GARDENS BY THE BAY

Gardens by the Bay - Singapore

Gardens by the Bay is an integral part of a strategy by the Singapore government to transform Singapore from a "Garden City" to a "City in a Garden". The stated aim is to raise the quality of life by enhancing greenery and flora in the city.

The park consists of three waterfront gardens: Bay South Garden, Bay East Garden and Bay Central Garden.The largest of the three gardens is Bay South Garden, standing at 54 hectares.

Sustainability in the Gardens

Underlying the concept of Gardens by the Bay are the principles of environmental sustainability. Much effort was made to plan and design for sustainable cycles in energy and water throughout Bay South Garden.

The conservatories are a statement in sustainable engineering and apply a suite of cutting-edge technologies for energy-efficient solutions in cooling. This suite of technologies can help to achieve at least 30% savings in energy consumption, compared to conventional cooling technologies.

Eleven of the Supertrees are embedded with environmentally sustainable functions. Some have photovoltaic cells on their canopies to harvest solar energy for lighting up the Supertrees., while others are integrated with the Conservatories and serve as air exhaust receptacles.

The Gardens lake system incorporates key ecological processes and functions as a living system. It acts as a natural filtration system for water from the Gardens catchment and provides aquatic habitats for biodiversity such as fishes and dragonflies.

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Gardens by the Bay - Sustainability Efforts

COMMONENERGY DATA MAPPER

CommONEnergy - Data Mapper

The European wholesale and retail sector is the big marketplace of Europe, contributing with around 11% of the EU's GDP. Therefore, sustainability of the retail sector may significantly contribute to reaching the long-term environmental and energy goals of the EU. Within the retail sector, shopping malls are of particular interest due to their structural complexity and multi-stakeholders decisional process, due to the high potential of energy savings and carbon emissions reduction, as well as due to their importance and influence in shopping tendencies and lifestyle.

More background information, data and the typical features of European shopping malls is available in the CommONEnergyReport Shopping malls features in EU-28 + Norway.

How to use

Navigate through data series on the top left menu and click data to be displayed.

To download/export map and graph data series, click on the "Excel" button.

To see the sources of the particular data series, click on the links below graph.

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CommONEnergy

THE NEW ERA OF SOLAR GLASS

Transparent Luminescent Solar Concentrator

A team of researchers at Michigan State University has developed a new type of solar concentrator that when placed over a window creates solar energy while allowing people to actually see through the window.

It is called a transparent luminescent solar concentrator and can be used on buildings, cell phones and any other device that has a clear surface.

And, according to Richard Lunt of MSU’s College of Engineering, the key word is “transparent.”

Research in the production of energy from solar cells placed around luminescent plastic-like materials is not new. These past efforts, however, have yielded poor results – the energy production was inefficient and the materials were highly colored.

“No one wants to sit behind colored glass,” said Lunt, an assistant professor of chemical engineering and materials science. “It makes for a very colorful environment, like working in a disco. We take an approach where we actually make the luminescent active layer itself transparent.”

The solar harvesting system uses small organic molecules developed by Lunt and his team to absorb specific nonvisible wavelengths of sunlight.

“We can tune these materials to pick up just the ultraviolet and the near infrared wavelengths that then ‘glow’ at another wavelength in the infrared,” he said.

The “glowing” infrared light is guided to the edge of the plastic where it is converted to electricity by thin strips of photovoltaic solar cells.

“Because the materials do not absorb or emit light in the visible spectrum, they look exceptionally transparent to the human eye,” Lunt said.

One of the benefits of this new development is its flexibility. While the technology is at an early stage, it has the potential to be scaled to commercial or industrial applications with an affordable cost.

“It opens a lot of area to deploy solar energy in a non-intrusive way,” Lunt said. “It can be used on tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device that demands high aesthetic quality like a phone or e-reader. Ultimately we want to make solar harvesting surfaces that you do not even know are there.”

Lunt said more work is needed in order to improve its energy-producing efficiency. Currently it is able to produce a solar conversion efficiency close to 1 percent, but noted they aim to reach efficiencies beyond 5 percent when fully optimized. The best colored LSC has an efficiency of around 7 percent.

The research was featured on the cover of a recent issue of the journal Advanced Optical Materials.

Other members of the research team include Yimu Zhao, an MSU doctoral student in chemical engineering and materials science; Benjamin Levine, assistant professor of chemistry; and Garrett Meek, doctoral student in chemistry.

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Michigan State University

http://msutoday.msu.edu/