321% German Village

It's been a while so I will post this:



Ok, those Germans are just showing off now. Not only has the nation announced plans to shut down all of its nuclear power plants and started the construction of 2,800 miles of transmission lines for its new renewable energy initiative, but now the village of Wildpoldsried is producing 321% more energy than it needs! The small agricultural village in the state of Bavaria is generating an impressive $5.7 million in annual revenue from renewable energy.

The village’s green initiative first started in 1997 when the village council decided that it should build new industries, keep initiatives local, bring in new revenue, and create no debt. Over the past 14 years, the community has equipped nine new community buildings with solar panels, built four biogas digesters (with a fifth in construction now) and installed seven windmills with two more on the way. In the village itself, 190 private households have solar panels while the district also benefits from three small hydro power plants, ecological flood control, and a natural waste water system.

All of these green systems means that despite only having a population of 2,600, Wildpoldsried produces 321 percent more energy than it needs – and it’s generating 4.0 million Euro (US $5.7 million) in annual revenue by selling it back to the national grid. It is no surprise to learn that small businesses have developed in the village specifically to provide services to the renewable energy installations.

Over the years the village’s green goals have been so successful that they have even crafted a mission statement — WIR–2020, Wildpoldsried Innovativ Richtungsweisend (Wildpoldsried Innovative Leadership). The village council hopes that it will inspire citizens to do their part for the environment and create green jobs and businesses for the local area.

As a result of the village’s success, Wildpoldsried has received numerous national and international awards for its conservation and renewable energy initiatives known as Klimaschutz (climate protection). The council even hosts tours for other village councils on how to start their own Klimaschutz program. The Mayor has even been doing global tours ever since the Fukushima disaster.

Mayor Zengerle has gone to Romania, Berlin and the Black Sea Region to speak about how these places can transform their communities and make money in the process. Speaking to Biocycle, Mayor Zengerle said, “The mitigation of climate change in practice can only be implemented with the citizens and with the Village Council behind them 100 percent of the way. This model cannot be forced from only one side. We often spend a lot of time talking to our visitors about how to motivate the village council (and Mayor) to start thinking differently. We show them a best practices model in motion and many see the benefits immediately. From the tour we give, our guests understand how well things can operate when you have the enthusiasm and conviction of the people.

Via Inhabitat

Turbine Free Wind Power

Can't embed the video, but it's here.

From the Times Year in Ideas:

Conservationists argue that wind turbines pose a risk to birds, bats and sensitive habitats like shorelines. People living close to wind farms, meanwhile, complain of constant noise and vibration. This year, engineers responded with a new way to draw electricity from the wind: oscillating wind panels.

The wind panels are the brainchild of Francis Moon, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cornell University. He created a panel of 25 pads that oscillate in the wind, much the way leaves vibrate when a gust of air sifts through a tree. The pads attach to piezoelectric materials that produce electricity from each vibration.

Moon and a team of undergraduates have a working prototype called Vibro-Wind, which functions in variable wind speeds and generates little noise, making it ideally suited for urban spaces. Moon envisions Vibro-Wind on the sides and roofs of buildings, powering electronics and ad displays day and night. ANDREW TOLVE

Free solar panels

The rash of free solar panel offers being promoted to householders aren't quite the financial bargain they first appear to be, a consumer rights group warns today.

Using figures from the Energy Saving Trust, Which? reveals that consumers could save as much as £10,500 over 25 years – depending on where in the UK they live – by taking out a loan to buy their own system.

full

Algae Fuel

The sizable scientific team at Ocean Nutrition Canada in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the world’s largest supplier of omega-3 EPA and DHA fatty acid supplements, was hardly looking for an alternative to conventional fossil fuels.

In 2005, as part of a five-year research effort, the company was screening algae samples, taken from marine environments across the Atlantic provinces of Canada, for specific nutraceutical ingredients. That is when, in one of hundreds of filmy, green test tubes and flasks, it uncovered a single-celled microorganism that produces substantial quantities of triacylglycerol oil — a base for biofuel.

