Recycling skyscrapers

Many tall buildings (called skyscrapers) were designed as office buildings. They are not equipped with showers, or bathtubs, so they probably cannot be used as apartment buildings. What would we do with these office buildings if an economic collapse required us to abandon them? If there are plenty of wealthy office workers around, there will always be enough money to maintain office buildings, but an economic recession or depression may cause hundreds, or perhaps thousands of these office buildings to close, since there is no money available to support them. In that scenario, an alternative use for the buildings must be found. The buildings may be useful for supporting windmills. The picture at the top of this article shows an abandoned office building.

The illustration above shows the same building after the exterior walls have been removed. All the interior and exterior walls would be removed. Most of the floors would be left intact.

The illustration above shows the same building after a windmill has been installed on top. The interior of the building's structure has been filled with storage tanks. These storage tanks are metal tanks that are used to store compressed air. It may be too expensive to store the electricity produced by a windmill in batteries, so the windmills would be equipped with air compressors instead of electrical generators. When the wind blows, the windmill blades turn air compressors to compress air. The compressed air is stored in tanks, for later use. When electricity is needed, compressed air from the compressed-air tanks is sent through pipes to a motor that turns an electrical generator. The compressed air is then used to produce electricity. This method of saving energy would be cheaper than filling the building with expensive batteries, and storing the power in batteries. The entire structure of the building may be filled with compressed-air storage tanks.

Anthony Ratkov November 27,2011. Computer-graphic images by Anthony Ratkov.