August 7, 2014
A couple of years ago a young man named Jorma Gorns from the Gymnasium Altenholz in Kiel, northern Germany, wrote Solar CITIES a letter asking if it would be possible to intern with us on some project around the world. A year later he took the train down and came to stay with us in Essen and helped Culhane redesign the ARTI gas holder on the porch. A year after that he raised funds from his school and came to work with Culhane at Mercy College in New York for a week and then in Niteroi and Rio in Brazil for a week, gaining expertise in IBC and Puxin designs. Once back in Germany he and his schoolmate built their own Solar CITIES IBC system in the garden of the high school, feeding it with chicken manure to get it started. When Culhane visited in July of 2014, they started a regime of feeding it flower petals from the garden. This is our first flower-fed garden biogas system and it seems to be working well!