Scavenging energy from hidden urban spaces: hyper-local power for communities without connections
- Charlotte Slingsby, founder of Moya Power, believes that we can “scavenge” wind energy from scrappy airflow in turbulent inner cities.
- “There would be massive benefits if people start generating their own independent energy… there are people that have never had access to it.”
- In a future where we grab every last little bit of wind power, could cities themselves change shape to emphasise energy generation?
Director John Lassiter’s movie “Toy Story” revolutionised an art form with the liberal use of new technology. He puts the relationship between art and technology very succinctly: “Art challenges technology, and technology inspires art.”
All creative projects tread the line between art and technology, and often the challenge is to make something that fulfils the two disciplines’ broad objectives of beauty and usefulness. Charlotte Slingsby, graduate of London’s Royal College of Art, knows how difficult and rewarding taking this path can be.
She, and the company she founded, Moya Power, has created a revolutionary material with a revolutionary purpose: to “scavenge” the gusty wind energy in cities that can’t be harnessed by traditional turbines.
It has potential beyond simple energy generation, allowing for hyper-local, small-scale energy generation in communities that may not have connections to the traditional grid.
Charlotte will be speaking at TOA 2017, and in advance of her talk, she spoke to TOA.life about the future of energy generation and how communities will be able to share what they can scavenge…
TOA.life: Moya’s technology allows for small amounts of electricity to be generated and stored over a large area and a large period of time. This is quite different to most energy generation, which is centralised and then distributed — how does Moya work?
Charlotte Slingsby, Moya Power: The motive for the research behind Moya Power is to find a solution to harnessing energy from within the city boundaries. It’s an untraditional source of energy, which therefore requires an untraditional approach to harvest it.
Wind energy is challenging to harvest within the city due to the density of infrastructure. As wind comes into the city, it hits the buildings, slows it down, and makes it turbulent.
Moya aims to capture these bits of scattered wind energy across the surface of infrastructure through a device that is readily adaptable to different surfaces, and is low-cost when mass-manufactured.
Moya’s device is a flexible sheet which supports thousands of free-standing filaments, embedded with a piezoelectric film, which converts strain energy [energy stored by an object being deformed] directly into electricity.
As each filament is moved by the wind back and forth it generates an Alternating Current: these tiny bits of energy are then rectified, accumulated and stored into useful energy.
Good city planning and infrastructure will be needed to support a dynamic flow of energy that can be generated and pushed into a distributed grid.
TOA.life: In the medium-term, wind, wave, and solar generation is increasingly viable as a major energy source. One consequence of a future where we all generate small amounts of energy, is that we start sharing the benefits of communal generation.
What sort of infrastructure do communities need to build to make this inter-connected future happen?
CS: Good city planning and infrastructure will be needed to support a dynamic flow of energy that can be generated and pushed into a distributed grid.
Homes and businesses are built on top of each other, and they often don’t own infrastructure that is exposed to enough solar and wind energy to make traditional approaches viable. Moya can be used as a dynamic building material and mounted on surfaces where both environmental and man-made wind is available, for the direct generation of power.
It can be mounted upside-down, lining the underside of bridges or the inside of tunnels, without putting strain on the structure or foundations. These applications give value to otherwise unused spaces.
There would be massive benefits if people start generating their own independent sources of energy. We hope that Moya’s untraditional approach could let people exploit whatever kind of surface area they own to scavenge the energy that it is exposed to, and be part of this inevitable communal generation.
TOA.life: In a future where we scavenge energy, could the actual design of buildings, cities and infrastructure change to adapt to energy collection? What would a city like this look like?
CS: We view the city as the first viable place to focus research and development, as we urgently need to find solutions for sustaining the energy needs of our cities without solely relying on fossil fuels. Yet what about the people across the world that have never had access to energy?
I come from South Africa, where power cuts have become everyday reality and you are exposed to extreme poverty. “Moya”, which means “wind” in Xhosa (one of South Africa’s eleven official languages), is my way of keeping it connected to its initial motives.
It would be a dream to see architects incorporate Moya Power sheets as part of their designs and use it as a building textile.
My aim would be to provide a new material to harvest energy that can be afforded by those who need it most, taking advantage of whatever land or space you may own; be it an overpopulated city centre, a shack in a township, or the vast expanse of the desert.
There is an emerging trend of dynamic facades that can be seen across the world — there is both budget and desire to see more than just stagnant concrete jungles, and let movement be part of the architectural design. It would be a dream to see architects incorporate Moya Power sheets as part of their designs and use it as a building textile.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider hitting the ♥︎ button below to help share it to other people who’d be interested.
“Millennials & Post-Millennials don’t hate advertising — they hate experiences that slow them down”: Shahar Erez of marketing tech company Kenshoo, explains how advertising will become contextual & more effective…
“It’s not about what you want to say, it’s about what they need to hear.”: Ayelet Noff, Founder and Co-CEO of PR firm Blonde 2.0, explains what’s really important when start-ups explain their story to the world.
