80% of the world’s cropland depends solely on rainfall for water. This land produces approximately 50% of global crop yields. The remaining 50% is produced on irrigated lands. Providing land with irrigation increases food production by between 40 and 300% relative to rainfed agriculture. For this reason, the global demand for irrigation technology is growing. However, in many parts of the world, the access to irrigation is constrained by the availability of energy for pumping water rather than the availability of water itself.

The price of solar energy fell by about 90% in the last decade. As a result, for new irrigation projects in developing countries, solar energy has recently become not only the cleanest but also the lowest cost source of energy for pumping water. The low cost of solar energy and the large demand for irrigation are the main factors driving rapid growth in the global solar pump market (7 to 12% each year, with a market size of about €2 billion).

For the smallest farmers, who cultivate less than 2 hectares of land, there are standard solar pumping kits which, on the whole, perform quite well. But for farmers who would like to irrigation larger areas, or for collective irrigation systems, the design of solar irrigation systems is a challenge. This is because each system needs to be customised: one needs to estimate the water demand for the crop grown, perform hydraulic calculations and make a technical selection from a wide variety of pumps: tasks which are complicated, require expert knowledge and are time consuming. The time and diverse expertise required to perform these tasks makes the design phase a bottleneck in project process flow for companies wishing to offer larger solar powered irrigation systems. For this reason, they are unable to meet the demand from their customers (farmers) and are also unable to scale.

Rishabh and Stephan, who met while doing their PhDs at TU Delft, set up Heliostrome, to address this challenge. Heliostrome aims to develop the world’s first comprehensive software for the design of solar irrigation systems. It enables the design of optimal solar irrigation systems by providing the required input data and the algorithms to use this data. This has several beneficiaries including the farmer, the irrigation engineer, the investor in the irrigation system (often governments or development banks) and the environment. Depending on the local irrigation business ecosystem, it therefore has different customers.

Although there are existing softwares enabling the estimation of water demand, selection of pumps and technical configuration of solar modules, none of them enables the design of the entire scope of a solar irrigation project. The complexity associated with design causes many solar companies to avoid the irrigation market altogether. Further, it also leads to the installation of poorly designed irrigation systems.

Poorly designed solar irrigation systems, which have commonly been implemented, either do not pump water and result in poor crop yields or cause permanent soil damage through excessive pumping. Heliostrome improves the design of solar irrigation systems by selecting the correct components based on the local conditions. By reducing project cost, complexity and time, Heliostrome also allows engineers to do projects at a larger scale. As a result of these projects, farmers will be able to increase their crop yields and buffer their harvests from drought at an affordable cost. As climate change leads to increased variability of rainfall, this buffer provided by irrigation is increasingly becoming a requirement for ensuring food security.

Initially, we are working on projects together with academics and field practitioners to try to understand the extent of improvement relative to the status quo. We later hope to expand to offer software services to solar pump manufacturers, distributors, governmental water authorities, non-governmental irrigation project funders and academic researchers.