Solar Greenhouses

Needs Address

• Food security
• Stabilised or increased productivity

Adaptation effects

Enables increased food production through advancing growing seasons by producing early seedlings, extending the season of fruit vegetables and saplings and producing leafy/root vegetables in spring and fall – can enable year round growing period

Overview and Features

Solar green houses are used for the production of crops that require warmer conditions in climates becoming increasingly unpredictable. Architecture enables energy efficiency through absorbing solar radiation during the day, and storing the heat in double walls and releasing it during the cold nights

Cost

• In India, approximately US$600 per greenhouse with owners providing some of the materials for the walls and roof and arranging construction [GERES, 2009]
• Manual labour
• Training

Energy source

• Manual labour
• Solar energy

Ease of maintenance

Simple to maintain

Technology performance

Extends the growing season while also diversifying horticultural production, using only solar energy

Considerations

• Requires knowledge of construction technique and suitable crops for growing in a greenhouse environment
• Farmers must have ownership of the land the green house is to be constructed on, or land owner must agree to construction

Co-benefit, suitability for developing countries

• GERES estimates that the planes and trucks which bring fresh vegetables to the area emit about 1.6 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of vegetables. Local production of 300 tonnes/year of vegetables in the improved greenhouses therefore prevents the emission of about 470 tonnes/year CO2 (or 0.84 tonnes/year CO2 per greenhouse
• Evidence of improved health for villagers through better diet
• Provides a solution in local contexts where there is no available conventional energy
• Simple to implement, using local materials
• Simple to use, to maintain, and to duplicate
• Empowers women social and economically
• Development of established mechanisms, rather than designing of new machinery, enables strengthening of existing work and enhancement of relationships with key stakeholders
• Useful for intensively farmed plots of land
• Difficulty arises in lack of land ownership of many farmers

Information Resources

GERES, 2009. Case study summary. GERES (Groupe energies renouvables, environment et solidarités), India. Available from: http://www.ashden.org/files/GERES%20full_0.pdf [15 November 2014]

GERES, 2013. Passive Solar Greenhouses in Mongolia. Available from: http://www.un.org/en/ecosoc/julyhls/pdf13/imp_forum_monaco-geres.pdf [15 November 2014]