upgrade that will help make the grid stable enough to handle wind turbines and plug-in hybrids.
How did the giant utility come around to embracing the smart grid? Probably not out of the goodness of its corporate heart. The costs of building new generation facilities—and the tumbling prices of plug-and-play gadgets—likely made raising the grid's IQ a more efficient way to improve Duke's long-term prospects. Look at the company's recent push toward IP-based open standards for all its grid hardware. Open standards will help operators communicate with one another regardless of utility—turning the grid into an Internet-like ecosystem rather than a scattered network of proprietary islands. But there may be another reason for Duke to become an evangelist of the approach: Open standards would make it easier for the large utility to gobble up and incorporate smaller rivals, since their systems could be integrated with minimal effort.
Duke isn't the only utility to grasp the financial upside of smart-grid projects. Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy is building SmartGridCity, a $100 million effort in Boulder, Colorado, that will allow customers to monitor their electricity consumption via the Web, as well as pump wind and solar energy into the grid. If SmartGridCity is a success, Xcel hopes to persuade public utilities nationwide to invest in similar systems.
This type of investment benefits the grid tremendously and must be encouraged at every turn. According to Roger Anderson at Columbia University's Center for Computational Learning Systems, tweaking the grid's communications capabilities can increase transmission efficiency by 50 percent—no additional wires necessary.
Self-interest has a long, noble history of spurring some of America's greatest infrastructure projects. But it must often be nudged along by cleverly crafted government incentives. The transcontinental railroads, for instance, got a crucial boost from a federal land grant program. These grants, often located in barren quarters of the western US, weren't worth much at the time; the railroad companies laid track through the land in hopes of increasing property values. Energy regulators already have some experience creating similarly ingenious carrots. In the early 1980s, states began to realize that utilities wouldn't become more efficient until their revenue was no longer tied directly to the sheer amount of energy produced. So regulators in dozens of states began to implement decoupling, a policy that rewards utilities for coming in below generation targets. Suddenly, companies could profit by promoting efficiency.
With similar policies, we can push energy companies to make the grid better for everyone. For example, utilities have not been eager to incorporate renewable power from customers' rooftop solar panels or backyard wind turbines. They would be more likely to do so if they were allowed to hike rates or were given tax breaks for making the necessary accommodations.
The grid took more than a century to grow into the unwieldy beast it is now. Given the urgency of climate change, energy independence, and economic demands, we have only a fraction of that time to fix it. But the solution won't spring forth fully formed. This, the greatest engineering challenge of our era, must be solved the same way it was created—piece by piece, with utilities and consumers acting in their own interests. For too long, those interests have been misaligned. It's time for a reset.

IKEA Designs the Ultra-Efficient Kitchen of the Future

2010-08-30T10:58:00.001-07:00

IKEA Designs the Ultra-Efficient Kitchen of the Future

by Ariel Schwartz

What high-tech gizmos will we see in the kitchens of the future? IKEA may have the answers. The Swedish superstore recently drew up a concept kitchen for the year 2040, and it’s pretty wild — it features self-cleaning kitchen counters, 3D holographic displays, cabinets on rails, a “sixth-generation” iPad, remote-controlled ovens, and a host of ultra-efficient energy-saving systems.

IKEA’s kitchen of the future contains some pretty incredible theoretical tech, but we’re most excited about IKEA’s vision for kitchen-based smart energy monitoring and 3D food printers — imagine how much energy you could save by ditching trips to the grocery store.
Of course, IKEA doesn’t specialize in consumer electronics, so we don’t expect any of these products to actually come from the company. But we can dream, right?

IKEA Kitchen Of The Future Looks Pretty Much Like The Present

by Lloyd Alter

They just don't do kitchens of the future like they used to. IKEA in the UK commissioned a study by The Future Laboratory, who claim "is recognized internationally for its innovative approach to trend forecasting, consumer insight and brand strategy." They came up with three visions of the kitchen in 2040, that really don't look all that innovative. This is, I believe, the INTUITIV.

As you walk into the INTUITIV kitchen of the future, LED light projections adjust to your mood - it will know if you have a hangover via sensors that will read your brainwaves. Aromatherapy infused walls will be synced to your calendar, calming you before a big meeting or energizing you before a gym session. The fridge will have selected some breakfast options, identifying the essential vitamins for your day via sensors. When you get home, a hologrammed chef will be on hand for recipe inspiration.

Or, as the head of kitchen design for IKEA Dublin told the Irish Examiner,

"In this world of the future, the kitchen will be a thoughtful, considerate friend, steering between being the health hub of the home, a cultural and social structure cradling human connection, and a technological yet animate force making life easier, cleaner, sustainable and enjoyable."

However it might have been the ELEMENTARA, which definitely sounds the most TreeHuggeresque:

The ELEMENTARA kitchen will encourage you to grow your own food and be self-sufficient with a garden or mini allotment as a standard extension of the room. Food will be kept cool through cold larders and recycling facilities will be seamlessly incorporated into the kitchen.

Most the Tech blogs are showing the SKARP.

This kitchen will be intelligent, predicting its inhabitants' needs with smart technology. Synchronized appliances will make everything happen at the touch of a button, communicating through iPad style devices which will act as the brain of the kitchen, making our lives easier.

