08.Apr.2010 Weekly Fuel — BOB Edition
by Jay Cox-Chapman, Design-Build Assistant
As always, click through the photo for the source article.
A monster battery grow in Texas: BOB, short for "Big-Old Battery" can store up to four megawatts for eight hours, helping smooth out irregularities in the grid, including those imposed by renewables.
Jarrett Walker of Human Transit, writing about a simplified Google Maps transit layer, provides some fundamental design insight:
Running Google Transit must be a lot like, well, running a big transit system: Your customer experiences your product at a level of detail that you mostly don’t have time to look at.
In other words, end users have a much more specific and detailed relationship with a system (or building or room or…) than the designer.
The Netherlands' Zecc Architecture is responsible for this stunning converted chapel. The stained glass windows and the organ remain, but the white color and choir loft extensions make it a home. How cool would it be to have an organ in your house?
Green development and policy have a very close relationship, one that is exposed by a recent Connecticut plan to roll back their Renewable [Energy] Portfolio Standard, which was set at an ambitious 20% by 2020.
And finally, an interesting project out of Canada: a small biofuels firm plans to make algae-based biofuels using the CO2 generated by a cement plant. The fuels will then go back to the cement company to power trucks and equipment. The symbiotic nature of the relationship is ground-breaking.
