Building in Hamburg Germany built with glass tanks for walls when hit with sun light heat the algae/water living inside creating energy. Not the most cost effective right now but seems the future is already here the people who live here.

I love this tech — so amazing that the heat from multiplying algae is enough to make a difference and enough to store! I wanted to do some thinking about the one drawback of the system as of the time of writing (in 2014) which is the high up-front cost of installing the system so I looked up the average size of apartments in Germany and got 120 square meters, then multiplied by the cost per square meter that the article estimates of $2500 to get an estimated cost of installing the system of $300,000, or €254420.56. Then I looked up the average monthly utilities cost in Berlin and got a figure of €231.77 per month, or €2781.24 per year, then divided the €254420.56 by the €2781.24 to see that the upfront cost of installing the system at the undoubtedly soon to drop price of the technology in its infancy would be equal to a 91.48 years of utilities at today’s undoubtedly underpriced rates, given the deadly externality of climate change and other potentially fatal environmental degradation. Symbolically appropriate given that we want our sustainable technologies to be viable on a scale of a hundred years! I’d love to drill into what the true costs of installation could be in 2017 under different circumstances...