A new generation of small green companies is emerging with radical but proven ideas to revolutionise engineering and create anything from intelligent fridges to colossal wind turbines moored at sea.
The designers hope their projects will transform energy supplies and cut carbon emissions in the next 20 years. They include huge wind turbines, more powerful than any seen before, anchored to the seabed 32km off the coast; fridges that monitor the national grid to use less power; a desalination plant that is also a theatre; and a tidal lagoon that protects the coast while generating electricity.
The new companies are rethinking major infrastructure projects using natural objects as their basis. The aero-generator turbine, now being laboratory-tested before sea trials next year, mimics sycamore seeds that spin like propellers in the slightest breeze. Its twin arms could each be as tall as the Eiffel tower, and the structure could be moored like an oil platform in 135m of water.
Each turbine, said Martin Pawlyn, an architect with Grimshaw — which developed the transparent ”biomes” at the Eden Project in Cornwall, south-west England — could produce 20 megawatts of electricity, nearly five times as much as any existing wind turbine. ”A cluster of 100 of them spread over just a few square kilometres of ocean, each turning at just a few revolutions a minute, could outperform almost all Britain’s existing wind farms put together,” he said. ”We are now learning from natural ecosystems, and are scaling up projects. We are going back to first principles, taking our inspiration from nature.”
The desalination plant, essential in countries that suffer water shortages, is also being rethought. Mostly banished to the edges of cities, they are disliked for needing large amounts of energy and looking like ill-designed boxes. Architects working with designer Charlie Paton have developed one that needs next to no energy and can double up as an open-air theatre. It has been proposed by Grimshaw for the city of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, historically short of fresh water.
The structure, looking like a wall of glass and steel, uses simple evaporators and condensers to produce large quantities of fresh water.
”The inspiration came from the Namibian fog-basking beetle, which uses its shell as a condensing surface for moisture, which allows it to survive in the desert,” said Pawlyn.
Mark Shorrock, a director of venture capital firm Low Carbon Accelerator, which is aiming to raise £50-million to back dozens of small green technology companies, said the market for imaginative, new renewable energy technologies was taking off and was expected to more than double in the next few years. Solar energy is expected to be a £50-billion market by 2015. — Â