World's First Off-Grid ReGen Village Will Be Completely Self-Sufficient Producing Its Own Power and Food
World's First Off-Grid ReGen Village Will Be Completely Self-Sufficient Producing Its Own Power and Food
Lorraine Chow
ReGen Villages, a completely self-sufficient village that can power and feed itself, is rising across Europe—and hopefully, one day, around the world.
A sustainable development in The Netherlands generates its own energy and food. Photo credit: EFFEKT
ReGen Villages Holding, B.V., a visionary real estate development company founded by entrepreneur and developer James Ehrlich, is piloting its first 100 homes across 15,500-square-meters in the planned city of Almere in The Netherlands with construction set for this summer. The company is also developing four other eco-villages in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany and has partnered with Copenhagen-based architectural firm EFFEKT as the global architectural framework company.
The village features a slew of already-existing green technologies such as energy-positive homes, mixed renewable energy sources, energy storage, organic food production, vertical farming, and aquaponics, water management and waste-to-resource systems. ReGen itself stands for "regenerative," an apt name for a village that aims to have its input and output entirely full circle.
"Today we spend 40 percent of the surface of our continents producing food," EFFEKT co-founder Sinus Lynge explained to DW. "Food production is the single largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, the biggest driver of deforestation and responsible for 70 percent of our global freshwater consumption. We ship our food from one end of the world to another just to waste 30 percent of the total production before consumption."
The village's pre-fabricated homes are enveloped in a glass shell to protect the building from area's cold and wet climate. The units also include passive heating and cooling systems, built-in solar panels, a garden and water collection. Household waste can be composted or converted into biogas.
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