Sunday, March 10, 2013
World Expo’s Legacy for More Sustainable Cities
by David B. Sutton, Ph.D.
Abstract:
The World Expo 2010 represented a unprecedented educational opportunity. Over 150 countries and 50 International organizations shared scientific and technological innovations and their experiences of urban development. The many diverse eco-city innovations showcased at the Expo and in and around Shanghai represented a unique opportunity to educate the public about what can be done to reduce the environmental impact of our development and make it more sustainable. Part I, appearing in the past four issues of Eco Nomy (Spring, Summer, Autumn, 2011 and Winter, 2012) discussed the massive environmental efforts that Shanghai underwent in preparations of this World event. Part II, to appear in this and the next several issues, will explore notable examples of sustainable design and practice demonstrated at the Expo Park itself during the event.
PART II
In Part I, we explored how the 2010 Expo accelerated Shanghai’s long term efforts in making itself a more sustainable city and provided additional momentum to strengthen its various environmental initiatives. Here, we will continue to explore the many unextolled virtues occurring at the Expo Park itself.
“A City within a City”
Shanghai, as discussed in our past four issues, took the opportunity of preparing for Expo 2010 to improve its municipal infrastructure, tighten pollution controls and advance its environmental initiatives. Extending the municipality’s efforts in environmental protection, the organizers of the Expo conducted extensive study and developed a comprehensive model of sustainable cities from which to plan and design the Expo Park (1). Using an integrative model focusing on energy, transportation, water and waste management systems, they set about developing the infrastructure for a “City within a City” on the Expo site.
This article will report on those elements of a sustainable city’s infrastructure developed for the World Expo’s Park, subsequent articles will report on what various countries and companies brought to their respective exhibits and pavillions and finally on the most informative fully integrated sustainable building demonstrations occuring in the Expo’s Urban Best Practices Area.
Brownfield Redevelopment
In choosing and planning the site for the Expo 2010, the Shanghai municipal government worked on the concept of harmonious city development, searching for a site that represented harmony between humans and nature, history and the future. The Expo site, after rounds of discussions and comparative studies, was chosen to be alongside the Huangpu River, covering a land area of 5.28 square km. After decades of industrial development, the site was crammed with shabby dwellings, factories, docks and warehouses. The 272 factories in the area, mostly outdated and heavily polluting, were a mosaic of power plants, steel refineries, chemical industries, mechanical workshops and shipping manufacturers.
The site construction was therefore also a massive urban renewal project for the area. Residents were compensated and relocated. Factories were either closed down or relocated with upgrades. The Expo site involved large scale construction and re-construction. The designs of all the permanent buildings followed state-of-the-art green architecture standards, incorporating best practices for energy efficiency, water conservation and environment-friendly building materials. The area was fundamentally transformed to meet with updated socio-economic functions and environmental requirements. For example, The Expo Center was one of the first buildings in the country awarded with the premier “Three-star Green Building Certificate” in China, and has applied for the gold standard in the American LEED system. This transformation in itself is a precise expression of the Expo theme “Better City, Better Life”.
ENERGY IN THE EXPO PARK
Smart power grids technologies
The smart power grid in the Expo Park is the first demonstration project of this field in China (2). It included nine subsidiaries such as: new renewable energy accessing (Eastsea Bridge offshore wind power field, Chongming solar photovoltaics and Expo Pavilion solar photovoltaics ), energy storage systems, smart transformer substations, distribution automation, TCM, quality examination of electric power, collection of electric usage information, smart electric building and housing, charge and discharge and access of electric cars into the network.
The project has set many records including the largest capacity for a single battery in the world — 650Ah sodium-sulphur battery; the first charge and discharge station for electric cars in China; the first set of TCM systems in the Chinese electric power sector; Eastsea wind power field(100 MW) is the first grid-connected offshore wind power project in Asia; the photovoltaic power station (1MW) in Qianwei village in Chongming Island is the first demonstration project of photovoltaic support for the Internet in China.
