Completely off-grid? A project in Marocco combines hemp and solar to make an innovative eco-building. There is a team of various organizations who completed the construction of a pioneering eco-building in Morocco. The construction is made of hemp with a high-tech solar energy system. You will not be needing electricity for this residence.
Sustainable Eco Home: Competion
The residence is built as a single-family home to be a participant in the 'Solar Decathlon', organised by the United States Department of Energy and Morocco's Centre de recherche en Energie Solaire et Energies Nouvelles. This competition takes place every two years and challenges students to create solar-powered buildings. The most recent edition was on the African continent, in Ben Guerir, Marocco.
Eco Home: Advanced ‘spaceship’
The residence looks like a spaceship. Monika Brümmer, a German architect and natural builder, was the leader of the project.
The challenge was to make a hemp composite with the use of vegetable bio-resins, where technical or synthetic components are avoided, according to Brümmer. The building is circular and has 24 exterior panels. This will give interior comfort because of the optimal damping and thermal phase shift and through the osmosis of the components in the hemp concrete formula.
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Hemp Meets High-tech
The SUNIMPLANT was built for around $120,000, a lot cheaper than most of the buildings in the competition. The residence of 90 square meters has the following additional features:
- A double layer. It is made of a mixture of earth, hemp, pozzolan and lime. These products are all produced locally.
- The exterior is spherical and aerodynamic. It has 24 semi-flexible photovoltaic panels, sponsored by DAS-Energy.
- There are curve bio-composite panels. They are made from hemp wool, which improves the performance of the photovoltaic panels by covering their backs against the weather extremes of the semi-arid area of Ben Guerir, where temperatures hit 42°-46°C (107°- 114°F) in the shade during the construction phase last August and September.
- High-quality glass from the French glass manufacturer Saint Gobain.
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Sustainable Eco Home: International Cooperation
Unfortunately, they were dealing with funding restrictions. Otherwise, they could have delivered more exceptional performance, according to Brümmer. The original plans for the construction were to install hemp-clay boards and internal dividing walls and floors.
Adrar Nouh participated in the architectural design, designed the hemp materials and contributed to the construction of the building. Other contributors to the SUNIMPLANT project were the Moroccan National School of Architecture and the National School of Applied Sciences, both located in Tetouan, Morocco, and the German Fraunhofer Center for Silicon Photovoltaics.
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