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.
I believe the essence of the original suggestion is cheapness and availability of spare parts.
Yes, running the grid to all homes in Africa would be best but its not going to happen in our children’s lifetime.
Yes, much better batteries exist than old lead acid car batteries, but cost a fortune by comparison.
Compressed air is interesting but I would not like to be around when a rusting ar reservoir goes bang. (pressure vessels need strict maintenance checks)
As Willis stated, you need a system that locals can ‘own’ or buy into, using skills that they have or can acquire easily.
Old auto parts are ubiquitous, therefore very suitable.
The idea of installing PV panels in lieu of the grid at a cheaper cost is good, but it is a very high cost compared to the original suggestion.
This suggestion could kick start thousands of micro businesses and self help groups, increasing skill levels across a continent.
Kev-in-Uk says:
September 29, 2013 at 2:05 am
“I have to agree with the cautionary comments regarding foreign investment and aid into some of these countries. The top down corruption and skimming of funding occurs more frequently in these types of ‘young’ countries..”
Scimming, scamming and purloining is probably among the top economic activities in many of these countries – a condition that largely reflects the desperate need for a decent level of economic development. Years ago, I worked for the Geological Survey of Nigeria and one could see in market places Oxfam cardboard drums of rice (A gift to the people of Nigeria from Oxfam) on sale for a penny or two a cupful. These likely were “distributed” by the minister (perhaps) of health and his family. I mentioned this once to an Oxfam fellow who strenuously denied this to be possible.
Boots-on-the-ground projects are necessary to get anything worthwhile done. In my experience (mining industry) NGOs ARE the stumbling block in trying to get real investment based on natural resources into play. It introduces jobs, technology and infrastructure. I think the NGO establishment are largely on safari and don’t want to really see much development. South Africa’s shooting of protesting miners unfortunately has added another black eye in this sector for NGOs to point to.
Here is a little more about a do it yourself hydro (least cost).
http://www.ki4u.com/webpal/b_recovery/3_alternate_energy/electricity/water/pumps/xftpfiles/pumps_as_turbines-a_users_guide.pdf
As with any remote electric system, know your resource and what the expected energy consumption will be.
Sounds like a great idea to me. It also leads me to wonder why it’s not being done already. I would expect someone would have tried this before. Maybe maintenance and spare parts would be the problem. There is lots of examples of people bringing technology to poor regions and that technology eventually becoming neglected and unused, and usually the problem is the ability to maintain.
It makes me think of the Inuit in Canada’s north. They are given subsidies and lots of welfare due to their relative poverty and their remote location. They have snowmobiles that are provided by the federal government. Perhaps some communities are more self-sufficient, but I do believe this is usually not the case, most income is and goods are provided by Canada’s federal government in the form of welfare.
Anyway, the point is, that when their snowmobile breaks down, they leave it by the side of the road, get a ride home and leave it there. At home they ask the government for another and they are given another free snowmobile. While waiting for the new snowmobile, they sit at home and do nothing.
The relative poverty of the community does not change.
This makes me think there is nothing wrong with your idea, but that it won’t work anyway, for the reasons described above.
A donkey cart an d driver may not be necessary to transport the batteries back and forth to the powerhouse school. Instead, the larger kids could use two-wheeled shopping carts to carry a battery a day to and fro for their families and near neighbors (the latter for a small fee). An adult could lift the battery in and out, if necessary.
These shopping carts fold up and so could be hung from a hook in a wall when not in use.
kadaka, very informative, thanks.
I ripped out the dozen clogged up pollution control pods from a 1979 Landcruiser and smashed them open for fun but I had never even been curious about alternators enough to discover not four but six big diodes in there, which I have now finally seen on EBay:
http://s9.postimg.org/yo78j8csf/image.jpg
In 3rd grade I built a blue ribbon motor from iron nails and card stock and now make my own hysteresis free triac dimmer circuit boards by addition of two back to back diodes to keep the triac always locked on via leakage current, I assume, but indeed I did *not* understand what that diode was for.
