A solar mobile clinic has successfully driven 800km across Kenya

Solar Team Eindhoven drove its solar ambulance Stella Juva more than 800km across Kenya with Amref Health Africa, and found it generated more energy than it used while running an X-ray machine, ultrasound scanner and vaccine fridge at a clinic with no electricity. The vehicle is returning to the Netherlands and funding is the obstacle.

A solar ambulance built by Dutch students drove more than 800km across Kenya and made more electricity than it used. Amref Health Africa ran the test with them.

It is not an ambulance in the usual sense. It carries an X-ray machine, an ultrasound scanner and a refrigerator for keeping vaccines cold, and it goes to the patient rather than the hospital.

The builders are 23 students from Eindhoven University of Technology and two other institutions, Digital Trends reported. The vehicle is called Stella Juva.

The route mattered more than the distance. It included hours on dusty clay roads and a clinic at Mosiro in the Narok region, which has no electricity at all.

The finding is the useful part. Parked, with every piece of medical equipment running at once, it generated more energy than it consumed.

“Stella Juva reacted even better than we had expected,” said Isabella Wanningen of Solar Team Eindhoven. Panels on the roof charge it while driving, and more fold out when it stops.

No patients were treated during the trial. The team and Amref estimated that around 200 people could have been seen over two days.

This is not the team’s first long test. TNW followed an earlier Eindhoven solar car through 1,000km of desert in Morocco.

The lineage runs further back than that. The team has been building solar vehicles since 2013, and five alumni went on to found Lightyear.

That company is the cautionary half of the story. It halted production of its €250K solar car to concentrate on a cheaper one.

Stella Juva now goes back to the Netherlands. The obstacle is not the engineering, it is who pays for the next one.

Europe has money pointed at roughly this. The Global Gateway package commits at least 2.625B euros to health in Africa, across vaccines, manufacturing and health systems.

None of it is aimed at a vehicle. A student team has shown the clinic can drive to the patient, and nobody has a line for that.