Design the crate that powers 400,000 villages.

The Design Problem

This is a spatial, structural, and logistical puzzle. You have a fixed volume — a fraction of a 40-foot shipping container shared with 23 other crates. Into that volume you must fit: solar panels (flat-packed), a hybrid inverter, a battery stack, a fuse box, metering, a mesh radio, cabling, connectors, ground anchoring stakes, and the crate structure itself — which is also the permanent installation structure.

The crate arrives on a truck. It opens. The back wall becomes a structural pillar with everything already mounted and wired. The two side walls hinge outward and upward into a gabled roof. The panels slide out and clip onto the roof rails. MC4 connectors click at the hinge junction points. Someone drives ground stakes through the base frame. Someone else drives a grounding rod. The inverter switch flips. Done.

Everything that requires electrical knowledge happens at the factory. Everything that happens in the village is mechanical: unlatch, unfold, slide, clip, hammer, switch. Two people. Under a day. No electrician. No training beyond watching someone do it once.

That is the constraint. Design a crate that can do all of this, survive shipping and a dirt road, withstand a decade of tropical weather, and fit 24 to a container. The best design gets manufactured at scale and deployed to 400,000 villages across Africa and South Asia.

Why This Is Interesting

This is not a render competition. It is a real engineering problem with constraints that interact in non-obvious ways:

• Panel packing vs. roof area: More panels means more power, but panels must fit flat-packed inside the crate alongside everything else. Larger panels may provide better watts-per-crate but limit how many crates fit in a container.
• Gable angle vs. energy yield: PVGIS simulations show that a 10° gable produces roughly 13% more energy than a 35° gable at equatorial latitudes, because near the equator the sun is high overhead. At higher latitudes the difference shrinks or reverses. The gable angle should be adjustable before fixing — set during deployment based on the site's latitude and local shading conditions. Each side of the roof may need a different angle if one side faces a tree line or hill. A fixed-angle design that works perfectly at one latitude wastes energy at another. This is a design decision entrants need to solve: a hinge or bracket system that allows angle adjustment, then locks securely for a decade.
• Hinge engineering: The side walls must fold up reliably after being shipped thousands of kilometers. The hinge must carry the weight of panels in wind. And electrical connections (MC4 junction points) must route through or alongside the hinge and still make reliable contact after 10+ years of thermal cycling.
• Weight distribution: The inverter and battery stack are the heaviest components (~35 kg and ~50–120 kg respectively). They are wall-mounted to the pillar for flood clearance — but the pillar must handle that weight, and the crate must be stable during shipping with all that mass on one side.
• Container packing: 24 is the minimum. The container freight cost is fixed — more crates means a lower cost per kit. A design that fits 28 instead of 24 saves roughly 15% on per-kit freight. A design that fits 30 changes the programme economics significantly.
• Ground anchoring: A gabled structure covered in solar panels is a sail. The base frame must include a mounting system — pre-drilled holes for ground stakes or similar — that keeps the structure standing in high wind. Must be deployable with included tools.

Specification Requirements

Entrants must design a complete, buildable system that meets all of the following:

Core

• Minimum 4 kW solar array — panel format, wattage, and count are design decisions
• All panels flat-packed inside the crate alongside all other components
• At least 24 crates must fit in a standard 40ft shipping container on pallets with loading margins — hard constraint
• Hybrid inverter — minimum 10 kW, integrated MPPT, must operate with as low as 4 kWp of solar input
• 10 kWh LiFePO₄ battery stack, plug-and-play expandable — many stacks support daisy-chaining
• LoRa mesh communication node (Meshtastic-compatible) with antenna at top of pillar
• Metering (Raspberry Pi or equivalent) with per-outlet-circuit current sensing

Structure

• Crate structure unfolds into a gabled roof frame with aluminum panel rail channels
• All electronics wall-mounted and factory-wired to the central pillar — not floor-standing (provides flood clearance)
• Physical space in the design for future battery expansion beyond the base 10 kWh
• Ground anchoring system — pre-drilled base frame holes for stakes or equivalent, included in kit
• Covered space underneath the gabled roof (shade, rain protection)

Distribution

• Multiple USB outlets (USB-A and/or USB-C) for direct phone/device charging
• AC outlets in the standard socket format for the deployment region
• Each outlet circuit individually metered and individually breaker-protected
• Surge protection on main input

Deployment

• Deployable by two non-technical people in under a day
• All required tools included in the kit
• No electrical work in the field — MC4 click-to-lock connectors only
• No specialist training required
• Hardware cost no more than $5,000 at smaller bulk quantities

Judging Criteria

These criteria apply across the competition, but their weight shifts by round. In Round 1, we're looking at whether the core idea is sound. By Round 3 and prototyping, every detail matters. In order of priority:

