Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In my last post, “Expensive Energy Kills Poor People” , I spoke of the women of Lesotho. In the comments someone asked what I would recommend that they do regarding electricity.
For me, there are two separate questions about the provision of electricity. One is cities and the grid. The other, and for me, more important question regards the folks living in places the grid may not reach for decades. For example, Steven Mosher pointed me to a quote that says of Lesotho (emphasis mine):
The majority of the population (76%) lives in rural areas, but has strong links to urban centres in both Lesotho and neighbouring South Africa. The majority of these villages lack electricity and the probability of connecting them to grid electricity in the foreseeable future is very low. Grid electricity, being a commercial form of energy, requires users to have a regular income. The income levels in rural areas are generally lower than those in urban areas due to higher unemployment and underemployment levels.
Those are the kind of people who I’ve worked among in the developing world, people way off the grid, the type of people who I met when I was in Lesotho. What can we offer them in the way of electricity, the most adaptable and useful form of energy?
I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours running the numbers on the economics of renewable energy of various kinds in the village. I used to teach the subject to starry-eyed Peace Corps Volunteers. Heck, you know how they say “he wrote the manual” on something? Well … I actually did …
Figure 1. Peace Corp Training Manual T-25. The ERIC Metadata says: This document was prepared as a training manual for people interested in developing appropriate technological approaches to using wind power to pump water. The training program is divided into two basic formats, one in which a session focuses on the design process and participants are expected to do some design work in groups, and another which uses a preselected design and does not include the design process. Besides providing sets of training guidelines and objectives, the manual describes training sessions which deal with: (1) the history of wind systems;2) large projects and community analysis; (3) shop safety and tool care; (4) representative drawings for construction; (5) shafts and bearings; (6) strengths and testing; … etc. etc.
I bring this up to highlight that I’m not an armchair theoretician about these matters, and that I’ve worked extensively in the somewhat arcane field of village-level use of renewable energy. So as you might imagine, I’ve thought long and hard about how to provide inexpensive electricity to the poor.
And curiously, the answer presented itself when I was in Paraguay about thirty years ago. I was there to once again put on the wind-power training that is laid out in my manual above. I was out in the outback with a driver going to look at potential wind-power sites, when I saw someone come out of the selva, the local low forest. He was driving a mule hitched to a cart.
And in the cart were a half-dozen auto batteries. I asked the driver what that was about, and I was surprised by the reply.
He told me that the batteries would be owned by several homes and farms far away from the road. There were no power lines anywhere along the road, of course, we were a long ways from the grid. He said the driver would leave the car batteries there by the side of the road, and a truck going to a nearby sawmill would pick them up. At the sawmill, which also wasn’t on the grid, for a small fee the batteries would be charged from the generator powering the sawmill. Then they underwent the same process in reverse. The truck brought them to the mule track, and the mule man took them back to the farms and ranches. There, they used them for power until they were run down.
Brilliant!, I thought. These jokers aren’t letting a little hardship get in the way of having electricity in their homes.
Later, I was talking to a local schoolteacher in Spanish, she had no English. She said that she’d noticed that the kids from the houses with electricity did better than those from the other homes. I asked what the people used the electricity for. Lighting and television, she said. Television? I asked, mystified, thinking that could only stunt their minds.
Yes, she said, they are the only ones who ever hear about the outside world. They’re the only ones who have a bigger vision, of something beyond the selva.
Dang, I thought. That’s how we can power the hinterlands until the grid arrives.
And over the years, I refined that idea into what I call the PowerHouse School concept. I almost got the agreements and the money to do it in the Solomon Islands, but then the government changed, and the tide went against me. Ah, well, the idea still lives. Here’s the elevator speech:
The PowerHouse School is a ten-foot shipping container that is set up to recharge 12-volt automobile batteries and cell phones, using whatever renewable sources are available locally—solar, small-scale wind, micro-hydro, or some combination of all three. It would be run as a for-profit battery-charging business by a school, with the children being trained in the operation, care, and maintenance of the equipment and the charging and feeding of the batteries. It would also sell (by order only, no stock in hand) a variety of 12- and 24-volt lights, equipment and tools. The older students would also be taught the business side of the operation—keeping the books, maintaining the supplies, figuring the profits and losses. Any excess power would be used by the school itself, for lighting classrooms and powering electronics.
