Introducing Step 2 of the campaign
Campaign objectives:
- Fully document the construction to make a user friendly guide in Open Source (CC-BY-SA) truly accessible to artisans, garagists and the total beginner.
- Create a Solar Fire foundation to steward and spread the DIY methods, publish Anne Steinlein’s book and start Solstock.
- See our road map!
Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, director of "Home", supports the campaign!
"Of course I support the Solar Fire project. It’s a great initiative that allows hundreds of villagers access to clean and renewable energy. "
The 30m2 solar concentrator build in Switzerland last Summer
Completed in step 1:
- On June 6th, 2012 we successfully raised 7900 Euro from 68 individuals and sponsors to build an local artisan - DIY high-powered solar concentrator using only hand tools, and
- developed a technique suited for majority wood and bamboo construction.
- On July 16th, 2012 we completed the frame, tower and wood based centre-rows of the machine and ran a steam engine.
- Nearly every component of the machine was an entirely new technique developed to stream-line building large concentrators for local construction.
- We took hours of video of the construction process, note-book drawings, many CAD files, and plenty of ideas on how to adapt to other situation, tools and materials.
- To compile all this information into an intuitive construction guide, blue-prints and series of tutorials, can only be done with you’re support. Please consider supporting this ground breaking work.
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Help us make it happen!
Solar Fire 90m^2 demo
View on YoutubeThe 90m^2 machine really shows the potential of this technique.
For the last 2 years we’ve been working intensely on refining the Solar Fire Concentration techniques to be truly cost-effective by working with industry. We have the team, skills and enthusiasm, but, unfortunately, we have been unable to fund our activities and release open source plans to the public for local DIY and artisan construction.
Yet relatively few funds are needed to properly build and document a model that could radically accelerate the development of this technique and increase the benefits it can bring to people. We have launched this multi-step campaign to do it with your support.
Local construction of the most cost-effective solar concentrators possible could revolutionize energy access across the Sunbelt, brining autonomous energy and new sustainable economic activities to farms and villages everywhere.
Creating simple to follow tutorials and plans, with images and text, and in video, that explain every detail of the experience we’ve developed could make it truly accessible to all.
In the past humanity mastered numerous techniques (such as fire, pottery, agriculture, canoes and boats, wheel and bombs) that radically changed how we live and interact with nature and between ourselves; techniques, that are taken for granted all over the world today. There’s no reason we cannot do the same with direct solar energy.
By developing truly democratic renewable energy methods that:
- Are accessible essentially anywhere with locally accessible sunlight and materials.
- Pay for themselves in fuel savings in a short enough time for communities to easily afford it.
- Provide a high-temperature and high-power thermal energy source to cover most domestic, local craft and mid-sized industrial thermal energy uses.
Could have huge social-environmental impact such as:
- Radically decrease pollution and reduce deforestation.
- Outperform destructive energy methods on price and efficiency.
- Bring solar energy to those disenfranchised by the coal and oil system.
- Provides an autonomous energy (and thus political) infrastructure to communities around the globe.
- Power new sustainable activities anywhere.
To name but a few. All this without complicated top level political negotiations, but by simply being more accessible and more effective than fossil, coal and nuclear energy. This may seem a big ambitious plan, but we think it is time to step up to humanity’s big energy problems.
Solar Fire proposes to make our contribution to this ongoing revolution. Releasing this knowledge into the public (open source) puts this knowledge directly into people hands.
Mid-sized solar concentration has almost no military or space application, nor is it inherently complex and easily controlled, and so is only really useful for ordinary people wanting to power autonomous energy, production and democratic systems. Only with the support of people like yourself can we develop this sort of technology in open source for people like yourself.
