Dongtan Eco City, China

Dongtan Eco City, China

Imagine this...an entire city that produces zero-emissions; clean electricity, clean transportation, clean energy overall. If you wanted to drive to the city, you would have to leave your car at it's border to keep it "green".

I bring you Dongtan Eco City in China. One of four "green" cities being built in China. This is an 11,000 acre city estimated to hold 550,000 people. All the energy will be produced, most of the food will be grown on site, and water will be used from that area. The designers of the city are trying to pay close attention to how the city is being put together to ensure that no one in the city will have the desire to drive in the city. It will be built near the sea with a flood system in place of building a flood wall. Canals and terraces will be built to help prevent the flooding of the city if such an event were to occur (by design, the area near the water would be allowed to flood).

I wish we could jump on the green energy bandwagon...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.05/feat_popup.html

wow that looks good..i've been to hong kong and china in the summer of last year. it was cool and all the food u can eat

this has actually been the best news I've heard this week

I think they're trying to ease up on pollution as a whole. China is one of the worst polluters. The air quality is so bad people in the streets have to wear face masks. I'm not sure how this Eco City would affect the rest of China. Will the Eco City be pollution free while the other ordinary cities get dirtier? Its a step in the right direction but I find it ironic how China is trying to be 'green' after seriously polluting for so long now. I just hope that the rest of China follows including the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_of_China

As a side note, what do you guys think of nuclear power? France uses it and its clean almost limitless energy despite the cleanup process and containment of nuclear waste. It would surely reduce pollution drastically and slow down global warming before its too late.

I highly support nuclear power plants...and i'll leave it at that. As for the pollution in China, pointing China out from the whole world would be unfair. Every country that uses any form of carbon based fuel are just as guilty. No one can expect immediate results when the trend that you've been following has been the norm of your daily life for years and years. I wouldn't expect every car manufacturer to end the production of gasoline engines and replace them with electric or hydrogen powered cells tomorrow...So to at least build a city with zero emissions in mind is definitely a step in the right direction. Remember, Brazil was a planned city. Washington D.C. was a planned city....but they were both planned cities many years ago. Dongtan could be the benchmark for the future.

Since you can't drive there, so are you gonna ride cow in that city?

mag-lev transpo moving sidewalks? cows? donkeys? human drawn carriages?

Nuclear power is what you want to see it as. It's either a cleaner form of energy or a hazardous one. There are risks with coal plants too. It's just no one wants a nuclear reactor in their backyard. And as for wind energy, you would have to understand that wind energy does not generate enough energy to be an effective alternative on a grand scale. Plus, it takes a certain amount of land for just one turbine. Wind energy would only be enough to power a mid-sized city, considering you had like 100 of them for the city. And the myth that the higher the wind speed, the higher the energy output is partially true. But wind turbines shut down at a certain speed (usually somewhere around 40-50 mph) for safety reasons.

I'm very interested in hydrogen energy though. If the only emission would be water, then why not. But as with all new technologies, there also follows its problems. For example, Honda is testing out a hydrogen powered car in America. There is only one and Honda selected only one average American family to test drive it and use it daily to give them feedback. They find to be a great and extremely quite vehicle....but in order to refuel the cell, the car needed to go to its designated fuel station (which Honda had built for the family). This fuel station was about the size of your average gas station lot of land (inlcuding the parking lot). The way they drew energy to operate this station was by setting solar panels across the entire plot of land. This just took up too much room. In order to meet the demand of the American people, there would need to be solar panels to fill the state of Utah.

But like all things good, they can only become better. Hopefully America gets its game together and starts getting serious about green energy.

Being that Gore released the Inconvenient Truth film makes me believe that he would have taken measures to ensure we reduced pollution unlike Bush. Bush only cares about the stupid war on terrorism and oil, which is one of the main reasons of pollution.

Well I'm not saying that China is the only one gross polluter but its a notoriously known bad one. I mean its so bad that cancer and air quality is affecting the lives of the every day citizens. I don't see it like that here in the US or in Europe. China is still 20-30 years behind in pollution control. Even building these Eco Cities would not even out the amount of pollution they have caused in the past. The US has stricter pollution laws but it still needs a lot of improvement. Due to a lot of loopholes, companies are getting away with a lot of things. For example, the production of urban assault vehicles, aka the Hummer. Its an overweight piece of junk that has horrible mpg, is a road obstruction, slow, inefficient, and not to mention very heavy. How can we ease up our reliance on oil if we guzzle gas by the barrel? So its not just China, its everyones fault. In the end, its all up to the politicians all around the world. What the hell are they doing? Obviously being corrupt and lazy, thats what.

And since solar and wind power can't meet requirements for producing fuel grade hydrogen, they would have to use fossil fuels to produce it. Kind of ironic, huh? If it's down to that why not just use fossil fuels instead of using fuel to produce fuel. I know that research is being done to find a new 80%+ efficiency solar cell. If that is obtainable, then solar power will be our main source of energy. We'll just have to wait and see.

Asian countries have little to no emissions. It's not unusual to see octane ratings of 95 or even 100 at the gas station. I would expect any asian country to be polluted for those simple reasons along with some being just plain overpopulated and be demanding of energy. But they are just as "known" to cause pollution as any other country out there. They are not the worst either. At least they have forms of mass transit to keep people from driving. Other countries don't fair as well. Take a gander at this map showing air pollution (it should be noted that wind does play a factor in the location of these "hot spots"...that's why, for example, the Philippines isn't blotted out in red



As for the hydrogen cell, it's expensive because it's not as readily available in large quantities. It's still fairly new technology and time can only tell when this or something else may revolutionize the energy hungry world. We don't need to deplete the world of it's fossil fuels so we can destroy it. And the answer to our problems is not to drill in Alaska....or the Sakhalin Islands for that matter (which by the way, they say contains more oil within its soil than the Middle East). We've polluted the earth more in a century or two than the entire lifespan of the earth. Something definitely needs to be done. One of the things our family has done to help reduce our impact was replacing all our light bulbs in our house with those energy efficient flourescent bulbs. We also have solar powered sensor lights out front too.