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Town Square: LAGI’s Social Network for Building Collaborations

September 6, 2011 | 2 comments

Are you interested in participating in the 2012 Land Art Generator Initiative competition and you are looking for the right people to team up with? LAGI Town Square is the place where you can connect. It is a complete social networking engine (built on the elgg platform) that will allow anyone to set up a profile and look around for people who they think would complement their skill set.

For example, an artist can go to the Town Square to meet an engineer, architect, landscape architect, or scientist to help them fully realize their ideas. Conversely, someone of a more technical background can find an artist in the Town Square who has an interesting conceptual idea for which they’d like to provide nuts & bolts details support. Or perhaps you are an environmental activist, or a writer, or anyone with an idea that you’d like to see through.

This site has all of the tools that anyone will need in order to create the perfect collaborative team around their idea. That is its primary purpose. But we also hope that it will serve to connect people of like-minded interests outside of the context of LAGI design teams—to discuss ideas about renewable energy, art and design.

The Town Square site is complementary to the LAGI design competition itself and not an integrated part of the 2012 registration process. You are not required to create a Town Square profile to enter the 2012 competition. 2012 registration will open in January and will be completely separate from Town Square. However, if you create a profile on Town Square, we will migrate that information over to the 2012 design competition site. That way you will already be registered when the design brief goes live in January and you’ll be able to access the design brief and downloads area with your Town Square login information.

When you sign up on Town Square, you will be able to provide information about your discipline(s) and team status. This way people will be able to browse other users on the site by discipline and find people with whom they are interested in partnering. For a while we will be building the network, populating it with new profiles. So please take five minutes to create yours now. It’s really easy (you can even one-click login via facebook if you like). Then in a few months, with a critical mass of members, you’ll be able to check back in and find your perfect team!

We encourage you to create a thorough profile and make use of the tools on the site. In this way, others will be able to learn more about you. If they think that you have something to offer their team, they can send you a message directly and privately through the Town Square site.

We’ve created the Town Square networking platform in response to a number of requests for something like this. Because we all don’t have the time to get to know people from across disciplines in our daily lives, Town Square will help to get scientists working with architects, working with electrical engineers, and landscape architects, and artists, and social activists, and writers…all working together to innovate the ways in which we think about design and public infrastructure of the sustainable city.

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Tags: social network, Solar, Town Square, water, Wind

Surface Area Required to Replace Mountain Top Removal Coal Mining with Solar Power

September 2, 2011 | No comments

click on the image for a larger version.

Mountaintop removal mining (MTR) is a form of surface mining that involves the removal of a summit or ridge. Acres of wilderness habitat is deforested and the wood burned. Explosives are then used to blast away the overburden (soil and rock) to expose the coal seams that lie beneath. An average of 3 million pounds of explosives are detonated in West Virginia every day.

More than 500 mountaintops have been destroyed so far. The air pollution from surface mining activities has led to elevated levels of adult hospitalizations for chronic pulmonary disorders and hypertension; higher rates of mortality; lung cancer; and chronic heart, lung, and kidney disease for individuals living in mining areas.
In addition, 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been buried by mining refuse. Valley fill (VF) destroys natural habitats and pollutes watersheds with high levels of selenium and other toxic compounds.

The small blue square (516 square kilometers) on the above map represents the surface area of mountaintop that has been removed in southern West Virginia as of 2010. The same area is also represented on the map in the exact locations of the MTR mining sites.

The small yellow square (312 square kilometers) represents the land surface area that would be required to generate 124.8 terrawatt-hours of electricity each year. This is the same amount of electrical power that is generated by the 63.4 million short tons of coal that is mined from the exploded tops of West Virginia mountains each year.

This large blue square represents 1.4 million acres of Appalachian forest that has been disturbed or cleared as a consequence of mountaintop removal mining practices according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

This larger yellow square represents the land surface area that would be required to generate 1,850 terrawatt-hours of electricity each year. This is the total amount of electrical power that is generated by the more than one billion short tons of coal that is burned in the United States each year in coal-fired electrical power plants. MTR coal amounts to less than 5% of the total US coal production.