The Expo smart grid covers nine demonstration projects and four exhibition projects. The demonstration projects were integrated into the smart power grid in the Expo Park while the exhibition projects enabled visitors to take a close look at and learn more about smart power grids. In the State Grid Pavilion, for instance, visitors could see a 110-kilovolt transformer substation running through glass windows. As the first smart transformer substation serving the Expo, it was called the “the center of power” of the Puxi Expo site. State-of-the-art digitization and intelligentization was employed to realize flow of information, collection, transmission, processing and output.
Non-electric air-conditioning technologies
Broad Air Conditioning was a global partner of Expo 2010 and it built and maintained 22 power stations containing a total of 44 decentralized gas-powered air conditioners. These lithium bromide absoption refrigeration units supplied the majority of the Expo’s Pavilions.
Broad is an advocate of non-electric air conditioning, which generates cool air from heat directly, without the inefficient energy conversion process of traditional air conditioners (3). Compared to conventional air conditioners, these non-electric models are more compact in size, more energy efficient, and served to relieve peak electricity consumption in the summer heat.
BROAD’s super efficient non-electric air-conditioning made a significant contribution to the low carbon goals of the World Expo, saving a total of 73,000 tons of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of planting 4 million trees.
I will be reporting more on BROAD in subsequent issues because I believe that its Pavillion and activities represent the the best the Expo had to offer in sustainable design, technics and application, as well as public information programs informing the Expo visitor and world at large. ( )
Solar Energy
Solar energy was used extensively throughout the Expo site. A total of 4.68 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels was installed on the roofs and glass walls of the Theme Pavilion, the China National Pavilion, the Expo Center and at the Nanshi power plant, as well as in some of the participating countries’ pavilions. This installed capacity was integrated with Shanghai’s major power grid.
Arrays of building-integrated photovoltaic cells, BIPV (4) generated electricity with sizeable installed capacity in the China Pavilion (0.3 MW), the Theme Pavilion (2.83 MW) and the Expo Center (1 MW).
Theme Pavilion had a total installed capacity of about 2.825 megawatt with an area of 30,000 square meters of solar panels, which was projected to generate 2.5 million kilowatt-hours’ electricity per year (5). It is currently the largest single building integrated with photovoltaics in China.
China’s National Pavilion was equipped with 1264 solar energy panels (each having an area of 1.3 square meters) was expected to generate 300 kilowatts of electricity per hour on sunny days.
Solar-powered street lamps, lawn lamps, and other lighting using battery storage as well as solar thermal heating systems were also widely used in the Expo site.
The old coal-fired station, Nanshi Power Plant, inside the Expo site was transformed into a renewable energy exhibition center installed with 0.5 MW solar PV panels. Its smoke stack was symbolically remade into the Harmony Tower, pointing to the need for human beings to live harmoniously with nature.
Ground-source or water-source heat pump technologies
Innovative technology using ground- and water-source heat-pumps was also demonstrated. Water-source and ground-thermal heat pumps were widely used on the site to provide air conditioning for the Expo Axis and its Underground Complex, the Performance Center, the Expo Centre and the Best Urban Practice Area. Taking advantage of the riverside location of the site, water-source heat pumps could provide cooling in summer and warming in winter for the buildings.
For example, there are seven ground-source heat pumps with underground pipelines and 8 water-source heat pumps spread throughout The Expo Axis. In the Expo Center there are 3 water-source heat pumps, 2 double duty screw ice cold storage units and 2 gas-fired hot-water boilers. At the Expo Cultural Center there are 2 water-source heat pumps, 3 water-source double duty centrifugal ice cold storage units and 3 gas-fired hot-water boilers. The China Pavilion has 3 third-level centrifugal water chilling units, 3 double duty third-level centrifugal ice cold storage units and 3 gas fired hot-water boilers.
