Japan’s Solar Shift

One thing that you can say about disasters is that they are rare opportunities to redo everything. A tabula rasa opportunity when it comes to rebuilding affected areas.

Japan is still recovering from the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck on March 11th and the nuclear crisis that it triggered.

The AFP is reporting that Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan is expected to announce Japan’s decision to continue operating nukes in order to meet the countries current power needs, but to also a mandate that would require all new homes and buildings to be outfitted with solar panels as part of the upcoming G8 Summit in France.

Of course a mandate isn’t legislation, but the construction required does present an opportunity for a solar company to step in and take advantage of the increased opportunity for demand if they can offer an efficient solar option.

Gary, Indiana: Unbroken spirit amid the ruins of the 20th Centry

A look back at the effectiveness of federal stimulus past and present by the BBC. Gary In was a town that received federal stimulus money after the great depression and once again when the Obama administration announced its stimulus package after the recent economic collapse. The movie takes a look at how effective stimulus can be, and the politics behind its delivery.

Watch this video over at the BBC.

To put this in context you have to know that Gary, home to what is still US Steel Corp’s biggest plant, is suffering from one of the most advanced cases of urban blight in the developed world. Its city centre is near-deserted by day. The texture of the urban landscape is cracked stone, grass, crumbled brick and buddleia.

Gary is one third poor, 84% African American, and has seen its population halve over the past three decades. If crime, as the official figures suggest, has recently dropped off then – say the critics – that is because population flight from the city is bigger than the census figures show.

Gary in the end got $266m of stimulus money and has, according to the federal “recipient reported data” created a grand total of 327 jobs. That’s $800,000 per job.

I went back determined to find out how the stimulus dollars had been spent; to get beyond the ideology and recriminations and see why President Barack Obama’s stimulus has failed to turn the country around.

The striking thing is that they are all structurally dangerous and yet totally accessible. I did not have to cross a single piece of wire, tape or fencing to get in, nor did I encounter a security guard or dog patrol. The city seems to have given up even securing these ruins.

Building the Urban Network

I came across an interesting article the other day while surfing the interweb about the future of new city building in Asia, (which is one of the few places in the world where cities spring up from scratch). In this age of bundling and value add ons comes a different vision of what a city is, how to make them more efficient, how they should be built, and how a couple of companies think they should be built. Estimates put spending on global infrastructure at $35 trillion over the next two decades and the new city market itself is likely to be worth at least $500 billion in the next ten years. How’s that for a growth industry?

Fast Company

Cisco’s Big Bet on New Songdo: Creating Cities From Scratch

By: Greg LindsayFebruary 1, 2010

The world is bracing for an influx of billions of new urbanites in the coming decades, and tech companies are rushing to build new green cities to house them. Are these companies creating a smarter metropolis — or just making money?

Stan Gale is exultant. The chairman of Gale International yanks off his tie, hitches up his pants, and mops the sweat and floppy hair from his brow. He’s beaming like a proud new papa, sprung from the waiting room and handing out cigars to whoever happens by. Beckoning me to follow, he saunters across eight lanes of traffic toward his baby, delivered prematurely days before.

Ten years ago, Gale was a builder and flipper of office parks who would eventually become known for knocking down the Boston landmark Filene’s Basement and replacing it with a hole in the ground. But Gale’s fate began to change in 2001 with a phone call from South Korea. The Korean government had found his firm on the Internet and made an offer everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale would borrow $35 billion from Korea’s banks and its biggest steel company, and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of downtown Boston, only taller and denser, on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea. When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.

New Songdo City won’t be finished until 2015 at least, but in August, Gale cut the ribbon on the 100-acre “Central Park” modeled, like so much of the city, on Manhattan’s. Climbing on all sides will be a mix of low-rises and sleek spires — condos, offices, even South Korea’s tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Strolling along the park’s canal, we hear cicadas buzzing, saws whining, and pile drivers pounding down to bedrock. I ask whether he’s stocked the canal with fish yet. “It’s four days old!” he splutters, forgetting he isn’t supposed to rest until the seventh.

As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better because there’s a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. A green city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It’s an “international business district” and an “aerotropolis” — a Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it’s supposed to be a “smart city,” studded with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its “Smarter Planet” religion.

Being seriously ahead of the curve explains why Gale had such a hard time finding a tech partner to bring this dream to fruition. First in line was LG, one of Korea’s homegrown conglomerates. None of its ideas had made it past the prototype stage. Next up was Microsoft, which signed a deal giving it carte blanche to mold the city in its image. “Designing an entirely new city from the ground up provides a unique opportunity to create an ideal technological infrastructure,” Bill Gates boasted. But before he could even measure for drapes, Gale decided a plumber would be a better fit and threw Microsoft over for Cisco.