But except for #2 on the left, the 3D food printer, the layout and the appliances look like the kitchen of today. Will we still be using inefficient two-door side-by-side fridges in 30 years?
Read the entire press release via ENGADGET, which perhaps was a little more realistic in its assessment of the kitchen of 2040:

These guys are certainly optimistic! Hell, we'll be happy if thirty years hence the typical kitchen isn't a leaking tent in a robot-run internment camp.

Personally, I think they used to do a better job of kitchens of the future.
Other Kitchens of the Future:

1939: The Electric House of the Future

1957 Frigidaire Dream Kitchen of Tomorrow

Merrill Environmental Center: the Greenest Building Ever?

2010-08-30T10:57:00.001-07:00

Merrill Environmental Center: the Greenest Building Ever?

by Bridgette Meinhold

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Headquarters located outside of Annapolis, MD is considered by many to be one of the greenest buildings ever built. Completed back in 2000, the Merrill Environmental Center was the first building to achieve LEED Platinum under USGBC's version 1.0 rating system. Boasting heaps of green building strategies and eco-friendly materials, the building backs up its eco credentials by completing building commissioning and building performance studies to ensure it is operating according to its design standards. The center uses almost 60% less energy and 90% less water than a typical office building built around that same time.

Read more: Merrill Environmental Center: the Greenest Building Ever? | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

Rainwater is collected from the Merrill Environmental Center’s roofs and is stored in three large exposed cisterns that supply about 84% of the office’s water needs. A 2 kW solar system on the roof supplies solar energy, while a geothermal heat pump provides energy to efficiently heat and cool the office. Solar passive design, natural ventilation, daylighting, tight insulation and low-e windows also play a big role in the energy-efficient design. The CBF headquarters use 59% less energy than other office buildings this size, which was determined during a year long testing and monitoring phase after the building was commissioned in 2001.

Environmentally-friendly materials were used throughout the building, including recycled-content materials like galvanized steel siding and roofing and reclaimed concrete, acoustic ceiling tiles, interior fabrics, and rubber flooring. The timber post and beam construction utilizes engineered scrap and new-growth FSC-certified wood and SIP panels for the roof and wall enclosures. Additionally, interior finishes included bamboo and cork flooring and reclaimed woodpaneling from pickle barrels. Many of the materials were sourced locally and there were no VOC finishes or materials used at all.
When the building was finished back in 2000, it was a shining example of what green building could be — and even today the center is still leading the way in green building strategies and performance . Employees are well accustomed to the composting toilets, the automatic ventilation controls, and their creative office layout. One of the reasons the center is so highly esteemed is due to its dedication after construction to building commissioning to ensure all the systems were operating up to their designed specs — in the ensuing year, the organization worked with NREL to monitor the buildings’ performance. The center continues to compare its performance against its operating benchmark to this day.

"Traditional" Design Meets Passive House Efficiency

2010-08-30T10:56:00.001-07:00

"Traditional" Design Meets Passive House Efficiency In Oregon

by Lloyd Alter

Images via owners' website
Most Passivhaus or Passive House designs we have shown on TreeHugger have tended to be modern, but Sarah Evans and Stuart Rue tell Green Building Advisor that "We wanted our house to fit in with the surrounding neighbourhood." At Jetson Green, a commenter makes the point that "It is nice to see more traditional styling reaching higher levels of performance. Many people aren't up for the boxiness of the modern design and the trend in green homes has been so modern that many folks think that is all that can be green."

But I will point out that it is hard to do good traditional design to Passive House standards, because the engineering drives so much of the design. That's why none of the blogs covering this house show the straight-on front elevation; it becomes obvious that the windows on the east side are way too small and out of proportion. Traditional design has rules, as does Passive design, and it is obvious from this photograph that the rules are different.

One might also point out that this house is no less boxy than the modern passive house designs we have shown; it is in fact a perfect box. Every jog and corner is a problem in passive house design as it creates an opportunity for a thermal bridge. The only place that the talented architect Nathan Good could have any jogging fun was with the garages.
But once one gets past the issue of style, Stuart Rue and Sarah Evans have built a great demonstration of how Passive House design really can work to make a comfortable, healthy home that runs virtually on body heat.

The walls are double-stud with almost a foot of Greenfiber cellulose insulation (made from recycled newspaper, you can still read bits of it). Windows are our favourite Serious Windows, with a U value of .105 (R 9.52, which is why even with the best windows in the country you have to be careful of how big they are and where you put them.) Serious Windows has posted a video of the builder, explaining the house.
The only mechanical heating and cooling in the house is a mini-spit heat pump with 12,000 BTU of heat and 9,000 of cooling. Some houses use that much energy for their bedroom.

Inside, they have used natural materials (wool carpets, wood floors) and minimized the use of products with VOCs. The owners have been writing a terrific and thorough blog about the process, while the builder, Bilyeu Homes, did a thorough presentation about it for the Passive House Northwest Regional Meeting in April.
Nice work, even if I have trouble calling it "Traditional."

