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By Mark Lundegren

I was working on a design study recently and soon realized that, although the approach had many merits, one disadvantage was that the basic form did not lend itself to conventional solar panels.

In my case, this was due to the novel geometry of the design. But the problem or issue of course occurs regularly across a variety of design formats, from traditional ornate designs and highly articulated styles to modern polygonal and free-form shapes.

In the future, we may have more flexible solar collector options. Today, however, our choices are more limited. Alternatives include abandoning the original design, or instead the goals of solar electricity generation and building energy autonomy. Another is to pursue custom and often expensive solar panel fabrication.

All of these options can have have substantial disadvantages, and the dilemma led me to envision a preferable alternative. This is the use of what I will call vertical solar power towers – either adjacent to or at some distance from buildings, or even independently of buildings and potentially as a more efficient approach to solar energy collection overall. Importantly, this tower concept is different from and simpler than far more complex solar tower furnaces designed to capture reflected sunlight from mirror arrays.

The Vertical Solar Power Towers infographic above describes the basic idea and summarizes key considerations surrounding the design, construction, and use of these towers. As you can see in the infographic, and as its title implies, the overall concept is quite simple: relatively slender towers of a varying sizes and shapes are constructed, covered or built entirely with solar panels, and in turn used to collect and potentially store electricity. I found a few examples online of the idea being explored, but overall the approach appears substantially unused, despite its many potential benefits.

What are these benefits? In addition to increasing both design flexibility and opportunities for solar energy production, vertical power towers can have a number advantages over traditional horizontal or inclined solar panels. These include: 1) a low cost of construction overall, 2) the potential for prefabrication, and resulting cost and quality benefits, 3) easy panel servicing and maintenance, 4) superior energy capture at low sun angles, high latitudes, and early and late in the day, 5) the likelihood of cooler panels and thus higher energy conversion efficiency, and 6) the potential for greater solar panel density overall. On the last point, this advantage notably is much as with vertical gardening compared with traditional crop planting – with solar panel towers likely to occupy more vertical space than is typical in ordinary solar installations, thus potentially taking up much less room horizontally for comparable production levels.

As my infographic explores, there are a number of solar tower design and placement issues that reman waiting to be examined, many a subset of the study of optimal solar building design overall. Some of these include the optimal shape of vertical solar power towers from both cost and energy collection standpoints, the ideal height of the towers from each standpoint, and optimal densities and placement patterns when solar towers are built in clusters.

With these ideas in mind, I would encourage you to consider my infographic and the many potential uses for vertical solar power towers in building and community design – and whether on a small, middle, or larger scale. In practice, whenever we build vertically and thus nearly every time we build, there is an opportunity to consider either the use of vertical solar power directly or at least the core design principles needed to optimize this approach to solar energy collection in the building’s plan and elevation design.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of ArchaNatura. 

Tell others about ArchaNatura…encourage modern natural design & sustainability!

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By Mark Lundegren

Architects, engineers, builders, developers, and planners have many ideas about optimal design. These include preferences and goals for the aesthetics, layout, materials, densities, spatial plan, and economics of buildings and our larger built environment.

All are important considerations, and can be essential to successful building and community design. But I would like to propose a simple, fundamental, and quite sweeping design principle that at once underlies and supersedes all other design issues and demands. This principle is consideration of whether the design or development aids or inhibits planetary health, which is my topic for today.

As I said, the idea is sweeping and fundamental. If you will give me a few minutes, I will first explain why this concern should be considered the first principle of natural design, and then outline how the principle readily can inform and guide other design and development ideas, across the modern world and for our common benefit.

The Design For Planetary Health infographic above describes two basic approaches to modern development – one primarily as it occurs today, the other how it might, if we are committed to planetary health and human sustainability. Please note that many of the ideas in the infographic are drawn from the work of the ecologist Walter Jehne, who you can learn about here and here. Let me also emphasize that my design for planetary health proposals do not involve either creating or living less vitally or robustly, only differently, or more intelligently and naturally.

