In one version, it's a woman from Binzhou in China's Shandong Province carrying a large plastic bag inflated with natural gas, tapped from a pipeline near some oil and gas wells. It's an illicit hack with “many latent dangers.”
In another version, it's a woman from the coming era of radical sustainability carrying a large plastic bag inflated with methane gas. Filling for about a week or so at the Biogas Farm Co-op, a puffy orchard of wind-fluttered arboreal dirigibles, she's plucked it off the ground as though a fruit off a tree.
The Landscape Art Generator Initiative has chosen Freshkills Park as the site for the next edition of its design ideas competition. In 2010, artists, designers, scientists and engineers alike were challenged to design a land art sculpture that was also a power plant capable of generating clean energy for thousands of homes. The brief for 2012 is basically the same, except of course you will be plopping down your installation not on the sands of the United Arab Emirates but on a park reclaimed from what was once the world's largest landfill, Fresh Kills (N.B. two words for the dump, one word for the park).
If you're not familiar with Freshkills Park, here's some information taken from its blog (every park should have a blog, or at least a Twitter account!):
At 2,200 acres, Freshkills Park will be almost three times the size of Central Park and the largest park developed in New York City in over 100 years. The transformation of what was formerly the world’s largest landfill into a productive and beautiful cultural destination will make the park a symbol of renewal and an expression of how our society can restore balance to its landscape.
In addition to providing a wide range of recreational opportunities, including many uncommon in the city, the park’s design, ecological restoration and cultural and educational programming will emphasize environmental sustainability and a renewed public concern for our human impact on the earth.
In case you're eager to start your creative process now, we suggest reading John May's essay on Fresh Kills, published in the boogazineVerb: Crisis, 2008. Here's one of the closing passages:
Fresh Kills is our generation’s A-Bomb: we express dignified shame at the fact of its existence to mask our delight in knowing that it belongs to us. It may be a disturbing thing, but it also seems somehow extraordinary, and in either case, it is our disturbing-extraordinary thing. We secretly love it. We like to know that it’s there. Its location with respect to Manhattan is indicative of a preferential derision; near enough to be seen, to enjoy the peace of mind provided by the power implicit in its existence, but too far away to be smelled, too distant to impose on our comfort. It is material evidence that the American Way of Life is still very much expanding, that our morality is still dominant, still at work in the corners of life. The size of the pile—taller than the Statue of Liberty across the bay—is evidence in support of our belief in American strength and control. Fresh Kills is the literal, substantive embodiment of the consumptive-moral technologies of flexible accumulation, of a late twentieth-century, Neoliberal American economy; a testament to the fecundity of its principal metropolitan region, its most prominent image of a free-market. Trash and waste are central elements in our morality; they demonstrate our power, and allow us to sleep well.
Now how can one resist adding a bit more seductive, soporific images on top of that tenuous veil separating us from our monstrous anus.
Full details will be released on 1 January 2012, and you have until 1 July 2012 to submit your proposals.
Apparently, it's in Chicago. Called Exelon City Solar, it was completed last year, generates 14,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, and powers up to 1,500 homes. More interestingly for us, it sits atop a 41-acre brownfield.
The Dirtsees it as part of an emerging trend. Instead of paying for a costly clean up of their heavily polluted sites, cities invest the money into solar farms.
Might this escalate to the point that we see the Fukushima Exclusion Zone turned into the largest wind farm in the world? Sure the place is radioactive but at least there are no militant NIMBYs living there to protest against it. The worse the disaster gets, the larger the contamination site — which ironically translates to more clean energy.
Over at Friends of the Pleistocene, they have an interview with Michael Madsen, director of Into Eternity. That film is a feature documentary on the world's first permanent nuclear waste repository, Onkalo.
“At the core of Into Eternity,” write Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, “is an attempt to imagine communicating to humans hundreds of thousands of years into the future (the film is structured as an address to the future). We talked with Michael about why he chose this mode of address and how he hoped audiences of today would respond to it. We also discussed how the circumstances that necessitate the building of facilities such as Onkalo demarcate a fundamentally new chapter in human history.”
Friends of the Pleistocene: Over the course of working on this project, did you sense your own ability to project your imagination into long spans of time increase?
Michael Madsen: Well, I have to say that there is an element of the scientific disease.
While in the tunnel, I was of course looking at notes written on the walls. There are these different tracings measuring cracks and how much water is dripping in. I remember looking at it and thinking if this place is ever opened, which I think it will be, these notes will be the cave paintings of our times. But what will it mean to the persons looking at it? This was strange to think about.
