Hybridizing Art and Energy

The Land Art Generator Initiative announces its submissions and finalists for their Abu Dhabi based competition for artists to merge sustainable energy production with art.

The NYTimes provides a nice write up. 
..."Its aim is to help participants to develop and ultimately attract investment to construct power-generating plants that are aesthetically and functionally integrated into the landscape.
The contest was established by the husband-and-wife team of Robert Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian, whose firm Studied Impact is focused on the environmental effects of design...."

They plan to hit NYC next!

Underdome

Underdome:  a project that identifies a range of positions on energy and public life and assigns to each a corresponding architectural icon.

"The guide’s taxonomy covers the political, spatial, and cultural dimensions of energy, and revolves around four main topics: “Power” asks how governments, corporations, organizations and individuals have the potential to restructure energy performance. “Territory” asks how energy transforms and is transformed by the changing networks of today’s metropolis. “Lifestyle” asks what kind of norms and behavior energy performance schemes imagine. And lastly, “Risk,” as a kind of meta-category that cuts across these other fields, asks how we weigh priorities among a diverse set of interests and contingencies."

interview here

Pushing Green in the Heartland

There were some really important points that came up in the recent article in the New York Times by Leslie Kaufman. The tools and techniques that we use to adjust peoples perceptions and behaviors of the environment and the impact our built environment can have on it are not "one fits all."

Coming from this part of the world myself, one can only image that using Al Gore, Climate Change Science and environmentalism isn't a way to get people to listen... instead

"Ms. Jackson settled on a three-pronged strategy. Invoking the notion of thrift, she set out to persuade towns to compete with one another to become more energy-efficient. She worked with civic leaders to embrace green jobs as a way of shoring up or rescuing their communities. And she spoke with local ministers about “creation care,” the obligation of Christians to act as stewards of the world that God gave them, even creating a sermon bank with talking points they could download."

...brilliant

read whole article here

Landscape of Energy

Landscapes of Energy 

Edited by Rania Ghosn.

Energy infrastructures deploy space at a large scale, yet they remain invisible because the creation of value in the oil regime has long externalized spatial costs, sliding them out of sight and away from design's agency. Contemporary environmental, political, and financial crises have brought energy once again to the forefront of design concerns. Rarely, however, do practices of sustainable design-efficient building skins, islands of self-sufficiency, positive-energy machines-address the spatiality of energy systems. Instead, they tend to emphasize a renewable/nonrenewable binary that associates environmental costs exclusively with the infrastructure of oil and overlooks the geographic imperative of all forms of energy.

Volume 2 of New Geographies proposes to historicize and materialize the relations of energy and space, and map some of the physical, social, and representational geographies of oil, in particular. By making visible this infrastructure, Landscapes of Energy is an invitation to articulate design's environmental agency and its appropriate scales of intervention.

Municipal Financing

image: Solar Panels 365

Affording solar panels for the typical American home can cost nearly 50,000$. The money to get those panels usually is covered by some home improvement loan...putting the home owner at risk if they decide to move...usually leaving the panels with the house, while hanging onto the loan.

Municipal Financing sees the implementation of solar panels in a community as a more infrastructural issue: ICC explains:

"Under municipal financing of solar power systems, initial solar power investments are covered by a loan from the city, which is secured by property taxes and paid back over time, generally with interest. The advantage of this system over private borrowing is two-fold. First, any homeowner is eligible (not just those with good credit), and second, the loan repayment obligation attaches to the house, not the individual. This means that if a homeowner invests in a solar power system and then moves, they are no longer covering the cost of the upgrade, but instead the loan repayment obligation passes to any future buyers."

Californians already have this option for increasing their local production of energy...with cities in states such as Texas, Colorado and Virginia tagging along.

Novel idea....treating energy production as real estate...and being financed by the city, it becomes a community investment...as energy that isn't consumed by the individual homes is fed back into the grid...

sources:
Institute for Southern Studies
NYTIMES: Harnessing the Sun, With Help From Cities

other energy sources:
wind: Staten Island Harnessing the Wind

Electric Cars = Electric Resiliency

Seeking greater electric and transportation resiliency.