The side effect of all this coal combustion for electrical power is that 2.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide, 7.6 million tons of nitrogen oxide, and 7.5 million tons of sulfur dioxide are dumped into the earth’s atmosphere each year, along with other harmful gases and chemicals.

The solar panel installations that would be required to replace all West Virginia MTR coal would cost approximately $180 billion to construct.

If West Virginia decided to produce the panels in-state, it would provide more than 10,000 new jobs—about the same number that have been lost since 1990 in the US mining sector (MTR techniques extract 2.5 times the amount of coal per worker as compared with mining techniques that are more sensitive to the environment).

Mud River, West Virgina. (Graphic from www.ilovemountains.org)

More information can be found at:

http://ilovemountains.org/
http://earth.google.com/outreach/cs_app_voices.html
http://www.seesouthernforests.org/news/mountaintop-removal-cuts-through-southern-forests
http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/coal/weekly/weekly_html/wcpweek.html
http://www.eia.gov/coal/data.cfm, http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/coal/quarterly/html/t1p01p1.xls
http://www.blm.gov/ut/st/en/prog/energy/coal/electricity_conversion.html
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/MountaintopRemoval/
http://www.epa.gov/region3/mtntop/eis2005.htm

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Tags: coal, infographics, Solar

Modern Solar Power Towers by RAFAA

August 23, 2011 | No comments

Some nice alternative designs for the BrightSource Energy Ivanpah solar thermal plant in California.

From the article by Bridgette Meinhold at inhabitat:

BrightSource is holding a competition to come up with designs for the solar towers and Zurich-based RAFAA Architectue & Design in collaboration with engineering consultant, Schlaich, Bergermann und Partner have submitted two different concepts. While conceptualizing the different options, RAFAA sought to achieve high performances and efficiencies in terms of structural integrity, material usage and sustainability. Option A is a constructed of modular precast concrete or slip-form parts that would be transported and then assembled on site. Inspiration for the design came from light waves wrapped into a helix to form a column with diamond holes cut into the towers for aesthetic and structural purposes.

This first option seems to answer to a set of parameters that BrightSource was seeking in their request for proposals, however RAFAA feels in the long run, lightweight steel would provide a better solution both economically and sustainably than concrete. Therefore, they also came up with Option B, a square tower with a twist in the middle constructed of prefabricated 40-ft long steel elements. RAFAA proposes that steel is more sustainable in the long run because it would create a smaller construction footprint causing less damage to the environment. The solar tower can always be dismantled and moved to a new location or sold to another company when it is time to upgrade or the material can be recycled at the end of its life whereas concrete cannot. Either way, in the end we’ll have some design-worthy towers supporting the new solar plants in the Mojave.

news via inhabitat.com and greenprophet.com

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Tags: Solar

Fibonacci Geometry and Solar Trees

August 20, 2011 | 1 comment

Aidan Dwyer’s Fibonacci Solar Geometry

Aidan Dwyer, a 13 year old Long Island resident, has made some big news this week with his astute observations and experiments on solar power efficiency. While spending time in the woods, Aidan noticed that the trees branch out in a pattern that, when simplified, resembles a Fibonacci series spiral. Familiar with the concept of biomimetics in design, he wondered if the geometry that the trees have evolved for maximizing the efficiency of their solar reception might be applicable to solar efficiency of photovoltaic panels.

His study, which showed an increase in efficiency with the biomemetic design over a flat geometry, has earned him a provisional US patent according to the articles.

According to TreeHugger:

Summing up his research and imagining the possibilities, Aidan wrote: “The tree design takes up less room than flat-panel arrays and works in spots that don’t have a full southern view. It collects more sunlight in winter. Shade and bad weather like snow don’t hurt it because the panels are not flat. It even looks nicer because it looks like a tree. A design like this may work better in urban areas where space and direct sunlight can be hard to find.”

We hope that Aidan will be interested in applying his ideas to the 2012 Land Art Generator Initiative design competition for New York City!

story and images via Northport Patch, TreeHugger, and Inhabitat

Update 1: We stumbled upon this interesting post from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Surrey, UK. There are some links there to some great diagrams which give further evidence to this principle.

