Basic training opportunities in small scale biogas build confidence and familiarity with biogas before launching into a larger community size build.
Therefore, to complement our work with the American NGO we inspired (UrbanBioRecovery: Digesters for Development), building institutional systems, Solar CITIES e.V., through our facebook group "Solar CITIES Biogas Innoventors and Practitioners", encourages everybody around the world to get involved and build their own small scale systems so that they gain confidence and expertise and can leverage success at the home scale to garner larger funding opportunities.
As our network grows Solar CITIES builds and trainings are beginning to occur in more and more locations, led by people who have been inspired by the open-source sustainable development network concept.
Our dear friend Paulo Mellett (RIP brother! We miss you down here!) was a leader in bringing open source solutions to the world and blessed us when he embraced the Solar CITIES small biogas cause and made it his own.
Before his untimely death (from malaria contracted while building biodigesters in Ghana) he made this video of the installation of our open source Solar CITIES 3 IBC system in Sao Paulo.
We hope this helps others who want to replicate and improve not only the Solar CITIES open source systems but the philosophy of collective intelligence leading to a better world. Paulo's video from Sao Paulo will help others visualize the storage system we developed with Hanna Fathy and Mike Rimoin in 2009 in Cairo and built with Alvaro Silva and Mike Bonifer and Danny Barth in South LA in 2010 and then up in Alaska with Adam Low and with Frank Di Massa in Santa Rosa and then in Slovakia and Budapest in 2011.
This unit in Sao Paulo Brazil we think is now the only functioning one of its kind. The one in Cairo was discontinued when the teacher at the SEKEM school left, the one in LA was stolen (!), the one's in Alaska dismantled at the end of the project (and the storage tanks froze!), the one in NoCal given away (to be reassembled some other time), the one in Slovakia has gone off radar, while the one in Budapest was forbidden by authorities to be operated. So this one, run by Fabio Poesia Sambasoul is the one to watch for future progress on this front. !
Our projects continue in Brazil, both through the work we are doing with Urban BioRecovery: Digesters for Development, and through Paulo's legacy and our commitment to Catalytic Communities.