"And in a true smart grid, electric cars will not only be able to draw on electricity to run their motors, they will also be able to do the reverse: send electricity stored in their batteries back into the grid when it is needed. In effect, cars would be acting like tiny power stations.

“Most days, most cars are going to have lots of extra battery capacity,” said Mr. Kempton, noting that on average, American automobiles get driven for just one hour each day. Electrifying the entire vehicle fleet would provide more than three times the U.S.’s power generation, he said."

NYTimes Article
Electric Cars and a Smarter Grid

Google's Power Meter

Kicking the smart grid into motion perhaps is the doing of Google, which introduced new software service online that helps homeowners track their energy use. This requires additional hardware that would plug into your main circuit breaker and would "talk" with your computer, downloading your energy patterns. The Google platform would then map it, graphically showing your energy use...thus prompting many to limit and adjust their use...saving money and surges on our energy grid. Google foresees implementing this into a social network interface...your daily energy use on facebook anyone?


related articles:
New York Times
Bits

...Crowded...

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman.

The case is made, the need is clear...the only thing missing (beside the actual leadership and money) is the tools, frameworks and designs.

While new batteries, better cables and technologies I will leave for the scientists, what is the role of architects and urban designers?

-Understanding the infrastructures (energy, transportation, data/information) on multiple scales, relationships, schedules and performance.

-Creating new relationships on the scale of the dwelling by representing the systems, the needs and the opportunities.

Green Washing Gas

Image: bp.com

The Helio House is BP attempt at marketing a green gas station. Though they don't offer any type of alternative fuel, they did manage to create a building with LEED certification. The building has recycled this and that, education materials, LED lighting....cell phone recycling. But as many have argued...its still gas, its still harmful no matter what container you put in it.

These stations out of Oregon, SeQuential, might have the better idea. Not as flashy to make national headlines, they do offer a variety of alternate fuels ... and a green roof.












So what are the opportunities for "fueling stations" in our urban environments? How will the station evolve when real alternatives to fueling becomes more mainstream? How can a gas station really engage the community, the environment, watershed, energy system, transportation systems? How is energy distributed, consumed within nature?

additional resources:
NPR Report

Solar Big Boxes

Original Article from New York Times here

"...the day might come when people can pull their electric cars up to a store and recharge them with power from the roof or even from wind turbines in the parking lot."

Its the last sentence in this article that grabs you. The article points out an increase in retail business including solar panels within their retail big-boxes. While the energy savings and bottom line of these maneuvers is clear (though it represents 10% - 40%) the price isn't such an easy answer - costing millions of dollars making coal still the cheapest option.

But a marketing maneuver it is, green-washing and visual displays of "do-gooding." But what of the notion of having a new infrastructure of retail energy outlets. What is the draw of retail business offering "energy" for free if you shop with them? How could this feed into the great (mobile) infrastructure of energy and its distribution? Can we imagine a scenario of working/shopping during the day, recharging our Car to return home and plug our cars into our house...energy is shared, distributed. What are the new market forces? energy, time, open space, energy prices, battery storage.

Q-box: for neighborhood fun and games

from the website

The Qbox is a Local Energy Network (LEN) Interface. It is at the heart of a building's infrastructure and it communicates with the surrounding buildings.

Sharing with neighbors: The Qurrent Qbox will handle this complicated task completely autonomously. It will measure all electricity production and consumption and will make it possible to share capacities with your neighborhood, or cluster. In that process it will take into account the energy rates, however varying they may be, government subsidies, your production and consumption profiles and personal preferences you might have. All without you having to look after it.

Its what technology was meant to be...completely transforms our life yet utterly, unnoticed. What happens to suburbia when we actually start sharing something...something as important as energy? Does this sustain our wasteful land use practices? Or will it ultimately promote greater community? More importantly, are we willing to share?

Tata for Now

Also called the "Peoples Car", this Indian car, already in production is being offered in India for $2,500. The cheep price allows a great number of Indians to afford the car, the expect the sale of the Tata in South America and Africa in the next four years.