Ice cold storage technologies
An interesting area of innovation was the use of ice cold storage technologies. Ice cold storage air-conditioning technology uses low-price electricity to produce ice and store cold when it is low electricity usage period at night; when it is peak time for electricity use at the daytime, it melts ice and supplies cold with the refrigerating sets.
The Expo Axis and four major pavilions all adopt the ice cold storage air-conditioning technology. China Pavilion uses 6 highly effective host machines, including 3,830-standard ton double duty units and 3,800-standard ton units. There is a huge ice storage pool beneath China Pavilion. When it’s low electricity usage period at night, the refrigerating units produce ice. When it’s daytime, the cold water from the melting ice would cool the pavilion. The Expo Cultural Center is equipped with 3,650-standard ton double duty units, 2,650-standard ton water-source heat pump units. In the Theme Pavilion there are 3 water-cooling frequency-converting centrifugal water chilling units and 8 air-source screw heat pump units.
It was expected that by using ice cold storage and water-source heat pump, energy consumption could be reduced by 15% -18% compared with using traditional air-conditioning systems.
New light source LED technologies
Green lighting was applied en mass in the Expo site. Light-emitting diode (LED) was the main technology used for indoor and outdoor illumination, especially for landscape and nocturnal lightings. It is estimated that 1030 million LED chips are used in the Expo park, specifically in the lighting facilities both indoors and outdoors, adornment of the landscape, indication board and information display screen, which makes the Expo site become the most focused demonstration area of semiconductor lighting.
Not only the landscape lighting of the Expo Axis, four major pavilions and Urban Best Practice Area entirely adopted LED, LED display screens whose total value are up to more than 1 billion yuan were also used to play various video information. Compared to conventional incandescent light-bulbs, LED lights were expected to result in an 80 per cent energy saving and are much more durable and colourful.
Among the indoor lighting sources of Expo pavilions, 80% of them adopted LED green light source, saving up to about 90% of electricity compared to ordinary incandescent lamps.
Transportation
To accommodate the over 70 million visitors to the Expo, clean energy vehicles were provided to ensure that all public transportation inside the Expo 2010 site was zero emission. The Expo experienced 400,000 to 700,000 visitors a day. A new rapid transit line (Number 13) was built. The Metro line 13 served the Expo Park with stations on both sides of the river. Admission was free with Expo ticket and service handled 50% of the visitor traffic.
In addition, four bus lines and five ferry lines were in operation for the Expo, taking care of about 35 per cent and 10 per cent of the visitors, respectively.
With the support of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Shanghai organized the car services and bus routes inside the Park with new clean energy zero-emission vehicles, including 270 all-electric coaches and buses, 36 supercapacitor vehicles, and close to 200 hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (6). There will also be 500 hybrid-electric cars and coaches bringing visitors to the Expo.
Water Management
Water-saving facilities were widely applied throughout the Expo site, especially those for sanitary and irrigation purposes. Permeable materials were used extensively for pavements to prevent stormwater runoff and their resulting pollution.
All the major permanent new buildings in the site, including the Expo Center, the Performance Centre, the Theme Pavilions, the China National Pavilion and the Expo Axis were equipped with building-integrated rainwater collection and reuse systems. Processed rainwater was used in the site for general domestic use, saving approximately one million cubic metres of water.
The advanced rainwater recycling technologies were applied and successful cases of biochemical sewage treatment and advanced water treatment were shown in various country Pavillions. Many advanced technologies such as membrane filtration technology, ultra-filtration membrane bioreactor, activated carbon absorption, disinfection by ultraviolet light etc. explained and sometimes demonstrated.
Ecological Water Treatment : Wetlands
The Expo site will have a total of 1 million square metres of green coverage. Three parks, namely the Houtan Park (14 hectares), the Expo Garden (23 hectares) and the Bailianjing Park (12 hectares), and other smaller green spaces and corridors were developed for the Site. Based on ecologically informed designs and new technologies, they were developed to be provide recreational, landscaping and ecological functions for the Expo and the city at large.