“It was like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Ian Lucas, Ocean Nutrition Canada’s executive vice president of innovation and strategy. “We got extremely lucky. This certainly isn’t our core business, but we’ve been told by experts that this is the most efficient organism for the production of oil identified in the world to date.”

Dozens of companies and academic laboratories are pursuing the objective Ocean Nutrition Canada did not know it had — to cultivate algae, the foundation of the marine food chain, as a source of green energy.

But Ocean Nutrition Canada’s prolific grower, experts say, appears capable of producing oil at a rate 60 times greater than other types of algae being used for the generation of biofuels.

In view of its discovery, the company will lead a four-year consortium, formed over the past months and funded by the federal not-for-profit foundation Sustainable Development Technology Canada, to develop its proprietary organism into a commercial-scale producer of biofuels.

full article

Thinking Small, and Still Smaller, on Wind Power

An article in The Times on Wednesday centers on Tocco da Casauria, a small, traditional town in Italy whose four wind turbines, installed over the past four years, produce 30 percent more energy than its residents use. In fact, money made from the production of clean energy has brought the town back from the brink of insolvency and allowed to renovate its school and perform other much-needed municipal repairs.

Tocco is near L’Aquila, the site of a devastating earthquake in 2009, and the quake damaged many of its buildings, including the city hall. Some were no longer safe to inhabit.

In fact, many of the recent renewable plants in Italy are small in scale — a turbine or two in a village — not those immense wind parks that dominate a landscape. That is partly the because the permitting process for large-scale installation is so complicated in Italy.

Still, across the globe, there are signs that wind energy innovators are trying to go smaller still. Just as there are rooftop solar panels, so, too, engineers have designed rooftop turbines.

Swift turbines, designed by the British company Renewable Devices, are pole-mounted rooftop wind turbines that can generate as many as 1,900-kilowatt hours of energy a year, supplementing the supply of energy-poor households at a time of high electricity rates.

This summer, the French designer Philippe Starck unveiled his own chic version of a rooftop turbine, a sculptural gizmo called the Revolutionair, which comes in quadrangular or helicoidal shapes and costs about $3,500.

Some buildings in New York City and elsewhere are experimenting with rooftop wind. But getting useful amounts of energy out of a turbine requires the analysis of wind patterns and proper placement. And buildings in tightly packed urban areas can scatter the breezes.

So whether super-small is good when it comes to wind turbines remains to be seen.

here
original full article

Water & salt rule

self warming baby bottle, with no electricity, just through water and salt. how cool is that?!


PS I hate the design, but whatever.

New York Times Year in Ideas

You've all probably seen this already, but worth posting anyhow.

Some samples:

PRINTABLE BATTERIES



Though you may not be aware of it, the technology already exists to create a video screen thin enough to fit seamlessly into the pages of this magazine. Ultrathin electronic devices can be built using a special inkjet printer that squirts fine layers of complex compounds instead of ink. When the compounds dry, they leave behind sheer metallic films, which in the right combination could act as thermometers, light sensors, even computer chips. So why haven't you seen these gadgets yet? In part because they are hard to power: even the smallest lithium-ion watch battery is too bulky.

The solution is to print batteries too. This year, a research team at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems revealed a 0.6-millimeter-thick battery.

It consists of a stack of metal pastes that act as anode, cathode and electrolyte, bound on top and bottom by carbon layers that collect electricity and deliver it to the attached device. This product can be built right into the device it's powering, as part of the production process, so there's no need for an additional assembly line. And the battery can be made as large or as small as needed, simply by printing more of it. The list of possible applications is endless — from bandages that release medication when they sense an increase in body temperature to wallpaper that changes color at the flick of a switch.

