Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) is a Danish company that is working on creating a floating neighborhood in Gothenburg, Sweden, called Living Tomorrow Sweden. BIG has been building student housing in inner city areas for many years, and for this project hit upon the idea of placing housing on barges in the river that runs through Gothenburg. One of the key factors for this project, explains BIGs Jakob Lange, was to use shipping containers, thus enabling owners to ship these homes easily around the world. The containers can be configured together in groups of nine homes urban riggers boasting internal courtyard views and interconnected communities, right there on the water.
Each rigger can be clustered to create larger communities. As harbors across Europe and elsewhere become abandoned or fall out of favor, new uses for this space are being explored. Residential dwellings have long been seen as a desirable option, and BIG wanted to take the concept further building not just student accommodation, but homes that were zero energy, made from upcycled materials and embraced the opportunities offered by new renewable energy technologies such as solar PV panels.
The riggers produce more energy than they consume. The homes are well insulated and made from upcycled shipping containers a production process that uses one-twentieth of the energy typically required to construct a similar dwelling.
The Gothenburg project will have a green garden route and also allow inhabitants to enjoy the space fully including sailing and swimming in the water, maximizing the views offered by the harbor, and developing an interconnected energy system whereby each urban rigger can feed or draw energy from their neighbours. Shipping of a prototype urban riggers has already begun, Lange said.
Click to vote and win an iphone 6
(Once you are confident you can correctly answer one of the four questions posed)
Candidate 1, maxx-Solar:
What does the school earn with the rented PV installation if the self consumtion rate is 90%?
(400, 800 or 1200 Euro)
Candidate 2, BIG:
How many containers are required to build an urban rigger?
(3, 6 or 9)
Candidate 3, Solartechnik Mitteldeutschland:
How much do the inhabitants of the 16 houses save thanks to the almost-autonomous mini smart grid?
(5% energy costs, 10% energy costs or 15% energy costs)
Candidate 4, Intellisol:
What percentage of the dealerships energy use is covered by the Intellisol PV installation?
(70%, 85% or 100%)
If you haven't yet voted to decide who should win the award, you still can do so here.
Voting is open until Friday evening, July 8.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
This website uses cookies to anonymously count visitor numbers. View our privacy policy.
The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.