One of the most sterling examples was the reconstruction of the wetland of Houtan Park, a 14-hectare greenland in Zone C of the Expo Pudong site, it is a brilliant example of urban reclamation and the strengthening of the area’s ecological capacity for purifying the water in the Huangpu River — of a reclaimed industrial brownfield transformed into “green lungs” that purify air, water and the frazzled urban spirit – one of the World Expo’s success stories representing the turnaround of destructive urbanization.
The polluted area was previously used as a steel factory, wharf and shipyard. A few buildings have been retained and incorporated into the educational design. The award-winning ecological park was designed by Harvard-educated Professor Yu Kongjian from the urban planning department of Peking University.
Every day its layers of soil, rock, sand and terraces filters 2,400 cubic meters of river water making it suitable for use around the Expo site. Each day it was projected to save US$500,000 in treatment of polluted water.
The scenic area features wild grasses, native plants, trees and crops, many of them blooming. There are green terraces, waterways, a 2-meter-high waterfall, winding paths and appealing views of the skyline.
As the initial planning document states, “Houtan Park is a regenerative living landscape on Shanghai’s Huangpu River riverfront. The constructed wetland, ecological flood control, reclaimed industrial structures and materials, and urban agriculture are integral components of an overall restorative design strategy to treat polluted river water and recover the degraded waterfront in an aesthetically pleasing way.”
Aspects of Shanghai’s industrial past remain. A shipyard wall has become a hanging garden of trailing plants. Nearby is a cafe and visitors can savor the scenery and enjoy performances.
A floating garden wharf replaces an old wharf and is covered with plants and flowers.
It accommodated Expo visitors wending their way through the tall high grasses. It is a wonderful demonstration of green technologies and pollutant filtering systems, if only those enjoying it knew. But any discussion or description for the visitor was not to be found.
Waste Management
Shanghai was committed to achieving a 100 per cent collection rate for construction and domestic solid waste generated inside the Expo Park. It had promised 50 per cent reuse rate of the waste. Wastes were sorted, classified, and then transferred to the municipal network of treatment facilities for utilization or safe disposal.
An advanced enclosed aero-dynamic waste collection and transfer system was constructed underground in the Expo Park. The advanced foreign pneumatic conveying technologies were introduced and applied in large pavilions and municipal roads in the main area of Expo axis and four major pavilions in Pudong. It is a totally enclosed garbage pneumatic conveying system; the whole garbage collecting process is preset by computer programs and needs no manual operation, which ensures that there is no odor and extravasation of garbage treatment.
There were also other demonstrations of waste management throughout the park. In Switzerland’s Basel, Geneva and Zurich joint case pavilion, the classification of garbage was very specific. For example, bottles are separated into brown bottles, green ones and bottles with no color etc., which is beneficial to the recycle and treatment of garbage.
Porto Alegre city case pavilion showed an innovative way of turning garbage into something useful: exacting fiber from PET bottles and using the fiber to make bedspreads, pillows etc, which also provides income and job opportunities.
The exhibited programme of Cairo Pavilion told how their people turned a 80-acre landfill on the eastern border of the ancient city into a park in 1980s.
Taipei Case Pavilion demonstrated that by classifying and reusing garbage, not only the total amount of garbage can be decreased, zero-dumping can also be realized.
Expo Axis
The core area of the Expo was composed of the four pavilions along the central axis: the Expo Center, the Performance Centre, the Theme Pavilions, the China National Pavilion and the Expo Axis. These buildings were designed with many best available practices and technologies, and adopted certain cutting edge applications.
The Expo Axis is a large, integrated commercial and traffic complex providing commercial, catering, entertainment, and exhibition services. During the Expo, it was the main entrance to the Expo site and connects with four major pavilions through the elevated platform and underground passages. It also connects to the elevated pedestrians’ walk that runs across the Pudong section of the Expo site, and guides visitors to different pavilions.
