If you never heard of Sanitov Studios, well, it's about time. They are a design team, a think tank actually, their goal is to develop urban designs which are sustainable in the present market/grim economy prospects to be more precise.
They had a lot of ideas until now, the last one is really something else : how to make a property in London affordable to the average Joe.
Since the demand for properties in the London area exceeds the construction number of new ones, the Sanitov Studios observed that the huge increase in house prices and the increasingly crowded property market are not cool anymore, at least for their taste.
The brilliant idea was to exploit an area never used before, that is the river Thames, since a 3 bedroom house in the current real estate market costs about 227 000 pounds and a houseboat goes anywhere between 60 000 and 100 000 pounds, they concluded that by building sustainable water-houses will be in the future a normal feature for the urban lifestyle, at least in cities like London.
You must realize that a house-boat is an off grid device so you need to develop a sustainable form of energy generation for such a home. The residents must be responsible people, capable of a sustainable life style, in terms of energy consumption. So, the Sanitov Studios came with "The Ark", a biblical name with a biblical nature, i.e. an autonomous house boat in terms of energy production and self sustaining, the perfect gizmo for the crowded urban developments.
Solar photo voltaic technology is nothing new for the house boat community, they used it for a while and it proved efficient and reliable in the long germ, so "The Ark" project, after a technical survey, decided to use for powering their baby a 2kWP solar array located on the upper deck, the project was developed in partnership with Enviko, a well known player in the solar energy market in the UK.
Based upon estimates from Enviko, the solar powered boat will produce 1,716kWh a year and will offset 1T of CO2/year, also, while a normal on-grid powered house consumes an average of 3,300kWh of electricity a year, "The Ark" will settle for ~1,000kWh annually.
You must realize that designing a photo voltaic farm for a house boat presents some significant problems, normally the solar panels face South for an optimum angle to generate peak electricity but on a boat that is moving, Houston, we have a problem.
So, Enviko decided to use Panasonic’s HIT range of modules which incorporates a mono thin crystalline silicon wafer surrounded by ultra-thin amorphous silicon layers – effectively boosting the solar module’s low-light performance.
Finally, "The Ark" prototype was ready to go, one of the first if not the first mission of the solar powered gizmo was to house a few members of the Danish Olympic team during the Olympics, hosted in the city of London, as you must know if you're from our planet.
London has became a pioneer of the brave new solar powered world, with projects such as Blackfriars Bridge and the BIPV installation at King’s Cross, now with "The Ark" let's hope that the future of green energy in the UK is brighter than ever.
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