Objective

The Solar Fire Objective

The goal of Solar Fire is the replacement of wood, fossil fuel, and nuclear fires with solar ones.

For this, in poor countries, we strive to develop and spread solar concentrators that are as much like a fire as possible: hot, simple, and low installation costs.

The basic feasibility of this goal can be easily visualized as the construction of as many solar concentrators in the world has we made cars.

What if for every car we had a solar concentrator?

There are around 500 million personal vehicles in the world today.

A high-powered solar concentrator is less complicated than a car. Tinytech is able to produce a 64 square meter solar concentrator, the Solar Fire P64, for around 10 000 USD, comparable to the cost of a car.

Building a significant amount of such concentrators could only bring down the cost further, such as improved design and incorporating locally grown bamboo and hardwoods and using the first batch of solar concentrators to provide all or some of the heat required to work the steel, aluminum and glass for further concentrators.

However, let us take a conservative estimate that the same effort as it has taken to make 500 million cars will make 500 million solar concentrators comparable to the P64.

Since the P64 can produce roughly 30 kilowatts of peak thermal power, then 500 million P64’s can produce 15 thousand million peak thermal kilowatts, or 15 terrawatts of peak thermal energy.

Humanity currently consumes roughly 15 terrawatts of energy, most of it in the form of thermal energy for heating homes, food, water, and industrial processes.

Now, our 500 million P64’s cannot all produce energy all of the time. If each only produces peak power on average a quarter of the time they would only produce nearly 4 terrawatts of thermal energy at any given moment. However, it’s a fairly good start.

But that’s not all

We can also note that since this energy is produced locally: e.i. it can be brought to the point of use and less energy is required to transport things. Though this sort of local energy and goods production cannot replace all transportation, it can significantly reduce it and so significantly reduce the worlds energy budget.

However, there’s no reason to stop at 500 million concentrators. The amount of working personal vehicles in the world will hit a cap and then start to decline because personal vehicles serve only to consume energy and do not conserve energy, and much less to produce: i.e. car’s are unsustainable.

Solar concentrators on the other hand provide new sustainable energy to society and so can actually help in the production of more solar concentrators. There’s no reason we cannot continue and built another 500 million concentrators and then another.

We can also note that since solar concentrator move fairly little they not tend to wear out like cars do. Though some components may have to be replaced, the metal structure of a solar concentrator can last for centuries if properly maintained. So compared to cars we can much more easily accumulate solar concentrators as we need not continuously replace them. Cars generally less less than 20 years whereas only the mirrors of a solar concentrator have lasted more than 30 years in the field.

The method

In order to start building a truly massive amount of solar concentrators Open Source design is required in order to compare designs, improve them, and adapt them to new applications and situations.

Using local materials is in general the most cost effective way to build and maintain a concentrator. Since what is local changes from place to place a significant amount of experience of adapting various materials to both solar concentration and differing environments is required.

We also feel Open Source is the best path because solar energy makes sense only if maintained for significant amounts of time. The best way to be certain to be able to maintain a solar concentrator over decades is if the design is available.

The basic design principles we follow are:

• Simplicity: construction with standard construction materials requiring no specialized tools or equipment.
• Power: temperatures comparable or higher than the combustion temperatures generally used for a given application.
• Based on these principles the site administrators have developed the Solar Fire P-series concentrators which is the technology most featured on the site.

There are of course other Open Source designs available but we have developed the Solar Fire Technology since we were in a position to do so, and it seemed no one else would if we didn’t.

We are confident the Solar Fire Technology is cost-effective in many situations and worth developing further.

However, we believe many other designs are cost-effective in many other situations. We hope this site can become a home for other solar technologies also and a place where technologies can encounter to create hybrids.