A New System for Open, Location Independent,
Reliable, Clean and Renewable Energy.

SHPEGS is an open design project to design and build a system that uses a combination of direct and indirect solar collection to generate electricity and store thermal energy in an economical, environmentally friendly, scalable, reliable, efficient and location independent manner using common construction materials.

The project is being managed with a similar methodology to Open Source Software Development and the ideas and contributions are being published openly on the Internet without an attempt to secure patents. The hope is that with an open philosophy that the project shows similar Rapid Application Development and success as Linux and other Open Source Software projects and provides a system that can meet future energy requirements in a sustainable manner.

The main focus of the design is to build a feasible renewable base load power station for moderate climates like Western Canada where there is high solar isolation during the summer, but very cold temperatures and little daylight in winter. Geothermal power plants are a proven technology to provide base load electrical power generation. To allow a geothermal type system to be location independent and to have the thermal source very close to the system, a massive solar water heater is built to heat a very large amount of underground thermal storage during the summer months. Power is generated while heating this thermal storage in the summer and becomes a very efficient geothermal power system in the winter due to the close location of the thermal storage versus a deep geothermal source and the cold winter climate. To improve performance of the solar thermal system, the solar heat is used to power a heat pump that transfers a much larger amount of heat from the warm summer air. The cold winter temperature allows for cooling a very large mass to sub-zero temperatures in the winter and provides efficiency in the summer power generation.

The system concept may also be adapted to arid, tropical and arctic regions to allow for base load reliable power generation from solar thermal.

The major power output of this system is in potentially doubling the thermal output of an existing heat source by using the heat to move much more heat from the ambient air and generating electrical power with that heat in a traditional binary geothermal turbine system.

SHPEGS Project Site