Update 2: Atlantic Wire has posted about a debunking of the claims in the media’s reporting on the project. It does rightly point out the sometimes less-than-critical nature of reporting on such things, but we don’t really see the harm in sensationalizing to some extent if it grabs attention and gets people thinking about the subject. In terms of the practical application of Fibonacci series placement of panels, it still may be true that if they are all optimally aligned to the sun there may be some benefit (think of the sunflower diagram with the entire thing pointed at 45 degrees and south, or the entire thing tracking the sun’s movement).

Rein Triefeldt’s Solar Tree Foundation

The story reminds of Rein Triefeldt’s Solar Tree Foundation project, which we learned about through Solar Artworks.

Rein Triefeld is bringing science education to people through his kinetic art. He has been using solar power to bring motion to his kinetic artworks since at least 2002.

And from a bLAGI post in 2009, which was about SMIT’s Solar Ivy:

I have long thought about how beautiful an orchard of 100 (10×10) trees with tiny PV leaves would be. The most beautiful place I can imagine to sit and contemplate is on the grass in the middle of an orchard. The sun makes such a beautiful tapestry of shadow on the ground and the multi-point perspective that the grid of trees constructs is ever-changing as you walk within. My personal favorite is an olive tree orchard with its tiny silvery leaves. Just imagine sitting in the midst of all that beauty while knowing that it is generating electricity. I figure an orchard that size would be enough to run more than a dozen homes. The above sketch is from an olive orchard on the Northern outskirts of Florence.

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Tags: Solar

Lunar Cubit: First Place Award Winner

January 19, 2011 | 6 comments

And the winner is…

Lunar Cubit

Robert Flottemesch, Jen DeNike, Johanna Ballhaus, and Adrian P. De Luca
Designed for Site #3 in Abu Dhabi, on Airport Road near Masdar City.
FIRST PLACE AWARD WINNER

Design Submission for the 2010 Land Art Generator Initiative Design Competition

Lunar Cubit is a site specific proposal to be constructed in Abu Dhabi just outside Masdar City, the world’s first zero carbon metropolis once completed. Combining artistic vision with sustainable design and engineering, Lunar Cubit examines the nature of time through nightly contemplation of lunar phases and daily transformation of sunlight into electricity, powering up to 250 homes. Inspired by astronomy, quantum physics and the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921, this work is open to the public, inviting a personal experience where one can literally reach out and touch a 1.74MW utility scale power plant, in the form of nine monolithic pyramids rising from the sands of Abu Dhabi.

Lunar means relating to or involving the moon and cubit is the name given to the oldest recorded units of length; employed though antiquity, the oldest cubit being the royal cubit, dating back to the Step Pyramid of Djoser circa 2,700 B.C.

Lunar Cubit is a timekeeper, a monthly calendar, allowing viewers to measure time through the eight lunar phases represented by a ring of eight pyramids encircling one central pyramid. All nine are proportional to the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza and scaled using the royal cubit but they’re not made from stone; they’re made of glass and amorphous silicon, giving them the appearance of onyx polished to a mirror finish. Supported from within, the façade of the pyramids is neatly seamless, like the face of a skyscraper, crisp against the heavens, reaching from base to tip, unbroken except for two silver streaks like rays of light scribing each face into two equal triangles and one diamond. Using frameless solar panels reduces embodied energy by nearly 30%, reducing time to be energy positive from seven years to five years. Around the pyramids flow natural stone paths in a repeating pattern that mirrors buried electrical cables, conducting electrons from the outer pyramids to the central pyramid where inside they are transformed into AC energy and transmitted to the Utility Grid. Co-locating walking paths and conduit runs minimizes the footprint of disturbed land during the construction allowing the maximum amount of natural ecosystem to remain untouched.

Nine pyramids resting on tan sand; encircled by distant trees; antiquity gilded with technology. Visitors are encouraged to walk amongst these clean power plants, beacons of science, rising to meet a hail of photons from 149 million kilometers away, traveling at the speed of light, to smash into electrons, jarring them free from their molecular bonds and channeling them into electricity. Day passes; a crown of shadows slides silently across the shrubs and sand as the sun rises and falls, moving across the sky and eventually disappearing below the horizon. Two pyramids begin to glow, rising in luminosity as twilight fades and the sky grows dark. Lunar Cubit illuminates inversely proportional to the lunar cycle and tonight is a new moon; white LED’s shine through thousands of tiny bands that are the cellular structure of amorphous silicon solar panels; creating a diffused glow that rises to become a solid pyramid of white light.

