ecogeek.org — A noob architect decides that he's obviously the best guy to revolutionize office buildings and, next thing you know, he's designed a wind-powered rotating skyscraper. While the technical details of the wind-power system are sketchy at best, the architect, David Fisher, claims that the tower could power itself and ten other similar sized buildings.
May 14, 2007 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountMay 14, 2007
"I'd like to know how they'd manage to get an elevator to work when all the floors are aligned differently...."Each floor has a central "lobby" area where their front door empties in order to get to the centrally located elevators and fire escape stairwells.What? Do you seriously think each person gets an elevator to their front door?!? o_0
crimsonblurMay 14, 2007
Have any of you people complaining about wind power generation actually looked at the picture and read the description of the building? The rotating floors have nothing to do with generating the electricity, other than to have the rotating floors there would be gaps between them. The wind turbines are placed in-between these gaps. He just combined wind turbines in a building with another cool idea. One thing he overlooked about the "rotating" idea though is you could incorporate solar panels far more cheaply by only applying it to one side of a rotating section of the building and keeping that section constantly facing the sun. In a building like that you could easily design it so that the "penthouse" suites always face the sun on one side, that way you don't have the floors with multiple suites complaining about never having sunlight. That could be the top 10 floors or so to have a large area, whatever, I'm not sure how many a building like that would actually have. You could just cover each side of the building and not care about the cost, but it might also be kinda cool for the penthouse people because they could decide to turn the auto-rotation off if they wanted, those people would be paying such a high price their rents alone would probably make up for the lost energy costs.
humptydankMay 14, 2007
Meanwhile, NO ONE has paid ANY attention to my design for an energy-generating skyscraper:You build the skyscraper with each floor suspended on levers connected to extremely heavy flywheels. Then you build an extra twenty-five feet between floors. When the building is ready for occupancy, you remove braces between the floors, and each floor begins sinking veeery slowly, turning the flywheels and generating electricity.So a twenty-five story building would shrink from six hundred feet down to three hundred fifty feet over the course of fifty years, using the weight of the building to generating electricity the whole way down. After that it's on grid power.I can't imagine why my genius goes so unrecognized.
fight4yourrightMay 14, 2007
I can do that...
hiscityMay 15, 2007
One good turn deserves another. Flip in on it's side, place it in a large river ... voila! Waterwheel power on a skyscraper scale. ;-)"What? What do you mean I could have done it more efficiently with turbines??"hehehe! That's it! A turbine shaped building! ;->
ultravioletmarsMay 15, 2007
they go up and down...
chosephMay 15, 2007
@Humptydank - not sure if that was a joke, but you seemed to put a lot of description into it. You just added the potential energy in the system when building the thing and hoisting everything up those extra X feet so you just consume the same energy (probably more). You need to steal some energy from some other power source...sun/wind/humans...
humptydankMay 15, 2007
See that's great -- we put some solar panels on the roof, and since the building starts out taller than it ordinarily would be, then it's closer to the sun and generates more electricity. Plus, rather than using cranes, we have the workers carry all the materials up by hand. Since the workers are powered by the breakfast and lunch they bring themselves, it's free energy.The upshot is, however, I'm a thinker, and I deserve better than to be sitting around giving my best ideas away on Digg. If anyone would like to be my patron please get in touch. Thanks.
Closed AccountMay 16, 2007
That is a pretty good deadpan you have there humpty. I really hope you're joking (for your sake).