Last spring, the networking giant became New Songdo’s exclusive supplier of digital plumbing. More than simply installing routers and switches — or even something so banal as citywide Wi-Fi — Cisco is expected to wire every square inch of the city with synapses. From the trunk lines running beneath the streets to the filaments branching through every wall and fixture, it promises this city will “run on information.” Cisco’s control room will be New Songdo’s brain stem.

And that’s just the beginning. No longer content to sell just plumbing, the company is teaming up with Gale, 3M, United Technologies (UTC), and the architects of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) to enter the instant-city business. At a Cisco event near New Songdo last summer, Gale stunned the room by announcing plans to eventually roll out 20 new cities across China and India, using New Songdo as a template. In the spirit of Moore’s Law, he says, each will be done faster, better, cheaper, year after year.

Cisco calls this Smart+Connected Communities initiative a potential $30 billion opportunity, a number based not only on the revenues from installation of the basic infrastructure but also on selling the consumer-facing hardware as well as the services layered on top of that hardware. Picture a Cisco-built digital infrastructure wired to Cisco’s TelePresence videoconferencing screens mounted in every home and office, with engineers listening, learning, and releasing new Cisco-branded bandwidth-hungry services in exchange for modest monthly fees. You’ve heard of software as a service? Well, Cisco intends to offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities — water, power, traffic, telephony — into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident’s bill.

Read More!

Sustainable Street Lamps by 3XN

Scotia and Photographer Adam Mørk.

Street lights are an important part of any urban environment, they allow us to travel from place to place in the city after dark without worrying for our safety and allow cities to operate after the sun goes down. The earliest street lamps are credited to the Saracens, which was a term used by romans for people living in the roman province of Syria. Garrison Fielding in his History of Medicine credits them with the invention of street lamps along with other civilizing advances;

“The Saracens themselves were the originators not only of algebra, chemistry, and geology, but of many of the so-called improvements or refinements of civilization, such as street lamps, window-panes, firework, stringed instruments, cultivated fruits, perfumes, spices, etc…”

The street light has taken on many incarnations, from the early gas lights which required a lamp lighter to tour the town and start them every dusk, gas lighting, the early ‘electric candle’ and then the modern incandescent lamps. The most common being the classic Sodium Vapor.

In the ongoing evolution of the street light 3XN has designed a new street light using an innovative LED luminaire, which with the help of a specially developed prism, uses solar energy for efficient street lighting. The firm has installed seven lamps at the Bella Center in Copenhagen for display at the upcoming UN Climate Conference.

Scotia and Photographer Adam Mørk.

The advanced technology results in the street lamps generating more energy than they use.  Therefore the lamp is an emblem of the Climate Conference ambitions of lowering global CO2 emissions.

Capturing Nordic Light

The streetlamps are a result of the close co-operation between 3XN and the lighting firm, Scotia.  The goal was to create a sculptural and CO2 neutral street lighting solution.  This was achieved with the combination of 3XNs GOTHAM luminaire and Scotias solar cell lamp post.  The lamp post is square and integrates upright standing solar cells which are strategically positioned to capture the Nordic light.

The sculptural lamp head is specially designed for the Scotia lamp post:

- The background behind our design for the lamp stems from ideas of Japanese origami and the natural shapes that emerge from geometry.  The luminaire contains folds which in addition to being very aesthetic, are very functional – even designed with respect to the wind.  The luminaire works in conjunction with the mast to form a very sculptural expression – with a veiled reference to the lamp’s futuristic LED technology, says Kim Herforth Nielsen, Principal at 3XN.

GOTHAM is found in several variations, although 3XN is working on a number of other lamp designs that can be combined with the solar cell lamp post.  The GOTHAM project has emerged out of 3XNs internal research and development department GXN and combines the newest technology with a very futuristic expression.  The development of the LED lamp lies as part of 3XNs natural ambition to be cutting edge in green and innovative design – without compromising aesthetics.

The seven street lamps are located in Parking Lot 5 at Bella Center’s main entrance and naturally will continue their role after the Climate Conference.

www.scotialight.com

www.3xn.com

The East Japan Railway and the Piezoelectric Effect

The Eastern Japan Railway company is taking something extra from its passengers. However this time its not a fare hike, the company is harnessing some of their Piezoelectric  energy. The Railway will be installing piezoelectric elements in the floors at its ticket gates and other high traffic areas of Tokyo Station.