Understanding why the promotion of planetary health is the first principle of natural design is fairly straightforward. Simply put, all design, building, technology, and indeed human action will have either a positive, negative, or neutral impact on the natural health or survivability of life and the ecosystems upon which we depend. While negative health impacts may be inconsequential when small or limited, as these cases increase they naturally undermine our capacity for further action, and even future life, and thus are irrational, paradoxical, inextensible, or unprincipled.

There are many potential methods for achieving positive planetary health outcomes in the aggregate, and my infographic is not intended as a final word on the topic. But its framework may reflect our best current understanding of how we are most contributing to reduced planetary health, and the most direct, efficient, and reliable alternative to reverse and undo these trends. As you can see in the graphic, this alternative approach to modern infrastructure design addresses many of our most important human and environmental health issues today. These include global warming, climate change, ocean acidification, land aridification and desertification, agricultural soil loss, poor food quality, habitat loss, increased atmospheric carbon, and other forms of human pollution.

As I said, the infographic describes two basic approaches to human design and development, one broadly running contrary to natural ecological forces and another intended to work in concert with them. In the two approaches, the central design difference is their relative emphasis and use of hardscape and softscape conditions. By this, I mean land surfaces or coverings that either inhibit or promote: 1) natural water retention and cycling, 2) soil building and microbiological vitality, and 3) green land outcomes – or ones that are sunlight absorbing, photosynthetic, and shading.

Here are brief descriptions of each design model or archetype, to help you consider and use the infographic:

> Model 1: Agricultural and Urban Hardscape – as indicated, this model describes our dominant present-day approach to design and development in both rural and urban areas. Whether through the use of monocrop annual food systems or the laying of urban pavements, today we typically create periodic or permanent hard landscape surfaces that tend to shed, rather than retain, water. When this occurs, and especially at scale, a natural result is that soils are dried and eroded, instead of hydrated and strengthened. This directly leads to diminished and decarbonized soils, less vibrant soil microbiology and surface vegetation, more sunlight reflected into the air, the formation of heat domes, and perhaps most importantly, diminished natural water cycling. Reduced water cycling, in turn, promotes compounding land aridification and reduced natural cooling on a regional scale, often further reducing soil and plant health. In addition, our common use of fossil fuels takes ancient, deeply buried carbons and releases them into the modern atmosphere, which adds to this unnatural system of planetary drying and warming.

> Model 2: Porous Natural Softscape – in keeping with the infographic, a more natural and reversing alternative to this traditional approach is to redesign and re-create our contemporary communities and infrastructure with none or few of these features. In this alternative approach, our modern infrastructure is broadly re-patterned based on natural methods and conditions, notably ones favoring water-retaining and soil-shading porous softscapes, and where carbon-free and sunlight-based economics are the mainstays of life. Key design steps in this approach include the move to perennial and polycultural agriculture, re-greening and perhaps re-agriculturalizing desertified lands, similar re-greening and softscaping of urban areas, and movement to solar-autonomous buildings and transportation. As a re-naturalizing opposite of current design and land-use practices, we can expect these steps steadily to increase landmass water retention, improve soils, increase plant cover and photosynthesis, aid many marginalized species, reduce atmospheric carbon and ocean acidification, and restore natural weather patterns and hydrological cooling.

In one sense, our modern ecological and planetary health problems are complex, vast, and overwhelming. But in another and more important one, we can understand that many of the challenges we face are rooted in a small number of specific features of modern life. These features, or design decisions, are inherently antithetical to natural systems and planetary health, demonstrable as such, and readily actionable and changeable too.

Whatever your role in the design, creation, and use of our modern infrastructure and industrial systems, I would encourage you to explore these ideas and consider how your own actions and efforts might be made far more natural, aiding, healthy, and sustainable – for our planet and all people.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of ArchaNatura. 

Tell others about ArchaNatura…encourage modern natural design & sustainability!

