Snøhetta has just completed an office building in Trondheim that produces more than double the amount of electricity that it consumes. If you recall my recent post on Norway's new coastal highway, you may remember that Trondheim is the northern terminus of highway E39. I mention this because of access to sun. Latitude 63.43.

The office building is about 18,000 square meters and it is wrapped with about 3,000 square meters of solar panels. The roof is angled at 19 degrees in order to maximize sun harvesting, and any excess electricity is fed back into the city's grid / neighboring facilities. Large batteries also help to help carry the building through the winter months (again, latitude 63.43).

Here are a few photos of the roof (via Dezeen):

I wish I had more of the details so that I could see how the numbers pencil. Hard costs, utility costs, office rents, government incentives/disincentives, embodied energy in the batteries, and so on. Because this looks like an extraordinary accomplishment for a city that is remarkably north.

Images: Dezeen

The E39 highway in Norway runs along the west coast of the country and connects Kristiansand in the south to Trondheim in the north. There's also a ferry connection to Denmark that forms part of the route. The entire highway (excluding the ferry south to Denmark) is about 1,100 km. But it takes about 21 hours to drive it because Norway's dramatic fjords (see above photo) mean that there are seven ferry crossings along E39. The Norwegian government wants to transform the route into a ferry-free highway, which would dramatically reduce travel times. But this presents a number of extremely difficult engineering challenges -- some of which haven't been solved yet. You can learn about a number of them in the below video from The B1M. If you can't see it below, click here. It's a fascinating video.

Photo by Christiann Koepke on Unsplash