Accompanying the center pyramid is a corresponding outer pyramid, clearly marking the lunar phase like a number on the face of a clock. Inverted illumination creates a dance, an ebb and flow like the tides; pyramids of light reaching out to a hidden new moon and as the moon begins to shine, the pyramids recede, allowing moon light to fill the landscape. On the night of a full moon, only moonlight will trace a crown of silvery shadows across the desert floor until the following evening when the pyramids again begin to glow and the moon begins to fade; light forever rising and falling as the moon spins around earth, as the earth spins around the sun as the solar system spins around a massive black hole.

Located five kilometers from Abu Dhabi international airport, Lunar Cubit is visible from the air and creates a landmark, a destination for travelers to visit, relax and meditate. Nine pyramids form a ring matching near-bye road structures, forming a symbol of infinity. Lunar cubit serves as a reference, a familiar sight like Big Ben or the Empire States Building, safe, comfortable and timeless as the sun and moon.

Generating electricity for 250 homes, is a perfect complement to Masdar City, a symbol of imagination and sustainability. Harnessing the power of the internet to reach a wider audience, Lunar Cubit utilizes data monitoring, connecting the system’s output and usage to a website that anyone can visit and see live information; how much energy is being generated, how much is being used by the LED lighting, what are the weather conditions and details about the site.
Follow this link for a demonstration.

Art and renewable power generation are expanding frontiers. Our world is changing and the pace of change is accelerating rapidly. Lunar Cubit is a portal between past and future, combining art and energy, welcoming us to step into the future.

low-res version PDF of submitted boards

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Tags: Public Art, Solar

Sun Drops

January 14, 2011 | 1 comment

Marcin Sikora, Rozalia Kostka, Marco Tarzia, and Andrzej Chorazyczewski
Designed for Site #2 in Abu Dhabi, between Saadiyat Island and Yas Island.

Design Submission for the 2010 Land Art Generator Initiative Design Competition

Artist’s descriptive text:
The sea and the desert: two gigantic forces in coexistence. Imaging the desert, first thing we see is a cold morning, when the sun starts its journey through the skyline and the sand is yet covered in the cold of the night. This is a very special time, when water in the form of the dewdrops begins to appear on the leaves of plants.

Sun Drops makes reference to this moment when water comes into being at the desert. Oval-shaped forms made of glass, placed directly on the sand, resemble dewdrops at daybreak. The character of the whole composition is strengthened by the nearness of the sea. Irregularly located installations, illuminated from the inside at night, recall the picture of pure diamonds, sparkling at night. From the bird’s eye view they bring to mind water that has just been spilled on the sand, still not soaked into the ground.

During the daytime, the Sun Drops change their character into glass domes, where hidden inside photovoltaic installations produce electricity. Glass forms, of which whole sphere is built, behaves like lenses, agglomerating and focusing light on the solar cells positioned inside. Produced energy is mostly transferred directly to the grid, but some is partially stored, so that it can be used to give power supply to illuminate the spheres at night.

low-res version PDF of submitted boards

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Tags: CSP, Solar

Solar Carpet

January 6, 2011 | 1 comment

Futai Hiroyuki, Asai Hiroki, Murakami Chikako, Ookawa Syotarou, Sawada Kazuhiro, Fujimaki Naoki, Horie Syota, Mori Ryohei, Nakajima Yuji, Nogawa Taishi, Komatsu Kazuki, and Miyamoto Kazuyuki
Designed for Site #2 in Abu Dhabi, between Saadiyat Island and Yas Island.

Design Submission for the 2010 Land Art Generator Initiative Design Competition

Artist’s descriptive text:
Drivers on the highway encounter a long skyline of the installation. One third of the total is deformed slightly and covered with a mist. The skyline evokes the image of a floating carpet.

