The pilot of the world’s first off-grid village is now open in Almere, The Netherlands. The plan is to house 100 homes, followed by sites across Northern Europe in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany. Further plans include the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, UAE, MENA, Malaysia, India, China, parts of Africa, the U.S. and Canada, ReGen announced.
ReGen Villages went viral around the world after press announcement from the Venice Biennale in June, 2016. In the past couple of months it has received over 20 million page views and 10 thousand emails from all around the world.
ReGen Villages is a tech-integrated and regenerative residential real estate development company. The Dutch holding company, in collaboration with Danish architecture firm EFFEKT, was founded by serial entrepreneur James Ehrlich, who describes his brand as “engineering and facilitating the development of off-grid, integrated and resilient neighborhoods that power and feed self-reliant families around the world.”
The model takes a holistic approach, combining innovative technologies that include energy positive homes, renewable energy and energy storage, door-step high-yield organic food production, vertical farming, aquaponics/aeroponics, water management and waste-to-resource systems.
EFFEKT co-founder Sinus Lynge recently said: “We like to think of ReGen as the Tesla of ecovillages. We want to make it easy, convenient and accessible to choose a sustainable lifestyle off the grid. We are simply applying already existing technologies into an integrated community design, providing clean energy, water and food right off your doorstep.”
The firm believes that in the next 30-years the size of the aspiring class will double to 4 billion, creating enormous demand for integrated neighborhood designs that incorporate door-step agency with high-yield organic food production that feed diverse nutritional needs.
On August 25th, 2016, ReGen Villages was presented at the White House for the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as part of a round table on the nexus of food, water, energy and waste at the neighborhood scale, and was nominated for a Global Solutions Award from Singularity University.
