The design of the vertical power poles (VWT) in the above picture, was a response to the immediate needs of people in the aftermath of a major earthquake. Survivors talked of being trapped in the dark, battery life of mobile phones failing, injured in the darkness and cut off all communication. In such situations off grid power sources become all important. What would be needed was a power source that could be placed in close proximity to buildings and be able to provide lighting, free Wifi and charge points for phones. None of the technologies used to meet this challenge are new, and yet it led to exploring the possibilities for sustainable power generation opportunities in unlikely places.
We are what Buckminster Fuller called “energy slaves” and with World energy consumption predicted to increase by 40% by 2030, access to sustainable power sources is becoming increasingly important. The argument by traditional power companies is that sustainable power cannot generate enough power on a sustained basis – but maybe it is that new technologies require new ways of thinking about where they are placed and how they are used.
I am trying to follow Jacques Franco's idea 'of not complaining without offering an alternative solutions' – or as Fuller put it: “you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”. If 35% of energy created is lost in transmission, it would make sense that any new model is likely to work on local supplies – possibly as a bi-product of other activities. As in the above picture, could vertical wind turbines be placed in the dividing space on busy motorways or indeed beside railway tracks or the runways of international airports? How much energy could be harvested from the air-flow in such situations? With a slight modification the fixed baffles that increase energy production could ensure that there was no dangerous spray from the devices in bad weather. The power from existing wind turbines is reduced to a restricted rotation to reduce noise – but noise would not be a problem in such situations. We live in a strange World where the MOD in the UK are protesting against wind turbines in Cornwall UK as a 'security threat' and in the USA a 'nuclear weapons facility' tries to earn itself some 'Green' credentials by claiming to 'be powered by the largest Federal wind farm' and this makes some strange ideas seem really quite sane.
In Korea there are electric buses in operation that charge wirelessly from the road. Could this be the future for cars? Is there also the possibility to generate energy from the movement of the traffic on the road? Maybe we are just not seeing all the energy sources available to us? Could the movement of people on a busy street, the pressure of their movement on the pavement, provide the energy to light the street, or train terminal, or airport? This might seem 'off the wall', but apparently a night club is taking people power literally and harvests power generated by the movement on the dance floor. It sounds like I'm 'talking out of my behind', but 'Poop Power' has also been suggested as a serious sustainable option and let's face it, there is an almost unending supply of the stuff. It's the methane gas bi-product that provides the power source in this idea and why couldn't a sewage treatment plant not power itself by the methane it produces? Instead of just letting the methane from landfill drift up into the atmosphere, why not capture it and use it? If the methane from 'Fresh Kills' was utilized, it probably wouldn't be enough to power NYC, but it could help reduce consumption on existing resources.
Using energy created as a bi-product as something else is an attractive idea and it points to the idea that future power generation will be localized. In the USA an architect was asked to look at power generation for an olive factory – they had PV panels, but the factory operated day and night, so they needed to supplement the power source. He discovered that their waste product – olive pips, could be used as bio mass, which reduced the factories waste and provided power at the same time – other factories across Europe are using this idea, but could the idea be replicated with other waste products in other industries?
It is likely that there is no one sustainable solution to the energy problem, but rather that it is a case of using combinations of different energy producing solutions to meet different modern demands. It is 'eco – logical', we have the technological capability, 'the Future' is already here – it just isn't very well distributed yet. This means that as energy demand sky-rockets government policies should include measures for implementing the distribution of sustainable technologies and in a sense there is some movement in this direction, but we the general public have to do our bit.
Here is an idea that you can try at home and it is one that if you live in the right climatic conditions, will reduce your heating bills to almost zero. It is possible to heat your home from the air by using an 'air source heat pump'. My father has installed one in his home (see above photo) and so far the heating and hot water bills are a fraction of what he paid in a quarter with a traditional system. If he linked the pump to a PV Solar panel his heating and hot water would cost almost zero. I had thought that the system would need underfloor heating, but watch the 'air source heat pump' video on Youtube and it seems that some people have made the system work on a 'traditional' radiator system. Governments need to provide incentives to retrofit such technology in the same way as they might promote Solar PV panels.
How we generate energy is becoming increasingly important: Imagine a planet where everyone had $10,000,000.00 – but no basic resources: no clean drinking water, no arable land or access to food, what do they actually have of real value? It's a matter of offering alternatives to Fukushima and fracking, so let's put our heads together and see what we can do.
Alex King is an architect and his design 'Santiago Townhouseʼ won the British Homes Awards in 2011.
Calling himself 'Designalexable', he occasionally puts a selection of what passes through his head on a blog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yGQhlRz8mc