The advantages of the PowerHouse School concept are:
• The education about how to use (and more importantly how to maintain) the technology is provided along with the technology.
• The homeowner is not expected to purchase ($$$) the charging system (solar panels, etc.).
• More importantly, the homeowner is not expected to maintain the charging system.
• Students will be trained to do the business side as well as the technical side , supporting entrepreneurship.
• There is no monthly cost to the homeowner. It’s purely pay-as-you-go. This allows participation by those without regular income.
• It uses existing technology.
• It can be sized appropriately, and increased incrementally (one additional solar panel or storage battery at a time).
Finally, it fulfills my own First Law of Rural Development, which states:
If it doesn’t pay … it doesn’t stay.
In other words, if someone can’t make a profit implementing your whiz-bang idea for improving the lives of the poor, your scheme will go to an early grave.
So that was the plan. Never implemented. The numbers sort of worked in the Solomon Islands, it could have turned a profit … if you were creative about the funding of the capital costs. The problem is that you’re looking at some thousands of US$ to set one up, and that would take a while to pay off. Should be doable, solar panels have a long lifetime, as do schools, and the sun is free. But some combination of a bit of grant funds and perhaps a long-term loan might have to be provided.
Regarding the micro-hydro aspect, there are several designs for hydroelectric systems using heavy-duty truck alternators. These put out about a hundred amps at twelve volts, so that’s about a kilowatt. The only issue is moving that power at 14 volts is a problem because you need a big wire size at low voltage. But in fact, they put out three-phase AC, so all you need is to pop out the rectifier that converts the three-phase AC to DC. Then run the AC into a three-phase transformer, and jack it up as high-voltage as you need, depending on the distance. Run your wires from the transformer to the PowerHouse, where you transform it back down to 14 volts, and then run it through the rectifier you removed from the alternator …
Like I said, I’ve put some thought into the question. That’s the best answer that I’ve come up with about how to provide the benefits of electricity to the hinterlands where the grid won’t arrive for many, many years.
Your comment, suggestions, and criticisms welcome,
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
September 28, 2013 at 2:46 pm
For US$200 per month for five years, a community could buy this South African wind power & pump combo, installed, with warranty:
http://www.kestrelwind.co.za/content.asp?pageid=455
Borehole digging would of course cost extra.
But the dirt cheap alternative is making a wind pump out of common materials, which could be maintained by local, semi-skilled labor. Here’s an experiment in South Africa by MA college students, using plastic buckets & rope (interesting once you skim over the obligatory CACA genuflection):
http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-042313-214136/unrestricted/WI13_MQP_Final_Report.pdf
I cobbled together a similar project in Bolivia.
As you may know, the Boers were big into wind pumps historically. If those isolated farmers could maintain late 19th & early 20th century models, I feel that mechanics in Lesotho could learn to do the same. Not all repair parts might be made there, of course, but after seeing the local gunsmiths of Pakistan & Afghanistan, it seems almost anything is possible.
Maybe solar cells will become cheap enough to replace windpumps for remote applications, however.
From my own more limited experience, I can tick micro-hydro and battery availability.
PNG has a classic example of the effect of television. In the 1980s the state-run service had bombed, leaving the commercial service, EmTV. (“Em as in “em nau”.) Enterprising local leaders / communities could get a kit, with instructions. TV, video player, aerial, solar panels, batteries. At 10 toea a session to watch, it could pay for itself in a year. The rule was, 80% of the advertising was to be produced locally, and it produced a number of masterpieces. No western guilt-trip or “me” stuff. Washing clothes? ” … try some of this …” (featuring twin-tub, laundry tub, and bashing on rocks in the river). New vehicle? No solitary vehicle, empty road, 1 or 2 occupants. Truck with a load of people in the back, smiling and waving. “Now you can carry all your wontoks in style”. Public service programs explaining how to set the systems up. Including “don’t bang the side of the TV if the picture goes blurry”. (Surprising the number of movie/tv dramas that have someone banging a TV.)
Another benefit at that time was PNG had not yet signed the International Convention on Copyright. At PNGUT we had AutoCAD 10 within a few weeks of its issue. The Pentagon version that didn’t need a dongle plugged in the back of the PC.
Martin Lewitt says:
> I wonder if just electrolyte could be transported?
Not with lead-acid batteries. The lead in the plates needs to change state as well.