Photovoltaic Solar Hot Water Panels Reap Multiple Benefits

2010-08-30T10:55:00.001-07:00

Photovoltaic Solar Hot Water Panels Reap Multiple Benefits

by Philip Proefrock

Solar panel manufacturer Solimpeks is offering a hybrid solar panel that is capable of providing both electricity and water heating from the same panel. The panels are ideal for applications where there is limited roof space available, but both solar electricity and solar hot water are desired. Even better, the combination of the two functions actually improves the efficiency of the electrical generation of the photovoltaics.

These hybrid panels address a problem most solar panels have: as photovoltaic (PV) panels get hotter, they get less efficient at generating electricity. A PV panel is about 1% less efficient for every 3.5 degrees F temperature increase. TheSolimpeks panels address this by using water to absorb excess heat and keep the panels cooler. Water cooling is far more effective than air cooling, making this a very effective combination. The heated water is then used to provide the additional benefit of hot water for the building.
Testing has shown the efficiency of electrical generation to be as high as 28% while at the same time producing 140-160 degree F water. This works out to an improvement of 20% over a similar sized electric-only PV array, and without the added hot water benefit, either.
Keeping the panels cooler has the additional benefit of extending their lifespan, keeping them in service for a longer period of time. These panels will also be able to pay back their installation cost more quickly since they are providing both electricity and hot water.

Zero Energy Casita

2010-08-30T10:54:00.001-07:00

Zero Energy Casita in Texas Opens to the Public!

by Bridgette Meinhold

Green building is making big strides in Texas as evidenced by this cute little zero-energy home in Fort Worth, which opens for public tours today. The Zero Energy Casita, erected by the award winning green builder, Don Ferrier, is a two bedroom, 1,051 square foot home packed with sustainable features. A residential wind turbine supplies power for the energy efficient home built from reclaimed materials. If you’re in the area, definitely take the time to check it out and see all of the green building techniques first hand.

The Zero Energy Casita, designed by Bundy, Young, Sims & Potter of Wichita Falls, Texas, is built on the shores of Eagle Mountain Lake in Fort Worth and oriented on the lot to take advantage of the sun with a large oak tree and bushes nearby to provide shade and protection from the wind. Super tight insulation from SIP construction along with a reflective roof and Weathershield ZoE5 windows create a well sealed envelope. Ductwork for the highly efficient HVAC system runs through the conditioned attic space. Reclaimed barn wood is used for the facade, floors and wood beams.
A 3.7 kW SkyStream wind generator is installed on the property to take advantage of the category 2-3 wind zone and provides enough power for the home, which is also grid tied for when the wind is not blowing for an overall net-zeroenergy demand. Other green features include rainwater catchment for irrigation, xeriscaping, a tankless water heater, on site construction debris recycling, Energy Star appliances, a programmable thermostat, dual-flush toilets, water-conserving showers & faucets, low-VOC and formaldehyde-free finishes, adhesives, and counter top materials.

Sonnenschiff: Solar City Produces 4X the Energy it Consumes

2010-08-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

Sonnenschiff: Solar City Produces 4X the Energy it Consumes
by Andrew Michler

Although net-zero projects have been creating a lot of buzz lately in the field of green building, the Sonnenschiff solar city in Freiburg, Germany is very much net positive. The self-sustaining city accomplishes this feat through smart solar design and lots and lots of photovoltaic panels pointed in the right direction. It seems like a simple strategy -- but designers often incorporate solar installations as an afterthought, or worse, as a label. Designed byRolf Disc, the Sonnenschiff (Solar Ship) and Solarsiedlung (Solar Village) emphasize power production from the start by smartly incorporating a series of large rooftop solar arrays that double as sun shades. The buildings are also built to Passivhaus standards, which allows the project to produce four times the amount of energy it consumes!

The project started out as a vision for an entire community — the medium-density project balances size, accessibility, green space, and solar exposure. In all, 52 homes make up a neighborhood anchored to Sonnenschiff, a mixed-use residential and commercial building that emphasizes livability with a minimal footprint. Advanced technologies like phase-change materials and vacuum insulation significantly boost the thermal performance of the building’s wall system.

The homes are designed to the Passivhaus standard and have great access to passive solar heating and daylight. Each home features a very simple shed roof with deep overhangs that allows winter sun in while shading the building from the summer sun. The penthouses on top of the Sonnenschiff have access to rooftop gardens that make full use of the site’s solar resources. The rooftops feature rainwater recycling systems that irrigate the gardens and while supplying the toilets with greywater. The buildings also make use of wood chip boilers for heat in the winter, further decreasing their environmental footprint.
The project’s simple envelope design is brightened by a colorful and dynamic façade. Gardens and paths cross through the development as well, linking the inhabitants. Offices and stores expand the livability of the community while contributing a sense of communal purpose.

Personal Hygiene- toothbrush and razor no longer throwaway

2010-08-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

Solar Powered Toothbrush Could Make Toothpaste Obsolete

by Yuka Yoneda

When we first saw this new gadget, we thought “Oh, a mechanical toothbrush powered by the sun.” But that isn’t what this is. Instead of using solar rays to charge itself up, the toothbrush uses them to catalyze a powerful chemical reaction that could leave your mouth way cleaner than regular old brushing does. “You see complete destruction of bacterial cells,” says Kunio Komiyama, the inventor of the device. Oh, and did we mention that no toothpaste is required? Watch out Colgate!

