Mission Statement

Clean energy from renewable sources should be accessible for everyone. Otherwise, how should we ever manage to limit global warming and reach the sustainable development goals?

Unfortunately, the energy supply of most countries is still controlled by some few large fossil fuel companies which try everything to keep the status quo. Their large coal and nuclear power plants should be replaced by millions of small, decentralized renewable energy generators.

Our mission is to help providing energy access for everyone and reclaim the energy supply using affordable renewable energy solutions based on open source hardware.

The primary focus of Libre Solar is solar electricity generation and storage, both for off-grid and grid-tied applications. Accordingly, the initial open source hardware projects are a MPPT charge controller and a battery management system for Lithium ion batteries.

Libre Solar - Explainer Video from flojoART on Vimeo.

Solar energy is especially suitable for decentralized and small-scale systems because the power of solar electricity generation scales linear with the area of panels. Simply put, it does not matter if you have some two or three solar panels on each roof or one large solar power plant with the same amount of panels. Small-scale solar systems might be even better, as they don’t suffer from partial shading problems.

For wind turbines, things are totally different. The power of a wind turbine grows proportional with the wind velocity to the power of three. So if you have twice the wind velocity you get eight times the power out of the same size wind turbine. Small wind turbines only have a low height and see significantly lower wind velocities compared to larger turbines in higher altitudes. So for urban regions, small wind turbines don't make much sense.

However, wind turbines can of course play an important role for the renewable energy supply in remote areas without grid access. Compatibility of the energy system with wind turbines is taken into account, but the development of wind turbines and accessories is currently not a major focus at Libre Solar.