The space under the carpet serves as a comfortable shade. The rays of the sun come from the random openings of the carpet, and variedly project on the white sandy soil. The horizontal pattern of openings is gradated from inside toward outside, which creates a smooth boundary between the installation and surroundings. With sensitivity to the environment and local ecosystems, 400,000 solar panels are placed over the land.

The public is restricted to the specific area with safety to view it. Under the carpet of that area, a viewing platform is formed on the hill by making maximum use of the existed geographical characteristics. At the top of the platform visitors have a view of the extensive solar carpet from above, on which a sea of mist clouds is wafting and wind power generators are rotating. The clouds of mist serve to cool down the hot solar panels. The wind power generators show reflections from their mirror surface and absorb sunlight energy on their phosphorescent surface.

During night, the luminous LED particles on the solar carpet welcome the tourists in cabin just before arriving at the Abu Dhabi International Airport. The twinkle led lights synchronize with wind velocities and visualize the real-time environmental shift. The wind power generators supply electricity to the LED lights. In addition, the phosphorescent surfaces of the generators emit blurred luminosity according to the amount of energy absorbed during the daytime.

low-res version PDF of submitted boards

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Tags: Solar

Lotus Garden

January 6, 2011 | 1 comment

Chika Tsuchida
Designed for Site #2 in Abu Dhabi, between Saadiyat Island and Yas Island.

Design Submission for the 2010 Land Art Generator Initiative Design Competition

Artist’s descriptive text:
Why does an artificial construction keep static? They persist in keeping static toward wind, rain, animals or human beings. Living nature reacts to external stimulation. Can we shake and breathe an artificial construction?

As the motif of the plant, I choose a lotus, one of a beautiful aquatic plant, and want to build an artificial lotus garden.
There are Organic Solar Cells on the surfaces of these lotus leaves, and they create electrical energy. Lotuses bend and wave in the wind. A stem of lotus keeps vertical. But when wind blows, it bends like a bamboo. TPE (Thermoplastic Elastomers) and stainless steel springs make this movement possible. The stems are hollow and house electrical wiring.
The leaves are also made of TPE, and water-proofed on the surface. They are as thin and as long as possible, and swing in wind and weight of rain. TPE is a recyclable and durable material that is fit for the harsh conditions of the site.

At the site under the water, lotus leaves float on the surface. These leaves don’t use stainless steel, and stand up via their buoyancy.

Organic Solar Cells are 1/10 the cost of common inorganic solar cells, require less embodied energy to produce and are non-toxic to the environment.

This lotus form has the merit in its construction: It doesn’t need to level without foundation, and it makes possible minimum ground level and maximum solar panel space.

An old Chinese proverb says “Lotus grows in the mud but never become muddy itself”. It is known as a symbol of virtue and pureness and is a suitable motif for a clean energy plant.

low-res version PDF of submitted boards

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Tags: Solar

Fractal Generator

January 6, 2011 | 1 comment

Tanzim Hasan Salim
Designed for Site #2 in Abu Dhabi, between Saadiyat Island and Yas Island.

Design Submission for the 2010 Land Art Generator Initiative Design Competition

Artist’s descriptive text:
The inspiration from fractals is derived from concerns both aesthetic and pragmatic. Not only do they create interesting geometries and patterns, but they also give a practical advantage by increasing a surface area of a form.

Fractal geometry is a field that mixes art with mathematics to demonstrate that equations are more than just a collection of numbers. What makes fractals even more interesting is that they are the best existing mathematical descriptions of many natural forms, such as mountains, biological structures, and coastlines (such as that which runs along the site of the artwork). Using fractal geometries in the planning and organization not only generates more electricity than a non fractal linear arrangement but also become more contextual to the site.

The structural stiffness of the inclined structures supporting the photovoltaic panels can also be increased as the concrete pylons form together a type of folded-plate structure. As a whole the project represents nature’s microcosm at a human scale. It is a celebration of nature and technology.

The pylons are oriented to maximize efficiency by properly adjusting each photovoltaic panel to an optimum angle & also by eliminating segments of concrete panels that fall into shadow zones. The total master plan would also incorporate fractals as pathways and landscaping elements.

