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 solar engineering companies, who sell solar modules and associated components, designing irrigation systems is a challenge. This is because they need to estimate the water demand for agriculture, perform hydraulic calculations and make a technical selection from a wide variety of pumps: tasks which are all out of the scope of their expertise. The time taken to perform these tasks makes the design phase a bottleneck in their project process flow. For this reason, they are unable to meet the demand from their customers (farmers) for solar powered irrigation systems and are also unable to scale.

During his PhD in solar energy at TU Delft, Rishabh Ghotge set up Heliostrome to address this challenge. Heliostrome aims to develop the world’s first comprehensive software for the design of solar irrigation systems. Solar engineering companies are our anticipated customers. The software will enable solar engineers to design optimal solar irrigation systems by providing the required input data and the algorithms to use this data.

In this way, the software enables our customers to enter a new market (solar irrigation) and rapidly scale in the design phase. 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.

Heliostrome’s first customer has recently expressed in writing that they will purchase and apply the software once it is commercially available. Partnering with commercial, governmental and research organisations, we recently submitted a proposal for a project. During this project, we will develop a basic working version of the software and pilot it with 40 farmers in Mozambique, where the consortium members have existing customers for solar irrigation systems.

On commercialization, Heliostrome will use a Software-as-a-Service model. We initially aim to offer services to solar engineering companies such as SolarWorks!. One month of software subscription will cost €200, 20% of the cost of a single pump. Considering only our initial customer segment, we hope to scale to 1000 customers within 5 years, yielding annual revenue of €2.4 million in a market which is in the range of €48 million. We later hope to expand to offer software services to governmental water authorities, non-governmental irrigation project funders and academic researchers. Our fixed costs are associated with hosting our service and the project data of our clients on the cloud. As we onboard more clients, we expect software training, customer care and project-based consultancy services to scale accordingly.

At this early stage, when we are focused on technical validation and working with our first few clients, we aim to finance ourselves using subsidy grants for collaborative projects. At a later stage, we hope to finance our venture through a combination of equity and business loans in order to offer our services commercially at scale.