Bangkok 2053
Though the light bulb has evolved to glow brighter and consume less power, Bangkok just seems to ante up the consumption of electricity. Like many of its residents, Bangkok likes to gamble with its future. Screens, big and small are prevailing as the wallpaper of daily existence, and the window to reality. LED displays light up the shadow under bridges that takes traffic over intersections.
Our battle against the dark has never been more tremendous in number of street lights, and lit up signs. Bangkok, does not go dark at night. The grid feeds the screens, and fluorescent lamps, and air conditioners through endless miles of live wire. Sometimes, the countless wires wraps up the top of electrical poles like strangler figs that have suffocated its host.
The black wires lead to Bangkok’s life sources from around the country, and also to neighboring Laos. A Mr. Bruce Shoemaker, said, “the water levels of the dam and river is controlled by Bangkok residents turning on their air conditioning”. Like veins that feed electrical blood to the cities, the black wires lead back to black hearts.
These hearts are not of flesh, though. They are made of concrete and metal, and they don’t contract and relax. They burn and turn. Hearts of black coal, diesel, fuel oil, and gases once thought to be clean, and of life damming dams. As the population demand more and more electric juice, more and more black hearts are produced.
Co2 from fossil fuels, and now, as it turns out, methane from natural gas, all attack the fragile atmospheric balance. The city’s consumption burns, and turns the atmosphere into heat trappers! Storms will grow stronger, with waves hitting harder. Our idea of nature’s weather calendar will be much missed. The polar bears are witnessing the plight, they could swim, but can’t take flight, their food gets scarcer with less ice.
Whatever can we do? With many of the gentry of the “beautiful world” busy with fighting against corruption and fraying people who are cruel to cats and dogs, and the fact that the beautiful world people’s weapon of choice, the keyboard and screen, needs to be used in air-conditioned rooms, all seems to be doomed. Must there be a ban? Is making all Bangkokers use the fan, our only option?
Technology is actually coming up with a few more less dramatic ways of addressing the energy challenges we are facing, by building smarter cities.
The BBC wrote an interesting article presenting a smart city that doesn’t only uses renewable energy, but can create and store the energy within its infrastructure. Smart cement that stores energy from windows that generates electricity. Vertical axis wind turbines by the highways will be a great way to collect all that wind energy from the swooshing self-driving cars. And roads and streets with piezoelectric capacity can make any commute be more time worthy, “I’m out for a walk dear, the city could use the electricity”.
Potassium-geopolymetric (KGP) composites are cheaper than cement and can store electricity. This means buildings, bridges, and even lamp posts could store energy, and solve the problem of solar and wind energy’s high costs due to the need of batteries for storing the energy for use when there is no sunlight or wind.
Another novelty to help solve the city’s energy consumption conundrum is Perovskite, an alternative to silicon’s need of high temperatures for manufacturing, and opaque transparency. Perovskite can be used to make windows that generate electricity to add the efficacy of harnessing the Sun with just solar panels on the roof. Marketwatch gives a clear view about the availability solar windows:
“UbiquitousEnergy, the leader in transparent solar technology, is pleased to announce that it has been selected to receive a grant of $3 million from the California Energy Commission through the Bringing Rapid Innovation Development to Green Energy (BRIDGE)”
By 2050, scientists believe 2 out of 3 human beings will be urbanites. This means cities would have bloomed all over across various terrains. New cities that will be built readily endowed with renewable energy and storage technology probably have a lot to be optimistic about. But, what about the megacities now. The cities with haywired electrical wiring, and concrete made of dead mountains and relocated sand. Cities like Bangkok where there’s not much room to build electric-storing skyscrapers, highways, or bridges?
Don’t worry, for the future old-cities, there’s still gravity. Bangkok can simply store surplus energy harnessed from the solar panels and windows, and the piezoelectric pavements in energy-vault towers. According to Popularmechanics, the towers will hoist up heavy bricks made with non-degrading concrete with surplus energy, and control drop the bricks to turn electricity generating turbines when the energy is needed. Tata Power of India will be EnergyVault’s first customer, with plans to start control-dropping bricks by 2019. If the brick dropping tower is a little hard to picture, check out Energy Vault’s video here.
So, how do you imagine Bangkok in 2053? (2053 is just a random differentiation attempt by the way.)