Urban Solar Updraft Tower Integrated with Hi-Rise Building – Case Study of Wuhan New Energy Institute Headquarter

Abstract

The upfront cost and technical difficulties of constructing a Solar Updraft Tower is its current bottleneck. Based on the case study of Wuhan New Energy Institute headquarters, this paper proposes to integrate an urban Solar Updraft Tower with a hi-rise building design. The integrated design can reduce the construction cost greatly: the solar chimney integrated with the elevator shaft can avoid large investment on a detached chimney structure; the heat collector can be integrated with the roof garden to provide shaded public space. This type of small-scale, distributed Solar Updraft Tower is relatively low-cost and easy promoting. Potentially, it can build up a distributed energy system as a supplement for the power grid. Furthermore, it can provide valuable experimental data for future researches on large scale Solar Updraft Towers.