Energy Structures of the Past & Future
This is a long, rambling footnote to my post on “Why Timing Matters in Startups” where I explore how a renewable energy revolution means we will see architecture-scale solutions in the form of power buildings. Lot’s and lot’s of power buildings.
The Idea Lab has been on my radar recently since I noticed the dual-success of two breakthrough energy companies they are involved with: Heliogen and Energy Vault.
Heliogen’s Solar Furnace
Heliogen’s technology uses an array of AI-controlled mirrors to focus solar energy into a single, concentrated beam. That beam generates extreme heat — over 1,000C — that can be used in energy-intensive industrial processes, like making steel (7.2% of global emissions), glass, and concrete. They call it Concentrated Solar Power and it will help us address the “75% Problem)” — all our other activities that generate carbon and contribute to climate change that can’t be solved by just generating clean electricity. [Bill Gates loves it].
Energy Vault’s Power Tower
Energy Vault, meanwhile, have developed a grid-scale system that stores/releases power through gravity and kinetic energy. Using automated cranes, it assembles a tower of concrete blocks to store energy, then disassembles the tower to release energy. While it’s optimal to place these towers next to the source of renewable energy, like a solar or wind farm, the physical qualities of the structure allow them to be built practically anywhere.(Masa loves it).
(You can read about Bill Gross’s thoughts on the challenges funding and scaling breakthrough energy companies here).
Both these companies are worth your attention, as their radical paths forward provide a lens into our future.
Our Cities Will Look Different
The climate emergency, if we are to meet it head-on (which is — alarmingly — not certain), is going to demand a re-think of how we organise our energy infrastructure, from charging cars to grid-scale capturing and storing energy. This will force a reorganisation of our built environment.
Transport Similar to Today
Our need to travel and transport things isn’t going away. So we’ll need to migrate away from a built environment defined by fossil fuels and towards one defined by clean energy. We’ll need to provide electric car charging ports everywhere, in lamp posts on streets and in car parks at supermarkets. Cycle lanes will criss-cross our cities providing safer access for micro-mobility systems and huge swathes of our urban centres will be pedestrianised (like in the Spanish city of Pontevedra). In dense urban centres in littoral zones across the developing world, with little appetite for tunnelling, electric trains will travel above, not below the buildings. Finally, autonomous electric vehicles that exist in shared fleets might be stored in automated parking towers (“nests” and “hives”), operate in constant motion as delivery vehicles, or act as rolling energy storage systems in their own right. Sounds a lot like today, right? That’s because it probably will be.
A Renewable Revolution Looks Like Massive Power Buildings
The change in the built environment driven by renewable energy generation and storage could be profound.
Residential solar panels will be common, but it’s more likely that we will have enormous solar farms in sunlight rich regions. Projects like DESERTEC propose enormous energy generation efforts in Libya and Algeria combined with high-voltage direct current transmission systems that supply enough renewable energy to power… the whole of Europe!
We will need to get used to large energy capture systems on the horizon. NIMBYism has no role in this new world, and the green belt may suffer. Very little about capturing earth’s energy flows is small scale. Whether it’s brown-field sites in cities acting as locations for Energy Vault towers, or micro-towers as C21 chimneys in our backyards to capture energy generated from our solar roofs, large structures are inevitable.
That is until companies like the UK’s Tokamak and First Light Fusion get grid-scale nuclear fusion online. Then it is large grey boxes in far off places.
Cosmic Communist Constructions
Heliogen’s technology uses the same principles children discover when they use a magnifying glass to burn a piece of paper. But if done at scale — with 12,090 mirrors, say — you can reach temperatures as high as 3,000C. More than half as hot as the surface of the sun!
That’s exactly the function of one of my favourite artefacts of Soviet techno-architecture — the solar furnace at the Solar Institute of Uzbekistan in Tashkent. Here it is, in all it’s glory, from Frédéric Chaubin’s study of architecture from the Soviet Union.