We're not talking megawatts, of course. According to Andreas Willert, one of the researchers, it takes about 15 square centimeters of printable battery to provide the same power as a single watch battery. But 15 square centimeters could be enough to power, say, a blinking magazine cover for a month. The Fraunhofer Research Institution introduced its battery at a nanotech expo in Japan in February. The next step is to open a small production line, which Willert expects will be ready next year. Which means that soon, instead of reading these pages, you might be watching them.

GOOGLE ALGORITHM AS EXTINCTION MODEL



Every species — be it earthworm or great white shark — is entwined in a vast and complicated system of predator and prey called a food web. To determine which species in a food web are most important to the survival of the larger ecosystem, scientists design computer programs to model how the extinction of a given species would affect the other species in the system. This year, two scientists announced that they had found an unexpectedly useful tool for this purpose: the seminal Google search algorithm.

Stefano Allesina of the University of Chicago and Mercedes Pascual of the University of Michigan began with a simple hunch. Google’s search engine uses an algorithm called PageRank to identify the most important Web sites on a given topic by analyzing links: a Web page is important if other important pages link to it. How different is this, really, Allesina and Pascual wondered, from an ecosystem, in which a species is important if other important species eat it?

Allesina and Pascual borrowed Google’s PageRank algorithm and modified it to model ecosystems in the natural world. As they explained in September in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, the modified algorithm was more efficient than existing ecosystem-extinction models at identifying which species’ extinction would cause the greatest number of other species in the food web also to go extinct. "Our algorithm is faster and computationally simpler," Allesina says.

The PageRank algorithm could be useful in analyzing other networks too. The world features countless interconnected systems ranging in size from the minuscule (metabolic networks within a single cell) to the immense (international financial markets). After publishing the paper, Allesina received e-mail messages from dozens of researchers interested in adapting the PageRank algorithm. "PageRank is a technique for finding hidden flows in huge quantities of data," says Yonatan Zunger, a Google software engineer who used to work on search technology and who contacted Allesina after seeing his research. "There are all kinds of networks. PageRank is enormously applicable beyond the Web."

GOOD ENOUGH IS THE NEW GREAT

"Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere," Robert Capps of Wired magazine wrote this summer in an essay called "The Good-Enough Revolution." Companies that had focused mainly on improving the technical quality of their products have started to notice that, for many consumers, "ease of use, continuous availability and low price" are more important.

High-definition televisions have turned every living room into a home cinema, yet millions of us choose to watch small, blurry videos on our computers and our mobile devices. Cameras capture images in a dozen megapixels, yet Flickr is filled with snapshots taken with phone cameras that we can neither focus nor zoom. And at war, a country that has a fleet of F-16 fighter jets that can cover 1,500 miles an hour is now using more and more remote-controlled Predator drones that are powered by snowmobile engines.

Lo-fi solutions are now available for a range of problems that couldn't be solved with high-tech tools. Music played from a compact disc is of higher quality than what comes out of an iPod — but you can't easily carry 4,000 CDs with you on the subway or to the gym. Similarly, a professional television camera will produce a higher-quality image than a phone, but when something important happens, from the landing of a jet on the Hudson River to the murder of an Iranian protester, and there are no TV cameras around, images recorded on phones are good enough.

In February, a music professor at Stanford, Jonathan Berger, revealed that he has found evidence that younger listeners have come to prefer lo-fi versions of rock songs to hi-fi ones. For six years, Berger played different versions of the same rock songs to his students and asked them to say which ones they liked best. Each year, more students said that they liked what they heard from MP3s better than what came from CDs. To a new generation of iPod listeners, rock music is supposed to sound lo-fi. Good enough is now better than great.

COWS WITH NAMES MAKE MORE MILK



For dairy farmers, whether to name their cows may seem like a matter of taste. But it might not be. It could be a business decision.

A study of several hundred British dairies published in the journal Anthrozoös in March compared responses to a survey about cow treatment with independently collected milk data and found that cows that have names make, in a given year, about 258 liters more milk per farm than anonymous ones — a bump of about 6 percent.