The Expo Axis is about 1,000 meters long and 110 meters wide with a total construction area of nearly 250,000 square meters. Its new architecture style of semi-opened structure has two layers underground and two layers aboveground. The roof design uses giant light cable-membrane structure, like white clouds floating in the blue sky.
In the whole structure, the 6 cone-shaped giant “Sun Valleys” constitute the most striking feature. The “Sun Valleys”, as the name suggests, are where the sunshine is collected.
The Sun Valleys [bad link http://en.expo2010.cn/a/20090514/000002.htm] will serve as hubs for the event and will cover the Expo Boulevard, a multilevel 1 km walkway that is the largest piece of real estate for the festival. Each of the six cone-shaped valleys stands 40 meters tall, and is constructed from steel and plastic. The sun valleys funneled daylight to the levels below, and were used to collect rainwater, which was then filtered and used throughout the grounds for irrigation purposes. The giant membranes shaded the walkway below to help moderate the temperature for visitors.
The unique profiles of “Sun Valleys” help to disperse sunshine and air into the underground, not only improving air quality, but also saving energy consumed by the artificial lighting. During the Expo, the “Sun Valleys” were decorated with colorful plants, becoming an attractive ”underground garden” where many visitors lingered in the cooling comfort.
Under the giant public walkways lie 700-kilometer long pipelines for the ground source heat pump system used for the natural cooling effect. Water from the Huangpu River was also introduced to regulate indoor temperature.
Post- Expo Utilization of Facilities
The Expo site involved a lot of renovation and new construction. The post-Expo utilization of these buildings and facilities is crucial to minimizing the environmental impacts of the event.
After the Expo, the site itself was to be turned into an area of modern service industries, meeting the needs of exhibitions and conferences, businesses, tourism, recreation, and accommodation. Old buildings were to continue to be preserved while new buildings would be utilized. For example:
The China National Pavilion and the Theme Pavilion were turned into conference and exhibition centers; The Expo Centre was turned into an international conference facility equipped with a media centre and banquet halls; The Performance Centre will continue to be a major venue for arts and cultural performances; The World Expo Axis in Pudong will be preserved and further developed for leisure and commercial purposes.
Several of installations, such as The Hamburg House, the Shanghai Eco-House and the ZED House in the Urban Best Practices Area will also remain as on-going educational examples of sustainable design and practice.
Most of the green spaces in the Expo site, including those along rivers, as well as all underground municipal facilities including sewers and cables have been kept after the event for future utilization. Transport infrastructure such as subway systems and roads have been sustained. For the temporary structures, reusable materials were constructed to enable future dismantling and re-assembling. Steel used for elevated walkways and electrical motors for temporary buildings were to be recycled and reused.
Conclusion: Recurring Theme
It has become a recurring theme in my writing on the preparation and conduct of Shanghai’s World Expo that there has been a significant lack of real substantive reporting on technological innovations occurring at the World event. Once again I must comment on the lost opportunity to educate the visiting public on the hidden gems of sustainable practice buried in the grand spectacle.
I have commented above on the masterful reconstruction of the Houtan Wetland and on the valuable ecological services that it provides. The award-winning work right on the edge of the Expo site along the Huangpu River waterfront, reclaimed from polluted ship building and steel industry sites, is a major example of environmental cleanup. Yet, there was no public information available at the time of the 70 million visitors and as far as I know there is none available today.
The brownfield remediation of the Expo site itself represents many important remediation principles yet was virtually invisible and left unknown to the public.
These examples represent a clear failure of the public information and education function — a lost opportunity of incalculable value.
One notable public education program, other than those superb examples occurring in various country pavillions that I will report on in subsequent issues, that I can note is the on-line calculator that was at: www.cleanair.net.cn [bad link]. The visitors could select their points of departure, means of transport and get an idea of how much CO2 they release on their journey to Shanghai. There were versions in 7 languages, including English and French.
Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing how many of the other wonderful things occurring at the Expo were never reported on, discussed, made clear and visible to the visting public.
