Mon 7 Jan 2008
The World’s Coolest Solar Collecting Building?
Posted by ecoble under Energy and Power, Environmental Images, Sustainable Innovation
Sanyo in Japan has constructed an amazing solar-collecting building that embodies both clean-energy ideals and awesome architectural design strategies. The so-called Solar Ark has over 5,000 active solar panels generating over 500,000 KWh of environmentally friendly energy. Nearly 500 multi-colored lighting units placed between the various solar panels can be activated to create a variety of shapes and letters on the sides of this enormous structure.
As a working example of the potential of solar energy, the structure contains a solar museum with interactive exhibits as well as a solar lab and various meeting rooms for global environmental programs. The curved form is designed to take maximum benefit from as well as to graphically reflect the path of the sun and its energy. An elaborate truss system allows dizzying cantelevers to span out from the center of the structure and rise toward the sky. More info @ MetaEfficient.
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January 9th, 2008 at 6:38 am[...] has over 5,000 active solar panels generating over 500,000 KWh of environmentally friendly energy.read more | digg [...]
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January 13th, 2008 at 2:01 pm[...] Fuente | MetaEfficient vía EcoBle [...]
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January 8th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
this is the coolest thing i ever seen. Its a shame to us Americans, that we can’t build this kind of buidings in America.
January 8th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Cool!!! But, my question, does it generate more power than it consumes (what with being a building for environmental friendliness and all)?
January 8th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Great pictures! I am also wondering about the amount of power it consumes compared to the amount it generates. Either way, nice find.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Sako, we have the coolest military gear though! Imagine what we couldv’e built for a trillion $$$ instead of war? Ron Paul for president!
January 8th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
This looks like you could ride your scatboard on it,preety cool
January 8th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Of course it generates more power than it consumes. Even if it consumes more, who cares, solar energy is free for life because James Bond has shutdown the one and only solar blocking satellite built by the crazy villains.
January 9th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Generates 500,000 kWh? I think you mean 500,000 kW (kilo-watt-hours is an amount, kilo-watts is a rate). It’s like saying Arnold Schwarzenegger is so strong he can lift 60 inches!
500,000 kWh isn’t a lot of energy. But 500,000 kW produced cleanly and sustainably is a lot of power.
January 9th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
RON PAUL for president!!! (forgot to add that to my previous post) =)
January 10th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
what makes it so hard for other countries to construct this????????
especially the netherlands
January 10th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Why are we not doing this too. How long are we going to be known as the idiots in america?
January 10th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
hristopher Sachs says: January 9th, 2008 at 5:43 am Generates 500,000 kWh? I think you mean 500,000 kW (kilo-watt-hours is an amount, kilo-watts is a rate). It’s like saying Arnold Schwarzenegger is so strong he can lift 60 inches! 500,000 kWh isn’t a lot of energy. But 500,000 kW produced cleanly and sustainably is a lot of power.
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Huh? Why do KWh go over the heads of so many people. A kilowatt-hour is a kilowatt generated for an hour. For instance, leaving a 1kw microwave on for an hour. That is 1kw/hr of electricity. 10c if you’re using fossil fuels.
The key to this is… how long does it take to produce the 500,000kw/hrs? Obviously it’s not producing a half million KW every hour or even every day, that’d be an insane amount of energy.
Is it per month? Per year?
January 11th, 2008 at 3:37 am
Justraw wrote : “This looks like you could ride your scatboard on it,preety cool”
Wouldn’t that make a pretty foul mess though?
January 11th, 2008 at 4:43 am
You think Ron Paul, ultra fundie Xtian racist who thinks Alabama and Mississippi had the right to decide that blacks shouldn’t integrate and abortion is murder, is gonna build that?
Put the bong down hippies….
January 11th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
How durable is this building? It’s awfully complicated, with a lot of moving parts, which is cause for concern due to the increased likelihood of problems arising. I think this may get very expensive to maintain.
That aside, this is one cool building!
Oh, and does the government of the country that produced this town have anything to do with constitutional libertarianism? Ron Paul?
January 15th, 2008 at 7:43 am
Americans could easily build it.
But not without making the last couple dozen years absolutely meaningless.
January 15th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Delete my last comment and just tell chris sachs that he needs to take a physics course. It’s much more suitable to the topic here.
January 16th, 2008 at 5:33 am
We can so build stuff like this. Look at the Googleplex with a total capacity of 1.6 megawatts!!!
January 16th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
That is so awesome when will these sustainability tech come down in price
January 19th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Impossible.
The most optimistic number that I can find for solar energy density is 1.4 kW/m^2. So for 500 000 kWh
(That’s 500 Mega Watts) you would need an area of 357142.9 square meters.
Follow the more info link and we find that the panel is 315 meters long that leaves the height at > 1133 meters!
Maybe it’s just the camera angle but it doesn’t look that tall to me.
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:20 am
Just like the unit’s name implies, KiloWattHours are made by multiplying a value in KiloWatts by a certain number of hours. If you want to know the rate of energy being produced, you need to divide it by time, just like metres per second (m/s) KiloWattHours when divided by time gives us KiloWatts which is a rate of energy production. A value expressed in kWh has a different meaning without the number of hours involved.
Imagine I said that my car can travel 10,000km. This doesn’t tell us anything about the speed of the car until we know the time frame. 10,000km per year is fairly normal, 10,000km per day is quite fast. 500,000kWh per year is pretty good, 500,000kWh per century is not so good.
kWh are a unit that most people find rather confusing unit, much like Nm (Newton Metres) which are found my multiplying Newtons (a measure of force) by metres. I suspect this is because we are more used to measuring rates expressed as one unit divided by another, not just a bare unit or a unit multiplied by another. I hope I have cleared things up a little.
What all this means is that the panel doesn’t have to be 1133 metres tall, it only needs to be 10 metres tall as long as it’s out in the sun for 113 hours. Of course, in reality, it actually extracts less energy than the theoretical maximum and runs for more than 113 hours per year.
There are many more details at http://www.solar-ark.com/english/about/spec.html but to clarify some of the details mentioned in this blog, the outputs are 630kW and 530,000kWh per year. The actual usable power is 2x 300kW at 440V AC.
Although this is pretty cool, some of the best improvements to buildings can actually be made without solar panels at all. The building behind the solar array looks like it has been designed with passive solar collection in mind. Large glass windows to let in light and avoid needing artificial light, insulating glass to avoid needing costly heating and cooling and passive air-flows through the building to reduce the need for fans to move the air. It’s amazing that for about 10% extra building cost, you can reduce the running costs of a building by 50% and save enormous amounts of energy at the same time.
April 13th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
That’s really amazing!
Japan is really playing with creative ideas (to be precise:a big international corporation).
I’m sure the USA is going to see loads of similar new renewable miracles, after the election, though.