The biggest discovery I made tinkering around as a kid was that if you wire a relay to shut itself off you get a buzzer which puts out a delightfully painful high voltage inductive spike train that casual subjects cannot readily let go of if you thread wires around a margarine cup with a mercury switch inside.
As a CNC router fanatic with a bio/chem/nano background, energy projects like these are certainly fun to think about if only the world hasn’t gone mad enough to slander us skeptics loudly enough to pull us into defending science, online, in our spare time, all in a crappy energy rationed economy in which the former Vice President calls for tyranny over reason and the current President scoffs at entrepreneurs since they “didn’t build that.”
I should have been a scammer. It pays very well today.
How about adding clean water to the micro-power and communication mix? Dean Kamen and evil capitalistic Coke Corp have teamed up to really help small villages do a lot of what we are talking about here. Very clever idea. Tell me what is wrong with it. Power for cell phones and a central TV too. Battery recharge as well (for flashlight lighting). A woman entrepreneur to run it and perhaps begin to pay for it?
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/dean-kamen-400-million-cell-phones-in-africa-wi0TV5FYQCqcFA6LofJM9w.html
Bernie
Thank you for share your experience and ideas about power sharing, power house school is a nice concept
NYCNik: I had a physics lab TA who, armed with his Ph.D a few years later, was working for an industrial firm evaluating instrumentation. He could recite in detail everything about electrons and holes and quantum states, but I had to explain to him that semiconductor diodes passed current in only one direction. Lots of credentials, no qualifications.
I have always been interested in PV ever since I got my hands on a couple of very small PC cells in the mid 50’s. Sadly PV is somewhat of a disappointment with promises of lower prices and better efficiency still not making PV cost effective. However now that I am retired and spend time in a motorhome I have installed the small Harbor Freight 45 watt PV panels to charge my utility batteries. This fairly cheap small system works well. I can get about 4 hours of laptop use a day and about four hours of light. But another far cheaper trick I use is the cheap solar powered yard lights. I have two $5 spotlight type lights that I simply put in the sun during the day and then place them in holders in the motor home to provide light for reading or cooking etc. They last forever, the oldest one I have is 5 years old but I know of even older ones that still work fine. I also use them to charge my rechargeable batteries that I then take out of these yard lights and use in the radio or flashlight. Fairly cheap electricity for small power usage systems. I have a generator on board but rarely use it.
Fuel cells? Using methane from dung/termite mounds etc…. armchair thoughts.
Careful about dragging those lead-acid batteries over rocks and gutted dirt rocks and potholed gravel: The heavy, long, closely spaced but carefully separated, very thin lead plates bend, touching plate-to-plate or cracking off when not carefully handled. Another reason to consider the older but sturdier iron-nickle batteries.
Let’s turn this in a different direction and consider that electricity is a energy carrier medium and not a source such as wood, coal, natural gas, propane, solar, etc. Electricity is a convenience not a necessity for many if not all machine driven tasks. The idea of bringing electricity to the “poor” is a Western concept based on current modern Western culture under the pipe dream of liberal equality of outcome’s faulty premise. BTW- this is how liberals justify keeping the poor at their current levels of poverty under the rubic of AGW. They have actually argued against Chinese modernization raising millions from abject poverty claiming it is not possible to raise every person’s standard of living to that of the US.
Both small portable TVs and lights (camping) can be charged with a small portable solar panel. This fills your requirement for education and information. Virtually any device requiring an electric motor for a driver can be substituted with an internal combustion engine powered by gasoline, diesel, or CO (made from wood, coal, camel chips or other locally available combustibles).
Batteries themselves are a very poor energy storage device that actually loses charge over a period of time such as a laptop battery. As others have suggested, consider compressed air as a viable energy storage medium. Compressed air actually has a secondary benefit in that IF you paint the compressed air tank black and leave it in the sun, the heat will cause the pressure in the tank to rise thus gaining extra energy to be used with no inefficiency associated with PV conversion. You can’t get that kind of effect from electricity as a carrier medium. Consider a wind mill for say a water pump, have the wind mill direct coupled to an air compressor. The compressed air will be stored in a compression tank and extra capacity can be easily added by piping in more tanks as needed. By decoupling the wind mill as a direct driver you take away some of the disadvantage of the lack of reliability of wind power. Paint the tank black and in effect your have a hybrid solar wind powered water pump turned by an air motor. Actually you could do the same for a small village run battery charging station or mini-grid. Have the air motor drive the generator to power the mini-grid or battery charging station. Or pipe the compressed air to various usage points to run pneumatic equipment or air motors for various applications.
