Client
Department for Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs
Domain
Sustainability
AI
Using a solar-powered Raspberry Pi box to reshape sustainable-first prototyping
Teams at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and Transform have pioneered a low-cost, sustainable, and innovative solution to a common digital problem. They've co-created a solar-powered box using Raspberry Pis to host and demonstrate digital prototypes, replacing costly and carbon-intensive cloud-based services and making Defra a key innovator in sustainable government.
The challenge they faced
As the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and other governmental departments, shift towards user-centred, product led design, their need to build and test prototypes with real users becomes essential for validating ideas quickly.
These prototypes are hosted on cloud platforms that rely on data centres whose energy sources aren’t always transparent. This questionable carbon offsetting creates ‘climate debt’ that is inconsistent with Defra’s sustainability goals.
How we helped
Alongside Defra, we created a self-sufficient, off-grid compute cluster made up of stripped-back, low-power Raspberry Pi computers. This cluster, in turn, is powered by small solar panels, with a battery backup for overcast days or nighttime.
This setup allows the team to run multiple prototypes with a net-zero environmental impact, directly controlling the energy source. It means:
Low cost, as the entire box only takes few hundred pounds to build.
A prototype can be ready for usability testing and design validation in a matter of weeks.
The Kubernetes cluster allows for multiple prototypes to run simultaneously. The team estimates that running six prototypes for 200 days on their device is more carbon-efficient than using the cloud.
The components are reusable.
The difference it made
The Rasberry Pi project isn’t just innovative, it also marks a change sustainability mindset and culture; having the intentionality to seek a net-positive impact rather than accepting that "burning a little carbon doesn't matter."
This shows that sustainability can be built into solutions from the get-go and empowers a move from project-led to product-led thinking, where teams are empowered to solve problems holistically with climate impact front-of-mind.
This approach puts power directly into the hands of the development team, enabling them to move faster. It delivers significant cost savings and, most importantly, provides a tangible, positive environmental benefit.
It's a validated, scalable case for off-grid IT.
A bunch of likeminded and innovative folks came together to hack in a single afternoon, getting hands on a building something we didn’t even know was possible. We think there is so much potential here, we had previously done a pilot with building sustainable AI looking back it seems super obvious that we could have used our solar powered raspberry pi’s as a kubernetes cluster for training AI models too.