Well, I did make a comment regard the ‘grid’ on the original post along the lines of ‘how is the power to be distributed amongst the people and how are they going be able to use it i.e. with appliances’
And yes, I worked in Africa (Congo and Gabon) in the jungle for a while – so I have some first hand experience (granted that was back in the early 80’s though).
Electricity remains and will continue to remain, a ‘point of supply’ fuel for third world contries who cannot easily install a grid system. Such systems are very expensive to install but of course, usually last a pretty long time. In the Lesotho example, if the population is 2million (guestimate), and the alleged investment is 9billion, that works out 4500 per head of population. If we say, folk live in families of 4, that works out at 18000 per household. Now, currently, it is possible to buy a top quality 3kw solar power system for about half that sum.
Surely, in the context of common sense – it would make more sense to install solar power to every household?
It’s a renewable, it’s installation is of course part of the distribution (i.e. no network grid required), and the spare funds could be used for supplying appliances? To my mind, THIS is exactly the logic that should be applied to the forced redistribution of wealth via the IPCC induced government initiatives. I mean, feck it – if they want to do good – do it properly?
just sayin……
. at i use
Willis, small typo …
“For me, there are two separate questions about the provision of electricity. Once is cities and the grid. The other, a”
I think “Once” is meant to be “One”.
I suspect that poor rural folks are more resourceful than many first world folks give them credit for being. When I lived in Korea in the early 1970s, Korea was just making the push to being a major manufacturing country. But they had many many old (1950s) vintage vehicles on the roads. And there was always a guy in a little shop down the road who could make the part needed to fix a broken down vehicle or anything else. Where the technology is not terribly complicated or requires rare metals, I imagine people could do well with a little of the kind of help that Willis suggests and go from there.
One future could be space-based solar beamed to earth, especially to drier regions with clearer air:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_satellite
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/visionary-beams/
Don’t know if power from US satellites would be affordable for Lesotho, without generosity from US tax & rate-payers.
Much of the world’s electrical power system & appliances presently remain susceptible to interruption by coronal mass ejections.
Flywheels can store energy and don’t have a charge-discharge cycle problem
There are “glow-in-the-dark” substances that store more, but solar to LED can illuminate a room.
Sterling engines can use any heat source. There is even one as a desk toy that will run on the heat of your hand.
One possibility would be to do heavy R&D, get patents, license the efficiency stuff to industry/consumer, but use it in these areas.
Perhaps they could sell citizenships – passports. There are enough sovereigns within the evil empire, but some might want to be able to live outside. Can you put a price on fredom?
starzmom says:
September 28, 2013 at 3:43 pm
My experience in Latin America is the same.
When the remote southern Chilean village near which I lived inherited a hand me down fire truck, they were able to keep it going with no problem, despite not have a gas station or commercial garage anywhere close by. The volunteer crew did however manage to burn the truck up while fighting a stubble fire.
Bula,
Try mini steam. Tiny Tech in India http://www.tinytechindia.com/Template/index.php.
25kva from steam engine. USD $18,000 for boiler, engine,alternator.
Add your biomass via what ever means and you have your energy problems done!
Using lead acid batteries as a source of electricity for house hold use has some problems. Standard car batteries last for a long time because the are immediately charged as son as the car is running, If they are heavily discharged the number of times they can be recharged falls dramatically.
The deep discharge batteries used in boats can be discharged and recharged more often than car batteries but they are more expensive and require better maintenance,
12 Volt batteries can be connected in parallel or in series to give either more voltage or more current but these connections also have their own problems.
Whether it is 12 Volt, 24 Volt or 36 Volt it is still DC. Most household devices require 120 or 240 Volt AC. You can get this with an inverter but they are not cheap.
Uninterupable power sometimes uses battery banks but they are under constant trickle charge by the normally available AC.
I would put my money on Diesel Generators. They provide the AC at the voltage local devices use, they are reliable and last a long time. Paying for them is a problem if there is no money. But I would rather work on some innovative way of finding the money than providing any battery system.
Hi Willis
I agree with what you say. I get to remote Africa time to time and one of the thriving businesses you see are little huts that charge batteries, mostly mobile phone, but also car batteries for running whatever. A couple of weeks back in central Madagascar I saw something even better. I was in a mineral exploration camp staying in a small tent erected inside a grass hut and on returning after dinner was surprised to find 4 or 5 workers sitting around a power board inside the hut, outside my tent, observing while their mobile phones recharged. You can’t get better than that, free power 🙂
Willis, your mention of car batteries suggests another solution that might be to your taste. How about we go through our junkyards, pull a few shipping containers full of alternators from old cars, and send them off to places like Lesotho? I’m sure that if we provide those, the locals will work out ways to turn them using locally available technology – whether that’s wind, micro-hydro, or just a donkey and a few wooden gears.
