Archive for October, 2009
When trying to come out of a recession or depression, rapid growth or innovation in a particular industry has proven to be a crucial element. Although the programs of the New Deal helped ease the pain of the Great Depression, most historians agree that the turning point for the economy was WWII. Increased factory production due to the war effort helped spark the financial system and restore some semblance of certainty to the markets.
After the economic decline of the 1980’s, the introduction of PCs and other personal technologies brought us back from the brink of financial disaster. Today we need a similar invention or innovation to get people excited about buying and investing. With the concern over global warming and peak oil, the clear answer seems to be something in the arena of alternative energy.
Last night’s guest on the Daily Show was a 22-year-old man from a small village in Africa. Due to famine in his country, the young man was forced to drop out of school to help support his family. His village maintained a small library, where he would go to study anything he could find, including physics and engineering.
Although his understanding of English was rudimentary, he studied various energy concepts, including how wind power works. Then just 14-years-old, he constructed an energy producing windmill from wood and other basic supplies for his family simply by studying figures and diagrams in the texts. We could use ingenuity and work ethic like that from children in our schools.
Compliments of inhabitat.com
As the world’s population continues to skyrocket and cities strain under the increased demand for resources, skyscraper farms offer an inspired approach towards creating sustainable vertical density. One of three finalists in this year’s Evolo Skyscraper Competition Eric Vergne’s Dystopian Farm project envisions a future New York City interspersed with elegantly spiraling biomorphic structures that will harness cutting-edge technology to provide the city with its own self-sustaining food source.
When considering the future needs of our cities, few urban designs address the world’s burgeoning population better than vertical farms. By 2050 nearly 80% of the world’s population will reside in urban centers, and 109 hectares of arable land will be needed to feed them.
Designed for the Hudson Yard area of Manhattan, Eric Vergne’s Dystopian Farm aims to provide New York with a sustainable food source while creating a dynamic social space that integrates producers with consumers. Based upon the “material logic of plant mechanics”, the biomorphic skyscraper is modeled after the plant cells of ferns and provides space for farms, residential areas, and markets. These organic structures will harness systems such as airoponic watering, nutrient technology and controlled lighting and CO2 levels to meet the food demands of future populations.
In addition to infusing dense urban areas with CO2-consuming green spaces, Vergne envisions the structures as dynamically altering the fabric of city life: “Through food production and consumption, this skyscraper sets up a fluctuation of varying densities and collections of people, bringing together different social and cultural groups, creating new and unforseen urban experiences that form and dissipate within the flux of city life.”
This year’s Evolo Skyscraper Competition resulted in an incredible crop of 416 projects from designers, architects, and engineers in 64 different countries. Their website currently lists the finalists, boiled down to three winners and 15 special mentions.
Here are the most frequently unknown or misunderstood facts about industrial wind power.
How big are the towers?
Industrial wind turbines are not the benign little structures you might see in a schoolyard or behind someone’s house.
The widespread GE 1.5-megawatt model, for example, consists of 116-ft blades atop a 212-ft tower for a total height of 328 feet. The blades sweep an area just under an acre. The 1.8-megawatt Vestas V90 from Denmark is also common. Its 148-ft blades (sweeping more than 1.5 acres) are on a 262-ft tower, totaling 410 feet. Also gaining use in the U.S. is the 2-megawatt Gamesa G87 from Spain, which sports 143-ft blades (just under 1.5 acres) on a 256-ft tower, totaling 399 feet.
Many existing models and new ones now coming out reach well over 400 feet high, with higher towers and extra-long blades designed to turn the generator in less-than-ideal sites.
The base of the steel tower is anchored in a platform of more than a thousand tons of cement and steel rebar, 30 to 50 feet across and anywhere from 6 to 30 feet deep. Pylons may be driven down farther to help anchor the platform.
The gearbox — which transforms the slow turning of the blades to a faster rotor speed — and the generator are massive pieces of machinery housed in a bus-sized container, called the nacelle, at the top of the tower. The blades are attached to the rotor hub at one end of the nacelle. Some nacelles include a helicopter landing pad.
On the GE 1.5-megawatt model, the nacelle alone weighs more than 56 tons, the blade assembly weighs more than 36 tons, and the tower itself weighs about 71 tons, for a total weight of 164 tons. The corresponding weights for the Vestas V90 are 75, 40, and 152, total 267 tons, and for the Gamesa G87 72, 42, and 220, total 334 tons.
Besides the noise and vibrations such huge moving machines unavoidably generate, they must be topped with flashing lights day and night to increase their visibility.
These issues and benefits are based on the use of large industrial Turbines, as the ones we see on the hilltops in the picture. When we build home made wind power for our own home use, most of the downsides are gone, as they are quiet and quite unobtrusive. Or we can purchase ready made and fun to look at.
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