Green design Archive

Solar Energy: Here Comes the Sun(Flower)

by Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office

SunflowerJust outside Seville, in the desert region of Andalucia, Spain, sits an oasis-like sight: a 100-meter-high pillar surrounded by rows of giant mirrors rippling outward. More than 600 of these mirrors, each the size of half a tennis court, track the sun throughout the day, concentrating its rays on the central tower, where the sun’s heat is converted to electricity — enough to power 6,000 homes. 

The sprawling site, named PS10, is among a handful of concentrated solar power (CSP) plants in the world, although that number is expected to grow. CSP proponents say the technology could potentially generate enough clean, renewable energy to power the entire United States, provided two factors are in ample supply: land and sunlight.

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Turning Grass Clippings Into Solar Panels

by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

Andreas Mershin Photo: M. Scott BrauerWithin a few years, people in remote villages in the developing world may be able to make their own solar panels, at low cost, using otherwise worthless agricultural waste as their raw material.

That’s the vision of MIT researcher Andreas Mershin, whose work appears this week in the open-access journal Scientific Reports. The work is an extension of a project begun eight years ago by Shuguang Zhang, a principal research scientist and associate director at MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering. Zhang was senior author of the new paper along with Michael Graetzel of Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

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Wirelessly Charging Electrical Vehicles While Driving

by Mark Swartz, via Stanford University News,

Wirelessly chargingA Stanford University research team has designed a high-efficiency charging system that uses magnetic fields to wirelessly transmit large electric currents between metal coils placed several feet apart. The long-term goal of the research is to develop an all-electric highway that wirelessly charges cars and trucks as they cruise down the road.

The new technology has the potential to dramatically increase the driving range of electric vehicles and eventually transform highway travel, according to the researchers.  Their results are published in the journal Applied Physics Letters (APL). 

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Empowering Minorities to Shape Urban Landscapes

by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, via Grist.org,

Seventh grade students transforming a Detroit community garden. (Photo by Michelle White.)When people ask me why I write about architecture, design, and cities — why I focus on these topics instead of all of the others — I like to tell the story of a park bench.

I first read this story many years ago in a book of essays on urbanism. It starts auspiciously enough with the development of a new neighborhood outside of Los Angeles. The developers promoted the neighborhood as one of inclusivity, a place where community would reign supreme. They designed everything from the houses to the garbage cans and the sidewalks.

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Geoengineering and Global Food Production

Geoengineering ideas for a cooler planetCarbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. There are concerns that a continuation of these trends could have catastrophic effects, including crop failures in the heat-stressed tropics. This has led some to explore drastic ideas for combating global warming, including the idea of trying to counteract it by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. However, it has been suggested that reflecting sunlight away from the Earth might itself threaten the food supply of billions of people.

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Sampling the Conscious Lifestyle

The Conscious Box teamWhile only 55 percent of Americans between 16 and 29 are employed, the plums in today’s job market for intelligent and motivated candidates are in software design, healthcare, engineering, management and accounting. But Jameson Morris, 23—along with his partners Jesse Richardson, 21, and Bjorn Borstelmann, 24—took a different route, driven by the passion to help others live conscious lifestyles.

Morris and one of his two partners had already founded a thriving online magazine called Organic Soul, and their newest enterprise— Conscious Box—is yet a further effort to make a difference, with little to no help from anyone else. “They both have basically been passion projects,” Morris explained. “We are young multitalented guys, and most everything we have done has been all between us. It was really just a lot of hard work and late nights and living in our office.”

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Hypersolar: Making Fracking Obsolete

Hypersolar reactor complexHyperSolar, Inc., the developer of a breakthrough technology to make renewable natural gas using solar power, announced that its technology can help reduce the need for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) used to access underground natural gas resources. The company’s renewable natural gas is a clean, carbon neutral methane gas that can be produced above ground and used as a direct replacement for traditional natural gas to power the needs of the world.

“Even though the United States has vast natural gas resources, a majority of these reserves are only accessible through fracking, a potentially environmentally-hazardous process that many environmentalists claim could contaminate our water supplies and the air we breathe,” said Tim Young, CEO of HyperSolar. “Rather than extracting difficult-to-reach fossil fuel reserves, we think that the focus should be on alternative technologies that can provide the world with affordable and clean sources of energy. We believe it is far better to consider sources of energy that are renewable instead of limited depleting resources such as coal, oil or natural gas.”

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Converting a Volcano into a Geothermal Power Plant

by Jeff Barnard, AP, via The Huffington Post,

In this May 16, 2008, file photo, a drilling tower stands under clear skies at the Newberry Crater geothermal project near LaPine, Ore. Geothermal energy developers plan to pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of a dormant volcano in Central Oregon this summer to demonstrate new technology they hope will give a boost to a green energy sector that has yet to live up to its promise.

They hope the water comes back to the surface fast enough and hot enough to create cheap, clean electricity that isn't dependent on sunny skies or stiff breezes – without shaking the earth and rattling the nerves of nearby residents.

