OUT OF OIL

Quoted from www.inhabitat.com:
Inhabitat » World’s First Positive Energy Building in Masdar, Abu Dhabi

March 6, 2008

World’s First Positive Energy Building in Masdar, Abu Dhabi

by Cate Trotter

Not settling for mere zero-energy, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill’s Masdar Headquarters are setting new design standards for green building, with their scheme that generates more energy than it consumes. The Masdar Headquarters building outside of Abu Dhabi is also the first building in history to generate power for its own assembly, using a solar roof pier that will be built first to power the rest of the construction.

The building’s sustainability gave it the edge to beat 159 others in the international design competition. The $300 million, 1.4 million square foot headquarters will serve as the stunning centerpiece of the super-green, car-free Norman Foster-designed Masdar City, the $22 billion development just outside Abu Dhabi.

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Whether you like it or not the days of the gas slurping mastodons are about to end. Okay, there are still a lot suvs (most of the suv drivers really look a lot like sportsmen don’t you think?)  rolling by every day, but believe me it’s a species on the brink of extinction. I have to admit I’ve always wanted to drive these Cadillacs and Studebakers of the fifties and sixties. Still love to see them, but I wouldn’t like to be paying their fuel bills… .

So now, since that episode is almost over, let us look ahead. Many people made plans and presented futuristic drawings of ‘the car of the future’ but only very few actually tried to make one. Well, these guys did. And they didn’t just try, they really did it! The efforts of their team resulted in the Aptera, which is Greek for “wingless flight”. And this is how it looks.

Liking it or not is a personal thing. How it looks is however not the most important thing, well it shouldn’t be, what it can and cannot do is. For those of you who love to exceed all speed limits it’s probably not the perfect car yet. It won’t go faster than about 90 Mph or 140 km/h and if you hope to impress an old lady on the curb by racing away from the traffic lights don’t buy one. But you wouldn’t anyway. If you like the thought of driving 100 kilometers on only 1 liter gasoline however, this might be the one for you.  It still could do with some restyling is my humble opinion but it’s a promising start. They even made a commercial for it, it’s not really dazzling but hey, they’re still young.

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Now I suggest the designers /engineers contact The guys from Nanosolar and use their ink based solar foil for the cars top layer, so its batteries will be charged all the time.

I’m a flatlander, I live in the Netherlands. No, not beneath the sea level but not that far above it too, high enough however to keep it dry if the pessimists scenario’s about rising sea levels become reality. One of the famous Dutch projects to control the waters and live happily ever after is the Afsluitdijk, a dike that keeps the North Sea out and after completion (in 1932) transformed the former Southern Sea into a freshwater lake, the IJsselmeer. The dike is ever since the physical boundary between the lake’s fresh water and the sea’s salty water. And guess what, there happens to be energy in it. I bet Mister Lely, the engineer who managed the whole project never thought of that. The process is called Reversed Electro Dialysis (RED) and is based on the principle that when fresh and salt water meet or mix, energy is released.

The project is still in the early stages of progress but by the time it will be finished the installation at the Afsluitdijk should provide about 200MW. The situation in the Netherlands have a total potential of 3000MW, roughly 10% of the national energy needs. Not bad for a 75 year old dike only created to protect the land behind it. For the technicians among you, this is how it works: