Public Funding for Carruthers Renewables Ltd

The vision for the Carruthers Wheel project is to electrify rural Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, in a way that helps battle climate change. The market opportunity to be targeted is affordable, environmentally friendly hydropower supporting mini-grids of 10kW to 1MW. The project will create a local, African/Asian framework for the building and maintaining the Carruthers Hydro System, together with a method of mass manufacture that will reduce the price of the Carruthers Wheel while improving durability. The current state of the art is that this size of hydro mini-grid is unaffordable and will result in stranded technology, UN World Small Hydropower Development Report 2016, and Review on Sub-Saharan African small hydropower situation published in the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers–Energy. The key area of innovation in this project is creating a hydro-turbine that can be assembled on site by unskilled workers and maintained and repaired by semi-skilled tradespeople.

The application of modern hydrodynamics to improve waterwheel design, just as the application of modern aerodynamics has allowed the improvement of windmill (wind turbine) design. To show the application of a mdern waterwheel will have less of an enviromental impact on our rivers whilst increasing electrical output.