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Trout Gulch: A Homemade Sustainable Hobbit Village

by Maria Grusauskas, via Wastonville Patch,

The handmade cob oven serves perfect for baking bread. Credit: Kirra HellfritschOn a secret hillside in Aptos, a small group of young people imagined their own version of a “21st-century Hobbit village.” Then, they built it.

A network of tree houses, huts, domes, a goat paddy, an orchard, and most recently, an organic farm, the small neighborhood named Trout Gulch is really only just beginning to sprout.

Built on the wilderness that surrounds animation filmmaker Isaiah Saxon’s mother's house, Trout Gulch is the creative sanctuary of Encyclopedia Pictura, a three-man animation company made up of Saxon, Sean Hellfritsch, and Daren Rabinovitch.

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The Shipping Container Oasis in Food Deserts

Stockbox outside viewThe term food desert describes a district in a city where fresh, healthy food cannot be found. It is estimated that 23 million people live in such areas. Since the nearest store is usually the corner bodega that carries packaged snacks, a variety of sodas and beer and a few highly processed food items, it is not surprising that diet-related illnesses soar in these food deserts. Two Seattle-area visionaries, fresh out of grad school, are implementing a food oasis—an “instant store” that is quickly set up and brings badly needed fresh food to these neighborhoods.

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How Human Waste Becomes Energy and then Money

Last year we noted the existence of a unique company, Sanergy, founded by a group of MIT students and grads. Sanergy originated a plan to furnish basic sanitation facilities to rural, impoverished communities and turn the waste accumulated into bio-gas and then revenue and jobs for these same communities.

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Coffee Roasters to Brew Up Renewable Energy

via University of South Dakota,

coffee roastingThe Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) at the University of North Dakota announced it is leading a project to develop an efficient renewable electricity technology for coffee-processing plants. The EERC is working with Wynntryst, LLC, an energy solutions company based in South Burlington, Vermont, to develop a gasification power system to utilize the waste from a coffee-processing plant to produce energy.

The project specifically focuses on the waste from the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (GMCR) plant. GMCR is a Wynntryst client based in Waterbury, Vermont, and is best known for its Keurig brand of individual coffee cups.

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Gotham Greens: Sustainable Farming in the Big Apple

Gotham Greens: Sustainable Farming in the Big Apple

by Bruce Boyers,

Our system of factory agriculture is exacting a great toll on our planet: 40 percent of the land and 70 percent of the fresh water on Earth is devoted to the growing of food, which, in the process, creates some 30 percent of greenhouse gases. Compounding these issues is the fact that commercial produce is often transported thousands or even tens of thousands of miles to its point of sale, consuming tons of fossil fuel. It is evident that our current agricultural model is a failed experiment in search of a more sustainable solution.

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Greening Cities on the Cheap

by Jared Green, via Grist.org,

Architect and urban planner and founder of the Instituto Jaime Lerner.Jaime Lerner was elected mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, in 1971, and reelected two more times before serving as governor of the Brazilian state of Paraná. As mayor, Lerner devised a number of low-cost solutions and innovative partnerships with the public and private companies that turned Curitiba into a model green community. He has won a number of major awards for his transportation, design, and environmental work, including the United Nations Environment Award. In 2002, Lerner was elected president of the International Union of Architects. Today, he is principal of Jamie Lerner Associated Architects.

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Micro-Hydro Turbines: Turning Canals into Power Sources

by by Lauren Craig, via EarthTechling,

Turbine being installed. Image via HydrovoltsHydrovolts is a Seattle, Washington-based start-up with an innovative micro-hydro turbine technology. Instead of relying on natural water resources, the Hydrovolts turbine is designed specifically for use in man-made waterways, such as irrigation canals, water diversion channels, discharge channels for wastewater, cooling water discharges from thermal power plants and large hydropower projects.

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Future Ships: Going Green by Going Retro

by Jesse Emspak, via New Scientist,

Future innovations for green shippingLike the clippers of old, the cargo ships of tomorrow may one day raise sails, though with a modern twist. They might also sport solar panels, and even glide through the ocean on cushions of air.

Typical cargo ships today are little different from their forbears a century ago: dirty, oil-burning behemoths. Because of their huge size, they're an efficient way to move goods, but the industry is so vast that the amount of carbon they emit exceeds that of all the world's aircraft. If the global fleet were a single country, its emissions would rank seventh in the world (see graph).

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Glow and Be Recognized

Fluorescent molecules with an open scaffolding called a metal-organic framework (MOF)by David Chandler, via MIT News Office,

Researchers at MIT have developed a new way of revealing the presence of specific chemicals — whether toxins, disease markers, pathogens or explosives. The system visually signals the presence of a target chemical by emitting a fluorescent glow.

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Chicago’s Sustainable-Oriented Transportation Commissioner

by John Greenfield, via Grist.org,

Commissioner Gabe Klein. Photo: Steven VanceWhen forward-thinking Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) Commissioner Gabe Klein reported for work on May 16 as part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's new administration, it marked a sea change in the city's priorities.

