What do you do when you have an idea?
‘To have a great idea, have a lot of them’ — Thomas A. Edison.
For us, ideas come and go. Too often they come when they are not expected. In the shower, driving through the country, looking out the window on the plane or on the bus. We were wondering: what do people do with them? Do they end up on post-it notes scattered around desks all over the planet? How many brilliant ideas are lost in a pile of reports or brochures somewhere?
Another question for us is: what do you with your ideas? Theodore Levitt (an American economist and professor at Harvard Business School who passed away eight years ago) said: "Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things." At E2Designlab, we like to pursue our ideas. We test them, we research them and share them whenever possible. That’s our approach to innovation. This is why it is important to us to remain extensively involved with Universities across Australia (e.g. Monash University, Australian National University, and University of Canberra). The realisation that a raw idea that appeared one day can actually be turned into something meaningful, is such a great feeling.
An idea - Biosolar roofs
One of the ideas that we have been pondering over recent weeks relates to the integration and possible synergies between green roofs and photovoltaic (PV) energy generation. The key benefits of green roofs are well documented. They relate to both restorative urbanism (improving habitat values, increasing urban biodiversity) and ecosystem services (reduced stormwater runoff, mitigation of urban heat island effects, and to a lesser extent thermal efficiency). PV systems are now very common on Australian city rooftops. The idea of combining PV panels with irrigated green roofs (some call them biosolar roofs[1]) is not fundamentally new: it has been tested and researched in Europe since the early 2000s.
One benefit of combining the two technologies relates to a perverse property of common PV cells: the hotter they get, the less efficiently they convert sunlight to electrical energy. A green roof can help to cool the PV panels so that they can produce more efficiently over a longer period[2].
The current research has tested the effect in a northern European climate, and find it to be perhaps overstated[3]. We think that this research does not focus on the integrated benefits, and does not reflect the likely benefits in an Australian climate. We think that an integrated design can be optimised for maximum productivity of energy and a reduced energy footprint for an irrigated green roof that would in turn contribute to an improved urban water management outcome. We also think that the cooling effect of green roofs could be much more significant in Australia than in Europe, because of our longer annual periods of high daytime temperatures, extending perhaps from October to March.
We are in the early days of this research. We are currently talking to the managers of precincts and large facilities, as well as industry suppliers of both PV and green roof systems in Australia and overseas. Our recent presence at the World Green Infrastructure Congress in Sydney (October 2014) was very useful.
~Simon Evans and Julien Lepetit
Would you like to get involved? Please contact us at Julien@e2designlab.com.au or simon.evans@e2designlab.com.au
We are currently looking for additional partners, ideally including large building owners, research and teaching facilities, with and without green roofs. Together we can try to figure out a way to drive innovation.
Do you have another idea that you would like us to test? Contact us. We run regular free ‘think tanks’ on urban sustainability problems, and we would also be happy to explore other research projects.
http://tiny.cc/wg0znx
[1] Biosolar Roof – a Leonardo Transfer of Innovation project (EU funding) http://www.biosolarroof.com/
[2] Kohler, M.,W. Wiartalla, R. Fiege (2007). Interaction between PV-systems and extensive green roofs. In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual International Green Roofs Conference: Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities, Minneapolis, may 2007. Toronto, The Cardinal Group.
[3] Francois Lassalle, President of the Association pour le Développement et l'Innovation de la Végétalisation Extensive des Toitures (ADIVET) (French Green Roof Development and Innovation Association)