The Becon

I attended the lecture by Marks Barfield Architects, The Quietrevolution, and Price & Myers at the building centre about the Beacon which is part of the Sustainable London, Power in the City lecture.

It was an impressive presentation and the duo Julia Barfield, joint Managing Director of Marks Barfield Architects, and Robert Webb, CEO of Quietrevolution were bombarded with a lot of interesting questions by the full house audience, which I think were answered satisfactorily.

The quietrevolution website says "...The Beacon is a 40 metre high Y-shaped structure, and is designed to be ‘planted’ along major roads and public spaces, reaching up to the stronger breezes above London’s buildings. Each Beacon supports five vertical 'triple-helix’ wind turbines called quietrevolution, each five metres high and three metres diameter designed to achieve ultra-quiet operation and more efficient utilisation of urban winds.

‘Most wind turbines are being planned in remote locations without any existing infrastructure. This isn’t efficient as 30 percent to 50 percent of energy gets lost
through transmission. We believe cities like London should take much greater responsibility for their own energy generation. London has a unique opportunity to make a difference in time for the Olympics’ said David Marks and Julia Barfield, co-designers of the Beacon.

Their partner in the project, Robert Webb, CEO of XCO2 and co-designer of The Beacon adds; ‘Within fifty years we will be living in a world which is 90 percent powered by renewable energy", with no sacrifice to quality of life. The Beacon is a showcase and a celebration of this revolution and is designed to bring the debate on wind generation directly into the cities..."

Link to Sustainable London PDF presentation.

Photo courtesy of Quietrevolution

Harnessing Wind Power for the Rural coastal Communities of Africa

I don't know how many unused oils rigs lay wasting in the Bright of Benin which is off the coast of Nigeria's delta region but these facilites have the potential to be put into good use. Wind turbines could be erected to generate electric power for the rual coastal communities of the Niger Delta.

John Goghegan of wired.com writes in an article "Inherit the Wind" about how littered carcasses of unused oil platforms in the gulf coast could be used as the backbone of the first offshore wind farm in the United States.

"...The port of Iberia has never been busier. Situated on a narrow canal leading to the Louisiana coastline, the docks here throb with the sound of tugboats towing oil platforms to and from their anchorages in the Gulf of Mexico. When a drilling site is depleted, the platforms return to port; the docks are littered with rusting steel hulks waiting for their next run.



Click on Image on the Right to view animation of the new wind turbines design.

In December, though, one of these platforms, stripped and refurbished by a local startup, returned to sea with a new mission. The first of a flotilla to come, it carried wind-monitoring equipment as well as radar for tracking migratory birds. Those that follow will be topped not by drilling rigs but by windmills. The turbines are bound for an 18-square-mile area roughly 10 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas, where the first offshore wind farm in the US is under construction. That’s right: The flower of sustainable energy is blooming in oil country. Get ready for the Great Texas Wind Rush.

Wind energy is the most promising carbon-free, nonnuclear alternative to fossil-fueled grid power. But regions with enough space and breeze for land-based wind farms—mostly in the Midwest—are far from coastal population centers; the cost of running transmission lines between generators and users is a major disincentive. That’s why wind-power entrepreneurs have set their sights on coastal waters. In the Atlantic, off Cape Cod, the 450-megawatt Cape Wind installation has been in the works for five years..."