Even if the cave is never marked in any sense, it will be a sign itself. The very construction will be a sign. Deep into time, even the canisters will be gone, but there will still be the scars in the bedrock. The bedrock will still have this hollow, spiral, triangular entry. There will be these symmetrical deposits of high-level or radioactive material. So, any intelligent entity in the future will be able to discern that there is symmetry in this area. Symmetry, I think, does not appear in nature as a natural phenomenon except perhaps in crystals, which are different. So any creature in the future will understand that this has been made. In this sense it will always be a sign.
To see if it's showing in a city near you, check out the schedule here.
While at Friends of the Pleistocene, also check out the first report from their recently initiated long-term project to create a typology of debris basins. Not many can arouse us more than landslide mitigation structures.
A disused gold mine might soon provide geothermal energy for the city of Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories, reportsCBC.ca.
Yellowknifers have long thought about drawing geothermal heat from the abandoned mine, as former miners have reported temperatures exceeding 30 C when they were underground.
If the project goes ahead, a network of distribution pipes would have to be built to deliver heat from the mine to various downtown buildings.
Oil would still be used under the proposed geothermal plan, but would make up five per cent of the energy used. Still, Yellowknife could save 7.6 million litres of oil and lower greenhouse gas emissions by 17,000 tonnes a year under the proposed plan.
To quickly change to a related or unrelated subject, we've often wondered if you can excavate a system of underground tunnels wherein differentials in atmospheric pressure (or some other laws of physics unknown to us) create air movements at speeds fast and consistent enough to produce appreciable wind energy.
If you perforate a mountain (or an entire mountain range) that's buffeted by strong winds all the time from all sides and then populate it with burrowing giant helium balloons to keep the air moving when the Chinook or Katabic winds are at a standstill, how many homes can be powered? The entire downtown area or just the reclusive hamlet of a rogue Swiss tunnel digger?
Wind power and the cost-benefit headaches of such a multi-billion-dollar project aside, can you perforate a mountain simply to hum a tune, to turn it into a gigantic wind organ playing a melancholic song from deep geologic time? You won't be singing it to the mountain; the mountain will instead, to you.
The team's project statement is worth quoting at length:
Unlike current renewable energy fields where technologies are publicly inaccessible, static, and always on, WeatherField offers a range of public engagement dependent upon wind, sun, and moisture. Energy generation becomes a public performance, dynamic, reactive, and interactive. The park is active when weather events are active, and calm when weather is calm, in each instance offering the public a compatible experiences.
The park is organized and designed to respond efficiently and creatively to climate. The intention is that the park serve as a barometer of regional weather events. WeatherField is simultaneously a public space, a dynamic energy icon, and a public weather service. The field is a registration of daily weather events including weather events such as Shamals winds, dense fog, and sandstorms, among others.
The Yas Island energy park is comprised of a field of 200 “Para-kites,” each is equipped with a base station of two flexible posts. Except for the posts that tether the para-kites, the ground and aquatic ecology is undisturbed. The para-kites use a parafoil system to remain aloft and a Windbelt™ system to harvest “flutter” energy from the wind.
At the Yas Island test site, the 200 para-kites extend across the site in a 60 meter grid that marks the tide levels. Each para-kite is capable of 6,220 kwh annually. Preliminary calculations generate approximately 21.6 kwh/month for each cell of the para-kite. With 24 cells per para-kite, that yields 518.4 kwh/month for each para-kite. Across the WeatherField, we calculate 1.24 GW annually, or about 620 energy-efficient homes. Or, more colloquially, each para-kite is able to power three homes for a year.
Whether these calculations are accurate or not, it should be noted that the competition is an art competition, and entrants were briefed to conceive their installations as art first and power plants second. The goal was not to design and engineer a device that provides cost effective renewable energy generation. Rather, the proposal should function primarily on a conceptual and aesthetic level.
Quoting the brief again at length:
As a park, visitors or residents can witness and experience their commitment to renewable energy field in many different ways. They can be stake holders, investing in a single generator para-kite. The investor receives energy equivalent to that harvested by that generator, as well as a live feed view of the landscape from the para-kite into their home. This in house artwork serves a weather gauge and a ‘living’ landscape painting. Visitors to the energy park can also approach the support posts and have a ‘periscope’ view from the ground of the para-kite’s view. And finally, a visitor, may elect—with managed permission—to ride up in a para-kite. This allows the economic models for the implementation of the project to be distributed either before, through residential stakeholders, or after capital costs, through tourism. The project has an entrepreneurial spirit.