Mechanical University of Saskatchewan dentistry professor emeritus Dr. Kunio Komiyama and his colleague Dr. Gerry Uswak are recruiting 120 teens willing to brush with a prototype light-powered toothbrush and sit in a dentist’s chair for a few extra inspections. The manufacturer, the Shiken company of Japan, is paying the researchers to investigate whether the brush, which causes a chemical reaction in the mouth, does a better job of eliminating plaque and bacteria than a conventional toothbrush.
Komiyama’s first model, which was described 15 years ago in the Journal of Clinical Periodontology, contained a titanium dioxide rod in the neck of the brush, just below the nylon bristles. It works when light shines on the wet rod, releasing electrons. Those electrons react with acid in the mouth, which helps break down plaque. No toothpaste is required.
Now Komiyama’s back with a newer model, the Soladey-J3X, which he says packs twice the chemical punch compared to the original. Protruding from the base of the brush is a solar panel, which transmits electrons to the top of the toothbrush through a lead wire. It won’t work in the dark, though – the brush needs about as much light as a solar-powered calculator would to operate.

Synthetic Diamonds Offer Key to Razor Blades That Last Years, Not Weeks

by Jasmin Malik Chua

Photo by dotbenjamin
Hair today, gone tomorrow? A diamond-tipped razor blade from Germany could soon supplant its disposable counterpart in the face-shaving department—and we’re not just splitting follicles. Developed by Gesellschaft für Diamantprodukte(GFD) in Ulm, the Diamaze PSD comprises a tungsten carbide blade that is coated with a film of synthetic, industrial-grade diamonds. Sharpened to produce a cutting edge of only a few nanometers, the blade is said to last 1,000 times longer than conventional steel, meaning it stays sharp for years, rather than weeks.

BLEEDING EDGE

The Ulm-based company has been manufacturing blades coated with synthetic diamonds for almost a decade, albeit for less-glamourous equipment such as medical scalpels, drill bits, and probe needles. That was before Andre Flöter, founder of GFD, had the brainwave to apply diamond’s near-invulnerability to break into the multibillion-dollar consumer razor industry.

GFD engineers use a “plasma-sharpening” process to create a cutting edge as small as 3 nanometers.

But toughness isn’t the only quality the hirsute look for in razors. To ensure a clean, close shave, GFD engineers use a “plasma-sharpening” process that involves sticking dozens of blades upright in a vacuum chamber and then pummeling them with oxygen or chlorine gas that has been excited to a plasma state. The resulting radius of curvature at the cutting edge, according to GFD, can be as small as 3 nanometers—or only a few atoms in width.
Of course, blades manufactured this way would cost a lot more than conventional ones, but Flöter insists that they’ll pay for themselves in the long term. “If one adds together the costs of disposable razors over the period of one year,” he says, “then our diamond blade could certainly be a reasonably priced alternative.”

Dwell’s Super Minimalist Prefabs Make Small Living Swell

2010-08-30T10:46:00.001-07:00

Dwelle’s Super Minimalist Prefabs Make Small Living Swell
by Yuka Yoneda

UK-based Dwelle has unveiled a brilliant set of prefabs that illustrate how small living is the new way to live big. With a tiny footprint (the bigger of the two is 253 sq. feet), understated modern design, and sustainable features like insulation made from 100% recycled newspapers, double glazed windows and the ability to achieve zero-carbon status, these sophisticated houses definitely are overcompensating for their small size — and we like it!

Recently, we were flabbergasted when a reader commented on Facebook that 700 square feet hardly seemed like enough room to live. True, some people might need more space, but there are plenty of perfectly livable tiny abodes – like Dwelle’s beautiful line of modern prefabs. Called the Big Dwelle.ing, the larger of the two models measures 6.7 meters by 3.5 meters (22×11.5 feet or 253 square feet) and costs around £35,000-£50,000 ($52,000-$75,000).
One thing we love about this prefab is that it can be clad in almost any material from timber to rubber, and it even has the option of being fully planted with foliage that will cover the whole structure in about 12 months. 253 sq. feet may not seem like a lot of room at all but look at how cavernous the interior feels! In a smart move Dwelle doubled the ceiling height over the main living area, giving the illusion of a much roomier space. The external timber louvres add spiffy detail to the exterior of the house while letting you control daylighting and shading

The smaller of the homes, named the Little Dwelle.ing is 4.9 meters by 2.65 meters (16×9.5 feet or 152 square feet) and costs around £20,000-£35,000 ($30,000-$52,000). Unlike its big sib, it’s meant to be more of a retreat, office or storage area than a main home, but it has almost all of the awesome features mentioned before. Just like in the Big Dwelle.ing, there is enough room for a bed that is lofted about the kitchen and main living area.
In addition to using FSC-certified timber, every Dwelle.ing has the ability to be fitted with renewable energy options that allow them to operate off-grid. The walls, floor and roof are insulated with cellulose fiber that is extracted from 100% recycled newspaper. The prefabs are heated by electric underfloor heating, and the windows are double glazed to further boost thermal performance. Plus, if you suffer from allergies or just want to live a healthier life in general, you’ll be pleased to know that all of the interior fittings and finishes are designed to improve air quality, health and general safety.

