This waste wood power plant in Austria is another project in cooperation with our partner firm e-f-p in Innsbruck. While power plants may not be our typical type of project, we are happy to contribute to projects that focus on a sustainable production of energy. These small local plants are community operated and highly efficient.
A waste wood power plant requires a series of sheds that are defined in size by the mechanical engineers. Together with a tight budget, there is usually little room for flexibility in architecture. The specific site features a small hill which was expected to be removed to make space for the required sheds. However, we discovered that the cost of burying the plant in the hill was completely offset by the savings of not hauling the hill away.
Sustainable solutions do not need to be expensive, high-tech and complicated, but often simple and obvious. Burying the plant has a number of advantages in regard to sustainability: less impervious surfaces, no heat-island effect, less dirt-hauling CO2 emmissions, less disruption to habitat and many more.
The project remains unbuilt because final calculations showed the areas energy needs are lower than expected and too low to sustain the plant at this time. While it is disappointing to see a project postponed, as a green design firm we are happy that it was because of lower than expected energy use.