From tz2026 on September 28, 2013 at 3:47 pm:
Flywheels need maintenance, when spinning flywheels fail they tend to effectively explode thus they need heavy enclosures, one sized for even household-sized electrical needs would be considerably heavy. And flywheels by their nature don’t travel well, you could build one into the heavy frame of a vehicle, but then you also have to move the vehicle to move the flywheel.
Don’t forget the fancy electronics involved in magnetically speeding up and taking energy from a sealed flywheel unit.
Doesn’t exactly scream “Suitable for dirt-poor rural communities without service centers in the same country” to me.
And after many decades of trying to scale them up from desk toys to something that can power a house, we’re still waiting for a practical unit.
Dave says:
September 28, 2013 at 4:16 pm
Like the used alternator idea. Micro-hydro would be ideal anywhere there’s running water. My granddad’s backyard water turbine in the Metolius River is still generating power after over 80 years.
Donkey is good, too, though. Plus hyperactive kids.
George Steiner says:
September 28, 2013 at 4:01 pm
Biodiesel!
Just kidding.
There are several different choices for external electrolyte batteries. The used electrolyte can be returned to the power source for recharging. Perhaps the technology can be simplified with gravity feed, or pedal driven pumps to exchange the electrolyte when needed. When I read about it, it was actually as a cost saving measure that leveraged the costs of the more expensive components.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
I had just yesterday purchased a minty copy of Integrated Circuit Projects Volume 1 for 15 cents from the local Goodwill to add to my Forrest M Mims collection of useful books and here he is today commenting. Thank you Forrest for the electronics education you have provided me via you many informative books. The IC Projects Vol. 1 has to be one of your earliest publications.
I spent my early childhood on a South Georgia farm with no electricity. However, we did have a superheterodyne, vacuum-tube, radio receiver that was approximately the size of a today’s washing machines and included short-wave reception bands. It was powered by batteries, so listening time was strictly rationed to fifteen minutes of world news and thirty minutes of entertainment shows each night after dinner (or “supper” as it was called in rural areas). Dead batteries meant a trip to the recharger in the nearest town and coins out the door. That was how we kept up with the outside world back in the 1940’s, but it only worked because we could scrape up a few nickles for the recharge. My grandmother sold eggs and butter to get those precious coins. Folks in town (like folks everywhere) had a natural aversion to giving stuff away.
How you could make even such a primitive system as that work in an area where the population has absolutely no disposable cash or goods is beyond me. What’s missing there is “wealth generation” and I have yet to see any government program anywhere produce a net increase in wealth; they simply “redistribute” and more often than not, “unintended consequences” result in a decline in net wealth.
All this is not to say we should not try to improve the fortunes of our less fortunate brethren, but as Willis’ story suggests, something other than what we’ve been doing will be necessary. I haven’t a clue what that different way might be.
Having had some experience with micro loans. The problem is the social structure and who owns it and profits by it.. If the tribe owns it, no one pays for the service and there is no incentive for anyone to keep it going. Somebody has to want to own and profit from the power, water, whatever.
Willis Eschenbach says:
September 28, 2013 at 2:46 pm
This is a nice idea and I think it is one that should attract funding – need a nice pitch, a video and possibly a little light and TV demonstration set up. Because to get it started is fairly cheap, it falls within modest budgets of many smaller NGO type organizations (church groups, etc. as mentioned in comments). Your practicality and understanding of the limitations in the vary rural regions is nicely summed up in your comment:
“as soon as it busts the game is up. You need to have the systems in place to repair it and get the parts and the like. There’s a whole social component to technology.”
I can say ”Amen brother” to this. Thirty years ago, my brother, a millwright and I undertook a project for the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) http://www.idrc.ca/ to convert a hand-worked quarry for producing small stone blocks (cement block size) for dwelling construction over to a larger capacity, more modern (but not too modern because they wanted it to be as labor intensive as possible), efficient quarry, slab-sawing and block-splitting operation. We bought a junked steel wire saw from a monument company in Barre, VT, a common construction size air compressor and two rock drills, tools, steel, etc. They wanted us to source materials as much as possible locally but my very practical brother insisted on throwing a few large buckets of bolts and other bits into the shipping container.
