Published by Martha Danly under Energy Efficiency, Kitchen, Renewable Energy, Sustainability

Whatever your plans for Thanksgiving this year, it’s a pretty safe bet you won’t have 20,000 guests around your dining room table. But you could easily serve that many diners at the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University’s headquarters near Mount Abu in a remote area of Rajastan, India, where all the meals are prepared in a solar-powered kitchen.

Using technology from Solare-Brücke in Germany, the Brahma Kumaris collaborated with the Academy for a Better World to build the planet’s largest solar kitchen. It produces enough power to cook 20,000 meals a day, and up to 38,500 meals at peak sun levels.

How does this solar-powered kitchen work?

The solar technology at Mount Abu is quite different from the electronic, photovoltaic panels that can be seen sprouting up on rooftops across the US. The one at Mount Abu is a mechanical system that uses the sun’s energy to heat up water—more like the solar hot water heater that Hubert Den Draak described in this blogspace earlier this week.

But unlike simple solar hot-water systems, here the sun’s warmth is super-concentrated by means of 84 parabolic-shaped mirrors to produce steam. To reflect the sunlight, each concentrator uses 260 pieces of special white glass about 6.5 x 8 inches in size, imported from Germany. The steam is collected in header pipes and sent via insulated pipes to cooking pots in the kitchen. OK, maybe you can’t bake a pumpkin pie this way, but I can smell an amazing curry with rice.

And the fact that 20,000 people can be served hot meals that are cooked using alternative energy alone is an inspiring example. Just consider what else might happen when government, private industry, universities, and a visionary organization such as the Brahma Kumaris team up together.

The giant solar kitchen at Mount Abu is only one of many alternative energy projects under the wise eyes of the Brahma Kumaris. Recognizing the economic and environmental advantages of alternative energy, they have now completed photovoltaic, wind turbine, biomass, thermal solar, and micro-hydro systems at various centers throughout India.

In these early days, I’d say it takes way more than a village to rear the child that is alternative energy. The long list of partners Brahma Kumaris has worked with includes Advanced Energy Systems, Australia; ECO Centre, India; Government of Australia; Government of Germany; Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources, India; Indian Institute of Technology; German Agency for Technical Operations (GTZ); Sunpower, Germany; the World Bank, USA; and Siemens Solar, India, to name a few.

So when you sit down for dinner next Thursday, conjure up an image of 20,000 happy diners, smiling in the sun—and giving thanks for its warmth and the nourishing part it plays in their good fortune.