EfficienCity is an interactive low-energy city
Greenpeace has launched a fun Sim City-type application on its website which aims to showcase how solutions to climate change can be applied to every British town.
Developed in collaboration with Biro Creative, "EfficienCity" is an interactive virtual city which boasts a wide range of renewable energy solutions that aren't coming from centralised sources.
You can click around the different zones of the town and visit various buildings to find out how they are replacing energy generated from fossil fuels with renewable solutions like wave, wind and tidal power, and how waste can be turned into energy through anaerobic digestion, biomass and combined heat and power (CHP) plants.
The site uses videos, animations, slideshows and sounds to guide the user through the low-energy town and demonstrates how the heating, cooling and electricity processes work.
It also offers real-life case studies of renewable technology in action. So we can visit the Scottish and Newcastle brewery in Manchester which has installed its own biomass CHP plant to run on spent grain. The brewery says this will reduce its carbon footprint by 25,000 tonnes a year - an 87% reduction in emissions from fossil fuels.
There's a leisure centre using photovoltaic cells and fuel cell CHP, based on Woking leisure centre in Surrey, a high street with solar power, based on Woking city centre, and Manchester City's football stadium, which is to be powered by a wind turbine.
Greenpeace is asking visitors to the virtual town to "reclaim the power" from central government and instead engage with their local councils, encouraging them to implement their own local energy schemes based on efficiency, renewables and combined heat and power.
Through interacting with virtual football stadiums, supermarkets, hospitals and breweries based on real world examples, visitors can see how their own communities can join the fight against climate change by generating their own energy, Greenpeace says.
Greenpeace says it developed the project in response to the official energy policy of the UK government, which currently favours large, centralised power generation and nuclear reactors as the solution to keeping the lights on and tackling climate change.
Greenpeace energy advisor, Darren Shirley, said: "With EfficienCity we're trying to demonstrate virtually how the real solutions to climate change can work in practice. We're hoping that visitors to the city will see that these technologies aren't science fiction - they're already available today.
"There's absolutely no reason why this kind of integrated, low-carbon system couldn't work in every town in Britain. That's why we want people to get active, contact their local politicians and demand real change."
So what renewable energy technology can you see in your village, town or city? Should we be investing more in renewables in the community?