Fields of Windstalks Harvest Kinetic Energy From the Wind

2010-08-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

Fields of Windstalks Harvest Kinetic Energy From the Wind

by Ariel Schwartz

Some consider wind turbines to be garish blips on serene landscapes. Not so with this Windstalk concept, which utilizes a series of 1203 kinetic energy-generating “stalks” to harness power. Designed for Abu Dhabi’s Masdar city, the project takes its inspiration from the way wheat fields blow in the wind.

The 55 meter-high stalks, which are made of carbon fiber-reinforced resin poles, contain piezeoelectric discs and electrodes that generate current. The current is stored in two chambers that act as a battery. LED lights placed on the pole tips glow or dim depending on how much wind is present. When wind is completely absent, the LEDs stay dark.
The Windstalk remains a concept, although its creators say that “It is based on a set of systems that already exist and work.” No word on how much energy a field of Windstalks could create, but we’re guessing it requires a lot of land to generate a significant amount of power.

How Many Cities Have a Ban on Plastic Bags?

2010-08-30T10:42:00.001-07:00

How Many Cities Have a Ban on Plastic Bags?

It's probably more than you think.

AP Photo/Paul Sakuma

We all know how terrible plastic bags are for the environment—they choke wildlife, they don't break down in landfills (or in oceans), they add to our demand for oil, and they aren't easy to recycle, which is the biggest reason why 90 percent of plastic bags in the U.S. are not recycled.

Yet an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year—380 billion of those in the U.S.—and governments have been slow-moving at best to do anything about them.
According to Salon, a study a few years ago "found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they've been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It's equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil."
But things are finally starting to pick up. Here's a quick look at a few spots around the world that have banned plastic bags, or at least placed a tax on their use.
U.S.
In California, the ban started in San Francisco in select stores; if pending legislation goes through, it could soon expand to all stores not only in the city, but in the entire state.
A similar ban exists in coastal North Carolina and was recently passed in Portland.
England
In 2007, Modbury became the first town to ban the plastic bag in Britain, where 13 billion plastic bags are given away every year. If customers forget to bring their own, reports the Times Online, "a range of bags made of recycled cotton with organic and fairtrade certification will be available from £1.50 to £3.95 and cheaper paper and biodegradeable cornstarch bags will cost 5p and 10p."
Other cities have followed suit, some just a few months ago, and there are efforts to make London plastic bag-free by the time the Olympics come around in 2010. According to the Daily Mail, "Londoners use 1.6billion plastic bags a year - for an average of just 20 minutes per bag."
Mexico
Mexico City adopted a ban last summer—the second major city in the western hemisphere to do so.
India
India seems to be taking the lead in bans on plastic bags, although enforcement is sometimes questionable. Cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Karwar, Tirumala, Vasco, Rajasthan all have a ban on the bag.
Burma
A ban went into effect (with little notice) in Rangoon late last year. In neighboring China, the use of plastic bags is restricted.
Bangladesh
Plastic bags have been banned in Bangladesh since 2002, after being found to be responsible for the 1988 and 1998 floods that submerged most of the country.
Rwanda
The country, which has had a ban on plastic bags for years, has a reputation for being one of the cleanest nations not only on the continent, but in the world.
Australia
Sydney's Oyster Bay was the first Australian suburb to ban plastic bags. Twelve towns in Australia are now said to be plastic bag-free—an effort to cut down on the estimated 6.7 billion plastic bags used in Australia every year.
Taxed, not banned
Plenty of other places have chosen not to ban plastic bags, but to discourage them through financial means. There have been taxes on plastic bags since before 2008 in Italy, Belgium, and Ireland, where plastic bag use dropped by 94 percent within weeks of the 2002 ban. In Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, the bags come with a fee.
And, in one lonely case (that I could find) of a reversal on a ban after it was implemented, Taiwan had a ban on plastic bags for three years before it lifted it in 2006.

trash & recycled fashion

2010-08-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

Soda can Bra

Gisele's dress made of water for Dolce & Gabbana

lady gaga's cigarette glasses

woven video tape dress

cabbage and kale dress

dress made out of hair - recycled blond hair

american express gold card dress

money dress

junk mail dress

beach glass dress

This 1950's dress made out of plastic grocery bags knit by Cathy Kasdan for her thesis project at Kent State University's Textile Department. Cathy says: "The dress is all hand knit from grocery bags that were the result of actual trips to the grocery store. As soon as I told people I could use their old bags for a project they brought them in by the bag full, I received thousands! The plastic grocery bag came about in the 1950's along with futuristic optimisim about America, so I made a "typical" 1950's ensemble complete with pillbox hat and purse, not pictured."

