z02 announces a the z02 Millennium Development Goal Project Cluster: a group of projects and projects in planning that answer the pressing global issues.

Currently this comprises two initiatives;
greenGen
Aquaculture Designer

In the near future we look forward to announcing two more initiatives to join the z02 MDG Project Cluster; the first an initiative dealing with organic carbon dioxide sinks.... and the another; a conservation science and management application for developing countries.

Aquaculture Designer (AcD) is a proposed software tool for complete assessment, feasibility, financial planning and plant design for land based freshwater (and saline) finfish & crustacea farms.

AcD would assist fish farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, consultants, academics, NGOs, government officers etc to design and plan commercially and environmentally sustainable fish farms by offering best aquaculture science and best aquaculture practice packaged into an intuitive and easy to use, regionally tailored, local language, decision support and planning software tool. AcD predominantly is focussed towards rural areas of developing countries, though it also may have some application in developed countries. The software tool would be deployed simultaneously in a web based version as well as a desktop version and be available as a free software download..

Following a successful working partnership and the imminent release of Microhydro Designer - Barefoot Power and Ian Scrivener of z02 have agreed to jointly develop, expand and commercialise Microhydro Designer to cover additional renewable energy technologies and a wider market, under the name of new project name of greenGen.

In summary: greenGen will be a complete feasibility, design & financial planning software product for small scale renewable electricity generation and distribution systems. The product is targeted at systems producing 1000 – 500,000 watts and will support hydro, solar, wind, biomass and liquid biofuels.

Microhydro Designer (MHD) is an application for the complete end-to-end design of microhydro electricity generation systems. z02 designed this RIA application and did all development using a Open Laszlo front end and ColdFusion, mySQL, mapServer backend.

MHD was conceived by Stewart Craine of Barefoot Power and received development funding by Natural Resources Canada.