The challenge
The kitchen burned about two tonnes of firewood a month. Wood was bought by the truckload at rising prices, cooks spent the first hour of each day lighting fires, and the cooking shed had no ventilation. The school had four hours of grid power on a good day — not enough to run electric cooking — and a diesel generator was out of the question on a programme budget.
What we built
- A School-size solar kitchen: about 18 kWp of solar on the kitchen roof and an adjacent frame, a 30 kWh lithium-iron-phosphate battery and a three-phase hybrid inverter.
- Six 20-litre electric pressure cookers and two 3.5 kW induction hobs on stainless prep benches, with a 250 L solar freezer for the week's protein.
- A cooking schedule built around the sun: beans and grains pressure-cooked between 9 am and 1 pm while the array is at full output; the battery carries lights, the freezer and the evening staff meal.
- Remote monitoring of energy, uptime and meals served; a spares kit; a laminated operating guide in the local language.
- Two days of training for four cooks and a school caretaker, and a three-year maintenance agreement.
Delivery
FBE surveyed the site remotely and in person, designed the system, supplied the equipment from its manufacturing partners in a single container and commissioned the kitchen with a local installation partner. The programme funded the kitchen from its capital budget; the firewood line in its operating budget was redirected to food.
The result
- Lunch for 500 students cooked on solar every school day, with capacity to add a breakfast service.
- Firewood purchases eliminated — roughly a quarter of the programme's food budget freed for food.
- No smoke in the kitchen; cooking time for beans cut from three hours to under one with pressure cooking.
- Monitored usage data reported to the programme's funder each quarter: meals served, energy produced, firewood and CO₂ avoided.
- A reference design now offered as FBE's standard School kitchen package.
The customer has asked that its name and country not be published. Figures are from the system design and the programme's own fuel records.