Gary Harvey is the creator of some of these incredible dresses

bottlecap necklace

evening gown made out of M&Ms

I doubt this one is wearable but it is so bitchen- broken delft saucers and plates

laundry bags reused as a dress

this dress is made from plastic grocery bags- I think it is kind of lame but I hate those bags even more, so any use is worth looking at.

pulltab tops and can bottoms

fatigue dress

denim dress

caprisun dress

newspaper dress

trash bag evening gowns

water bottle mohawk

bicycle tires

multicolored trash

tab can bra

Jamie Kuli McIntosh made this ball gown out of the blue plastic protective covering that comes on sheets of plexiglass. The corset underneath is made of 225 mustard packets.Wow! Read all about it on her blog, Twisted Textiles.

phone cord wig

phone book dress

newspaper dress

trash bag dress

this corset is made from old chinos - the kind with the pleated fronts

More Shipping Containers!!!!!!

2010-08-14T15:27:00.001-07:00

Breathtaking Shipping Container Studio in San Antonio

We’re green with envy over this beautiful shipping container studio in San Antonio designed by Texas architect Jim Poteet. Painted a deep blue, the 40′ shipping container was transformed into a gorgeous backyard retreat, complete with a living green roof, composting toilet, rainwater collection and eco friendly finishes. The studio retreat also features floor-to-ceiling windows cut out of the container, blown-in insulation, and bamboo floors and walls. Dwell has the full scoop on the container as well as a ton of gorgeous pictures.

Fun PreFab Gym Built from Containers in Just Three Days!

by Andrew Michler

The students of the Dunraven School located in South London are enjoying a huge new prefab gym that took only three days to erect! Designed by architecture firm Scabal as the world’s first gym of its kind, the team of designers carefully chose materials that would provide for a fun and bright environment for the school children to enjoy. And best of all, the school reduced overall costs by a third opting to go prefab over a traditional facility built-on-site. But don’t think being budget conscious came at a cost to the overall program — this dynamic eco-friendly design easily provides for twice the engagement.

The bright building uses a wall of containers to hold changing rooms, storage and offices, while at the core of the box arrangement is a spacious gym floor for the kids to get some serious physical education done. While a stacked arrangement of containers could give way to a behemoth of a building, by using four primary colors, lots of light, and fun details like zigzag cutouts for observation deck, Sacbel easily broke the mass down to a more manageable level that also inspires fun.

The 8,200 square meter building uses a number of green materials, including reused shipping containers and walls of translucent polycarbonate (what is used in green houses) to allow light to pour into the space. The school has a tradition of green building, and the gym is no different, even employing a rainwater collection system for the campus-wide reclaimed water system.

Recycled Dumpster Pools Unveiled in NYC this Weekend!

by Ariel Schwartz

Would you ever go dumpster diving? A whole lot of New York City residents did this weekend, as the city unveiled three unused dumpsters converted into small swimming pools as part of the third annual Summer Streets festival! The dumpster pools were laid out on Park Avenue this weekend for approximately 450 eager swimmers to enjoy.

Designed by Macro-Sea, each 50,000-pound pool features a layer of felt below 4,600 pounds of chlorinated water. The 8-by-22 pools are slightly on the small side — they only fit 10 people at a time and aren’t deep enough for diving — but they’re good for soaking.
We’d love to see more of these pop-up pools in places that don’t have the space or cash for full-sized versions. Because sometimes it’s just so hot that you’ll swim anywhere — even in a dumpster.

More Shipping Containers!!!!!!

2010-08-14T15:24:00.001-07:00

Breathtaking Shipping Container Studio in San Antonio

Fun PreFab Gym Built from Containers in Just Three Days!

by Andrew Michler

Recycled Dumpster Pools Unveiled in NYC this Weekend!

by Ariel Schwartz

Transparent Solar Spray Transforms Windows Into Watts

2010-08-14T15:22:00.003-07:00

Transparent Solar Spray Transforms Windows Into Watts

by Cameron Scott

Photo by Robert S. Donovan
Norwegian Company EnSol AS has developed a remarkable new spray-on solar film that allows windows to generate solar power without clouding the view. The material consists of metal nanoparticles embedded in a transparent composite matrix that can be easily sprayed on. And the cells don’t just work on glass — they can be used on the rest of the house, too!


Electron microscope image of EnSol nanocrystals

Inhabitat has brought you a number of technologies that make it possible to create ultra-thin solar cells, making them far more versatile. But there’s something particularly satisfying about EnSol AS’ new transparent spray-on solar film.
Lead researcher Christopher Binns of the University of Leicester said, “The coating would be built into the windows or other materials as part of the manufacturing process. It could even be used on the roofs of cars to charge up batteries — although powering the vehicles themselves would probably be pushing it.”
Perhaps EnSol’s slogan should be Solar: It’s not just for rooftops anymore. The cells achieve efficiencies of 20 percent (which is average) and the company claims they will be commercially available at a reasonable price by 2016.

Light-Bending Polymer Sticker Boosts Solar Panel Output by 10%

by Jasmin Malik Chua

Looking for an instant power boost for your solar panels? Slap on a large, transparent sticker by Genie Lens Technologies to get 10 percent more juice. The polymer film, which can be applied to panels you already have installed, comes riddled with microstructures that bend incoming sunlight for better absorption. More light equals more electricity, which in turn lowers the per-watt cost of solar power.

