Check out this pretty interesting concept for a sustainable house (powered by spinach, of all things) that I found on business2blog.com. The house is not only sustainable from the energy it produces from its spinach factory, it’s edible too.

Here’s a blurb about how the process works from the C2C site (sponsored the contest in which the spinach house won first place):

Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It is collected and returned. This design utilizes timeless passive solar strategies by shielding unwanted summer sun and absorbing heat from low winter sun through its thermal mass. Active solar collection provides the main source of necessary electrical energy. The core extends vertically, clad with a super-conductive photosynthetic plasma cell skin that is able to generate 200% more electrical voltage per area than contemporary photovoltaics. Building on current research involving extracted spinach protein, this living skin is photosynthetic and phototropic it grows and follows the path of the sun, generating electricity in excess of single family needs. Excess power is distributed to neighboring homes and street lighting infrastructure.

Pretty sweet stuff. Or bitter—I’ve never been a big fan of spinach, raw or cooked. But I might like it more if it were pumping clean juice into my appliances…

TAGS: Environment | Energy | Photosynthetic | Solar

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2005 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Books and Films, Interesting News, Social Enterprise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.