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Solar Power Villages

Critical Need Being Addressed

Remote villages in developing countries, and eco-villages face two overlapping challenges. Supplying the energy needs of the community including collecting energy, storing it and then converting it to the desired form and creating a sustainable food supply especially on sites innappropriate for year-round open-air organic growing.

Description of Initiative

Developed over many years by Jürgen Kleinwächter & his team at Sunvention, the Solar Power Village solution is designed as part of meeting both these challenges. It is inspired by realising that integrating solar collection with greenhouses allows direct sun-light to be concentrated and extracted as heat while the plants utilise the diffuse light. In addition one structure can protect both the plants and the energy systems saving resources & money. Each solution will be unique, it depends on the climate, diet, the size of the community being served etc, and picks from components that include:

-Envelope Power Greenhouses – that incorporate solar thermal collection of heat into the framework of the greenhouse.
-Heat storage solutions such as tanks of vegetable oil at 200°C
-Low temperature, low speed Stirling Generators that turn this stored heat into mechanical power, or electricity.
-The waste heat from the generators can warm the greenhouse at night.
-Round the clock community cooking solutions based on this hot-oil and Scheffler mirrors
-Stand alone solar thermal water pumping

A fully working version of this system has been installed at the Tamara eco-village in Portugal, incorporating all these elements in a 130 m2 greenhouse, with a 1500 W electric generator, and hot oil storage sufficient for 28 kWh of electricity.

Developments in the pipeline that are designed to integrate into this framework. include: A system that allows for burning of low-quality biomass, and production of high-heat for ceramics or industrial processes; solar cooling and water purification. Integrating aquaculture with organic horticulture through our partner Urban Ecological Systems including scaling to larger systems (500+ people) at very high efficiency. Achieving a high degree of water efficiency through collecting condensation.

BFI Assessment Summary

This project is impressively holistic, combining brilliant, cutting-edge innovations in small and medium-scale solar power technologies with very well thought-out community-building socio-economic strategies. The technologies are designed to be highly efficient but robust and affordable so they can be successfully built and deployed in many poor regions of the globe. The Solar Villages team’s goal is to complete a fully operational example of an energy-autonomous village to serve as a “technology transfer” campus where people from around the world can be trained in building and using these technologies. The technologies exist; they are not speculative. The project is quite advanced and seems to be on track.

The vision behind the Solar Village is to enable the creation of viable, prosperous, self-sustaining rural communities in even the poorest, hottest, most forbidding environments (such as the Sahel), to permit abundant food production, to stop the massive, global rural flight to urban slums, to halt the destruction of forests and woodlands for heating and cooking while curbing air pollution and asthma/lung disease from cooking fumes.Based on Jürgen Kleinwächter’s highly sophisticated innovations and refinements of Stirling engines, solar water pumps, greenhouse designs and the use of vegetable oil tanks to store heat/energy (far more affordable than batteries), as well as complementary biomass burning, a “Solar Village” could meet all its energy needs to heat and cool its buildings and greenhouses, pump and purify its water, grow and cook its food crops (including aquaculture), and power its workshops and light industries, even in harsh terrain.

Most of the elements of a fully working version of this whole system have been installed at one of the three partnering organizations behind the initiative, Tamera eco-village in Portugal (a very successful, well-established “intentional community” with some 250 inhabitants on roughly 330 acres, founded in 1995, that also has an extensive international network). A 130 square meter greenhouse, a 1500-Watt generator, and hot oil storage tanks sufficient to generate 28 KWh of electricity are all up and running. The remaining features are all on track to be on line within a year or so. Solid international contacts in India, Indonesia, Africa and South America have been established, and some students from some of these regions have already been studying the technologies at Tamera.

This project seems to hold great promise. Key issues will be whether the technologies can be made affordable enough to be widely accessible in poor countries, whether they will be simple enough to be manufactured in machine shops in developing nations and robust enough to survive wear and tear in difficult environments. Jürgen Kleinwächter is confident on all these counts, and, apparently, plans to build his solar engines and water pumps in Indonesia are quite far along.

PEOPLE: Solar Power Villages

Jürgen Kleinwächter, who founded Sunvention 40 years ago with his late father, is a consultant to UNESCO, member of the international board of EUROSOLAR & Technical Director of COMPLES (Mediterranean Solar Energy Society). He is an expert in Stirling engines, and in particular in adapting them to low-cost, low temperature, distributed applications. He developed light-weight concentrating optics and integrated them into modular solar power stations in the early 1980’s. In Sunvention he has assembled a team of talented and committed engineers who can be drawn on for projects of a humanitarian nature.

ABOUT Tamera

Tamera Peace Village was established in 1995 in Portugal as a community with a focus on peace education. In 2007 they started a major development of a water landscape to show how the dry land of that region could be restored to abundance. The Solar Village test-field, with the inventions of Sunvention, was opened in October 2009. Their work has received strong support from the local and national government who see its potential to reverse the region’s decline.

Natural Innovation, founded by Mitra Ardron, works to support bringing innovation with high developing country impact to scale by bringing together resources including, but not limited to, funding. He previously pioneered group solar purchases in Australia.

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