[P2P-F] Do It Yourself Solar: Austrian Self-Build Coops

Sun Dec 14 11:34:41 CET 2014

yes, of course, excellent history!

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 8:18 AM, George Mokray <gmoke at world.std.com> wrote:
>
> Thought you might be interested in this story of self-help solar.
>
> -------------
>
> In 1983, a couple of years after the second of the 1970s oil shocks and at
> a time when petroleum prices were relatively low, in a village near Graz,
> Austria, in the province of Styria, a farmer and an engineer led a group of
> 32 people in building simple do it yourself solar heaters.  They said, "Our
> primary aim was to build a collector that was inexpensive and easy to build
> for every one of us. Having become aware of the 􏰜finiteness of natural
> resources, we also aimed at avoiding all material waste in constructing the
> collector. Other important aspects were the saving of energy, environmental
> protection, and community building. Everybody was expected to build their
> own collector in order to be sufficiently familiar with its function.”
>
> By the end of 1984, two more self-building groups with more than 100
> participants were needed to meet the local demand for such solar heaters.
> By 1986, the do it yourself groups were producing more collector surface
> area than all the commercial suppliers in Austria.  In 1987, the first
> build-it-yourself guide was published and in 1988 the Association for
> Renewable Energy (AEE) was founded to institutionalize the group build,
> self build, do it yourself solar movement which now included about 50
> groups and more than 1,000 participants.
>
> By the end of 1998 there were 360,000 m2 of solar collector area and about
> 30,000 household solar hot water heating systems built by the do it
> yourselfers, out of 100,000 private household solar systems with 1.3
> million m2 of plate collector surface in all of Austria.  For a decade and
> more, do it yourself, self-build groups dominated the Austrian solar
> industry and the model was exported to Switzerland, the Czech and Slovak
> Republics, and Slovenia.
>
> From 1986 on, the self-build group leaders met monthly and improved the
> heater designs based upon practical feedback from users and builders.  They
> met with manufacturers, examined their products, and placed bulk orders to
> produce solar installations for their members and participants at very
> competitive prices.  The self-builders developed a new method to integrate
> solar collectors directly into the roof and expanded the solar hot water
> systems into space-heating or combination systems as well which became more
> cost-efficient and popular as building insulation and air infiltration
> standards rose in the 1990s.  It is estimated that 50% of all the new solar
> systems in Austria are now designed to serve both hot water and space
> heating needs, making it the leading market for solar combination systems
> today.
>
> A do it yourself group starts with an introductory lecture and a trip to
> existing self-built solar systems. The construction groups work with the
> help of technical leaders to build 􏰜finished solar water systems. The
> average life of a construction group is usually three to four months.  The
> most remarkable characteristic of the members of the self-help group is
> that farmers and part-time farmers seem to be the largest adopters.
>
> Although the solar companies originally saw self-build groups as amateur
> competition likely to botch the solar systems and installations, the
> success of the self-construction movement made solar more popular and
> certainly more visible.  Today, Austria has one of the highest penetrations
> of solar thermal energy systems in the world and Austrian solar collector
> producers are market leaders in the European market with one third of all
> solar systems sold there coming from their factories and workshops.
>
> I first learned about the Austrian self-build cooperatives in the
> magnificent Let It Shine:  The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy by John
> Perlin (Novato, CA:  New World Library, 2013 ISBN 978-1-60868-132-7) and
> followed his footnotes to Michael Ornetzeder and Harald Rohracher's
> original work:
> User-led innovations and participation processes: lessons from sustainable
> energy technologies
> Energy Policy 34 (2006) 138–150
>
> http://www.musiklexikon.ac.at:8000/ita/ita-papers/Ornetzeder_Rohracher_Energy_Policy_2006.pdf
> Of solar collectors, wind power, and car sharing: Comparing and
> understanding successful cases of grassroots innovations
> http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:685433/FULLTEXT01.pdf
>
> Back in the day, in the late 1970s, I started something called the Solar
> Work Group in the Boston area.  It was a group of people who met together