I venture to say that most of the visitors concluded their Expo experience with little or no appreciation for the wonderful elements of sustainable city infrastructure created for the “city within a city” that was the Expo Park for Shanghai’s World Expo 2010.
Notes:
(1) “Sustainable Planning & Design for the World Expo 2010 Shanghai, China,” edited by Wu Siegfried Zhiqiang (November, 2010) is a wonderful overview of the concept, design and planning of the World Expo site. To my knowledge there is still no comprehensive treatment available of what was actully implemented, of what applications were actually demonstrated and what could be learned from real operating examples.
(2) Smart power grids, also called power grids 2.0, are the intelligentization of power grids. Built on the basis of the integrated, two-way, high-speed communication network, it is reliable, safe, economic, efficient and eco-friendly by using advanced sensing and measuring technologies, equipments, controlling methods and decision support systems.
(3) The advantages of BROAD’s lithium bromide absoption refrigeration are: (1) Thermal energy is used as impetus. Not much electric power is needed and the requirement of thermal energy is not high, (2) Lithium bromide solution is used as working medium. Refrigerators are working under vacuum conditions. Odorless, nontoxic, eco-friendly, with no explosion danger, safe and reliable., (3) It has a wide cooling range. With the variation of outside load, the machines can adjust within the range of 10% to 100%. When outside load is low, thermal efficiency will not be affected. It has a stable performance and can well adapt to the variation of load.
(4) BIPV, Building Integrated PV — Instead of simply covering the building with solar panels, this system is used to turn common building materials such as rooftops and facades into power generators.
(5) All figures,unless otherwise stated, are projections from official sources. To the best of my knowledge there is no public data available on actual verified performance.
(6) Fuel cell is a power generation set that converts chemical energy stored in fuel and oxidant into electricity. There were 196 vehicles with fuel cells at the Expo, including 6 buses, 90 cars and 100 sightseeing buses. To help them run smoothly, a hydrogen station was built near Jiyang Road near the Expo Park and two mobile cars were provided to supply fuel cell vehicles with fuel. The Chery Automotobile Company contributed their world’s leading technology in fuel vehicles to the Expo. Its power system used hydrogen fuel cell power and large capacity batteries, which can not only drive in the electric mode of the fuel cells, but also in the mixed mode of fuel cells and lithium batteries.
(7)It should be noted that the overall benefits of electricity-dependent and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles depend on how electricity is generated. Hydrogen, as an energy carrier and not an energy source in itself, requires energy to be produced. While having zero local emissions, the indirect emissions from hydrogen-production and power plants needs to be considered in the overall life- cycle analysis to determine whether and how many net environment benefits.
(8) A note on collecting data: I had begun this study in the hopes of producing a guide for Expo visitors, a guide to the best real operating examples of sustainable technologies being demonstrated at the Expo for those interested in such matters. It soon became clear that such a guide would not be able to be done because of the reticence of officials to share the necessary information. I then decided to wait until the Expo opened and document, by personal observation and verification, what was actually present and accessible to the public as learning examples and a legacy of this Expo. It was my goal to document the many valuable applications being showcased at the Expo and to have them live on as an Expo legacy and serve to facilitate the technology transfer beyond the Expo and Shanghai well into the future and throughout China. The World Expo should have not only inspired and informed but also empowered the visitor with the tools to facilitate the spread of these technologies that we need for a sustainable world.
Since the Expo has closed, I am reading reports of what had occurred there. Whether these reports are true or not I can not verify but I can attest to the fact that much of what is reported was not open and accessible to the public. Notwithstanding the many lofty pronouncements about educating the public and professionals in field about sustainable design and practices it is clear that information and education programs to accomplish the task were not a priority. The “Shanghai Declaration” (see [bad link] http://expo2010.ifeng.com/english/news/detail_2010_10/31/ ) issued on the concluding day of Expo continues with these lofty statements. One can only hope that it will result in more public education in the future.