“Honey, Our Power Station is Home!”

Buildings will be their own power stations in the future. The Active Classroom, now operating for 6 months in Swansea (England), is the United Kingdom’s first energy positive classroom that might model future homes. Housing units would feature solar roofs, shared battery storage and electrical vehicle charging. Water is heated through a solar heat collector and waste heat is captured and recycled in the building.

Homes that are designed to generate, store and release their own solar energy would cut energy bills by more than 60%, saving the average household over $800/year. If 1 million of these homes are built, peak generating capacity falls by 3 gigawatts - the size of a large central power station - and reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 80 million tones over 40 years. 

And there could not be a better time to start with solar panels. New solar PV capacity grew by 50 percent in 2016, with China accounting for about half of the global expansion. By 2022, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that total global solar PV capacity will exceed the current combined total power capacities of India and Japan. The expect renewables to grow by 1,000 GW by 2022, which equals about half of the current global capacity in coal power, which took 80 years to build. While coal remains the largest source of electricity generation in 2022, renewables are expected to close the generation gap with coal by half by then.

However, cleantech innovations only become practical, intelligent solutions when they are combined and integrated. Tesla, for instance, has already made steps towards this all in one solution for homes. After acquiring Solar City, Telsa customers can now generate energy from their roofs, charge their cars, and store what remains in a home battery pack. Saving the planet becomes a lot more popular when it’s cheaper and easier than an existing alternative. 

Sources

http://www.specific.eu.com/assets/downloads/Indicative_Energy_and_CO2_Savings_of_Buildings_as_Power_Stations_Homes.pdf
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2017/10/three-countries-to-account-for-two-thirds-of-global-renewables-growth-by-2022.html
https://electrek.co/2016/09/23/tesla-integration-home-charging-station-energy-storage-solar-roof-change-everything/