I’m not sure how all of the logistics would work (I’m more of a sociology guy than a STEM guy), but I don’t see why a colder climate wouldn’t be able to take advantage of renewable energy sources – geothermal and perfected solar technology and such.
Aesthetically, you’d probably end up with something very similar to the “Northern Lights glass igloos” in Finland:
Maybe connect all the igloos with a tunnel/tube system and have them all link up to a big hub at the center. Maybe the hub has advanced solar panels and sits on a geothermal hot spot, and the energy accumulated there could power the surrounding homes and buildings.
People can and should add to this, because my winter solarpunk imagination is a tad limited.
One thing to remember about northern climes is that while winter days are brief and dark, summer days are very, very long; in my part of the world, nights at the height of summer last something like six hours. The issue comes with the winter months, when the sun all but disappears and the emphasis turns to keeping out the cold and lighting up the dark; geothermal is an excellent solution, but wind power is also a viable option that’s fairly popular. Additionally, a concept exists wherein one uses walls as heat-sinks, absorbing sunlight and heat during brief winter days and using that to keep a structure warm through the night, combined with a broad roof to keep the sun off of it in the summer months when the sun hangs higher in the sky; scale it up a bit, and one could imagine entire south-facing housing complexes benefiting from this method.
Venturing into a more sci-fi sorta realm, one could take the most advantage of geothermal by constructing subterranean cities that siphon heat from the depths of the Earth’s crust, or take advantage of long summer days by setting up solar heat-sinks that store huge amounts of energy all summer and slowly release it through the winter. On a smaller scale, combine OP’s transparent igloos with dark-colored spheres filled with something with a high heat capacity (even plain water would do) and you get something that takes up heat through the day and radiates it all night, a low-tech, solar-powered space heater (though combine this with ultra-black nano-compounds and glass that turns opaque at night to keep the infrared radiation inside and it becomes a bit less low-tech).
Solar is less of an option in cold climates – they’re cold because the solar energy density is lower. Geothermal and wind are the way to go.
Then there is tidal energy. Solarpunk doesn’t have to be literal solar
There’s been a big increase in the popularity of mudbrick, compressed earth, and stone housing, which is naturally insulating (both heat and cold) and is super economical. They’ve been doing it for millennia – check out the turf houses of Scandinavia and the underground houses of Tunisia (famously used as the Lars Homestead in Star Wars).
Also – I can’t find the link for it, but – there’s an aircon system using a series of liquid-filled coils buried in the ground (3-5m deep iirc), you can have natural heat exchange (warmth in the winter and cold in the summer), and all you need to power is the pump.
Steel Phoenix Studios 