The park generates other phenomenal events such as playful shadows on the ground and dynamic patterns in the sky. These geometries could be commissioned to environmental artists, or could be coordinated with regional events or seasonal holidays.
Unlike large-scale energy infrastructures that are out-of-scale, off-site, and off-limits, WeatherField is interactive, and its energy capacity is scalable to the size of a single-home. In other words, energy use is quantifiable and qualitative at the scale of a single user, promoting energy efficiency and energy consciousness.
Be sure to check the Land Art Generator Initiative website for other entries, which are being posted one by one on their blog until the winner is announced in January 2011 at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dbahi.
Another fascinating project from Paisajes Emergentes in collaboration with Lovisa Lindström, Sara Hellgren and Sebastian Monsalve. Called Clouds, it's a proposed installation to be located in every town that will be flooded by the Ituango Hydroelectric Dam megaproject in Colombia.
Having not yet read any project statement, we can't accurately describe the actual mechanics of this installation. Nevertheless, we like what we think is the intent of the design team. That is, we're imagining this as an act of protest for environmental and social justice — which, if true, would be a refreshing change from the typical Archigram and Buckminster Fuller-inspired apocalyptic and utopian buoyant scenarios.
While cities and villages await the start of dam construction and their inevitable drowning, these ominous clouds will be deployed up to the water level of a future reservoir, forming an archipelago of artificial islands in an absent artificial lake. Their shadows will cast upon forests and mountains to be asphyxiated. They will loom high above lives about to be wrenchingly disrupted.
Since the top is leveled, locals (and perhaps disaster tourists) will hop on and ride these aerial barges. Agents from the hydroelectric company will come to educate the benefits of the dam. Politicians will come to boast this public works project as civilizing and modernizing. And environmentalists will come to praise this new source of clean energy.
But other environmentalists who have actually done their homework will come to counter the engineers and bureaucrats with the dam's monumental destructiveness. Indigenous peoples will come to protest their displacement from their ancestral lands. Downstream localities already suffering from water scarcity will come to claim their water rights. And many more will come to seek redress of unfair compensations for their lost properties.
The views of the surrounding (contested) terrains will be absolutely picturesque, but the air will be highly charged. One false move from any of the factions and things will combust.
But what are they exactly? Sculptures? Follies? Floating parks? Pavilions?
Pavilloons™?
In the aftermath of the deluge, will they be used as diving platforms from which former residents will try to salvage what few they can of their possessions from their submerged cities? And unsurprisingly from where looters will carry out their moon fishing expeditions?
Perhaps while awaiting relocation, some of these hydro-refugees will use these platforms as temporary informal settlements, which then organize organically into permanent island cities.
Exit Art is a little gallery in New York that's been putting together some incredibly fascinating exhibitions. Like Storefront for Art and Architecture, it always seems to be beckoning us with thematically enticing programs.
Another recent installation featured vertical farms, urban gardens and green roofs. If you follow much this trendy landscape genre, no doubt you've seen most, if not all, of the projects, but sometimes it's nice to see what previously has been just a disparate and rather messy jumble of bookmarks littering your hard drive now collected into one, easily surveyed room.
Even some of the ancillary events sound interesting, such as a lecture once given by Oleg Mavromatti, the co-founder of the art collective ULTRAFUTURO. His talk was on Russian Cosmism, which was a “philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” and how this mystical philosophy “affected the development of Soviet science and space research.”
A quick wiki-research on Russian Cosmism brought up Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, a “representative” of the movement and who was “an advocate of radical life extension by means of scientific methods, human immortality and resurrection of dead people,” and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who we read “believed that colonizing space would lead to the perfection of the human race, with immortality and a carefree existence.”
One wonders if the early development of space exploration in America and by extension the nation's popular imaginings of the landscapes of other worlds have similarly interesting antecedents, or does everything trace back to a bunch of Nazi rocket scientists and not to some deep philosophical inquiry into the human condition?
In any case, opening today at Exit Art is The End of Oil, “an exhibition of photography, prints, videos, installations and new media that addresses human dependence on oil and other fossil fuels; the ramifications that this dependency has on the future of the environment and of global geopolitics; and the recent push towards viable alternative energy resources.”
The works in this exhibition draw attention to and investigate the violent conflicts (such as in Nigeria, Burma and Sudan) and negative environmental effects that result from mining and drilling; the politicization of the oil industry; carbon-footprinting; and renewable energy options, such as vegetable and electric-powered cars, geothermal energy, and solar power. The End of Oil does not prophesize a dystopian future, but looks critically at the way in which we use and generate energy, encouraging a dialogue on this issue for the benefit of future generations.
