Will bio-LEDs turn trees into illuminating street lights?

The search by scientists for new and greener lighting technology is continuing. After the invention of LEDs and OLEDs, there are now the bio-LEDs. This technology still is in its experimental phase, but it might be a future way of using trees as streets lights

The ZEDfactory

The ZEDfactory are the architects that designed BEDZED, the first and largest Zero Energy Development in the UK, built in 2002. Many more projects of low carbon architecture designed by them can be found on their site.

Energy online in real time

Several organisations and companies show the energy consumption and energy production of their building or of their products online in almost realtime.
Some nice examples:
- Live heatpump: a monitoring project of 6 houses in Belgium and The Netherlands, 5 of them equipped with an air-water heat pump and 1 with a gas fired condensing boiler. Of course, energy consumption not only depends on the heating system, but also on the insulation level, the occupants' behaviour, etc. And it is a project established by a heat pump producer. It would be nice to also have the real energy consumption figures, but it is already interesting that you can compare the houses on a yearly, monthly, weekly or daily basis.
- Adam Joseph Lewis Center: AJLC is an American academic demonstration building in Ohio that forms part of a larger initiative that aims to be a catalyst for ecological design. Their website is a Building Dashboard, showing quite some real time information on energy consumption, energy production, water consumption, geothermal and solar energy. If you search a little bit on the website, you find quite detailed information on end energy use, water use and others, also historic data. 

Ask Nature - the Biomimicry Design Portal

Ask Nature is a free, open source project of the Biomimicry Institute. It is established as an online inspiration source on biomimicry. You can find many cases, quite extensively explained.

Bio-inspired building designs

One of the most beautiful and intriguing buildings I saw at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai was the British pavilion, called the Seed Cathedral. Unfortunately it was closed the day I visited the expo.
Only now, after watching the TED talk of Thomas Heatherwick on 'Building the Seed Cathedral', I learnt to know that it was a bio-inspired building, capturing hundreds of seeds.

Some other very nice examples of bio-inspired design can be found in his TED talk (do not quit the talk on his rather funny first work he is showing at the beginning of his talk, because the most interesting examples come more at the end).

A building made of water: sensing and actuating architecture

As architect Carlo Ratti tells in his TED talk on 'Architecture that senses and responds' the physical world turned into a digital one during the last decade, but now the digital world is turning again into the physical one, as the omnipresent digital data can be used to create our physical environment. Many examples can be found on the website of his MIT SENSEable City Lab and in the TED talk.

Digital Water Pavilion, Zaragoza (source: Inhabitat)

One of the most beautiful examples of sensing and actuating architecture is the Digital Water Pavilion, built in Zaragoza. It really is a building made of water. How it works is shown in the TED talk. Wonderful to see how it even can disappear!

R2B2: kitchen appliances that do not need electricity

Christoph Thetard is a German designer who designed the R2B2. It is a set of 3 kitchen appliances which are powered by muscular strength.
On his website you also find the design of heatable outside furniture that does not produces CO2.

If you are interested in or want to contribute into making environmentally friendly household devices, take a look at http://www.areyouwheel.com/

A world on 100% renewable energy possible by 2050?

Ecofys together with WWF made a well founded study on how the world in the coming 40 years can shift to renewable energy only. All figures and details on their assumptions can be found in The Energy Report (Dutch version) (English version)

Climate Action Tracker

Source: Climate Action Tracker

If you are interested to know which impact our current efforts concerning GHG emission reduction will have on the global temperature rise, have a look at the Climate Action Tracker, developed by Ecofys.
You also find detailed information there on individual countries and how well they are on track.