> once a month or so to build simple solar devices.  We built a couple of
> water heaters out of copper sheet and tubing, helped a friend fix up his
> attached solar greenhouse, and projects like that.  At about the same time,
> the anti-nuclear movement was warming up in Western MA anbd in Southern NH
> over the proposed Seabrook nuclear power plants .  The Solar Work Group
> rolled into the NE Coastal Power Show, a traveling energy show housed in a
> big, old White van, an old bread truck, that went from Maine to Washington
> DC, from Pennsylvania to Cape Cod over the next few years as an affinity
> group of the Clamshell Alliance, and presented energy efficiency,
> renewables, and nuclear energy information to an estimated 250,000 million
> people throughout the Northeast.  We had a big parabolic trough hot water
> heater on the roof and a detachable windmill we could place on top of a
> mast on the van.  The van itself had a secondary battery that was charged
> by the engine as we drove.  Solar cookers, hot water heaters, Stirling
> engines, buttons, bumperstickers, pamphlets and books, we had more
> information than any one person could absorb.
>
> Also during that time period, another group of us formed the Urban Solar
> Energy Association which soon became the "fastest growing" solar group in
> the nation.  It also had monthly meetings and did solar barnraisings,
> building solar attics, greenhouses, windowbox solar collectors, solar hot
> air collectors, and solar water heaters.  The group went on for a number of
> years producing a do it yourself solar hot air heater manual, other
> technical reports, and a monthly newsletter.  Eventually, it merged with
> the MA Bay chapter of the Northeast Solar Energy Association to become the
> Boston Area Solar Energy Association (http://www.basea.org) which still
> has monthly meetings, lectures and presentations on the solar issues and
> technologies of today.
>
> In the last few years, the Home Energy Efficiency Team (
> http://www.heetma.com) here in Cambridge has been doing weatherization
> barnraisings and a number of other communities have begun to do the same.
> In five years, HEET has organized more than 225 energy-upgrade work
> parties, assisted with more than 50 solar installations, and trained more
> than 3,500 volunteers in hands-on skills in saving energy.  There have been
> other weatherization and solar barnraising groups in Western MA, NH, ME,
> CA, and around the country.  Perhaps, if they institutionalized and
> organized themselves as well as the Austrian solar water heater group, they
> could multiply their impact.
>
> Austria's solar self-build movement has had a significant effect on that
> country's energy economics.  Can Ukraine do the same?  In November 2014, I
> saw a BBC article (http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29840214) on Roman
> Zinchenko and Greencubator (https://www.facebook.com/greencubator;
> http://greencubator.info; @greencubator).  In that country, with its
> energy supply dependent upon Russia, Zinchenko has been organizing
> hackathons - "off-grid, solar-powered meetings of an assortment of
> programmers, engineers, and bloggers set 'in the middle of nowhere'".
> These events give birth to businesses like Ecois.me, an app being tested by
> Deutsche Telekom which helps households reduce energy consumption and works
> with a sensor installed in the electrical meter, and eCoopTaxi which
> combines electric cars, a taxi service, and open energy co-operation as a
> business model.  Greencubator is also building an "energy torrent", a
> platform to encourage open-source energy tech designs and is about to
> "retrofit" an existing building in Kiev as a showcase for green
> initiatives, an "architectural hackathon."
>
> Energy is power and power is politics.  All these examples are forms of
> Solar Swadeshi, the locally productive nature of solar energy, and can fit
> within the definitions of Gandhian economics, the formation of a
> non-violent economic system.
>
> Previously:
> Solar Swadeshi
>
> http://solarray.blogspot.com/2005/05/solar-swadeshi-hand-made-electricity.html
>
> Personal Power Production:  Solar from Civil Defense to Swadeshi
>
> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/11/10/919251/-Personal-Power-Production-160-Solar-from-Civil-Defense-to-Swadeshi
>
> Solar Barnraisings
> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/03/05/470085/-Solar-Barnraisings
>
> Old Solar:  1980 Barnraised Solar Air Heater
>
> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/07/05/527101/-Old-Solar-1980-Barnraised-Solar-Air-Heater

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at:
http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20141214/c5a4d685/attachment-0001.htm 