SEA is a unique endeavor that presents a diverse multimedia exhibition program and permanent archive of artworks that address social and environmental concerns. SEA will assemble artists, activists, scientists and scholars to address environmental issues through presentations of visual art, performances, panels and lecture series that will communicate international activities concerning environmental and social activism.
So many good things piled up on top of one another.
Urban Battery, by MOS, was the winning entry in last year's Flip a Strip competition, which challenged entrants to rethink and redesign the strip malls of Arizona. In response, the designers offered an “off-the-grid power station, vertical greenhouse and a billboard all at once.”
It's the unabashedly longitudinal literally flipped up.
Largely leaving the strip mall intact, MOS concentrated on the parking lot, wherein stands a “300’ by 300’ lightweight structure support[ing] a series of thin glass channels housing a network of pipes, tubes, and algae to produce filtered, clean air and gases for biofuel. A system of wind turbines generates electricity supporting the activities of the strip mall and the surrounding neighborhood. It dispenses electricity through wind turbines, breezes and healthy air offsetting the effects of Scottsdale Road and the parking.”
The team noted that the Scottsdale competition site “lacks any healthy urban infrastructures, no community centers, no pools, no green space, it's a dead quadrant.” To offset this, MOS added public and semi-public spaces underneath this vertical aquarium that would be used for dancing, yoga and other forms of physical activity. Additionally, these spaces are connected to other vertical gardens at other strip malls via bike and walking paths.
All put together, then, here is an urban infrastructure meant to counter the effects of obesity, pollution and urban sprawl.
Meanwhile, could you pixelate those algae-filled tubes — that is, make them chromatically flicker either by chemical means or through changes in light filtration and salinity or some heretofore unknown method &dmash; so that you could make an avant-garde movie (or an animated billboard ad) to be shown for spectators parked in their cars on the parking lot or for motorists navigating through the urban flatscape?
New Scientist reports that “Ian Edmonds, an environmental consultant with Solartran in Brisbane, Australia, has designed a giant engine with a balloon as its 'piston'. A greenhouse traps solar energy, providing hot air to fill the balloon. As the balloon rises, it pulls a tether, which turns a generator on the ground. Once the balloon has reached 3 kilometres, air is released through its vent and it loses buoyancy. This means less energy is needed to pull the balloon back down again, resulting in a net power gain.”
For those merely interested in hard numbers, calculations show that “a large 44-metre-diameter recreational balloon could generate 50 kilowatts, enough to supply energy to about 10 homes.”
For us, we want to see some fantastic, unrepentantly beguiling images showing vast tracts of land (or the ocean) planted with boldly colored balloons bobbing up and down, a strange buoyant forest unfurling and retreating during the day, fully resting at night.
Taking cues from Ken Smith and Kathryn Gustafson, urban parks everywhere will have their own aerial installations, generating power for the park itself, if not for the surrounding neighborhood.
Or in the urban periphery of foreclosed suburbs, now bulldozed and eradicated, reformatted as energy fields, electrifying cities and hopefully not tragically impeding bird migrations.
With the all too brief mention earlier of OTEC comes this image of a concept OTEC power plant.
It looks more sleek and futuristic (or retro-futuristic, if you're much versed in vintage SF) than other prototypes, a creature more adapted to fictional outer space than to the oceans.
But something about its bulbous main compartment led us to wonder if there is enough room inside for seasteaders to muck about with nation-building. Amidst all those noisy condensers and turbine generators and navigational gears, perhaps even inspired by them, they try to formulate the mechanics of a new micro-civilization, new identities and new cultural traditions.
If not, how about a second, similarly bulbous habitat module perched on top, above the water line? Or a polyhedral honeycomb of spherical units for, you guessed it, climate change refugees to call home? It would be a kind of artificialenergyisland but sovereign.
With an overabundance of low-cost, carbon-neutral energy, this New Tuvulu could desalinate fresh water for its citizens and a mini-aquaponics industry. Power enough open-ocean aquaculture cages, and all will be well fed. Any surplus electricity, fish and fresh water would then be traded to neighboring countries. Consequently, their GDP skyrockets.
As reported by SciDev.net earlier this month, Namibia may soon construct its own solar updraft tower outside its capital city. This renewable-energy power plant isn't going to be a prototype to test the technology's engineering and economic feasibility; rather, it is proposed to be an actual working plant plugged-in directly to the country's electrical grid.
