Check out the heat on this solar cooker. Watch your fingers!

I ran across this competition a few weeks ago and I thought it was a great idea. Invite the best designers in the world to try and design technologies which are more power efficient and sustainable but still stylish and useful. In other words, develop technologies which remain marketable but are still good on the environment. For example, from an off the grid perspective, this gravity-powered 4 hour led lamp is a brilliant way to light up the house while using only the energy to turn the lamp over. (or lift it up with a string.) It’s similar to many of the old grandfather clocks you see in old houses. Even more interesting, to me is the possibility to extend this lamps capabilities to last even longer. Perhaps even hundreds of hours on one turn by adjusting the gears and such.

More off-the-grid technologies below the fold

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I was invited to a ISEEESA networking dinner last night at the University of Calgary. For the uninitiated, ISEEE is the “Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economics.” It’s a multidisciplinary institute at the UofC specifically designed to try to deal with the many problems facing our world with climate change and peak oil. ISEEESA is the Student Adjunct to that group with the mission statement:

ISEEESA’s mission is to integrate a multidisciplinary group of students alongside today’s energy and environment leaders, to help make positive changes that ensure a secure, competitive supply of energy, a sustainable environment and a strong economy for Alberta.

The crowd was fairly impressive, and the food was okay (I didn’t enjoy the beef as much as everyone else seemed to). I met people from Devon Canada, the National Energy Board, and many engineering students wanting to get a leg up by networking with these big wigs. However, the highlight of the evening was the keynote speaker, Chris Turner. The writer of a very interesting book, “The Geography of Hope“. Discussion on his book and talk after the fold.

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As discussed in an earlier OTG posting. The idea of going off the grid can include the ability to grow enough food to supplement the supply for whoever is occupying an off the grid apartment. Food is on the grid, and requires many gallons of gasoline to ship/grow/process before it even reaches the supermarket. By taking the idea of community gardens a bit further, it is not unreasonable to imagine an off the grid apartment complex which has it’s own hydroponic food.

Knafo Klimor Architects took the idea of not only making an apartment environmentally friendly, but also bringing some of the environment into the apartment to produce usable food for the residents.

Pretty pictures below the fold:

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The trauma worms experience in a composting toilet is nonexistent according to a vermicomposting expert. This was enough to satisfy the people holding up development of the fantastic energy and water saving technology. To even suggest that worms, which have no brains to speak of, could become upset by having human waste given to them regularly as food, is absurd.

A new wind farm in Alberta can power a city of over 30,000 people. The farm is located near Taber, and is operated by ENMAX.

What type of technology will the Taber Wind Power Project use?
The Taber Wind Power generation facility will employ a technologically advanced wind turbine design supplied by ENERCON, a German manufacturer. ENERCON’s wind turbine generators (WTG’s) are unique in that they utilize a direct drive system and not a gearbox system as with other turbine manufacturers. The 37 ENERCON turbines will have a total power output of over 80 MW. By comparison, the McBride Lake Wind Farm, of which ENMAX is a 50% owner, consists of 114 turbines for a total power output of 75MW.

I’m looking forward to Saskatchewan one day competing with Alberta’s growing wind power generation expertise. We have the open spaces and blustery winds that should be ideal for farms like the Taber operation.

The crown corporation SaskPower has finally made a positive move in “net metering”. This allows people who have their own power generation capabilities to sell their power back to the crown utility at the same rate they buy power from the utility. Previously SaskPower was not being as fair to electricity generators, and so the number of people willing to do it had never risen sharply, to my knowledge.

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Several bloggers have taken note of the policy change too.

While I am certain this was not his intention, the possibility of taking a large building in a downtown off the grid by using wind power and such, and then making it into a full blow arcology by simply growing all of the food necessary would be an incredible way to get off the grid. From the torontoist:

If scientist Gordon Graff gets his way, a new skyscraper in Toronto’s Theatre District could be the unlikely source of food for 35,000 residents.

The SkyFarm project is the concept-only design for a 58-floor tower that would produce as much food as a 420-hectare farm. The building would be 238-metres tall and contain 750,000-square metres of hydroponic growing area, with products ranging from soybeans to strawberries to high-rise fields of lettuce. A service core at the back of the tower would include irrigation and electrical systems, and an isolated lower area could house chickens bred for both eggs and meat.