The inexpensive film works by preventing light from bouncing off the surface of the panel, according to Seth Weiss, the company’s CEO and co-founder. Not only does the sticker trap light inside the semiconductor materials that convert light into electricity, but it also diverts incoming rays so that they travel across — rather than through— the panel, bettering their chances of being absorbed.
Tests at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory showed that the film increases power output by between 4 to 12.5 percent, with the biggest improvement occurring when the sky is overcast and incoming light is diffuse. Although adding the sticker, whether in the factory or on solar panels already installed, raises the overall cost of the panels by 1 to 10 percent, the additional electricity generated makes up for the price.
A more efficient solar panel also means getting by with fewer solar panels, according to Travis Bradford, a solar industry analyst and president of the Prometheus Institute. As a result, other costs such as shipping and installation could also drop. Just one downside: Although the film has been rated for 20 years, it hasn’t been tested for durability — scratches, discoloring, and trapped dust can actually lower power output over time.

New Lessons From Old Buildings

2010-08-14T15:22:00.001-07:00

New Lessons From Old Buildings

Over the last 60 years, architects and engineers forgot how to make buildings work without cheap energy. But many are learning the lessons from the past and applying them to the new.

By Lloyd Alter

Porches are cool and friendly.
National Archives

A hundred years ago, almost every house had a front porch; they served an important function in the world before air conditioning, when it provided a cooler place to sit. In the early 1980s, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk put front porches on the houses in Seaside, the iconic planned community that was the first big demonstration of New Urbanism (and where they filmed the Truman Show) They did it to reduce the need for air conditioning, but found other benefits as well, telling NPR:
"People would sit on the front porch instead of in the backyard because they could see people coming and going, say hello to their neighbors and have short conversations," says Plater-Zyberk. "The bonds of community were being formed through that brief interaction."

Credit: Steve Mouzon
Now front porches are almost common again, as New Urbanism spreads and people realize that they are nice, comfortable spaces. But that is only the most obvious of the lessons of the past that architects are learning, and applying to new buildings.

A hundred years ago, awnings were everywhere. It made sense; air conditioning did not exist, and awnings kept the heat from getting in. Now, we let the heat in and pay to use electricity to pump it out again. Dumb and expensive.

H&H Enterprises
But more and more, architects are installing louvres and sunscreens to take advantage of the way the sun is higher in the summer than in the winter. Have a look at this picture; the windows are almost completely in shade by the carefully designed and sized louvres. They make a dull facade look more interesting, too.
More on Awnings: Keep Cool with Awnings

A hundred years ago, buildings were shaped like letters of the alphabet. Es, Os, Us and Ls. Nobody could be too far from a window; that is where the natural light and air was. Then the fans and ducts and air conditioners came in and windows became almost irrelevant. Floor plates became huge and fresh air inside just a memory.

Weber Thompson Architects
But architects are learning , once again, that buildings with fresh air and natural light are not only cheaper to operate but more pleasant to work in. Weber Thompson's Terry Thomas Building in Seattle is an O building, with a big hole in the middle for air and light.
More on the Terry Thomas: Terry Thomas Building By Weber Thompson
Architects: Go Back To The ABCs and Design Buildings Like Letters Again

A hundred years ago if you had electricity it was expensive. People had all kinds of tricks to bring natural light deep into stores, my favourite being prism glass. When electric lighting came in, nobody needed it any more.

Parans
But as electricity becomes more expensive and people try to reduce their carbon footprint, and in Europe where building codes insist that workers have the benefit of natural light, all kinds of systems are being developed to bounce, pipe and reflect natural light deep into buildings. The Parans system shown here is based on fiber optics, but others are as simple as a skylight.
More: Daylighting Is Making a Comeback
Tubular Skylights for Ad Hoc Daylighting Are Totally Cool
DayRay: Flexible Daylighting

A hundred years ago, many buildings were covered in vines. They served a useful function; they can cut the heat gain on a wall by 50%, reduce temperatures and provide insect and bird habitats. They were really high tech, falling off as winter approached to let more warming sun in.

Today architects are once again integrating nature into their buildings. Edouard Francois clads his buildings in green facades, where plants grow to enclose and protect the buildings from the sun. They are also more lively; he says 'Watch a tree. It has a thousand branches, it moves, grows, changes colour!' and thinks buildings should too.
Those are just some of the ideas from old buildings that are being used in new ones.

10 Overlooked Low-Tech Ways of Keeping Your Home Cool

by Lloyd Alter

Ontario Archives
Summer is here and the air is full of the the sound of whining air conditioners, all seriously sucking kilowatts. Yet much of that air conditioning load could be reduced or the air conditioning season shortened if we did simple things, many of them common before air conditioning was common in North America. Here are some low-tech tips for keeping cool.
The best ideas are those that keep the heat out of your home in the first place, rather than paying to pump it out after it gets in.

1. Use awnings.

According to the Washington Post, The Department of Energy estimates that awnings can reduce solar heat gain—the amount temperature rises because of sunshine—by as much as 65 percent on windows with southern exposures and 77 percent on those with western exposures. Your furniture will last longer, too.
We noted in Planet Green last spring that this can translate into a saving of cooling energy of 26 percent in hot climates, and 33 percent in more temperate climates where it might even make air conditioning unneccessary.

