Hamburg: A new apartment complex here generates heat, as well as revenue, from growing the micro-organism. The five-story Bio Intelligent Quotient has a high-tech facade that looks like a cross between a Mondrian painting and a terrarium but is actually a vertical algae farm.
The designers of the B.I.Q. building, which relies entirely on renewable energy, promise that their pioneering energy system will harvest fast-growing algae to create biofuel, produce heat, shade the building, abate street noise and make history.
Lukas Verlage, managing director of the Colt Group, part of the high-powered consortium that constructed the energy system, said in an e-mail that the building was “an outstanding and important development in the use of renewable resources in building technology,” comparable to advances in the space programme.
And Rainer Müller, press officer of the International Building Exhibition, which introduced a competition in 2009 that led to the creation of the B.I.Q. house, said, “Using algae as an in-house energy source might sound futuristic now, but probably will be established in 10 years.”
The competition, won by a consortium including the Colt Group, asked entrants to use smart materials, defined as “systems and products that behave dynamically, unlike conventional building materials, which are static.”
The $6.58 million building’s multifunctional facade is a world away from aluminum siding. Mounted on the southwest and southeast sides of the building are 129 bioreactors, flat glass panels on exterior louvers that serve as an environment for the algae to flourish.
Jan Wurm, one of the chief designers of the energy system and associate director of Arup, an engineering firm in the winning consortium, describes bioreactors on a Web site, smartgeometry.org, as “transparent containers which create a controlled environment for photosynthesis.”
The algae are fed liquid nutrients and carbon dioxide to spur growth. Pressurised air is pumped into the panels to further increase growth and prevent the micro-organisms from settling down and causing rot, said Wurm. He notes that scrubbers in the panels automatically keep the glass clean. The panels double as solar thermal collectors to convert sunlight into usable energy.
“The part of the light which is not absorbed by the algae for the photosynthesis is converted into heat,” said Wurm, and can be used immediately for hot water or stored in the building’s underground geothermal system.
Periodically, the algae will be collected and stockpiled in tanks in the building. A local energy company then will buy the harvest and transport the biomass to a nearby heat and power plant, where it will undergo fermentation. The process produces methane gas to generate electricity. “The generated power would be carbon-neutral,” said Wurm, who foresees buildings larger than the 15-unit Hamburg structure including on-site power plants.
But whether a building with algae bioreactors is the start of something big or amounts to a one-of-a-kind experiment generates plenty of debate. Wurm, who reports that his company is negotiating with an automobile manufacturer (he won’t say which one) to retrofit a plant with algae power, acknowledges that the nascent technology costs more than solar or conventional fuel systems. “In terms of investment costs you can’t compare it to established, mass produced systems on the market,” he said.
