CHALLENGE 4c1: Community Renewable Energy

This is Challenge 4c1 from CH4c: Community level circular products and services

TYPE

global

Note: All our challenges are collaborative. Skype, email or contact us if you want to work with us in real-time! Let’s make a better world for everyone together! gien@stopresetgo.org

BACKGROUND
Energy is one of the most important enablers of a modern society. Without a ready supply of high density energy in the form of hydrocarbons, we could not have built the modern industrial technocracy we now live in. Of course, we are now also quiet familiar with the side effects of cheap fossil fuel.

Our energy supply is the one thing holding us back from stopping enormous amounts of pollution. Finding non-polluting forms of energy is therefore of the greatest urgency. The Rapid Emissions Reduction scenarios from Tyndall Centre are based upon the conservative assumption that we are still going to be dependent on fossil fuels for our energy needs. Hence, the need to severely curtail usage until renewables have scaled to the extent that they can take over from polluting fossil fuels. But what if there were other feasible forms of energy production that could scale rapidly? This challenge looks at some of these…mostly distributed energy systems that can be used at household or community level. Community level systems require some kind of community level distribution system such as mini-grid for electrical AC/DC distribution or a hydrogen system.

CHALLENGE

Activity: Global brainstorm session and begin initial design

CH 4c1a: The renewable energy designs of physicist Carl Johnson
CH 4c1b: Community Open Source AC/DC micro-grid design
CH 4c1c: Wind Technologies
CH 4c1c1: Cape Town Urban and Rural Wind Challenge
CH 4c1d: Solar Technologies
CH 4c1d1: Solar Thermal
CH 4c1d1a: Gosol Community Solar Thermal
CH 4c1d2: Solar PV
CH 4c1e: Bioenergy
CH 4c1f:

SKILLSETS

  • industrial design
  • engineering - hardware, software, mechanical
  • renewable energy
  • physics
  • chemistry
  • computer simulation and modeling
  • applied mathematics