Lloyd Alter

2. Plant A Tree.

I don't own an air conditioner. The house immediately to the south does it for us, completely shading the south side of our house. What it misses, a huge ancient maple in its front yard gets, so in winter I get a lot of sun in my window, and in summer I am always in shade. A tree is as sophisticated as any electronic device around; it lets the sun through in winter and grows leaves in summer to block it.
Geoffrey Donovan studied it in Sacramento, and calculated the savings.
"Everyone knows that shade trees cool a house. No one is going to get a Nobel Prize for that conclusion," says the study co-author, Geoffrey Donovan. "But this study gets at the details: Where should a tree be placed to get the most benefits? And how exactly do shade trees impact our carbon footprint?"

Travelpod

3. Plant Vines.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said "a doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." It turns out he could have been a mechanical engineer, for it is surprising how effective vines are at keeping a house cool. With the new weatherization grants, the salesmen are out peddling ground source heat pumps to keep you cool for less, but really, free is better.
Vines such as ivy, russian-vine and virgina creeper grow quickly and have an immediate effect; according to Livingroofs.org.
Climbers can dramatically reduce the maximum temperatures of a building by shading walls from the sun, the daily temperature fluctuation being reduced by as much as 50%.Together with the insulation effect, temperature fluctuations at the wall surface can be reduced from between –10°/14°F to 60°C/140°F to between 5°C/41°F and 30°/86°F. Vines also cool your home through envirotranspiration, described in our post Be Cool and Plant A Tree.

4. Tune your Windows

The windows on your home are not just holes in the wall that you open or close, they are actually part of a sophisticated ventilation machine. It is another "Oldway"—People used to take it for granted that you tune them for the best ventilation, but in this thermostat age we seem to have forgotten how.
For instance, everyone knows that heat rises, so if you have high windows and open them when it hot inside, the hot air will vent out. But it can be a lot more sophisticated than that. When air passes over your home, it works the same way as it does over an airplane wing: the Bernoulli effect causes the air on top and on the downwind side of the house to be at a lower pressure than on the upwind side. So if you have double hung windows, you can open the bottom section of the upwind side of the house and the upper section of the downwind side, and the low pressure will suck the air through your house. Make the outlet openings larger than the inlet opening, it increases the draft. That is why I love double hung windows; they offer the most flexibility and options. Others say that casement windows are best because they can open up to 100%; double hungs can never be open more than 50%. However I have seen studies (which I cannot find) that show that double hung windows actually work better because of the many options in setting them.

5. Get a Ceiling Fan

It doesn't have to be like Collin's Batman fan; they come in all kinds of designs and work on the same principle, that moving air evaporates moisture from your skin and keeps you cooler.
Collin notes that using them is one of our 25 Ways to Save the Planet, and they can save you some cash since they operate at a fraction of central and window air-conditioning units (and they can work great in tandem with your A/C if global warming has you sweating it out). As Energy Star reminds us, ceiling fans help keep you cool, rather than cooling the entire room.

Cool Roof Contractor

6. Paint Your Roof

Kristen writes: In much the same way that more ice/snow reflects UV rays instead of absorbing the heat the way the oceans do (think: feedback loop that results from melting polar ice caps), cities are now giving white roofs a second look as a way to cool cities and fight climate change. The Los Angeles Times reports that the Climate Change Research Conference, held this week, advised that if buildings and road surfaces in 100 of the largest cities in the US were covered with lighter and heat-reflective surfaces the savings could be massive.

White Pine Handbook

7. Install Operable Shutters or External Blinds

The best way to deal with unwanted solar gain is to keep it out in the first place. One can do that with properly designed overhangs or bris soleil, which keep out the sun in summer but are designed to let it in during winter. However this is not very flexible. Another option is the exterior blind, quite common in Europe or Australia but expensive and hard to find in North America, where upfront cost always loses out to operating cost.
Shutters really are the most amazing overlooked technology. They provide ventilation, security, shading and storm protection in one simple device.

8. Get an Attic Fan

A lot of people run expensive air conditioning when it is actually pretty cool out- after the sun has been baking a California house all day it can be cool in the evening but the house is still holding a couple of hundred thousand BTUs of heat. In more temperate parts of the country, just moving the air and having good ventilation could eliminate the need for AC much of the time.

Culinary Historians of Ontario

9. Don't Cook Hot Food Inside

There is a reason our ancestors built summer kitchens; those stoves put out a lot of heat and you didn't want them in your house in summer. Outside summer kitchens are all the rage in the luxury house/ mcmansion set as well. It really makes no sense to run a stove inside, just to then spend money to run air conditioning to remove the heat again. So get a gas barbecue and grill your vegetables, take advantage of farmers markets to get fresh stuff, and eat lots of salad.

10. Be Smart Where You Put Your Money and Energy.

John's graph from the Florida Solar Energy Center says it all. When the weatherization contractors come to get you to insulate your house, (the most expensive thing you can do to save energy) you can show them that this makes no sense, only 7% of the cooling load is coming through the walls. A couple of hours with a caulking gun to reduce infiltration would do more.
When they tell you that you need to install expensive new low-e tinted windows, remember that an awning or a shutter is more sophisticated and flexible; you have the choice whether to let the sun in or not.
Tape up your ducts, turn off your computers and save your money. The simple, low-tech tried and true methods cost less, save more energy and work forever.