Issues

Suniva powers 1MW solar farm at Chattanooga Airport, Tennessee |

GLG/101 Final Project Environmental Sustainability Paper |

Week 9 |

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Sara McKnight |

4/22/2012 |

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Solar farm at the Chattanooga Airport

As we know, the United States consumes more power than any other country in the world. The success of the U.S. can be directly related to its power consumption. Most of our electricity that power our homes comes from burning fossil fuels (Coal, oil, etc.) that puts Co2 in the atmosphere, this is causing major pollution. The U.S. mainly has refused to take this matter seriously, as showed by their refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and continues its high consumption. The amount needed in the future will only rise because of that reason we need new alternative sources of energy. These new alternative power sources include wind, solar, and hydro two of which is a huge interest to architects ‘Active Solar’ and ‘Wind Technology.’ I believe that architects have a responsibility to look for new sources of energy, not just for our environments sake but to gradually lose our dependency on fossil fuels which is quickly running out while demand keeps increasing. This research paper is about the ideas behind the technology and how Architects can use active solar and wind technology to power homes now and in the future. Wind technology is “a system of equipment that is used for gathering and converting wind into mechanical or electrical energy and of transferring these forms of energy to the point of use or storage.” The two main uses are for electric generation and water pumping. Wind has a lot of the drawbacks as does Solar, but the constraints are less geographic and much more meteorological. Which means the future of this type of energy...