They were supposed to have the site some 30-40km south of Moshi, Tanzania hooked up to the grid and we waited about 8 months for their call for us to come over. What we found was 30 km of poles lying down in the ditch and no power. We ended up getting a couple of Soviet generators that weren’t working and made them into one that did – sort of. Wire sawing requires water, clay or cuttings and grit and these have to be balanced 1/3 of each (settled 5 minutes in a coke bottle to estimate). Of course the cuttings build up so you have to periodically remove material from the sump and add water and grit. We were only allowed 2 weeks for training after the plant was running. We quarried several blocks, built the plant, sawed slabs of wall thickness and then split them into blocks with a large guillotine (we made) and sledge hammer. We also had made a jib crane with a couple of telephone poles (hardwood jib and tripod), a barrel of waste steel filled with concrete as a counterweight to which a 3 tonne chain hoist was attached- the jib being the short end to give enough leverage to raise a 5-10t block onto the flat deck of a truck – swung by manpower.
A couple of weeks of this and we left them to carry on. Not long after, we learned that production had stopped. The wire kept breaking which we determined was a result of unsteady power from the generator. I went back, found a Catholic technical training school on the grid near Moshi and they agreed to accept the plant which we dismantled and moved to the new site. We got it working again. The intention was to move back out next to the quarry once the hydro line was completed. Part of the idea was to progress to getting the simple wire saw replicated in Tanzania for use across the country. With the doubt expressed by the Tanzanian partners, I suspect this didn’t happen.
I recommend you contact IDRC (they are into innovative projects) and see what they say or suggest if you wanted to give your plan a try.
https://twitter.com/Ruth_A_Buzzi/statuses/383959516284325889
daly, that book sounds vaguely familiar but I didn’t recall that. My intro to the semiconductor revolution started with breadboarding off of a Sharp Pocket PC in the late 70’s The unit had a lower power clone of the Z80 with a bunch of extra latches that could be programmed in machine code. The latch lines, the address bus, the data bus, and clocks were all exposed on a small connector on the side. I had a couple projects with 110VAC, but never did burn the thing up.
Years later I have a raspberry pi plus breadboard, but the breadboard is still sitting in the box. Programming on the pi is too much fun all by itself.
The relationship to the topic at hand is that it would be great if the technology sent to the third world could be on breadboards or similar modular connectors. It would be even better if every component were driven by a tiny cheap microprocessor that was software interchangeable with any other component with only the minimum of hardware needed (servos etc). I am not at all an expert on the mechanical side, but a lot of “toy” mechanical building sets are very modular.
Willis, thank you for sharing your wonderful stories! I’ve done some of this work, focused upon conversion of animal manure into methane gas with anaerobic biodigesters. My first design was published by the Center for Community Change about 1980, using geotextile to create a simple, lined digester of plug-flow configuration. These are now common all over Asia, called “CIGAR” (covered in-ground anaerobic reactor).
I’ve worked on pig farms in the Philippines that generate 100% of their electricity for pumps, lights etc. using swine manure gas, burned in a stationary internal combustion engine/generator set. Amazing economics, the engines are just cheap auto engines….when the sulfides cause the engine to seize, it gets tossed & a replacement is easily fitted in. I’ve seen some pretty ugly installations, but the lights come on at night.
Household electricity is an interesting challenge, perhaps we need to break consumption down by the appliance? The One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) program seeks to distribute rather simple laptop PCs to children throughout the developing world, and these units are charged with a small hand-crank on the side. I’ve read where, in many homes, the light from the screen is the only artificial light for the household at night. See http://one.laptop.org/ Similarly, small radios, LED lights and other appliances might have their own individual hand crank/manual charging device… I have flashlights like this in my home for emergencies. Can’t beat ’em.
Like you, I investigated solar power for very modest applications in my Latin American and Asian farm biodigester projects and found the economics wanting (2005). Perhaps that is changing, but I’m sold on manual charging for small applications. Put a bicycle generator in some houses, everyone would ride it and charge the batteries. Might work. Hell, Americans should do some of that, we are all fat as the Philippine pigs!! Cheers, Willis! Charles the DrPH
Light in a bottle, no electricity required.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23536914
I wish I could add more stuff but I am tired, tired and going to bed.