As a side note, many modern electric conveniences are less energy efficient than their natural gas counterparts given their thermal efficiencies.
@Grey Lensman
>How about a Crispin Mongolian furnace, using wood, coal or biomass, heating water to lp steam.
>Use the lp steam to drive a micro steam turbine, magnetic bearings, one moving part, to drive integral 1kw generator. Waste steam then heats water and condenses back to water heater. In summer the neat can fire up an evaporative cooler.
I have always like the idea and even tried to get a man who knew a lot about steam to design me a 4″ piston machine. I had an engineering workshop at the time. A great deal of mechanical work can be done by steam pressure at <4 bars (above which certification is required).
The ideal would be something that can make about 50 Watts of 12 VDC. It is not all that much energy and as heating demand is on the order of 4-7 kW it does not have to be efficient. The Brazilian steam-stove was a bit of overkill in terms of cost but it worked and that was the point. In some places there is no shortage of fuel at all.
I am reminded of a scene from the movie, Out of Africa, when the Baroness had been explaining the need to send all of the tribal children to school and the old chief said, “The British send all of their children to school. What good has it done the British?”
Willis, thank you for sharing your experiences and practical ideas in assisting the poor. As the evidence for AGW increasingly fails to support assertions by environmental activists, perhaps it is time for the ‘sceptic’ community to begin shifting its focus from challenging the proponents of AGW to formulating a new global energy agenda based on real evidence, sound economics, and balanced human/environmental values.
from your prior article dealing with coal for heat, I was wondering how a remote boiler fired by coal using steam to drive alternators (or gens with converters) as well as piping heat to a few homes.
w/o knowing the exact topography its hard to say if its feasible, but if homes are close together (I cannot imagine they are large) one boiler could heat a few as well as charge batteries.
don’t see where you could get to the scale needed to be an actual coal fired gen plant, but the battery charging could be a secondary usage of the heat.
Jimbo says:
September 28, 2013 at 5:49 pm
Light in a bottle, no electricity required.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23536914
=====
You beat me to it by a country mile, Jimbo.
A very useful asset – h/t to Alfredo Moser.
Cooking – [doesn’t] Oxfam distribute a solar-powered one [so the wood etc. doesn’t get burnt, so more wood, plants – less erosion; and less carbon in the house’s atmosphere – and so a reduced rate of lung/bronchial diseases].
Transport – there’s a charity in the UK that ships container-loads of used bicycles out to [Africa?] some where in the Third World; Re-cycle; there are others I’ve found Wheels4life, Jole Rider, etc., but I’m not sure about sourcing [and paying for] new inner tubes/tyres . . . .
Again, as already indicated above many times, the elephant in the room is the local social structure.
One of the reasons England/Great Britain had the Industrial Revolution was that we had a workable rule-of-law. If you made money you kept most of it.
Auto
Crispin, Thank you. As others have stated for remote rural off grid applications, efficiency is really not necessary. That it is simple, cheap and works is the key. The range of fuels is growing. India is expert at low cost cow dung methane and using it as a kitchen fuel. To produce a cheap integrated unit requires a little bit of design engineering, its not rocket science.
An oddity I see with electricity, it needs to be simple, plug and play so to speak, or it gets left alone and dies. Odd that.
Auto says:
September 29, 2013 at 9:59 am
One of the reasons England/Great Britain had the Industrial Revolution was that we had a workable rule-of-law.
_________________________________________
That’s it.
JHC, having read through the comments here I can see just why a fair old percentage of the population (of Earth) are still living on a couple of dollars a day after decades of Western attempts at trying to eradicate poverty.
