Saturday, July 11, 2009

Solarix's 'Sustainer'

In an interview Bas Vlugt of Africa Sustainable Energy asks the founder of Solarix,Jan Hein Hoitsma about the 'Sustainer' solution:
'The Sustainer is a containerised installation which can be used in rural areas to convert oil-bearing crops and seeds into edible oil and biodiesel. The seeds are stored in an integrated bunker which feeds the oil press. After the oil has been extracted, it is then refined into edible oil or it can be used as raw material for the biodiesel process. The 'press cake' by-product can be used as livestock feed. Many nuts have shells/husks which can be used as fuel for cooking. An integrated tank unit allows for the biodiesel to be directly dispensed into, for instance, diesel vehicles. The Sustainer is fitted with 4 wind turbines and its side panels consist of foldable solar panels which generate electricity. The electricity can be supplied directly to the grid or can be stored/buffered in a battery pack which can, for instance, provide electricity in the evenings or at night...[continue reading] Watch related video here:

via Nubian Cheetah
Posted by Emeka Okafor at 8:35 AM
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1 comments:

Antti Karttunen said...

Nice!
Please check also "Open Source Ecology" project
in Missouri, USA, for a "viral" project
aimed for sustainable living with
appropriate technology and local resources. (Including biodiesel, solar power and self-made agricultural tools).

Their weblog
http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/
demonstrates some of their tools and techniques. (See e.g. entries for the July 10th and 7th and June 29th of 2009.)

For an assessment by Franz Nahrada, read:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/strategic-support-for-factor-e-farm-and-open-source-ecology/2009/06/19
from which a quote:

* the overall OSE project is radically geared towards local autonomy -
something which sometimes seemingly cuts deeply into efficiency and especially life quality. I think that in many respects the Factor e Farm zeal, the backbreaking heroism of labor, the choice of the hard bottom-up approach, is more a symbolic statement- and the end result will differ a lot. In the end, we might have regional cooperatives, sophisticated regional division of labor and a size of operations that might still be comparable to small factories; especially when it comes to metal parts, standard parts of all kinds, modules of the toolkit etc. But the statement “we can do it ourselves” is an important antidote to todays absolutely distorted system of technology and competences. A friend of mine with whom I had many - sometimes also very cointroversial - discussions, Peter Weibel, has put it into the words “we are all disabled”. Peter never made entirely clear if he meant that positively or negatively, because he was celebrating sensual extensions and technological crutches for everything with the same vigor which he used against Microsoft and the “enslavement through technology”. But that is a very good bottomline. We are all disabled and our goal should be to redo the whole technical system in a way that eliminates our disabilities. We should understand technology from the bottom up, understand the patterns behind the patterns and should not refuge automatically to crutches like in todays world where we constantly are dependent on malicious “dependence - reenforcing mechanisms”. Most of us cannot escape this completely, Yet factor_E_Farm stands as a firm statement against this - as a kind of counter pressure enabling us to negociate totally different relations with the ones that still control the production process today.

See also http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=756.

6:28 AM

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