Have impact, join us in bringing solar thermal
to farmers and entrepreneurs.
Solar Concentration can power local economies, globally. Solar energy is available everywhere and our technology can be deployed without depending on infrastructure, institutional support, exotic materials or advanced skill sets.
Solar Concentrators can displace massive quantities of carbon emissions in thermal industries of all sizes — without large scale clear cutting of forests, poisoning water tables or creating radioactive waste.
Globally, women feel the burden of energy poverty most acutely: from fuel-wood collection, which is time-consuming and dangerous to enduring cooking smoke. Solar thermal is easier, cleaner and provides additional energy to run small businesses.
Children do much of the fuel-wood collection, or are left alone when the mothers go out to collect fuel. We can reduce the biomass fuel-dependence that keeps children from attending school and spending time with their mothers.
Solar Fire technologies can be built and maintained by local tradespeople and provide sustainable energy for local industry.
One single GoSol SOL4 model replaces as much as 9 tonnes of wood per year. In many areas solar concentration can make the difference between the regeneration of the ecosphere versus continued deforestation.
Solar concentrators can reduce household air pollution, cook food more thoroughly, provide energy for water purification, power refrigeration, and sterilize hospital equipment and improve nutrition by preserving in-season produce.
Particulate pollution from industry and cooking fires is a major health hazard world-wide and a major cause of ice-pack melt. Solar Concentrators can replace fuels such as coal and biomass which are largely responsible for these emissions.
Currently, our resource extraction rate doubles every 20 years. This is completely unsustainable. Solar Fire modules can be completely recycled and Solar Thermal can enable recycling-focused closed-loop economies.
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In countries where incomes are low, fuel is expensive and electricity grids are missing or unstable, energy poverty creates a vicious cycle of deforestation, pollution, ill-health and low-income outcomes.
Energy is the foundation of all activity, and by creating technology that is cost-effective, adds value to products, outputs at commercial scales, and can be maintained by end-users or local artisans — using free and clean solar energy — it’s possible to radically increase income and well-being while reversing deforestation and increasing resilience to economic and environmental disruptions.
Our environmental and social problems are severe and getting worse. Real solutions must be scalable.
How to scale is the heart of the problem. The first step for us is developing the expertise and algorythms for deep optimization of solar technology for the actual context people are living in.
In some locations labour costs are high and lot’s of optimization is needed to reduce operating costs. In other places labour costs are low and skills and infrastructure are less developed; and therefore optimization in these contexts means making technology that is much less automated and expensive, easy to deliver and install and can be maintained locally, and providing energy scales and temperatures that produce real value for a local business and entrepreneurs.
Return on one’s effort and investment is just as important in low-income areas as in high-income areas, and since prices are also low for products, there must be sufficient scale of production. All of our analysis starts and ends with Return on Investment for the client or end-user.
Less-automation does not mean a technology must be less thermally-efficient or only have tiny production scales. An artisan baker in Kenya must bake as many goods as an artisan baker in France to stay in business. There is no real limit to the solar technology that can be made based on manual tracking. However, desining such solutions requires the same engineering methods and code as we use for high-precision development for industrial clients.
After optimizing a technology using state-of-the art numerical methods, CAD simulation and then testing it in real conditions in actual small business context (a step we have completed), the next step is to work with as many people and organizations as possible. It is our belief that solving global problems requires global cooperation.
We are currently building a network of business, organizations, entrepreneurs, industry, government and impact people of all sorts that’s needed to build the programs that can realistically overcome the barriers to massive exponential growth of solar thermal technology. Join us!
You can also read the first version of our manifesto, it’s here and it’s free.
Case Study: The Koptige Bakery in Kenya. Baking every day, saving money every day.
The Sol5 technology can be built for the artisan scale businesses with local fabrication and maintenance. With a clean and low cost of energy incomes can increase and deforestation reduced. To start the wealth creation process we work with as many partners as possible in the public, corporate and non-profit sector. By working together we can have far greater impact in people’s lives all over the world.
Posted Friday 15 February 2019, by
We are excited to announce the start of a collaboration with the MDP program at UC Berkeley, California.
UC Berkeley’s Master of Development Practice (MDP) equips the next generation of...
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Posted Tuesday 12 February 2019, by
We’re happy to share with you this video which shows some great moments from the Solar Entrepreneurship Training we conducted in Uganda with Plan International (Uganda) and SmartUp Factory Uganda....
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Posted Wednesday 6 February 2019, by
GoSol & Autodesk Foundation invite you to join us for refreshments
and learn about GoSol’s solar concentrators developed to empower millions of entrepreneurs and slow climate change.
After...
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