Brilio.net/en - A small village named Freiburg will never pay for a single electricity bill ever again, thanks to Rolf Disch. The German architect built a building named Heliotrope to capture solar energy to power itself, but his creation far exceeded the initial energy production and actually garnered five times more than it uses. This means that Disch has only set his goals higher.
Soon after a 125-meter block of residential, retail and commercial area was built with the same system as his Heliotrope. He named the new constructions he privately funded between the Upper Rhine and the Black Forest as Sonnenschiff (Solar Ship), and it was energy net-positive in 2004. The good thing about the location is that it is in the sun belt of the country in Southern Germany, so they have plenty of sunlight with approximately 1800 hours of sunshine per year. The area is therefore known as German Tuscany.
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Image via ewao
In the following 10 years another 60 residential buildings Energy-Surplus-Houses were built around Sonnenschiff and named as Solarsiedlung am Schlierberg (Solar Estate of Schlierberg.) They are all have the energy positive electrical system that produce four times more energy than it consumes and has become the largest solar research center in Europe. The houses are two and three stories high, while the Sonnenschiff has four to five levels. Thus the Sonnenschiff also functions as fortress that hides the community from the traffic on Merzhauser Strae.
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Today, the village that inhabits 204,000 citizens has become the economic and cultural centre of the region. It is the only major city in Baden-Wrttemberg with a consistently rising number of inhabitants and is well known for its many efforts to protect and preserve natural resources and the environment. Freiburg received several environmental prizes, such as "Ecological Capital of Germany in 1992 and Sustainable City in 2004, besides winning the National Solar League for several times.
Let us hope that more solar-based constructions like these will be built in our communitiesespecially in the tropical countriesso we can all be freed from electricity bills too!
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