Alella Green Tech

My name is Tom Rozier and I am a French student in energetics and mechanical engineering. I spent a month at Alella Green Tech in June 2022 as a volunteer. During my stay, I have been put into a beautiful global project: the creation of a self-powered property where an entire family and a bunch of volunteers would be able to live and welcome a group of children for an educational summer camp. Children would learn a lot of things about plants and trees, electricity production, water management and even some computer skills and so many other things. Of course, they could also just have fun all together!

The general architecture of the power production system has already been thought of by other volunteers. Some hypotheses have allowed them to determine that solar panels and wind turbines would be able to supply the entire demand during the day, while power accumulation systems would stock the surplus in order to deliver it during the night. The principal energy storage device should be a network of ponds at different altitudes and pumps that can move water from a low pond to a higher pond to take advantage of the potential energy of the transferred water. Some other energy storage devices could take advantage of the inertia of a big wheel spinning almost without friction for example or a heavy charge, put high in a well, storing potential energy.

My role on this project was to move from assumptions to real data. The first step was to make a good and realistic estimate of the power consumption by listing as comprehensively as possible the devices of all kinds on the property and compute their duration of use. This has been possible thanks to the IOT devices implemented all over the property that deliver very useful data using MQTT protocol about the consumption of power for all the pumps in the different wells.

Thanks to that, I have been able to size the solar panel park considering some weather data and the available space on the property to have a harsh but reachable estimation of the possible power produced. Then, I produced an estimation of the power that some wind turbines would supply to finally determine how much power would be produced and potentially needed from the grid in a year.

The global project is long and bold, so the basis calculations need to be certain and dependable to begin the implementation. Also, the results depend a lot on the future choices like the solar panel and wind turbine models chosen. That is why, making our work easily understandable and editable by future volunteers is important to see the project moving forward.

Help to understand and use data from IOT devices, estimate and increase the available area for solar panels, calculate the best orientation for panels depending of the sun position, find the place where the wind is the stronger for wind turbines, … whatever you can do, there is a lot of interesting things to oversee in this project to make it real and the potential impact of such a power production network is a great experimentation and an exciting example for the future.