Milan's Vertical Forest. Wednesday, 12 October 2011 GreenMuze Staff Milan’s Vertical Forest from Stefan Boeri Architects.
The Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) will be the greenest building in Milan when completed, which is one of Europe’s most polluted cities. Designed by Stefan Boeri Architects, as part of their BioMilano vision to incorporate 60 abandoned farms into a greenbelt surrounding the city. The Bosco Verticale building has a green façade planted with dense forest systems to provide a building microclimate and to filter out polluting dust particles.
The living bio-canopy also absorbs CO2, oxygenates the air, moderates extreme temperatures and lowers noise pollution, providing aesthetic beauty and lowering living costs. Each apartment balcony will have trees (900 plantings are planned for the two buildings) that will provide shade in the summer and drop their leaves in winter to allow in winter sunlight. Visit: Via Inhabitat.
Heating/cooling. Renewables. The "Ultima" Tower, Two-mile High Sky City. Project Owner: None Location: Any densely populated urban environment Date: 1991 Cost: $150,000,000,000.00 Population: 1,000,000 people Exterior surface area of building: 150,000,000 square feet Enclosed volume: 53,000,000,000 cubic feet Square footage: 1,500,000,000 Total enclosed acreage: 39,000 acres Elevator speed: 20 feet per second (13 miles per hour) 9 minutes and 40 seconds to reach the top floor from the ground floor.
Dimensions: Height--10,560 feet; Diameter at the base--6000 feet; Number of stories--500; Total Square Feet: Approximately 5,000,000 square feet Why build a two-mile high, one mile wide building? To prevent the uncontrolled blight of the natural landscape by rapacious developers and industry. At current rates the surface of the planet will be nearly totally covered with residential, commercial and apartment dwellings within the coming century. The concept can be thought of as what would happen if nature grew upwards with multi-soil levels.
Letters: The rising cost of energy - Letters - Opinion. As the campaign launched by Compass in The Independent yesterday argues, with the average dual fuel energy bill having increased by 75 per cent since 2004, more action needs to be taken at a time when incomes are squeezed.
However we have to ask whether the quick fixes called for by the campaign are the answer. It is not clear what a windfall tax will do to stop underlying problems in the market, such as the overcharging of consumers who won't switch to a cheaper supplier. It is also misleading to blame the huge rise in prices solely on the Big Six's profits, when we know that wholesale and distribution and policy costs have driven over 87 per cent of the price increase since 2004. The real issue is where the profits are being made. Ofgem's research shows that between 2005 and 2008 the Big Six's total net profits came from 48 per cent of their customer base – largely those still with the same supplier since before market liberalisation.
Clare McNeil David Porter Lawrence Slade Eltisley.
Energy and kids. Energy demand management, also known as demand side management (DSM), entails actions that influence the quantity or patterns of use of energy consumed by end users, such as actions targeting reduction of peak demand during periods when energy-supply systems are constrained.
Peak demand management does not necessarily decrease total energy consumption but could be expected to reduce the need for investments in networks and/or power plants. The term DSM was coined during the time of the the 1973 energy crisis and 1979 energy crisis. Ideally, energy use would be optimised by supply and demand interactions in the market. For electricity use in particular, the price paid on the market is often regulated or fixed, and in many cases does not reflect the full cost of production. Electricity use can vary dramatically on short and medium time frames, and the pricing system may not reflect the instantaneous cost as additional higher-cost ("peaking") sources are brought on-line.