Renewable Archives - Ambient Green

Urban Cool Roof and...

HoustonUnited States

The Houston Permitting and Green Building Resource Centers are housed within a certified LEED Gold building, which incorporates a large variety of sustainable and low-impact features.

Its roof not only supports this large solar installation, but is designed to follow a ‘cool roof code’, as mandated for commercial buildings by the city. The code serves to reduce buildings’ contributions to the heat island effect (a localized increase in temperature around urban areas, created by their everyday activities).

This roof utilizes solar panels (which also act as additional barriers between the sun’s rays and the roof, helping to keep the building cool), as well as exhibiting a light-colored and more reflective roof material, and vegetated green roof on the building’s side. These features give the roof a very high solar reflective index (SRI) of 89/100.

University “Solar Garden” Installation

MartinUnited States

These solar flowers were co-designed by students from UT Martin’s Engineering and Visual Arts departments.

Urban Solar Parking Canopies

AustinUnited States

These solar canopies for parking lots not only help to provide electricity, but offer shade, rooftop protection, an efficient use of the substantial area allocated for parking space, and the option to introduce and power electric vehicle charging stations directly where they are needed.

Small Urban Solar Array

AustinUnited States

Small scale solar setup outside of a local business park.

Urban Windmills

Corpus ChristiUnited States

Small lineup of vertical axis (VAWT) windmills along the beachfront.

Solar Public Art Installation

AustinUnited States

These installations are named ‘SunFlowers – An Electric Garden’. They are stunning, and line the entrance to a local shopping center in the Mueller community of Austin, Texas.

Building Indoor Solar Faucets

HoustonUnited States

I have seen a few installed Sloan solar faucets, which use the ambient INDOOR light to power the faucet sensor, turning it on and off automatically.

University Solar Emergency Call...

HoustonUnited States

Our campus features scattered emergency call boxes that are powered by solar panels.

LEED Home Rooftop Solar...

HomeUnited States

This LEED Platinum home plot exhibits a large variety of sustainable features, including this 30-panel solar installation atop the barn roof. The setup involves a 6.9 kW system, which serves to power roughly 1/3 of the plot’s operations (covering three buildings and a pond).

In addition, with the aid of supportive credits, the cost of the system was able to be reduced a great deal, to half of the overall total.

Urban University Solar Trash...

HoustonUnited States

To date, the university’s campus features 80 dual recycling receptacles and solar-powered trash compactors. While the compactor takes little space more than an ordinary receptacle, it may hold 5 times the capacity of waste, due to the self-powered compressing process.

This also saves on the amount of labor required to keep up with accumulated trash. BigBelly Solar, the product manufacturer, notes that this can reduce trash collections by up to 80%.

Large Rural Texas Wind...

West TexasUnited States

The Roscoe Wind Farm is one of the largest wind farms in the world, with over 600 operational turbines spread over 400 km2 of land, producing nearly 800 MW of energy, to date.

Urban Solar Trail Lighting

MiamiUnited States

Our local park has solar panels that are used to power the trail lighting. There are about 40 individual installations, and we believe the lamps act on a light sensor that operates using standard dusk till dawn settings.

Earthship Highly Sustainable Housing

New MexicoUnited States

We noticed these earthships while driving through the state of New Mexico. Earthships are incredibly well designed, innovative, low-impact homes. They generally offer a multitude of sustainable features, are built with sustainable materials, designed for efficient heating and cooling, harvest both energy and water, and utilize a great variety of other friendly practices.

Urban Hotel Rooftop Solar...

PragueCzech Republic

The solar panel installation at our hotel can be seen at the center right of the image, and utilizes the sunlight as a source of energy to heat running water. The temperature of the working fluid can rise up to 80°C. Thanks to our Pontos, cooling, and boiler systems, the running water is then cooled to 55°C by the end of the whole process.

In the summer season, there is no need to activate the Pontos or boiler systems, as the solar panels absorb enough sun energy (up to 240 kW) to warm up the running water.

More information on the Mosaic House Pontos system may be read in another post:

Hotel Grey Water System with Heat Recuperation

Renewable Hybrid Power System

NacalaMozambique

Our lodge has constructed an advanced hybrid energy system, using the combined power of solar and wind sources with an assortment of battery banks and a three-phase inverter system. In total, our solar park contains 180 PV modules, and the system altogether may be monitored remotely.

With this, we have also been able to provide additional modules to a local school, and stimulate the community in a number of other sustainable and innovative ways. To date, our system has allowed for 280 MWh of clean electricity, and provides power to the entire lodge, our dive center’s air compressor, and to our water treatment plant.