This research was compiled by 14 masters of architecture students at the University of Melbourne, in June, 2015. The research was a quick exercise, just a small part of a semester-long design studio, but the results seemed compelling enough to share with the world. As this was a research assignment, most of the content relies heavily on other sources; citations are given at the bottom of each report.
Intent:
Because sustainable energy technology is complicated, most of the literature out there is written by scientists and engineers. This information tends to be too technical for public policy makers and the general public to understand without devoting a significant amount of time and study. We wanted to create an “executive summary” of the major sustainable energy technologies that were either viable or new and intriguing. For this reason the calculations are reduced to their bare essentials, and should be understood to be guidelines only – a place to start from to understand the potential of these technologies, not a definitive source for engineering data.
For most technologies we looked at how to power 750 homes at an average power consumption of 10,000kWh/year. The notion here was to promote the idea that communities could produce their own sustainable power – and that by having the power plant within the community there would be an inherent interest in making the plant healthy, as well as a direct relationship between power production and consumption. Community-based power plants can serve as combined power, heat and chilled water plants, because the customers are within a small enough radius to distribute multiple services efficiently. This makes them up to 60% more efficient than traditional grid power by reducing transmission power losses, and eliminating the concept of “waste heat” that most power plants exhaust into the atmosphere.
In addition to power generation, we also included two types of energy storage. We felt that this was important because solar and wind are often dismissed as non-viable power sources because of their intermittent nature. These two phase-change energy storage systems are easily scalable, and don’t require heavy metals associated with solid-state batteries. The combination of sustainable energy generation and scalable energy storage allows for the design of off-the-grid sustainable energy, the ultimate goal for those who wish to cut ties with our carbon and nuclear focused energy grids.
You can download a PDF copy of the compiled reports here.
Team: Bryce de Reynier (studio leader) Adrián Beltrán / Yuan Chang / Kay Chen / Phil Culpan / Lola Digby – Diercks / Sheng Ge / Muhd Soffian Hashim / Edward Lu / Lavinia Spruit / Stephen Thai / Erin Wang / Ning Wang / David Xu / Madina Zhazylbekova