Not to be confused with a solar power tower, to which sunlight is focused by mirrors arrayed at its base, this one produces energy by “heating air inside a vast transparent tent, several kilometres in diameter, at the base of the tower. This hot air rises inside a tall concrete chimney, driving wind turbines linked to generators. The tent can also be used to grow crops.”
We should state that questions of its feasibility don't so much interest us as the image of hundreds of these Apollonian axis mundi dotting the desert, puncturing both sky and land.
It may be one and a half kilometres high and 280 metres wide, but is that enough to meet the desired energy output?
Will its power be as cheap as coal power?
Can Namibia and its partners afford the $900 million price tag?
Somehow contemplating these and other issues can't be as fascinating as imagining an arid rainforest of solar towers mechanically evapotranspirating in the Kalahari, divining the surrounding air into static mini-hurricanes, their whirring blades immitating the mating rituals of imagined fauna. No one will doubt that this new landscape is as much a natural part of the country's ecology as the boabab tree. In fact, so vast is it that it may be considered a new terrestrial biome and given its own Köppen classification.
Give them a geometrically interesting facade, and everyone will want to cultivate their own rainforest, with the enthusiasm never given to wind farms.
Meanwhile, The New York Times will have to rewrite their recent Namibian travelogue to include this “dazzling geological display” and “otherworldy landscape.”
This is the Soil Lamp, designed by Design Academy Eindhoven student Marieke Staps and recently exhibited during Milan Design Week 2008.
Quoting the project brief, in Dutch:
Gratis en milieuvriendelijke energie voor eeuwig. De lamp werkt op modder. De stofwisseling van het biologische leven produceert genoeg elektriciteit om er een led op te laten branden. De modder zit in verschillende cellen. In deze cellen zitten koper en zink om de stroom te geleiden. Hoe meer cellen hoe meer stroom er geproduceerd wordt. Je hebt enorm veel mogelijkheden binnen deze techniek. Het enige wat de lamp nodig heeft is zo nu en dan een scheutje water. Ik heb voor het materiaal glas gekozen omdat ik de techniek zichtbaar wil maken. Door de mooie simpele vormgeving kun je de lamp in elk interieur en elke tuin plaatsen. De vormgeving is een direct gevolg van de techniek.
And this is how BabelFish translates it:
Free and environment-friendly energy for eternal. The lamp works on mud. The stofwisseling of biological living produces enough electricity to launch LED there to burn. Mud is present in several warrants. In these warrants are present purchaser and zinc conduct the flow. How more warrants how more flow is produced. You have enormously many possibilities this technique. Some what has the lamp necessary is this way now and then scheutje water. I have chosen glass for the material because I technique makes visible will. By the beautiful simple design you can place the lamp in each interieur and each garden. The design is an direct consequence of technique.
So essentially, then, the metallic strips of zinc and the cornucopia of minerals and organisms in the damp soil chemically react with one another to initiate a constant electrical current that lights up an LED.
A few questions:
1) Is it an actual working model or just another concept model, a Gravia Lamp v2.0?
2) If it's a working model, how does it work actually? We'd be interested in seeing some flow diagrams and numbers. And what kind of soil mixture?
3) And if it does work, can you take the metallic body and LED out of its lower 3/4 glass enclosure, remove the test tubes and the soil contained therein, and then impale it into the ground — will the LED still glow? Can a generous benefactor of the arts (perhaps Dia) manufacture for us several thousands so that we can run amok with these geological illuminations in Canada's trillion-barrel tar pits or Russia's still untapped gas fields, away from amateur astronomers and other light-sensitive nighttime fauna, making new earthly constellations of future negative contour lines and rhizomatous pipelines? Because why should this alternative energy light fixture be installed only in parks, gardens, driveways, streets and indoor rooms everywhere?
Last week, The Guardianreported that Europe is looking to Africa to serve part of its energy needs by basically turning the continent into one giant solar power plant.
Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5bn on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East.
More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.
Billions of watts of power could be generated this way, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.
Of course, one is compelled to wonder here what would happen if Africa provided Europe with all of its electricity?
Most likely that won't happen; no European country would want to subject their whole energy security to regional volatility. However, one could imagine a fairly optimistic scenario wherein this energy cooperation would provide a stabilizing force to unstable states, help cure both continents' post-colonialhangover, counteract China's growing geopolitical influence in the region — and all the while reducing carbon emissions to zero.
