Located on the roof of the Human Powered Student building are ten Skystream windturbines. Together, these can supply 20 kW of power with a strong breeze (11 m/s).
Whenever it’s windy, human energy production is taken over by the wind turbines. During windy periods, students thus enjoy free and effortless energy use. Daily working duties are reduced or eliminated.
The lower floors of the human powered student building are reserved for communal energy production. How long the students need to exercise on these floors depends on their demand for power. Because the energy users are also the energy producers, there’s a strong incentive to reduce energy demand.
The human powered student building is self-sufficient in terms of energy use and produces no CO2. However, humans need extra food when they produce power, and producing this food also requires energy.
Assuming a typical Dutch diet, one kilowatt-hour of human generated electricity produces up to 30 times more greenhouse gases than one kilowatt-hour of grid electricity. How do we keep the human powered community carbon neutral?
The food waste from the kitchen and the excrements of 750 students are used to produce biogas that supplies the thermal energy for cooking.
Three floors of the human powered student building are taken up by the central human power plant, which is run by the entire community. How long the students need to exercise on these floors, depends only on their demand for energy.
Two floors of the human powered student building are dedicated to washing clothes and showering -- the individual student rooms have no bathrooms or washing machines.
Showering and washing clothes both involve the use of hot water, which requires a lot of human power. To make it work, the student community applies low-tech and lifestyle changes.
The human powered student tower building has 22 floors and no passenger elevators.
The human powered Van Unnik Student building can house 750 students in individual rooms, spread over 15 floors. The cheapest rooms are on the north side (no sun) and on the upper floors (there are no elevators in the building).
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The Willem C. Van Unnik building is the tallest building on the campus of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The concrete, steel and glass monolith, which occupies a central position on the campus, was built in the late 1960s and has been mostly empty for the last 15 years. Maintaining it is an important cost for the university, who owns the building.
The Human Power Plant proposes to turn a problem into an opportunity by converting the building into student housing that runs entirely on human power. The University of Utrecht has the ambition to become CO2-neutral in 2030. The ecological footprint of the human powered Van Unnik Student Dorm will be close to zero, and the building is already there.
Continue reading "How to Power a 22 Floors Student Building without Fossil Fuels?" »