More vertical farming...

"...the building itself is an organic looking thing."

Yes, indeed. Very reminiscent of these natural structures:

http://images.google.ca/images?ndsp=18&um=1&hl=en&rlz=1C1CHMG_enCA291CA303&q=venus+flowerbasket&start=90&sa=N

Here is a fascinating document (actually the overhead teleconferenc presentation) by Amory Lovins, Head of the Rocky Mountain Institute:

Negawatts for Fabs

Advanced Energy Productivity for Fun and Profit.

http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E98-03_NegawattsForFabs.pdf

Though the document is specific to semiconductor manufacturing, the concepts, I believe, are transferable to different types of urban infrastructure.

Yet another presentation:

https://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E01-07_ECEEE8FoldWay.pdf

RMI has a wealth of great documents on sustainability.

More vertical farming

This concept recently won an award at the Evolvo Skyscraper competition. Called Dystopian Farm, the building itself is an organic looking thing (see poster).

I'm excited about vertical farms because they envision a partial solution to getting urban populations more involved in the chain of infrastructure that supports urban existance. And anything that can shorten supply chains, build redundancy and enhance diversity is something I am always interested in exploring.

More on vertical farms at wikipedia.

Previous post on sky farming

visibility and power management

Hot on the heels of my last post where I ranted about better use of existing power I noticed this article in the IHT regarding Google's tool "PowerMeter". From the article:

Google is one of a number of companies devising ways to control the demand for electric power as an alternative to building more power plants. The company has developed a free Web service called PowerMeter that consumers can use to track energy use in their house or business as it is consumed.

Google says: "Studies show that access to your household's personal energy information is likely to save you between 5–15% on your monthly bill" (and provides sources and calculations). 

Compare this with this statement from the US Energy Information Administration regarding projected global energy consumption (this is a great read, btw):

World marketed energy consumption is projected to increase by 50 percent from 2005 to 2030.Total energy demand in the non-OECD countries increases by 85 percent, compared with an increase of 19 percent in the OECD countries. 

This suggests that in North America, with increased visibility of consumption patterns alone, we can absorb the next 20 years of economic growth on our existing power infrastructure. If we grow our energy consumption on off-peak hours, we don't need to build new plants; we can focus exclusively on shifting to renewable resources.  

What this says to me is that we're not desperate for new capacity. We need clean, reliable, efficient sources. We need to drop our carbon footprint, but we also need to build a more robust and self-healing system. If we're going to sink $60B into infrastructure, let's build a system that can't be knocked out with a single point of failure. That means we need to invest heavily in innovative research and planning now. We need legislation and taxes that reduce power consumption in all devices and their lifecycles. This is an opportunity to look not just at energy consumption but at design methodology and gear our economy to reward the creation of more desirable technologies. We need to consider power, resource, social and human use of the technologies. Just swapping the battery without looking at the machine is missing the point.

wind power

So Fast Company has an article on a "rural renaissance" from investment in wind power. I'm wary about all this alternative energy source hype; I think it's a money play. Until I see some real commitment to reduced consumption, I will keep thinking this is mostly a bunch of goons dying to get their hands into the public coffers. Yes, we need alternative energy. No, I don't want to see wind farms covering every square inch of the countryside and huge power corridors carrying electricity to the cities at our current rate of energy consumption.

The best solution lies in taxing the hell out of low energy efficiency machines, incentivizing off-peak power use, and investing in truly distributed, decentralized, and pluralized power sources. This secures our power source against any individual point of failure, and prevents the need for excessive numbers of new power corridors. 

In my ideal world, I'd love to see every home produce what they need from a mix of small, clean, and unobtrusive technologies, with a slight surplus they can feed back to the grid. We've got any number of avenues we could be investigating - wind and solar being the two obvious ones but that still leaves any number of clean waste burning techs, piezoelectrics, geothermals. We're not being sufficiently innovative here. Electricity is an atomic level phenomenon. With the right micro- or nanoscale harvesting techniques, we could be capturing power from water running over rooftops or down drains, vibrations from people walking on floors, the sway of tall buildings in the wind. There are opportunties. We're not even trying. Instead we're getting all frothy at the vision of macro-industrialists who can't wait to sink $60B of public money into a 19th Century infrastructure plan.