The risk of food poisoning in two remote villages on the Fijian island of Vanua Levu should decline as soon as these communities get their first reliable source of refrigeration. A local hot spring will be the unlikely source of power, supporting a centralized cold storage facility planned to serve the off-grid villages of Vusasivo and Natewa.

A pilot project will pipe the Waikatakata Hot Spring at Vusasivo, which is coming out of the ground at 70 degrees Celsius, into an absorption chilling facility at Natewa Bay.

Geothermally driven absorption chiller technology is based on traditional electrically driven vapor compression chillers, but uses heat-driven absorption or adsorption and evaporation for refrigeration and freezing instead. The technology is already proven and is technically identical to the Chena Hot Spring in Alaska, which provides year-round ice for an ice museum and sculpture gallery.The Waikatakata Hot Spring at Vusasivo. Source: University of New South Wales

With geothermal energy so close to the surface, the islands of Fiji are a perfect low-risk, high-benefit place to install this type of technology.

The project is part of the long-running Geothermal Cities initiative set up by a University of New South Wales (UNSW) researcher in 2008 with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and other universities, and is being funded and championed by the University of the South Pacific in collaboration with UNSW.

The project team has enough funding to undertake the reconnaissance work on the hot springs but still needs to raise the capital to build the cooling facility.

The next stage is running the Clean Power for the South Pacific Conference 2017 in Fiji to seek investment or sponsorship from the geothermal community as well as the World Bank, which has identified Fiji as a possible target for promoting geothermal energy in the South Pacific.