A desire to help rural India’s dairy farmers who do not have access to electricity led New Delhi-based New Leaf Dynamic Technologies to come up with a refrigerator powered by farm waste, abundantly available in the countryside.
Now the company has won a grant to use the same technology to design an ice-maker, which can produce 1,000kg a day.
Such off-grid, low-carbon innovations could provide much-needed cooling methods for about 2 billion people living without reliable power or unable to afford conventional products, said Larry Bentley of Engineers Without Borders USA (EWB-USA).
The nonprofit runs a competition that backs low-cost, energy-efficient cooling systems suitable for developing nations.
If the technologies work and are commercially viable, they would make life easier for the poor, from India to Mali, by helping keep food, medicine and people cool as the world warms.
“Affordable refrigeration in off-grid communities will be more than a cool drink. It will, in a small way, change the world,” because of wider benefits such as improved nutrition and education, Bentley said.
Global temperatures have already risen by about 1.1°C above preindustrial levels and could climb further if the world does not step up efforts to curb planet-heating emissions, scientists say.
Warming is fast approaching the most ambitious goal of 1.5oC set in the 2015 Paris Agreement within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, beyond which lie rising seas, catastrophic weather events such as droughts and floods, and the loss of species, scientists say.
A study led by Columbia University warned that extreme heat and humidity are increasing around the globe, threatening millions of lives and economies in places where it could become fatal to work outdoors.
Surviving in these conditions would require adapting buildings to provide shade and cooling, and minimizing outdoor labor during the hottest hours, experts say.
However, poor people cannot afford to stop working, nor can most buy air-conditioners, which use 20 times as much power as running a fan and could exacerbate climate change.
Hotter temperatures also mean fresh produce spoils more easily, slashing the incomes of small farmers.
Julian Kruger of German start-up Solar Cooling Engineering said that, on Kenya’s coast, people suffer up to five power cuts per day, and farmers selling milk or fishers selling their catch “have a huge problem.”
The company, also an EWB-USA grantee like New Leaf, is developing a solar-powered ice-maker that can produce 100kg to 120kg of ice a day based on its existing cooling unit that is the size and weight of a small suitcase.
Bentley and competition joint organizer Andrew Dowdy said that their passion for off-grid solutions was born from years of overseas assignments and volunteering with EWB-USA, which took them to bush clinics, and accommodation in Africa and Asia that had little or no electrical power.
“Fresh bread will mold in high heat and humidity in about three days,” said Bentley, recalling a trip to rural Papua New Guinea where only one house in the community had solar lighting.
EWB-USA in August last year launched a US$300,000 “Chill Challenge” to fund the development of prototypes for low-cost community refrigerators and ice-makers.
The focus on larger products was intentional, because many people would still struggle to buy even cheap individual refrigerators and this way households could band together to buy them or vendors could sell the ice, the organizers said.
Earlier this month, it selected seven proposals — from India, Germany, the UK and the US — out of 43 submissions.
The winners said the grants of about US$40,000 each would allow them to buy key components and accelerate technology development.
Costs are still being worked out, but they want their products to be affordable, they added.
New Leaf now hopes to deliver a working product in four to five months, instead of a year or two.
Its new ice-maker would run on farm waste such as straw, cow dung cakes, biomass pellets, wood and hay, and use a refrigerant with “zero global warming potential,” said Akash Agarwal, who founded the company with his father.
“We have lots of ideas, but to convert them into products there’s some amount of capital needed. If there’s access to funding, we can expedite the process,” Agarwal said.
Another winning team from Imperial College London is also working on an ice-maker developed by business partner Solar Polar that is powered by solar thermal collectors and which is being tested in the US and India.
The final product would be a box with chambers and tubes, but no mechanical or moving parts, said Christos Markides, who leads the college’s Clean Energy Processes Laboratory.
While all three are developing ice-making systems in line with the Chill Challenge requirements, they said the technology behind their products could also be used to cool spaces, a pressing need in many developing nations.
“We already have a partner in Mali — he has a cold storage and he’s also cooling down his office space because it can get up to 40 degrees,” Kruger said.
The company also aims to build and source as much of its final product as possible locally to keep costs low, and has already conducted workshops for technicians and entrepreneurs in Mali and Kenya, he said.
As the COVID-19 pandemic forced nations to impose restrictions on movement, Solar Cooling has started offering training online for a small fee.
Generally, poorer off-grid communities are located in a belt around the equator where there is ample sunlight and high levels of heat, Markides said.
“The technology we’re looking at, called a diffusion absorption refrigerator, is something that can convert heat to cold, which allows a very promising synergy — generating more cooling the more sunlight you have,” he said. “It doesn’t have a compressor, a pump or a fan. It’s very quiet. It’s dirt cheap to make.”
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