Chicago spent most of the 20th century trying to make it easier to drive. In recent years, as other cities pioneered green transportation initiatives like car-protected bike lanes, large-scale public bike sharing systems, and "ciclovia" events which shut down streets to make room for car-free recreation, Chicago futilely tried to fight auto congestion by removing pedestrian crosswalks, shortening walk signal times, and installing slip lanes and right-on-red signals to help drivers make faster turns.

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Desertec Sahara Solar Project Could Power Half the World

By Charis Michelsen, via CleanTechnica,

Desertec solar power from AfricaThe African desert is hot. It gets a lot of sun. These are facts that we all know, even if we have no personal experience (and for those of you who haven’t been there, let me assure you, it’s true). It seems intuitive that the intensity of the sunlight pressing down on that desert makes the area ideal for generating solar power, and indeed – such plans were conceived in 1913 (by American engineer Frank Shuman), and again explored in 1986 (by German particle physicist Gerhard Knies).

Both Shuman and Knies strongly believed desert solar energy was necessary; Shuman believed that humanity would revert to barbarism without it, and Knies felt that it was the only way to avoid dirty and dangerous fossil fuels.

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Crops in the Desert—in Seawater Greenhouses

by Renee Cho, via State of the Planet,

The seawater greenhouseAccording to the World Health Organization, about 20 percent of the world’s people live in regions that don’t have enough water for their needs. With the global population increasing by 80 million each year, a third of the planet will likely face water shortages by 2025. This looming water crisis is inextricably linked to food production because agriculture accounts for 70 percent of all fresh water used, and obtaining irrigation water in arid regions has serious environmental impacts. Drilling wells can deplete groundwater, and desalination is energy-intensive and leaves behind concentrated brine.

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Can We Tap Our Way out of Bottle Addiction?

Faucet Face reusable bottlesWhen many of us were kids, there was no such term as tap water; it was simply known as water. We drank it when we were thirsty, we drank it with meals, we used it to make ice, we cooked our food with it, we made other drinks (such as iced tea) with it, and much more, without a second thought.

Then things began to change. “The first bottled water came out in the late seventies,” Mason Gentry, founder of Faucet Face, told Organic Connections. “It was kind of a laughing stock back then, like why would you pay for water when it comes out of your faucet? But the early nineties came around and extreme sports became popular. Somehow the bottled water industry marketed their wares around that and they were able to make it popular.”

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Warren Buffet Bets Big on Solar Energy

via First Solar,

Solar array installationBuffet subsidiary, MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company announced it has entered into definitive agreements to acquire the Topaz Solar Farm from First Solar, Inc. The 550-megawatt photovoltaic power plant being built in San Luis Obispo County, Calif., will have the capacity to generate enough renewable energy to power approximately 160,000 average California homes. The more than $2 billion Topaz project is one of the two largest PV projects in the world, both being built by First Solar.

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Urban Agriculture in Berlin: Planning An Industrial-Sized Rooftop Farm

by Jess Smee, via Spiegel Online International,

The Fresh from the Roof team will turn this flat roof into an urban field, covering 7,000 square meters, the size of a football pitch.Most of our [Berliners'] food makes an environmentally-costly journey by plane, train or truck before it lands on city supermarket shelves. But three Berlin-based entrepreneurs want to change this by cultivating food in the heart of the metropolis.

The Frisch vom Dach, or Fresh from the Roof project, plans to create a 7,000-square-meter roof garden, complete with a fish farm, to provide Berliners with sustainable, locally-grown food. They hope to sow the seeds of a new form of urban agriculture, arguing that traditional farming needs to evolve -- and soon.

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A New Way to Capture Solar Energy

by David L. Chandler, MIT News Office,

"Conventional" solar concentratorsMost technologies for harnessing the sun’s energy capture the light itself, which is turned into electricity using photovoltaic materials. Others use the sun’s thermal energy, usually concentrating the sunlight with mirrors to generate enough heat to boil water and turn a generating turbine. A third, less common approach is to use the sun’s heat — also concentrated by mirrors — to generate electricity directly, using solid-state devices called thermophotovoltaics, which have their roots at MIT dating back to the 1950s.

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The Upward Future of Vertical Farming

by Twilight Greenaway, via Grist.org,

"The Living Skyscraper: Farming the Urban Skyline" by Blake KurasekIf you haven't seen the slickly rendered architectural models of farms growing in skyscapers, you probably live under a rock. When I first I saw one -- this was a few years back, they've been making their way around the internet for years -- I got a little tingly. Had the clean, green future of food really arrived?

Since then, I've come to wonder about how realistic these models are, how likely it is that we'll ever really move farming out of rural areas and into skyscrapers, and whether it'd really be any better for the environment if we did. How might these models fit into a decidedly less glamorous, but perhaps more collectively drawn, vision of a localized food system that uses fewer chemicals, preserves biodiversity, and employs people fairly?

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