More research is still needed. The possible psychological effects on cows of having a name, for example, have yet to be determined. But the results so far reveal a correlation: "The naming," says Catherine Douglas, the Newcastle University animal behaviorist behind the research, "reflects the humans' attitudes toward the cows, and therefore how they behave around them." Named cows are more often treated nicely, and well-treated, calm and happy cows make more milk. The point, Douglas says, is that it definitely can't hurt to name your cows.

Naming criteria vary widely. Some farmers name cows alphabetically; others recycle parents' names. Herb and flower names are popular in Britain. "You know," Douglas says, "Daisy, Rose, Buttercup." Douglas once named a cow after her sister, Hattie.

But some American dairy farmers scoff at this idea. Barbara Martin, a third-generation California dairy operator, says naming her 2,200 cows would be completely unrealistic. "Everyone," she says, "has an ear tag with a number."

SUBSCRIPTION ARTISTS



This summer, Allison Weiss, a 22-year-old singer who writes melodic songs about "hopeless hope," wanted to produce a 1,000-CD run of a new album she was recording, but she wasn't sure how to get the money to do it. Then she heard about Kickstarter, a Web site unveiled in April. At Kickstarter, creative types post a description of a project they want to do, how much money they need for it and a deadline. If enough people pledge money that the artists reach (or surpass) their financial goals, then everyone is billed, paying in advance as you would for a magazine subscription. For goals that aren't reached, nobody is charged.

In essence, Kickstarter offers a form of market research for artists. For perhaps the first time, an artist can quickly answer a nagging question: Does anyone actually want my art badly enough to pay for it? If the goal is reached, the artist now has a list of subscribers to her vision. And if the goal isn't reached? "It's painful, but it's better to find out early," rather than spend precious time and money on a project nobody wants, says Yancey Strickler, who helped found Kickstarter. More than 1,000 projects have been started on Kickstarter since April, raising money for projects as diverse as a solo sailboat trip around the world ($8,142 raised) and a book by Scott Thomas documenting how he developed the graphic design for Barack Obama's presidential campaign ($84,614 raised).

Landscapes of Energy Book Launch

http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/academic/upd/agakhan/newgeographies/

Roof Ridge Solar Heater

I like that this is so no-big-deal designwise.

From Treehugger:
Sometimes the most impressive products at Greenbuild are the most innocuous and boring looking things; last year I thought the best of show was Agriboard, a SIP made from straw. This year I spent some time trying to figure out this ridge vent for a standard shingled roof with tubes running through it, thinking that there wasn't much surface area on it and it isn't going to do much. Then I realized that all of the heat in an attic runs through the ridge vent and this thing turns your entire roof into a solar collector.

As much as 25% of the energy consumed in a house goes to making hot water, and as we have shown before, it costs a tenth as much to generate a watt of power from the sun to heat water as it does to make electricity, so it makes a lot of sense to do this first. The Greenward solar ridge vent may tilt the economics even more, since you already own about 90% of the system- the roof of the house.

As the sun beats down on those dark grey shingles, the heat rises and flows out through the ridge vent around PEX plastic tubes, heating an ethylene glycol and water mixture that is pumped down to a heat exchanger, preheating the water before it gets to the water heater. The existing hot water heater only fires up when needed.

Sovna Video

Haha so rad. But uh is it me or does that one dude look kinda like Josh?

And New Rule: All FAMILY videos must start with a guitar solo.

Dallas Boards

Lots of good stuff here, son. Just needs to get polished up.

Eilat Boards

The final boards for Eilat as prepared by HQ and dudes.

Dallas Peaks

We are totally lagging on posting our submission to the Dallas Re:Vision competition that ended a few months ago. Its a good project (haha aren't they all!) and I think we actually managed to solve the task of providing for 100% of the site's energy. It's very hard to do! Covering a building in grass or vegetables does not, surprisingly, fix the earth.

Hot air balloons on the other hand. I mean, global warming->more hot air->more balloons, right?. Im pretty sure that's how it works.