The challenges inherent in the stacked design are odour and pest control, effective drainage, and the complex system of trucking and distribution that would be required at grade. Such a structure, however, would theoretically avoid problems like seasonal droughts, diseases spread by livestock and water runoff pollution. Plus, Torontonians would gain the benefit of locally-grown produce, and growth could be greatly accelerated with a controlled artificial climate and 24-hour “sunlight” year-round.

Though the idea may seem somewhat far-fetched for a hesitant, cash-strapped city like Toronto, we have reason to be worried about our fresh food supply. Farmers are a dying breed, farmland is wasteful when it comes to space, and as we grow, we pave over our countryside with subdivisions. According to the United Nations, the world’s population growth over the next thirty years will require 60% more food than we produce now. By 2050, almost 80% of Earth’s population will live in urban centres.

Perhaps the best direction to go now is up. High-density greenhouses would be an efficient use of energy, space and water, and such a building would have a massive green-roof effect. Much of the waste could be recycled, composted and reused, and the vertical farm could operate entirely organically and without the use of pesticides or fertilizers. Though the design and construction would be extremely expensive, Graff believes that the farm could reap about $23,000,000 in annual revenue. A corporation like Loblaws or Dominion could build a revolutionary flagship hydroponic structure that could include a supercentre at its base and service its other stores, while taking advantage of the incredible global publicity that would result from such an environmentally revolutionary project. Richard Branson: call us.

Sadly, we wouldn’t likely see a farmscraper in Toronto for two more decades, but we can imagine a day when they are no longer be a novelty on our skyline. Not only in dense downtown, either—they’d be perfect for some of our troubled properties, like the desolate area formerly populated by Tent City down near the Gardiner, now owned by Home Depot. It could also be a scientific and eco-tourist attraction, and Toronto could be the first metropolis to mass-source its fresh restaurant food directly from its own inner-city urban organic farm!

We don’t currently have many problems in the West with supplying food—it’s just that the way we do it happens via disproportionately wasteful and polluting practices. It may be that vertical farming is a step in giving back some of the nature we’ve destroyed, and who can argue with cheap, local, organic produce grown right before our eyes? We shouldn’t just talk about it for decades—let’s get serious about this one, Toronto.

1337hax0r

Finally, a politician starts to figure out what’s wrong with corporate mentality when it comes to renewable energy.

“What surprised me the most was how quiet the turbine was. From just 200 yards away the blades could no longer be heard and closer in much of the noise was masked by the rustling of leaves on neighbouring trees.

“I was also impressed by the amount of electricity produced by the turbine. The two turbines at Swaffham produce enough energy over the year to power the entire town.

“There is great potential for renewable energy in the UK but we need to make sure that we capitalise on it. I recently met with representatives from a major energy company who pointed out that the demand for renewable energy in the UK is starting to exceed the installed capacity. However instead of building more turbines like this one, or working on other forms of renewable energy, the company’s proposal was simply to increase the price!

“There is something clearly wrong with the energy market when demand management is needed for renewable energy. This is where we need leadership from the Government to support the development and expansion of renewable energy.“

The idea of supply and demand is a useful one for working on increasing the capacity of an organization. However, simply raising prices and avoiding building more of these wind turbines does not help anyone except the few executives at the top of these organizations. Hopefully someone else will step up to the bat and provide cheap clean energy to Britain and hopefully, when they do, the British government will be fully supporting their initiative.

1337hax0r

h/t Liberal England 

but the government seems to refuse to invest in it… What is it? Solar power. from the NYT:

The trade association for the nuclear power industry recently asked 1,000 Americans what energy source they thought would be used most for generating electricity in 15 years. The top choice? Not nuclear plants, or coal or natural gas. The winner was the sun, cited by 27 percent of those polled.

It is no wonder solar power has captured the public imagination. Panels that convert sunlight to electricity are winning supporters around the world — from Europe, where gleaming arrays cloak skyscrapers and farmers’ fields, to Wall Street, where stock offerings for panel makers have had a great ride, to California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Million Solar Roofs” initiative is promoted as building a homegrown industry and fighting global warming.

But for all the enthusiasm about harvesting sunlight, some of the most ardent experts and investors say that moving this energy source from niche to mainstream — last year it provided less than 0.01 percent of the country’s electricity supply — is unlikely without significant technological breakthroughs. And given the current scale of research in private and government laboratories, that is not expected to happen anytime soon….

1337hax0r