🦠Earth Power Lodge's: From Waste to Wealth
The Earth Power Lodge. Designed by REGENiTECH.
Summary:
This scape is inspired by the ongoing innovation at REGENiTECH.
Sat at the intersection of food, farming and energy, the Earth Power Lodge is a systemic solution that showcases a strategy for solving multiple problems at once. In essence it turns waste into wealth.
The Problem
This is not a case of technology solving one problem. Technology fitting neatly into the problem-solution thinking that our entrepreneurial culture has been trained on.
Instead, this tech sits at the intersection of three, fairly seismic problems.
1. Biomass ending up in landfill. As a global population we currently waste roughly 30% of our food production. At least half of this waste ends up in landfill which produces large amounts of methane. Unfortunately this only a percentage of the biomass – organic matter – that we dump into landfill to suffer the same methane-emitting processes. (It is worth noting that Methane has Global Warming Potential of between 84-87 times that of CO2 over a 10 year period.)
2. Soil degradation. With food systems being the make-or-break of a civilisation, healthy soil is possibly the best litmus test for a healthy society. Today, our soil is being degraded at record speed due to heavily chemical-based agriculture. We need to begin regenerating our soil if we're going to continue producing real food at a rate to feed our population.
3. Energy independence. The most obvious. Whether it's Russia invading Ukraine or its debates about trying to open up the North Sea to fracking, our energy systems are desperately fragile. Renewable, localised energy production offers a resilient alternative.
The Scape
Earth Power Lodge: regenerating local economies and environments.
Imagine a world in which rural and suburban communities were no longer vulnerable to the geopolitics of energy.
In which the farmers were seeing their soil health improve year on year, translating to healthier food on everyone’s plate.
In which their waste biomass – from food waste to timber waste – had become valuable inputs into a local, circular economy.
Introducing the Earth Power Lodge (EPL).
Spanning nearly two acres, these lodges are nestled in convenient locations to receive the local biomass waste and deliver soil regeneration solutions to the farmers. They are contain a series of interlocking chambers that generate different reactions.
The Thermo-chemical reactor breaks the waste biomass down into soil-regenerating compound Biochar, electricity and CO2.
The Photo Bioreactor feeds the CO2 into algae production acting as a carbon sink equivalent to around 50,000 trees.
The Anaerobic Bioreactor digests the algae to produce biostimulants – a nutrient-dense soil feed – and biogas which is finally fed into the Microgrid to produce a further source of electricity.
Today these EPL's are commonplace across rural and suburban communities. Fed and maintained by the local community, they begin to generate a profit within 2 years. By producing enough electricity to power 150 homes and producing various forms of soil-regenerating products, the dependence upon national grids has been massively diminished while local farmers have begun to move away from heavily-chemical based forms of agriculture.
The original creators of the EPL had realised that top-down scaling methods were less appropriate for this form of technology. Scaling out node-by-node and open-sourcing the majority of their innovation, they decentralised the global adoption of EPL's. Consulting each community on the prime location and unique opportunities in the region, the technology expanded in web-like form. Their open-source protocols meant that a learning-community was built upon the rationale that if anyone adopted and improved the system, the learnings had to be transferred back to the wider community.
Today, this learning community has become a hub of activity looking to develop Mycoremediation Power Lodge's (MPL). Conceived to breakdown inorganic waste such as plastics, the MPL – still in trial phase – uses a similar systems-approach, working with fungi. Originally the decomposers of matter, fungi have been shown to breakdown inorganic chemical compounds to non-toxic compounds. It marks the next step in the return to a circular world.
Downstream Value Creation
The adoption of Earth Power Lodge’s had led to:
Healthier, more productive soils
With biostimulants being fed into the soils and replacing the damaging chemical inputs, soil health is improving dramatically.
A catalyst for agricultural transformation
The return to more organic forms of agriculture had been long seen as too costly in the short term as the degraded soil required inputs to remain productive. The biostimulants, by speeding up the rejuvenation of soil, have minimised the short-term costs of transformation.
Healthier food
With the farming community no longer spraying vast quantities of chemical-inputs over crops, the food chain is far less poisoned.
More resilient energy infrastructure
With many communities now feeding a third, and stable, renewable energy source into their local grid, the dependency of national grids has dramatically decreased.
A circular economy
By taking biomass previously bound for landfill and transforming it into a source of value, local community is benefitting from less waste and more wealth.
A new paradigm
Run by the local community, the EPL's demonstrate how a systems-approach can adopted to regenerate a bioregion both at an economic and an ecological level.