This isnt’ the only place a piezoelectric floor has been used. Previously on Urban Neighbourhood we highlighted Club WATT, a nightclub in Rotterdam that uses  piezoelectric elements in its dance floor to power the light show in the club.

The panels in the floor use the piezoelectric effect; there are certain materials that when squeezed become charged and produce energy. The up and down action created by thousands of people stepping through the gate (from the floors point of view anyway) compresses cells containing piezoelectric material.  The downward pressure powers tiny generators beneath the floor which then send the electricity to batteries or back into the grid.

The Railway Company has been carrying out experiments with power generating floors since 2006. It aims to try to achieve a stable generating capacity. The total power generating area will cover about 25m² in total, and will be installed at seven ticket gates in the Yaesu Kita exit and seven steps of a staircase inside the gate. In past experiments the panels were covered with a rubber surface but the company hopes to improve power generation by converting over to stone tiles similar to what is used on the other station surfaces. Currently the power is just being used to display the systems generating capacity, but the railway hopes to powers its ticketing systems and automatic gates in the future. S

Press Release from East Japan Railway company.

Demonstration Experiment Paper of the “Power-Generating Floor” at Tokyo Station(PDF).

Floating nuclear power plants: Power where you need it, When you need it

Concept Drawing of the Academician Lomonosov

There is an article over in engineering news online about new russian technology which could help South Africa meet its medium-term energy needs.

You may or may not be aware that Eskom, South Africa’s state owned power utility is operating near i’ts maximum. The utility’s reserve generating margins are pretty much at zero and this is unlikely to change in the next five years until new base load power stations start coming online from about 2013 and onwards. South Africa is already feeling the effects of the lack of capacity and is afflicted by rolling black-outs. The official term for them is “load-shedding,” anyone who has lived in an area beset by rolling black outs is aware of what a disruption they can be both to life and too the local economy.

The country is in a bind in that there is no way for it to see any additional capacity to the system before 2012. That date isn’t even the new baseline plants but the potential start up date for a number of short term co-generation projects, these plants are joint ventures between Eskom and the private sector to build small gas-fuelled power stations to help cover peak periods.

However Russia is currently building the worlds first FNPP or Floating Nuclear Power Plant. The main devision of Russia’s State Nuclear Shipbuilding Centre, Sevmash began construction in 2006 and will see the first boat completed in 2010. It is possible that South Africa might be able to convince Sevmash to lease them an FNPP. Though currently the first is earmarked to stay at Sevmash and power the companies facilities, along with ‘the local social infrastructure,’ oh and it also will generate heat to be used in the community and desalinate water. The company has a second boat in the works but it is also earmarked for use in the East Siberian Sea. However the Russia government has made suggestions that it would be willing to lease one of them to South Africa for a couple of years.

The idea of a number of these floating nuke stations being used to provide power in areas that need it is an intriguing one. The possibilities for their use in area’s that have maxed out their capacity or after a natural disaster gives flexibility to the worlds power grid that has until this point never existed.

Of course the idea of a floating nuke station is likely an environmentalists nightmare, not to mention the potential security concerns that come with having a nuclear plant that isn’t sitting on solid ground and therefore could be approached from underneath. The KLT-40S is however reported to be a well-proven design and is already employed in a number of nuclear icebreakers. The gross power production of a KLT-40S is 35 MWe. To give you a comparison the Western GeoPower Unit at The Geysers Geothermal Field in California will be 35 MWe. Each FNPP with be comprised of two KLT-40S nuclear reactors built on top of a 20,000 ton non-self propelled barge with a length of 140m and a beam of 30m. It should be noted that when the FNPPs are towed the reactors will be off line and emptied of nuclear fuel. I mean you would have to be a true idiot to risk getting a working nuclear power plant caught in a storm at sea.

Whether or not you agree with it the FNPP is coming. The Russian News and Information Agency, Novositi, reports that Russia considers the FNPP to be a ‘Vital element’ in the national energy programme.

FNPP

Would you like your power hard or soft?

There is a great article over at The New York Times, about the debate between the two different perspectives on Energy Production. One of the things that is most interesting is that this debate over hard and soft power has essentially been done before.

Back in the 1970s the debate over nuclear energy vs. green power already took place, with nuclear power being the loser, though green power didn’t really win either. The big winner was actually coal and other cheap forms of power.

