Going green is becoming fashionable not just in homes and offices but also when the lights go out and the party times roll. The world’s first sustainable dance club started with a gala night and rocked on with green energy late into Amsterdam’s chilly nights. While all the booze flowed and the music roared, the completely human-powered LED floor and loads of other sustainable features stole the show. The energy of the entire lighting of the dance floor is generated from the fancy footwork of the guests on dance floor and as the party got wilder, the lights got brighter and crazier!

Watt, the sustainable dance club in Amsterdam had its awesome opening and it set new standards when it comes to partying clean. The club sports a variety of efficiency standards established by the Sustainable Dance Club group that allow it to save 30% on energy consumption, 50% on water use, cut CO2 emissions by 30%, and reduce waste by 50%. The LED lighting, the water-less flushes and the green power generation hope to save not just the planet but also some cash for the club in the long run.

London already has a green club and this chain of sustainable clubs intends to spread its way across Europe and then across the Atlantic. While the green movement might be spreading a tab bit slowly it surely is rocking the nightlife in Amsterdam. If you wish to promote green among the teens, then this is pretty much the way to go!

Via:Â Inhabitat

With the benefits of Windmills come common concerns like the whooshing sound that regular turbines produce, as well as their divisive visual aesthetics. Keeping in mind the volatility of the speed of wind in the urban environment, the QR (Quiet Revolution) has been designed. A new type of wind turbine intended to address both of these issues, Quiet Revolution’s QR5 Vertical Axis Wind Turbine, or VAWT for shawt, is smaller, quieter, and way better looking than your typical windmill, plus it should produce the equivalent of its £25,000 price tag in clean energy within 15 years or less. The elegant helical (twisted) design of QR ensures a robust performance even in turbulent winds. It is also responsible for virtually eliminating noise and vibration.

At five metres high and three metres in diameter, it is compact and easy to integrate, and with just one moving part, maintenance can be limited to an annual inspection.

Though the energy output will vary according to the wind speed but is likely to be between 6,000 and 10,000 kWhrs on a typical site. And if that wasn’t all, according the usage of such windmills will also lead to reduction in CO2 emmisions.

Via trendir

With the West in a water crisis, it’s not surprising to see a machine that pulls water from ambient air at West Coast Green. Though not an innovation, these machines require a lot of energy which has been dealt with by Element Four who have addressed the issues of energy use for creating water. The unit uses just 300 watts; a relatively low amount for these machines, the Watermill senses its environment and acts accordingly.
The Watermill checks its environment every three minutes to determine the dew point and keeps itself operating at just a few degrees below that dew point. This way, it maximizes efficiency of the energy it uses to operate by maximizing the amount of water it can pull from the air 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
It can pull an average of 13 quarts of water each day, which is plenty of potable water for an average family of four. The water is essentially distilled, but a filter can be added to restore organic minerals if the user wishes.

And if that wasn’t all, a solar powered version of the machine is in the works and will be available in about six months. So, this one is sure to tackle the water needs and the environmental issues with utmost efficiency.

Via geekologie

Imagine you making an effort and 70% of the energy getting wasted. That’s the plight of your engine which blows about 70 percent of the energy it creates straight out of the tailpipe in the form of heat. As Eric Mattessich realized the truth, he marched on the journey to make power plants more efficient to work on hybrid cars by adapting the kind of heat-recapturing mechanisms. Though not an absolute innovation, Eric’s design is certainly a better packaged one as the size has been worked upon.

The mechanism uses two turbine generators; in the first, the pressure of escaping exhaust spins the turbine to generate electricity. The second uses waste heat from the exhaust to turn water into steam; the steam powers the generator before traveling into a condenser, where it turns back into water and starts the loop again. Both turbines feed electricity back into the hybrid system’s batteries for a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions and a 20 percent more efficient vehicle.

In the pipeline, Mattessich is working on a prototype and applying for a patent. With this he is also looking for an automaker interested in testing by incorporating the system into new cars thereby realizing the efforts put-in in working on the noble cause.

Via inventorspot

Scientists at Oxford University are all set to take the legend of Einstein a step forward by working upon the 1930 invention by Albert Einstein to develop an environmentally friendly refrigerator which they claim will run without electricity. Determined to fight the repercussions of modern fridges that emit greenhouse gases called freons and as a result damage the environment, the Oxford team is developing appliances that can work without electricity and thereby reduce the gases. Motivated by contemporary newspaper reports of a Berlin family who had been killed when a seal in their refrigerator broke and leaked toxic fumes into their home, Einstein and his colleague, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard patented an absorption-type refrigerator which has no moving parts and requires only a heat source to operate.

The machine is a single-pressure absorption refrigerator, similar in design to a gas absorption refrigerator. The refrigeration cycle uses ammonia, butane and water, has no moving parts, and does not require electricity to operate, needing only a heat source, e.g. a small gas burner besides taking advantage of the fact that liquids boil at lower temperatures when air pressure is lower.

The forgotten fridge alongside being greener also is better fit for rural areas where there is no electricity. The modus operandi is that by introducing a new vapors above the butane, the liquid boiling temperature decreases and, as it boils off, it takes energy from the surroundings to do so which in turn makes it cold. Pressurized gas fridges based around Einstein’s design were replaced by freon-compressor fridges partly as they were not very efficient.

Electrical engineer Malcolm McCulloch at the University of Oxford is reviving the design and is looking into solar energy to kick start the process, though in future the team will also experiment with different types of gases to improve the mechanism’s efficiency.

