100,000 Cars Running on Windpower in 2013

The world's first offshore wind farm, at the head of Copenhagen harbour.
Denmark has long been a world-leader in wind energy and now the country will act as a laboratory for the development of infrastructure for electric cars, using wind power to charge the new vehicles.

The main reason is that in five years Denmark will have wind turbine capacity enough for 1 million homes. This goal will be reached when the world's largest offshore wind turbine farm opens in 2012, between Anholt and Djursland.

The offshore farm will look like this new one off the coast of Copenhagen.
The colossal amounts of energy generated will also be used to power cars, in order to exploit the wind energy as best possible. The energy generated at night, when usage is low, will be used to charge the cars for use the next day.

The island of Bornholm will be the first test area and Peder Andersen of Energinet.dk believes there will be 100,000 electric cars in Denmark in five years.

It will be considerably cheaper to own an electric car. Among the test cars is an electric version of the Renault Megane with a top speed of 160 km/h. It will cost about 2 kroner for 8-10 km of driving. That's a third of the price for petrol [gas].

The first cars will be presented at the Global Climate Conference in 2009. A number of energy players are involved in the project, including Danish Oil & Natural Gas, Ens.dk and energinet.dk.

Not saying it's a good thing, more cars. Just reporting it.

7550 New Bike Parking Spots at Copenhagen Central Station

For all of Copenhagen's badassness as a bicycle city, there remains one thing that the City still completely sucks at. Bicycle parking at train stations. At Copenhagen Central Station there are only about 1000 bike parking spots. Danish State Railways can't even tell us how many spots they have. They're not sure. Even in Basel they have 800+. In Antwerp they have this . Don't even get me started on the Dutch. 12,500 bike parking spots are on the way in some place called Utrecht . Amsterdam has a multi-story bike parking facility, floating bicycle barges round the back and are planning 7000 more spots underwater . Even at the nation's busiest train station, Nørreport, the recent and fancy redesign failed miserably in providing parking that is adequate for the demand . Architects once again failing to respond to actual urban needs. It is time to remedy that. Here is my design for 7550 bike parking spots behind Copenhagen Central Station. Steve C. Montebello i...

The New Question for 21st Century Cities

It's all so simple if we want it to be. For almost a century we have been asking the same question in our cities. "How many cars can we move down a street?" It's time to change the question. If you ask "How many PEOPLE can we move down a street?", the answer becomes much more modern and visionary. And simple. Oh, and cheaper. Let alone the fact that the model at the top can move 10 times more people down a street than the model at the bottom. When I travel with my Bicycle Urbanism by Design keynote , I often step on the toes of traffic engineers all around the world. Not all of them, however. I am always approached by engineers who are grateful that someone is questioning the unchanged nature of traffic engineering and the unmerited emphasis placed on it. I find it brilliant that individual traffic engineers in six different nations have all said the same thing to me: "We're problem solvers. But we're only ever asked to solve the sam...

Desire Line Analysis in Copenhagen's City Centre

Continuing in our series of Desire Line Analyses, we decided to cast our critical and curious eyes on yet another Copenhagen intersection, this time where Bremerholm meets Holmens Kanal. We decided to be more specific and focus on one part of the intersection - a location that we know well and one with a specific congestion problem in rush hour. We filmed for one hour from 08:15-09:15. Behaviour vs Design With the massive numbers of bicycle users in the mornings in Copenhagen, bottlenecks occur at a number of locations, particularly where many bicycle users need to turn left. This is something that all of us at the company experience each morning so we decided to study it. It was a November morning and it was party-cloudly, dry and 6 degrees C. The focus was to determine how bicycle users react to the sub-standard design of this location. How they react to having to battle with motorised traffic - something that is unusual in the city. Yep, even in Copenhagen, The Arroganc...

The Life-Sized City Blog

Search This Blog