At one end nobody has asked what, exactly, the locals need. Let’s try lighting. OK boys and girls, let’s all turn off the electricity in our lovely Western home at sunset. No cheating with a torch though! Let’s see what you miss most by daybreak. Light? Heat? The Internet?
Then we get all the way to “carpet bombing them with PDA’s”. Quite apart from PDA’s requiring electricity (which we don’t have) from sockets (that we don’t have), what exactly would they be used for? We don’t have electricity and we sure as hell don’t have ‘Internet access’. I suppose we could pre-load the ‘to do’ list though. ‘Take care of four children until my husband gets back from SA and do it all during daylight hours’. Then again we knew that without the PDA chirping away at sunrise.
I think that we are back where Willis started all this. Cash and Coal (if we are lucky) from our four month stint working in a SA mine are what we have.
Oh yes and stupid Westerners arriving periodically with some new hair brained scheme.
Its a compelling idea. Following up your travels in the UK, one thing that is striking about past centuries in Britain is that work for pay often began quite young. Of course images of 10-year olds down coal mines is a very negative one. However in the light of problems of delinquency one sometimes feels that starting work early can be good for many. I am reminded of the film “Master and Commander” with Russel Crowe on which quite young boys served in the UK navy.
However the point raised by several about the rule of law is a valid one. If these units were indeed profitable, how long would they stay in the hands of teachers and school children?
Instead of solar what about coconuts? Coconut diesel could be used to power a generator to charge the car batteries. No deforestation necessary, locally available, free and renewable. To get it going the generator could be sold dirt cheap to a local who presents the best plan to run the operation for his own profit.
http://www.onecountry.org/e151/e15101as_Deamer_profile.htm
In Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, cars are run off coconut diesel. Necessity is the mother of adaptation. This was apparently in reaction to the trade blockade. The fule was also used in the Philippines in WW2 to power generators.
http://www.kokonutpacific.com.au/CoconutBiofuelKP.php
http://youtu.be/p6KChpTMfUI
dmacleo says:
September 29, 2013 at 9:47 am
A coal-fired furnace & boiler (for running a turbine generator or a older, even-less-efficient, even more troublesome-to-keep-running, steam-piston engine generator is a complex, dangerous machine tool. (Think steam locomotive and tender sitting between a group of houses with children running around, steam pipes running around, and the generator cables and wires.)
Yes, the nuclear plants in the communist Europe DID get put right around the apartment buildings to heat the apartment buildings and factories. Doesn’t mean it was right.
Low temperature heating water (as in the old, inefficient coal-fired “boilers” of the US and Europe northeast) do not heat the water enough to make efficient steam generators. Using a village central boiler requires twice the length of clean, leak-proof water and steam pipes (easily stolen!) going house-to-house to get the hot water out, cold water back to the boiler or heat exchanger. More than quadruples the cost since you have to install all that extra piping. Also, the clean pure water needed inside the generator or steam engine has to be treated carefully (can’t use river or raw water!) and the extra runs add to the make up water and losses. Not to mention “wash water and drinking water” taken from the heating water lines! For example, people are regularly electrocuted tapping into high voltage electrical lines to steal un-metered electricity even in US cities and European cities where they should know better.
Thermal efficiency drops with all those thousands of feet of un-insulated extra pipe runs. Sorry, it is just not practical.
high Maintenance, high operating expenses (fuel, water, short running times before reloading), and continual repairs and the short operating times for steam engines on trains are the primary reason that diesel locomotives replaced them. Continual improvements in efficiency and costs are what keep pushing real-world coal-fired and nuclear plants to ever-larger sizes. Small size and small generators are simply more expensive than big ones.
But – if all you can get a very small generator rather than none at all? Better a small one.
I’m in complete agreement with Willis about “expensive energy kills poor people”.
Pielke the Younger had a series of articles on the subject in the fall of 2012 for instance here: Against Modern Energy Access. http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/11/against-modern-energy-access.html
Pielke the Younger wrote:
Willis’s example of the diesel powered, donkey transported electrical grid goes a great way to illustrate exactly how important rural electrification is to rural people. That these people are willing to invent, and put up with about the most ridiculously absurd and inefficient method electrical transmission possible – automobile battery by donkey – shows how important it is to them. Ironically, that method seems to work better in practice, and is less ridiculous and absurd than the method being proposed by the 1st world Peace Corp workers back in the ’80s.