Via popsci

This may be called optimum utilization of resources or a measure towards being biodegradable. If you have ever pondered over the amount of food waste that becomes a food for the dustbin, this one is sure to put a smile on your face. The innovative Hybrid Gas Range created by award-winning Korean designer Seokmoon Woo, is an amazing concept, utilizing food garbage as an alternate fuel for the gas range. This concept helps reduce food garbage in households while meeting a chunk of their energy needs as well by allowing them to switch between the collected methane and regular gas at the press of a button.
If we change food garbage at home into methane energy, we can cook with methane instead of gas all the time. Considering that the dwindling natural gas resources have raised an alarm worldwide this device is sure to be a boom for the consumer.

The concept allows users to put away their food garbage in a classifier in the center which ferments and creates methane that is used as fuel for the gas range. The resulting waste is dehydrated by the machine and collected in a tank at the bottom that can be disposed off later. Though still a concept, this one is sure to have buyers in the market the day it is launched.

Via designist.kr

Imitating nature, this may be called!! With Lianne van Genugte designing an automatic functioning device which lights up with the sun, technology seems to be going the nature way. Intertwined with flexible solar cells that receive power from the sun during the day this device provides shade to its owners or to portions of a house in need of protection from heat or bright light. This innovation has been selected as one of 64 finalists for the Golden Eye, the top award for which is to be given at Dutch Design Week in mid-October.
Though this is a step ahead towards optimum utilization of natural resources, it has its respective loop-holes. Automatic switching may lead in wastage of accumulated energy when not required. Besides this, it also requires a battery to store solar energy to reserve all the power for illuminating the nights followed by cloudy days.

Also such a solar guzzling shade can be utilized to power up few household gadgets. Like a flower opens to the sun, this device opens at daylight and closes at dusk.
Via EcoDesign

The Crown Estate of England knows which way the wind blows and has decided to acquire the prototype of the world’s biggest wind turbine, Clipper’s 7.5 megawatt MBE turbine, also known as the Britannia. While the other windmills have been land-based, this giant will be located in deep waters near the UK. This will assist the marine interests of The Crown Estate which includes almost the entire UK territorial seabed out to 12 nautical miles , about 55% of the UK’s coastal foreshore, and rights to lease seabed for the generation of renewable energy on the continental shelf within the Renewable Energy Zone which extends out to approximately 200 nautical miles.
This will drive forward the development of turbine technology designed for the challenges of the offshore environment hence providing a great opportunity to help establish a new industrial base of activity to advance the UK’s leadership in renewable energy.

The 10-megawatt monster machine built by Clipper Windpower of Carpinteria, California will have a wingspan larger than two soccer fields and will stand 574 feet tall when completed. The windmill is expected to displace two million barrels of oil as well as 724,000 tons of CO2 over its lifetime. It will also serve as the flagship for Clipper’s Britannia Project, an effort to produce massive new turbines on deep-sea floating platforms. If all goes as planned, the Queen’s windmill will light up thousands of British homes starting in 2012.
This thus, will not only prove benevolent but when yield as a good financial investment for the Crown as well.


Via fashionfunky

One of San Francisco’s most exciting green projects, the construction of the new California Academy of Sciences building, has finally come alive. Designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano in collaboration with engineer Rana Creek, the building is topped by an undulating, functional and HUGE living green roof of 2.5 acre. Not only does this roof provide all the sustainable benefits that living roofs bring to a structure, but it is also visible from within the exhibition spaces, connecting inside and out, and engaging the context of San Francisco’s flora-filled backdrop.

All set to open to the visitors from 27th September, this new Academy Building houses an aquarium, planetarium, and exhibition spaces. Aside from its green roof, the building is a feat of institutional green building, using some of the most cutting-edge energy efficiency strategies, daylighting, possible biofuels, and water reclamation.
The architectural design of the new Academy responds to the Academy’s mission, history, and setting. Inspired by the natural world, nature becomes part of the building itself. Its taken ten years and great vision to unify the Academy’s twelve buildings into one notable structure, standing in the middle of the city’s Golden Gate Park.

With 60,000 photo-voltaic cells covering a glass canopy that frames it, the 410,000 sq ft compound involved a cost of US$500 million. See it ones and you’d acknowledge, it’s WORTH IT!!
Via luxury-insider

Suniva Inc., a manufacturer of high value crystalline silicon solar cells, recently announced that its R&D team has developed several silicon solar cells with over 20% conversion efficiencies using a patented combination of simple cell designs and screen printing technologies. These high efficiency milestones have been verified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the U.S. Department of Energy’s premier laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. Following the company’s two recent customer agreements with Germany’s Solon AG and India’s Titan Energy Systems Ltd, together worth approximately USD$1 billion, this demonstrates “Suniva’s advanced technologies in diffusion, surface passivation and contacts increase conversion efficiency while reducing processing time and maintaining low cell cost.” according to Dr. Ajeet Rohatgi, its founder and CTO.

Suniva’s current ARTisun(TM) cell technology has produced a verified efficiency of 18.5% in the lab and its techniques can produce solar energy for 8 to 10 cents per KWh— a comparable price to conventional energy sources in the United States. Suniva can create a higher sheet resistance emitter as well as enhanced surface passivation dielectrics in a single high temperature step. It produces narrower screen-printed contacts on the front of the cell and a high-quality surface reflector on the back. These components, combined with improved texturing methodologies, allow it to trap light and achieve high efficiencies while keeping costs low.

Though it’s still time for long way to go before the cheap solar cells are on the market, this one is sure to be a cost-effective and environment friendly device & indeed worth being called a breakthrough in the cell technology.
Via Earth2Tech