John Tierney writes in his article about how in some ways the fact that environmentalists won the last debate over nuclear power has contributed to more environmental pollution. While they succeeded in preventing more nuclear plants from being built the replacements weren’t green, they just built more coal fired plants.

The article goes on to discuss how all the bad press actually did wonders for for their design, safety, and efficiency. Making them a more realistic option.

While nuclear power has some serious issues that remain, this article is worth reading to update your perspective for the energy debate.

via Findings – Energy Lessons From the ’70s – Hard Power vs. Soft Power – NYTimes.com.

Growing Water: A Vision of Chicago in the Future

Proposed Eco Blvd

The Growing Water proposal was put together by UrbanLab for the City of the Future Competition hosted by the History Channel. The History Channel’s competition preamble lays out the historical context of epic engineering projects that are remembered through time.

“The civilizations covered in Engineering an Empire on The History Channel achieved the impossible—they were the first to design and engineer marvels that astonished the world and transcended time.

This competition, in the spirit of visionary thinkers and planners, world’s fairs and literature everywhere, challenges participants to imagine tomorrow’s buildings, transportation networks, and centers of commerce and begin to give them form by creating bold and visionary designs reflecting what their city might look like and how it would function 100 years from now.

The competition aims for clear architectural and engineering responses with the goal of using what we have learned from past civilizations in order to peer into the future. We want to see tomorrow’s cities foretold in three dimensions, not merely written about or described. We are looking for tomorrow’s architectural and engineering marvels, which like the engineering and architectural marvels of past civilizations, have the staying power to endure beyond their times.” s

The Growing Water Proposal for Chicago puts out a few basic underlying points about what it sees as the conditions facing the world in the upcoming century. It is projected that by the year 2106, the most precious commodity in the world will be water. The Chicago proposal suggests that the city become a fresh water factory in a sense. Reversing the hydrological design which has the city draining water from the great lakes and diverting it across the continental divide into the Mississippi watershed. Currently almost none of the water is returned to the Great Lakes water system.

The project installs a network of Eco-Boulevards designed to function like a giant living machine that will feed used water and storm run off back into the lake after filtering it through a series of engineered marshes. The proposal enhances the ‘Emerald Necklace’ of parks that Chicago is known for and expands them, converting them to a system that not only provides an urban oasis and parkway system but turns the City into a giant fresh water factory.

Fresh water is foreseen to be the Oil of the coming century and as such positions Chicago to enjoy the wealth of living next to one of the largest fresh water deposits in the world.

The proposal is inspiring when especially when you consider that this hydrological utopia is completely achievable with contemporary technology, all it takes is the collective will and a waterfront view is possible most Chicago urbanites the Growing Water Proposal creates a future where cities have a positive impact on the environment, please check it out. Click to see the History Channel Competition and the other winning proposals from LA and New York City.

Growing Water

Automated Vacuum Collection

Photo From Waterfront Toronto

The Automated Vacuum Collection or (AVAC) is a pneumatic garbage collections system that transports waste through underground tunnels by a vacuum to a central processing facility where it is compacted, and trucked away. There are a few of these systems in the world right now most of them are in Scandinavia and Asia. There are only two such systems in North America are in Roosevelt Island and of course the magic kingdom of Disney World. You can’t have garbage trucks, or any visible garbage in a magic kingdom now can you?

The system works similar to a packet switched network, transporting one type of waste at a time. The systems usually use a set of pipes or bins for the different types of waste that the system will transport. In parts of Stockholm (they sure have a lot of cool underground things) Envac installed a number of pipes which protrude from the ground in groups of three. The pipes are colour coded, blue for mixed wast, green for organics, and grey for newspapers. The computer controlled evacuation takes about 30 seconds, the waste is sucked out through the pipe network at a speed of approximately 70 km/h. Last year Hammarby Sjostad, a new waterfront community in Stockholm won a clean energy award for their vacuum based underground collection system that allows them to separate waste into organic, recyclables and other forms. The development also uses incinerators to burn any combustible garbage and return it to the waterfront community in the form of energy. The system would still need to be supplemented by occasional curb or alley based collection as you couldn’t throw a broken chair or a hockey stick into the pipe, but for regular household waste it would handle the bulk of the trash removal. A big upside for the consumer is that you wouldn’t have to remember garbage day anymore.

Currently Waterfront Toronto, an organisation set up by the city, provincial and federal government to redevelop the public lands on the waterfront in Toronto are considering using the system in the West Don Lands. However the organisation is waiting on support from city officials to give it the go ahead. The general manager of the solid waste division of the City of Toronto stated that his department had no objection.