At night, these concrete inclined pylons become illuminated creating interesting silhouettes. These strokes of light are monumental as observers pass by the highways and stand as iconic art at a regional scale.

low-res version PDF of submitted boards

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Tags: Solar

Solar Veil

December 31, 2010 | 1 comment

Rudabeh Pakravan Studio
Rudabeh Pakravan, Juipai Chen, Victor Otter, Maya Taketani, and Sage Renewables
Designed for Site #3 in Abu Dhabi, on Airport Road near Masdar City.

Design Submission for the 2010 Land Art Generator Initiative Design Competition

Artist’s descriptive text:
Living in the Middle East often involves negotiating the space between your body and the sun. Or between your body and the eye of a neighbor. The veil is a way for you to protect yourself from both of these gazes—a personal sanctuary in the form of a tent or a body covering. The veil itself is functional, but the space it creates within itself becomes infinitely valuable because it is covered.

Solar Veil capitalizes on the availability of a vast swath of land while consecrating it through the idea of the veil. By demarcating that which we consider sacred, whether it is land or body, we claim a responsibility for its cultivation and protection. Veils, curtains, and tents are also temporary; there is an acknowledgement of borrowed space, a desire to leave what we are covering unaltered underneath.

Our proposal covers the site at Airport Road with a porous drape of 300,000 solar units that together have a nameplate capacity of over 16MW of energy. At nearly 175,000 square feet, Solar Veil responds to both the scale of its context and its needs. It becomes a destination in its own right, becoming part of the history of record-breaking infrastructural endeavors in the region while reflecting the vastness of the landscape.

The drape lifts up and touches down on the ground, creating an occupiable and shaded public space. Slits are also cut into the drape and lifted up, catching wind in the direction of its flow and allowing air currents to enter and pass through the space. The wind catchers act in two ways as shown in the diagram above – one, to allow air to pass in and through the space and two, by connecting to an enclosed shaft that pushes the wind underground two meters, where the ground is a constant, cooler temperature. Air returns upward, cooling the space within the drape.

In a region where shaded public space is reserved for parks with entry fees, luxury malls, or on green patches alongside highways, our proposal will create a rare opportunity for people to participate in the public realm, either for recreation or to be a part of a social structure that supports environmental accountability. Situated immediately adjacent to Masdar, the world’s first carbon free city, Solar Veil can both take advantage of the physical infrastructure that is being built there, such as using the proposed monorail to access the site and limit the use of vehicular traffic, and the social network of a sustainable community.

Our proposal attempts to have minimum effect on the site at ground level. The ground remains 80% untouched, with the remaining 20% being excavated for shallow spread footings for the structural system and for the passive cooling tunnels. The site is mostly sparse, but porosity built into the drape system allows for light to reach some areas under the veil that would allow vegetation to remain. The ring of trees around the site remains untouched. At 600gm/square meter, the drape system is very light and needs only a minimal structural armature. We propose a light steel tube framing system that forms a lattice and columns. With the energy generation at a minimum of 16MW, Solar Veil can power 8,000 homes.

Solar panels have already proven to be an extremely effective source of renewable energy. It is no longer necessary to rely on the large and bulkier solar panels traditionally found on roofs or as part of solar farms, but even the most advanced solar cell technology that is available today relies on large, rigid backings and standard sizes to function. In order to create a drape, we are working with a thin film photovoltaic manufacturer to create a small scale unit that is made of photovoltaic laminates overlaid on a 7mm fiberglass panel. The units are 50cm x 50cm and link at the midpoint of each panel to provide flexibility. The units are incredibly light, allowing for attachment to a minimal structural armature. Our proposal ensures that the overall form of the veil allows for 60% of the units to be between 10 to 15 degrees from the horizontal, resulting in maximum solar contact.

Our proposal allows for 20% of energy generated to be stored for off peak use. Wanting a highly efficient storage system with a small footprint, we integrate a group of 12 sodium sulfur (NaS) batteries underneath the surface of the veil.

The surface area of Solar Veil is approximately 160,000 square meters. Even conservatively estimating that only 30% of its area is generating energy, Solar Veil can power 8,000 homes or other buildings in the community. At its peak, it can power twice that.

low-res version PDF of submitted boards

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Tags: Solar

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