What ever the solution is it must work, it must be affordable, it shouldn’t break easily, it must be repairable, the parts available, and it must not make anything else worse.
I really like the bit: “If it doesn’t pay, it doesn’t stay.” This is the ultimate economic reality in much of the world were there is no surplus to spare for someone else’s bright ideas.
Some first thoughts:
I have to ask, what will really change with the Powerhouse School Concept? I like it on the one hand, I think it has potential to fill a niche need, and I don’t like it on the other hand because I don’t think it will really solve the problem of lack of rural development and may have some unexpected social repercussions.
How much new wealth or economic activity will Willis’s scheme generate? Willis is a pretty astute analyst when it comes to the numbers, but I wonder if he has missed some possible negative outcomes: like what happens to the guy with the donkey cart? and what happens to the guy who was running the charging business out of the back door of the sawmill powerhouse, and what about the sawmill truck drivers in between? These people represent economic activity and personal income that are at risk of being co-opted by the Willis’s scheme.
I have to ask because I’ve spent enough time myself out on the Reservation with tribal peoples to understand how these businesses often really run. I don’t know, but I suspect in Willis’ Paraguayan example that the real cost to the sawmill of diesel fuel, operator, and capital expenses were not being fully captured in the price of recharging the batteries – that is if all of the electricity wasn’t being out and out stolen from the mill’s owner and the costs to the enterprise had more to do with bribes and payola than no.2 diesel and motor oil.
One factor that differs between Willis’ program and the Paraguayan model is that the latter had almost no capital costs of its own. The generator and all of its capital and overhead expenses is paid for the mill, the donkey cart already paid for, there is a [small] available supply of used car batteries around that are inexpensive enough for the farmers to obtain – probably because they are too decrepit to start a car.
The more successful the Powerhouse School Concept becomes the more it will push the economics of return-on-investment into the area of having to deal with users having to pay for new auto batteries more often, or more expensive deep-cycle batteries up front.
I like that Willis’s proposal is containerized and probably modular. There seem to be a possibility of significant economies of scale, as well as making the scheme turn-key and franchisable. Keep the consultants out of it, but leave the design to professionals. Big plus.
Question is, will it “pay” in reality? and who will finance the initial capitalization of operation? I’m sure Willis has costed all of this out, but as a business proposition his scheme has has to bear much more financial responsibilities for its own upkeep than the original Paraguayan model. As Willis mentioned, people in these circumstances have irregular incomes. Businesses have difficulties with irregular incomes when they have fixed capital expenses. If the scheme is not able to help create real economic development in the adult population of the communities it serves then it will always be at grave risk of not being able to “pay” – and it won’t “stay”.
I like the educational and technical training aspect of the program but I don’t like the child labor aspect of the program. Does the income from the scheme pay the child workers? The school? The schoolmaster? How do the impoverished parents pay their own kids for the household electricity? If the Powerhouse School doesn’t help alleviate the problem of adult non-employment then all you will wind up doing is exacerbating the problem of the flight of human talent, young people, and resources to the city, leaving everyone else much as before. The kids are going to move to a grid connection once they figure out electricity and that real work can be gotten out of it.
The Powerhouse School concept may be some kind of a stop-gap, but at some point you have to raise the threshold of electricity use for these people to the realm of ‘modern’. This is something I hope most people can agree on because – expensive energy kills poor people.
I like the idea that the project will be supervised by someone with some education and social independence [especially social independence] in the village, the teacher, but I also don’t like the idea of concentrating economic activity at the school, government run or otherwise.
Unfortunately, in my last analysis, if ideas such as the Powerhouse School are not protected by an “open-access order”† society, then it will likely remain marginal and incapable of producing the real kinds of change and development that the undeveloped nations desperately need.
That’s my opinion,
W^3
† The Natural State: The Political Economy of Non-Development, Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast; UCLA Center for Comparative and Global Research, 2005 – http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=22899