“Should they wish to proceed with that, it’s really their decision, not ours. If something like that was built, we could pick up the material at the end of the pipe. So the decision would be Waterfront Toronto’s or the developer’s.” s

The city appears to be taking a cautious approach to the idea but it isn’t dead yet so we may see this space age style of waste collection in Canada yet.

Automated Vaccum Collection Wiki

The Envac Site

Added Edit….
This just in, the city of Montreal has approved a plan to install a vacuum trash collection in the Quartier des Spectacles, a planned rennovation of the city’s old red light district. The city has given the plan the go ahead as the streets in the Quartier des Spectacles are all slated to be torn up to replace the underlying infrastructure; all the sewers, water lines, and power-lines need to be replaced anyway and the city has estimated that the cost of adding in the additional pipes for the vacuum system will only cost an additional $8.2 million.

The system will not only provide street collection but also provide services to all buisnesses and residents in the area with service. Not only that they will also be adding compost collection to the system too!

Envac System Diagram

Sustainable Stormwater Management

It isn’t often that I get really excited about the things I read but I positively nerded out when I started reading about a pilot program for Sustainable Stormwater Management that Kevin Robert Perry designed for the city of Portland. One of the most exciting things occurring in Urban Hydrology right now is a return to basic low-tech solutions that not only cost little to maintain, but beautify the area’s they serve.

During A Rain

The NE Siskiyou Green Street is a project that is so simple in its basic premise that the benefits become self evident as soon as you look at it. It is one of those visionary ideas that took a landscape architect willing to think outside of the high-tech box to come up with.

The premise, allow Mother Nature to do the work she is already equipped to do by bringing her back into the equation. The NE Siskiyou Green Street project removed a portion of the street’s parking zone and converted it into a pair of landscaped curb extensions. Curb extensions are ideally suited for residential applications on their own as they act as traffic calming devises and thereby increase pedestrian safety. In this case they go one step further. The curb extensions on this street also capture, cleanse and infiltrate storm water runoff.

The Water Slowing Berms

The project basically removes NE Siskiyou St. from the city’s storm/sewer system and manages the runoff locally. Water flows down the approximately 10,000 square feet of of NE Siskiyou Street and the driveways leading off of it until it reaches the seven foot wide curb extensions. The curb extensions have an eighteen inch cut that allows the water to enter the curb extension. The landscaped area within is designed to hold up to seven inches of water, allowing the landscaped area to infiltrate the water. The water is slowed and contained using a series of rock berms that facilitate the curb extensions three inches per hour infiltration rate. In the event of a very intense storm there is a curb cut at the lower end of the planting that allows excess water to flow through and enter the city’s established storm/sewer system.

The extensions are planted with a series of native plants including Oregon grape, sword fern, and grooved rush. The grooved rush does the majority of the storm water management. The upright growth structure of the grooved rush slows down water flow and captures pollutants while its deep penetrating roots work well for water absorption.

Another advantage to this type of local solution is that it keeps the rain where nature put it. Part of the issue with the way that cities currently deal with storm water runoff is that the water is removed from where it fell and away from the local plants that could use it. This system restores water that had been shunted away, back to the local environment.

The most impressive thing about this system is that it manages nearly all of NE Siskiyou’s annual street runoff, estimated at 225,000 gallons, and deals with it locally. Taking the equivalent load off of the old city system. It gets even better, this low impact solution was built for less then $20,000

Please click here to read more.
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Epic Storm Drains

Epic Storm Drain

I have to admit I am a bit of a sucker for the monumental and, in this case, I was truly blown away by the scale of the city of Tokyo’s Storm Water System. The photos make it look like something right out of final fantasy.

The system was designed by the Japan Institute of Wastewater Engineering Technology (JIWET) in order to handle the yearly typhoons and rainstorms that hit Tokyo and the Japanese Islands on a regular basis. The storm water system is comprised of approximately 64 kilometers of tunnels linking concrete containment silos, which are 65meters deep and runs off a number of 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second.

Like many other parts of Asia, 82% of the ward area is served by combined sewage systems in which wastewater and storm water are channelled through the same sewer line. This results in a number of issues, not least of which is the smell, but also that during times of heavy rainfall some waste water is mixed in with the rain water and is washed directly into local rivers and out to sea. Either way, the system is of truly epic proportions and can be enjoyed, not only for its capcity and complexity, but its visual impact. Caverns like these are just begging to be used as a futuristic film set.

JIWET homepage; http://www.jiwet.or.jp/english/

A 'little' repair work