But, as always, what we are immediately most interested in is this: in what ways would this energy pact be physically manifested in Africa?
As but one illustration of how energy consumption is spatialized, there is the so-called mountaintop mining, whereby whole mountains are leveled off, literally grounded down, to get at coal deposits instead of using tunnels. The erased geology would then be dumped nearby, chocking streams and old growth forests.
In one of the best (and certainly longest) articles on the subject that we have ever come across, Eric Reece, in Harpers Magazine, writes:
Where once there were jagged forested ridgelines, now there is only a series of plateaus, staggered grey shelves where grass struggles to grow in crushed rock and shale. When visitors to eastern Kentucky first see the effects of this kind of mining, they often say the landscape looks like the Southwest - a harsh tableland interrupted by steep mesas.
In other words, heating up your ex-urbian McMansion is right now turning Appalachia into Arizona and New Mexico.
One can easily picture Julie Bargmann and her D.I.R.T. Studio, like ambulance chasers circling a scene of devastation, salivating over photos of negative mountains, scheming away at plans to reclaim them from destruction, waiting for that commission.
But returning back to our question: what will Google Earth tourists see when they point their vigilant eyes towards an electrified North Africa? Will they come upon vast plantations of coronal fields, perfect geometries arrayed in similarly perfect arrangement, irrespective of terrain but nevertheless finely attuned to the sky? Pure form, pure function coexisting without contradiction.
And what about the people on the ground? Where once was desert, might they now enjoy newly sprouted oases fed with water from solar-powered desalination plants?
An Emerald Necklace of Olmstedian design inscribed in the Saharan landscape.
Will foreigners descend en mass to undertake a Bowlesian journey, trekking from one incomprehensible terrain to another equally unfathomable recess of the desert, utterly unprepared for the otherness of it all but obviously so seduced that they travel on, even while in the grips of dysentery, losing themselves psychologically and literally to the sands? All bearings and comfort are lost.
And then just as things couldn't get any stranger, they will come upon a stand of solar updraft towers; there are hundreds of them, possibly thousands, forming a kind of arid rainforest mechanically evapotranspirating.
But in their parched and hallucinatory conditions these adventurers will mistake them for Persian tower tombs, divining the surrounding air into a vortex, the whirring blades resonating ghostly howls.
Whether it is the spectacular result of a collaboration between Chetwood Associates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, an ancient Greek myth-maker and ILM special effects supervisors or not, the Wind Dam is truly something to behold, either digitally or when fully realized.
The dam, which would be located over a gorge at Lake [Ladoga] in north-west Russia, includes a cup-shaped spinnaker sail, believed to be the first of its kind, which will generate renewable energy by funnelling the wind through an attached turbine.
The spinnaker shape is similar to the mainsail of a yacht, and is thought to be particularly effective in capturing wind.
Project architect Laurie Chetwood, said that the shape of the sail was influenced by functionality and a desire to produce something “sculptural”.
No doubt Chetwood and colleagues will next propose to gouge a network of artificial valleys in the Tibetan Plateau and then install thousands of these lepidopterian wind turbines to alleviate China's energy needs. A new kind of prayer flags billowing between jagged peaks and ridges, simultaneously symbolizing Tibet's complete colonization and echoing the last few sighs of a dying culture.
Extrapolating a bit further, why not bore a Turrellian complex of tunnels through the world's mountain ranges, specifically those soon to be depleted of their glaciers, wherein wind turbines are strategically inserted. Bolivia may not supplant Venezuela as South America's premier energy producer, but its sonic landscape will surely generate billions in tourism revenues. Andean folk pipe music writ large.
Surely this can be applied here in Chicago, right?
Enwave and the City of Toronto have created an innovative cooling system that brings an alternative to conventional air conditioning to cool Toronto's downtown core — one that is clean, price competitive and energy efficient. A permanent layer of icy-cold (4°C) water 83 meters below the surface of Lake Ontario provides naturally cold water. This water is the renewable source of energy that Enwave's leading-edge technology uses to cool office towers, sports & entertainment complexes and proposed waterfront developments.
The system has been in operation since 2004.
A similar form of air condition is being used in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At Purdy's Wharf, we read here, it “provides all the cooling for the building for 10 ½ of the year. During the remaining six weeks, the buildings use conventional chillers, but the seawater is used to cool the condensers. The system was paid off in two years, and saves the complex more than $100,000 annually in electricity and maintenance costs.”
In the U.S., Cornell University is implementing its own deep lake water cooling system.
