LivingGreen

Read the rest of Marinetek Unveils Finland’s First Floating Village! Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | digg Post tags: boatshed, eco-friendly housing, finland architecture, Finland floating resort, Floating Houses, floating villas Finland, lightweight floating homes, Marina Housing Finland, marinetek, marinetek floating villas, prefab architecture

The Missouri University of Science and Technology is putting its old entries to the Solar Decathlon to good use by making a model Solar Village. Four solar homes from past competitions are being reused in an on-campus experimental solar-powered micro-grid. Created in collaboration with students, researchers, utility companies and the Army Corps of Engineers, the [...]

Making environmentally friendly choices is more than recycling or turning the lights off. Every decision can actually have a positive impact on the world. What many people don't know is that applying for home loans can lower greenhouse emissions. Thus, improving the energy efficiency of a home and looking for loans to fund such projects can save people on energy costs and lower their carbon footprint. Environmental Impact of Energy Efficiency at Home: Steve Baden, Executive Director for the Residential Energy Services Network, which regulates home energy ratings' standards, says that homes contribute up to 21% of the greenhouse emissions. Thus, the smallest home improvement projects can have a huge impact on a home's energy use. Cut Utility Costs: Green home improvement projects help homeowners cut utility bills in half. This saves hundreds of dollars every year, if not more. An investment today will have a large payoff later on down the line. This is why green home loans are a valuable investment. These funds give people the chance to lower their expenses and do something positive for the environment.

A new construction at a test center in Østerild, Denmark has become the largest wind turbine in the world.

Well, that title depends on which criteria determine "largest." If rotor diameter is your rule, Siemens's latest, the SWT-6.0-154, has surpassed the previous holder, the second-generation Enercon E126, by over two dozen feet. While the E126 has approximately a 127-meter rotor diameter, Siemens's new offshore wind turbine boasts a 154-meter rotor diameter--and its immense 75-meter long blades combined with its 4-meter wide hub means a massive swept area of 18,600 square meters.

With a 6MW turbine, under the most optimal conditions, the new model will produce around 65 percent more electricity than earlier models from the company. This SWT-6.0-154 won't be a lonely giant for long; according to Gizmodo, Siemens plans to construct 300 more of these massive machines.

The massive blades for this new turbine are built as a single piece, without heavy fittings and connections, allowing a weight savings of 20 percent.  This will likely be a greater benefit for offshore turbines like this, since enormously long single piece blades are hard to transport over land.

The size isn't simply for world-record showiness. The larger the wind turbine, the more energy produced, according to a study by Swiss and Dutch Scientists, accounting for both size and the improved technology over time. Constructing massive offshore wind farms makes scaling up easier and makes harnessing wind energy more cost effective. Since expensive underwater foundations are needed to support these turbines, having larger but fewer wind turbines will reduce production costs.

Image via Siemens

via: Wired.co.uk

If UCLA researchers are correct, a new supercharger could transform both the way we power our electronics and recycle their old sources of energy. Bringing together the quick-charging qualities of a capacitor and the energy-holding capacities of a battery, graphene supercapacitors could replace the often toxic batteries we currently use to power our electronics.

Batteries and capacitors are relatively similar devices, functionally speaking. Standard batteries consist of two chemicals that react with each other, separated by a barrier, and have a circuit between them; capacitors are composed of two oppositely charged metal plates, separated by an insulator, with a circuit between them. When electrons flow through the circuits of batteries and capacitors alike they provide electricity. Although capacitors can be charged very quickly, they don’t hold nearly as much energy as batteries.

Graphene supercapacitors would solve the energy holding problem of capacitors. Graphene conducts electricity better than any other common substance, and the one-atom thick material has more going for it than capacity: it’s also thinner, lighter, and can be turned into cheaper energy-holding devices than batteries. Because it’s carbon-based, it’s also biodegradable. Considering the care we need to take when disposing of batteries that are often made of toxic metals, how much would it rock to be able to compost our disposable charge holders instead?

Extremely flexible and stronger than steel, graphene has been notoriously difficult to work with, as the Focus Forward video describes. The researchers who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for their work with graphene created the substance by carefully peeling graphite with scotch tape--not a method that’s easy or quick to replicate. However, researchers at UCLA claim they have found a better method to craft the substance in a delightfully MacGyver-like way: by using a consumer-grade DVD drive. After pouring graphite oxide onto CDs, popping the CDs into the drive and using the drive’s laser to beam light on the material, the graphite oxide deoxygenates and becomes graphene. Miles ahead of scotch tape, this DVD drive method produces the essentially two-dimensional material easily and quickly. Imagine what could be done with a machine designed to create sheets of graphene on a larger scale.

Graphene supercapacitors have immense potential to revolutionize the efficiency and environmental-friendliness of our electronics. Especially after listening to the researchers discuss graphene’s potential, it’s difficult not to be excited for the future of this technology. Graphene supercapacitors could charge electronic devices, but further research will determine just how much these supercapacitors can charge (are electric car charging stations really a possibility?), and if and when they'll be available for consumers. In any case, here’s hoping the technology can take off.

image: CC BY-SA 2.0 by CORE-Materials

via: Boing Boing

Ford just launched its new MyEnergi Lifestyle collaboration, which show how a family can reduce their electricity bills and CO2 footprint by integrating home appliance technology with a plug-in vehicle and a renewable energy source. Ford is collaborating with Eaton, SunPower and Whirpool to highlight the MyEnergi Lifestyle technologies at this week at the 2013 [...]

As a species, we waste an amazing amount of food. According to Natural Resources Defense Council, people chuck an incredible 40% of all food we produce. Dumpster divers have long sought to live off of the excess of our inefficient system, scrounging for edibles amongst the trash bin. Going one step further, some enterprising cooks [...]

Read the rest of Maison Escalier is a Tree-Like Parisian Home Wrapped With a Leafy Sun Shade Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | digg Post tags: biomimicry, black locust wood, concrete, Daylighting, electronic shutters, Jacques Moussafir, Maison Escalier, Moussafir Architectes, Paris, stairway, steel, Tree