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By Mark Lundegren

If you follow public and scientific debate about human-induced climate change, you likely have noticed there is a good deal of conflicting information about both the problem and its principal causes.

This is unfortunate, not only as a matter of accuracy, but because the ambiguity can make needed action and essential focus areas much less clear. At its worst, false or incomplete carbon pollution information risks overburdening minor contributors to climate change, while giving major producers of new atmospheric carbon relatively easy treatment, or even an unwarranted pass.

As a study in this, and prompting the infographic below, I recently read an editorial piece, aimed primarily at the perils of meat production, suggesting that more than a quarter of human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were from agriculture. If you search this topic, you will quickly find that agricultural GHGs vary considerably by country, but are estimated to average about half of this level worldwide and thus form only a small portion of human-created GHGs overall.

Beyond the precise amount of GHG from agricultural activities, a more important but subtle and often overlooked point is that many agricultural emissions are significantly natural or historical GHG sources. And while reducible to a degree, such broadly natural emissions are also significantly unavoidable overall, as I will explain.

As with living nature overall, the principal direct sources of GHG from human agriculture are animal metabolism and decaying plants, which we can think of helpfully as continually released and in turn naturally recycled forms of surface carbon. Though I should add that this is not the full truth. In particular, natural plant and animal ecosystems are typically perennial or evergreen systems, both producing and using carbon dioxide throughout all or much of the year, and also steadily sequestering or encapsulating atmospheric carbon, via the natural buildup of soils that normally occurs in perennial ecological systems.

But crucially, only some of human agriculture involves perennial ecology, notably pastoral ranching and wild fisheries. Much of the rest of our agriculture instead produces annual crops raised in monoculture, often with the use of GHG-releasing fertilizers and pesticides, and where soil lies exposed, eroding, unproductive, and leaching carbon into the atmosphere for significant periods of time each year. In these cases, and leaving aside fertilizers for a moment, annual crop GHG emissions extend beyond surface animal metabolism and decaying plants to include the release of sequestered, buried, sub-surface, or ground carbon, as soil is exposed to the sun and erodes in the wind and rain. Still, even here total GHG emissions are small overall, though they appear to be increasing with ongoing soil loss from monocrop agriculture and forest clear-clearing, and could increase dramatically with the thawing of Arctic permafrost.

One important consequence of these ideas is that if we return perennial agricultural grasslands and savannas, or ocean fisheries, to natural or wild conditions, we can expect little or no change in carbon emissions. Think about it. Left alone, these areas would soon re-populate with wild animals and plants, which would naturally and perennially grow, release and consume carbon dioxide in balance, and build carbon-sequestering soil in time, as they have for millions of years. To stop this re-population, we would have to prevent wild animals and plants from re-occupying these areas, through one means or another, but with the natural result of destroying these wild, soil and atmospherically beneficial, ecosystems.

My infographic above first seeks to capture the idea that perennial organic human agriculture, while subject to productivity or efficiency opportunities, is largely a natural process and not a principal source of new GHG in the atmosphere today. Second, it emphasizes that soil and sequestered carbon disrupting human activities – from logging and annual agriculture to human-increased air and water temperatures – are significantly unnatural, an important and compounding source of new GHG, and destined to steadily reduce the earth’s capacity to re-absorb atmospheric carbon, new and old.

Lastly, the graphic highlights the primary and indeed vast majority source of human-produced GHGs in the modern atmosphere. This is the mining and use of carbon fuels, or ancient soil carbons, long buried deep below the Earth’s surface. Such underground carbon includes coal, oil, and gas-based transportation, electricity generation, industry, building, business and consumer goods, heating and cooling, plant fertilizers, and agricultural machinery.

In addition to unnatural soil-degrading and vegetation-inhibiting agricultural practices, this is where our modern climate change problem squarely and principally lies.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of ArchaNatura. 

Tell others about ArchaNatura…encourage modern natural design & sustainability!

Additional Reading: Carbon Cycle, Climate Change, Greenhouse Gas Types & Sources