The First Solar Community Kitchen
— Louise Meyer reports from a trip to Egypt.
Alex Gagneux, the Swiss mechanical engineer responsible for building this kitchen was first brought into a project by Anna Marie Wenger-Marti, an elementary school teacher who lives near Berne. In 1990, she began teaching literate women to solar cook.
Her students live in "New Communities" located in the northern sugar-beet zone south-west of Alexandria. Each woman bought one-family sized box cookers built by a local carpenter for $30 each.
On January 10, 2001, we traveled north on the desert road towards Alexandria to visit El Sherouk Farm, a plantation located 72 km away from Cairo. I knew from my Swiss partners that Egypt’s first Solar Community Kitchen had been completed five months earlier when it was officially inaugurated by the Swiss ambassador to Egypt. I was curious to see how this community kitchen, able to cook for 300 functioned. Although I had trained hundreds of women to solar cook in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe I had only seen photographs of institutional solar kitchens.
January is the winter season in Egypt, evenings are cool but most every day brings with it a cloudless
sky and pleasant temperatures. Solar cooking can be done here year round! Dr. Adel El Ghandour, one of the owners of El Sherouk Farm organized our transportation from Cairo. I was accompanied by two Swiss, Dr. Denham Pole and his assistant, Mona, who both live in Egypt and work for the Swiss Red Cross on a project improving blood transfusion services. Before the installation of the Solar Community Kitchen El Sherouk Farm management had to truck in bottled gas for the workers to cook their food with. Dr. Adel El Ghandour stated that cooking "was much more convenient every since Alec Gagneux completed the kitchen", explaining that it was being used daily.
An Egyptian "solar pioneer"
Dr. El Ghandour took us on a tour together with two other visitors, both agronomists from the Horticulture research Institute in Giza. We walked through the "kitchen", a building composed of two rooms; one where dining space was provided for about 100 people; a second with a sink, a traditional stove fueled with bottled gas which was not in use and two huge pots. The pots sat up on two-foot pedestals against the wall outside. The cook picked the lid up off one of the pots to show us that the beans were boiling. We exited through the back door onto a cemented patio area holding two parabolic reflectors. It was the solar radiation reflected off the parabolic discs that was being projected onto the pots that provided cooking "fuel".
The reflectors were composed of over 100 mirrors each attached to the next with twisted wire and fixed to a large frame. All materials were purchased locally. The total cost per unit was $1000. Dr. El Ghandour paid for all the materials plus a portion of Alec Gagneux’s honorarium, a clear indication of his willingness to invest in renewable energy making him into an Egyptian "solar pioneer".
From outside the patio area where we now stood, we could see the pots through the open port-holes.the solar reflection on each pot looked similar to fire. We saw that paper immediately caught fire when placed at the focus point. Cooking time is equivalent to traditional fire cooking. Both solar reflectors were equipped with a tracking system in order to follow the sun’s rays; one with a mechanical and the second with a photovoltaic.
After our visit Dr. El Ghandour invited us to his office. He explained his wishes to introduce a totally integrated energy system at El Sherouk and that the next step would be making biogas from waste. The Minister of Agriculture had sent agronomists to visit El Sherouk to assess the possibility of replicating it elsewhere, such as in the Toshka Project, south-west of Luxor, where the Egyptian government hoped to win back farm land from the desert. On this 2nd trip to Egypt I realized that most every part of the country offered a perfect climate for solar cooking, with perhaps the exception of Cairo where air pollution might prevent.