What We Don't Want

• In Round 1: nothing — send us your idea however you can communicate it. The bar rises in later rounds.
• Novel technology that hasn't been manufactured at scale — use off-the-shelf components
• Designs that require specialist tools or training to deploy — if it needs an Allen key that isn't in the kit, it fails
• Proprietary components or vendor lock-in — the spec is open, the design must be open
• Designs optimized for lab conditions rather than a village clearing in equatorial Africa during rainy season
• Beautiful industrial design that ignores the realities of forklift operators, dirt roads, and termites

Who Should Enter

Round 1 is open to anyone with an idea. You don't need a degree or a team — a good sketch on paper with a clear explanation of how it works is a valid submission. Later rounds require more engineering depth, but the door is wide open at the start:

• Mechanical and structural engineers who understand hinges, loads, and thermal expansion
• Solar system designers and installers who know what actually breaks in the field
• Industrial designers and product engineers who've taken something from prototype to production
• Manufacturing engineers who can look at a design and know whether a factory can build 10,000 of them
• Teams from solar, battery, or inverter manufacturers who know their own products' mounting requirements
• University engineering departments looking for a capstone project with real-world impact
• Makers, tinkerers, and builders who solve problems with their hands
• Anyone who has ever looked at flat-pack furniture and thought "I could do that for a power station"

What the Winner Gets

The prize amount will be announced when the competition opens. But the prize money is not the main reward.

The winning design becomes the reference for mass production. Every SunCrate kit manufactured is built from your design. Your engineering in 400,000 villages. Your name on the design origin credits in every deployment report, every programme document, every container manifest. If this programme succeeds, you will have designed one of the most widely deployed pieces of energy infrastructure in history.

That is not a prize. That is a legacy.

Prize Structure (Planned)

The prize structure will be finalized when SunCrate is formally established. The intended model:

The progression is deliberate: Round 1 casts a wide net for ideas. Round 2 turns the best ideas into real engineering. Round 3 refines them. Prototype Round 1 reveals what actually works when you build it. Prototype Round 2 lets teams fix what didn't. At every stage, everything is published — a team in Round 2 can look at every Round 1 submission and think "that hinge mechanism is better than ours." A team in Prototype Round 2 can watch another team's build video and see a rail clip solution they never considered. The best design at the end is better than any single team could have produced alone.

Open-Source Requirement

Every submission is published openly the moment it is submitted — not just the winner. All designs, all rounds. Teams that enter agree to open-source licensing as a condition of entry.

The winning design is credited to its creators, but it belongs to everyone. Any certified manufacturer can produce it. Any organization can adapt it. This is infrastructure, not intellectual property. If your design ends up being adopted by organizations beyond SunCrate, that is success, not theft.

Reference Dimensions

These are the physical constraints that entrants must design against. Space inside the crate is the primary design challenge — everything must fit while meeting the 24-crates-per-container minimum.

40ft Shipping Container (Internal)

Minimum 24 crates per container, on pallets, with loading margins.

Solar Panels (Typical Dimensions)

Dimensions vary by manufacturer, cell count, and technology. These are representative. Entrants may choose any wattage and count that achieves minimum 4 kW total.

Hybrid Inverter (Typical 10 kW Unit)

IP65/IP67 rated. Wall-mountable. MPPT inputs accept MC4 directly. Must operate with as low as 4 kWp input.

Battery Stack (Typical 10 kWh LiFePO₄)

Battery stacks must be wall-mountable for flood clearance. A full expanded stack (~1.5m tall) must fit on the pillar below the crate roof height (~2.3m internal). Entrants must account for physical space for future battery expansion.

Design Trade-off: Gable Angle

PVGIS simulations for equatorial Congo (latitude ~3°) with east/west facing gabled panels show:

A shallower gable captures more energy at equatorial latitudes where the sun is high overhead. Both angles shed rain adequately. The gable angle should be adjustable at deployment — set based on the site's latitude and local shading, then locked. Each roof side may be set independently. Entrants should design a hinge or bracket system that allows angle selection during deployment, then secures for long-term durability.

Major Manufacturers (Reference)

For entrants designing against real components. These are the companies whose products are most likely to be sourced at volume.

Solar Panels

JinkoSolar (market leader, ~93 GW shipped 2024), LONGi Green Energy, Trina Solar, JA Solar, Tongwei Solar, Astronergy (CHINT), Canadian Solar, Risen Energy, GCL, DAS Solar. The top 4 account for ~58% of global shipments.

Hybrid Inverters

Huawei and Sungrow (top 2 globally for a decade, ~55% combined market share), Ginlong/Solis, Growatt, GoodWe, Deye (fastest-growing hybrid specialist).

LiFePO₄ Batteries

CATL (~43% Chinese market share), BYD (~23%), EVE Energy, CALB, Gotion High-Tech (Volkswagen strategic investor), Hithium. For residential-format stacks: BYD Battery-Box, Pylontech, Sungrow, Huawei LUNA. CATL, BYD, CALB, EVE, and Gotion collectively dominate global LFP production.

Get Notified

The prize will be formally announced when SunCrate is registered and seed funding is secured. If you want to be notified when the competition opens — or if you want to start sketching now — get in touch.

Contact SunCrate