But is the American dream of everyone owning a car really best for the "people?" No matter what the size and the price, its an increase in the number of individual cars and adding to pollution and traffic.

What is the "Peoples Car"? isn't this just another "persons car"? How can the industry rethink sales in terms of community, public or infrastructure...instead of numbers, individuality...consumerism. Is there a place for the auto industry in transportation for "the people?" and what does that look like?

Tata Motors
The Worlds Cheapest Car

Parking Lot Power

What new forms of exchange can an electric car bring?

What are the possibilities that the automobiles themselves could become the power plants? While sitting in parking lots across American automobiles could become utilized resources. And with new electric cars with charged batteries, could a corporate office size parking lot actually run the building during the day? The cars could be charged through the night via home units and then while sitting in lots, charge the buildings while being plugged into on site solar collectors?

The potential of course depends on the different locations, businesses and schedules. How can mall shoppers participate? How can the local business use it as an incentive?

Image from : Los Angeles Community College District: a 1.2-megawatt solar farm spread over the 3-acre, 530-spot space in Monterey Park. With 5,952 photovoltaic panels tapping energy, the array is expected to last at least 40 years and provide up to 45% of the college’s electricity needs.

New Electric Infrastructure

Tesla Motors: I have been following the events regarding Tesla motors and their introduction of the electric "high performance" vehicle. The idea being, if they reintroduce the concept of an electric car as a performing roadster - 0-60 in 4 seconds - it would get attention and make their following "sedans" more worthy of attention.

But I often wondered how the introduction of a new energy driven vehicle, could redefine the urban environment. The extensive network of Gas stations have to be reconsidered, refueling now means electricity... with the expansion of locally available solar, wind, etc energy production, new questions arise.

Can the electric call also begin to redefine other patterns beside energy? Local source energy allows for a great community effort in transport? Carpooling turned car-shares? Neighborhood generation stations become neighborhood owned fleets? What sort of scales can be imagined when it is realized that size does matter. Urban fleets, vs inter-state vehicles. And what of expanding the technology to a great "digital" infrastructure of the roadways...auto-pilot-highways, GPS centered movement, social networking passenger pools?

check out these websites:
Tesla Motors
Inhabitat
www.obviousa.com

Station Infrastructure

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2002, there were 117,100 gas service stations in the U.S., of which 84,700 had convenience stores. That is just a bit lower than the number of grocery stores in the US (169,414 - http://www.manta.com/mb_34_B619B_000/grocery_stores).

As we enter peak oil, and the already decreasing use of automobiles (In March, Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles on public roads than in the same month the previous year, a 4.3 percent decrease — the sharpest one-month drop since the Federal Highway Administration began keeping records in 1942. from NYC see April 24th blog post below). What will become of our gas stations? Or what is the new infrastructure of energy going to look like, or how could it utilized the existing grid of our antiquated service stations? Hydrogen, solar....electric?

Outside of depots for transportation, how can this matrix of "energy centers" provide human energy? Growing stations? Water stations? fruit and vegetables? greenhouses?

Convenience stores for calories and not CO2!

End of Suburbia or We Need More Real Towns

In a NY Times article recently they explain the recent decrease in suburban house prices and the increase in energy as indicators for a new urban renaissance and the demise of suburbia. While some see this only as a blip on the energy and real estate bubbles, its an exciting time to rethink not only where we live but what suburbia can do for us.

The article, Rethinking Country Life as Energy Cost Rise, includes interviews from both sides of the fence: the rural forever's and the urban interested. They all remark about the loss of privacy, safety and the ideal of their children able to "run outside barefoot".

But if we are to really "rethink" suburbia it doesn't mean we have to all move to the urban centers. A new vision of what suburbia can be is necessary. One that rethinks density, proximity to commercial conveniences, public transportation and the access to local employment. Why can't suburbia become the new enclaves of community?

Photo and article from NY Times article: Rethinking Country Life as Energy Cost Rise (June 25, 2008 by Peter S. Goodman.

Additional readings:
Volume 9: Suburbia After the Crash by R. Koolhaas, O. Bouman, M. Wigley
Suburban Transformations by Paul Lukez