Posts Tagged ‘nature’

Adding Turbines to Existing Structures

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

The photo below is a mock-up of the winning idea for Metropolis Magazine’s 2009 Next Generation Competition: Wind turbines attached to electrical towers.

Wind It

While the article acknowledges some shortfalls in the idea (“The general consensus was that the adaptive-reuse model would be tricky to justify financially.”) it brings up an interesting question around how you can begin to integrate the technology into the landscape even more whether it’s possible to effectively (and efficiently) use existing construction (it sounds tough, but not impossible). I also really like the look of their designs, as we mentioned in our Turbine Aesthetics post last month, we think there are big opportunities to bring a little more flair to the design and layout.

The Turbine at Jiminy Peak

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

We’ve posted a few videos and things from our trip to the wind turbine at Jiminy Peak, but we haven’t talked about it much yet. So … that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

First off, here are the basics: It went up in August of 2007, it’s 80 meters high (that’s 262.467192 feet according to Google), each blade is 37 meters long (~121 feet … which is about 10 feet bigger than the largest blue whale ever recorded) and it’s roughly a 7-to-7.5 year return on investment for the folks at Jiminy Peak. (I will go deeper into how they made this whole thing happen in another post. Turns out it’s not super easy for an individual/organization to procure a single turbine.)

Anyhow, here’s Betsy from Jiminy talking about how it happened and why they made the decision to go with a turbine:


As a side note, she mentions the trouble with getting it up there. We’re trying to find the video of them doing that to throw up on the site. Hopefully will be up in the next few days.

Turbining

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

We’re slowly getting through all the video from our trips so far (probably about 12-15 hours total). We’ll be posting the good stuff as we go. Here’s our day at the turbine in 3:42.

Lotus Leaf

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

I’ve never actually seen a lotus leaf, but apparently it’s got pretty amazing water repellance. It’s inspired some nanotechnology I’ll talk about a bit later, but first check out what it can do: