There is a certain irony hidden in the title I chose to give my blog. “En Un País Ventoso” is spanish for “In A Windy Country”, but in actual fact, the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua is not a particularly windy place at all. Average wind speed here over the course of a year (neglecting those times when the occasional hurricane blows through) is 3.4m/s, or about 6mph. Compare that to around 5-6m/s for my home in the UK, which is not exactly considered a particularly windy place itself, and you might start to wonder - why choose to build wind turbines here at all? Surely one thing there is plenty of in Nicaragua is sun - maybe solar panels are a better choice for renewable power generation than wind turbines? Or, if the amount of energy needed for a project demands a wind turbine, why not just import cheap mass-produced ones from China?
If you did wonder any of these things, you'd be getting to the core of what blueEnergy is doing here. These and similar questions came up during January's induction program for the new volunteers. In many cases, Guillaume & Mathias (the "management") admitted that they didn't have answers and were still wrestling with the implications.
blueEnergy's emphasis is on sustainability and self-sufficiency. They won’t be here forever, and there will not be an endless stream of funders and donors waiting to subsidise energy systems in these communities. One of the aims of the work here is to build capacity and to engage and stimulate the local economy so that it can become a self-sustaining entity. This is the reason why the turbines are made locally, using locally sourced materials and a local workforce. Solar panels, on the other hand, have to be imported - they cannot be made locally. That isn't to say that there aren't cases where they are the most appropriate solution, indeed they are a vital component of the hybrid systems that blueEnergy installs here. And even though they aren't made locally, their procurement still stimulates local supply chains and the energy they generate still contributes to improving the quality of life of the recipient communities. The same is true for some of the more complicated electronics that go to make up the battery charging circuitry of blueEnergy’s installations, such as inverters and charge controllers. But nevertheless, the most impact can be made by engaging as much as possible local labour and suppliers.
So, what’s my part in all this so far? Well, I have been put in charge of the design and development of a new, bigger turbine. This baby is going to be 17’ in diameter, and should generate about twice the energy per year of the current 12’ machines. That means in any given community, more lights can be installed, more TVs powered, more mobile phones charged – or it could open the door to more productive uses, such as powering an ice maker (to keep fish fresh till it gets to market*) or a grinder to grate coconuts and extract their oil. Of course a bigger turbine also means a bigger alternator attached to it, a bigger tower to lift it up into the wind, and heavier duty electrics to handle all the power. For someone who came into this knowing pretty much nothing about electrics beyond the little I could remember from A-level physics, it’s been a challenging couple of weeks bringing myself up to speed on a lot of this stuff. In some ways I’ve felt a little guilty that I’ve basically been spending my time training myself up, gaining knowledge that I’ll take away and use later in life, and haven’t contributed anything productive to blueEnergy yet. But it’s still early days. I feel like I now have a good grasp of the alternator design and the balancing that has to be done between performance, cost and feasibility of actually making the thing in the workshop conditions that exist here. I think the alternator is the most complicated bit though, and the rest of the design should be fairly straightforward from here on.
My initial task is to produce a report to management which will help them to decide whether to go ahead with the project and find the funds necessary to commence it. It’s going to be one hell of a report, I can tell you, but my only worry is that the whole decision making process and subsequent identifying and allocating of funds might take so long that I won’t actually still be here to see the thing get built. That would be a frustrating conclusion, although I would still have the satisfaction of knowing that I made my own contribution, however small.
I have also been assigned to work on a gasification project for a Garífuna community in Pearl Lagoon. The goals here are still somewhat vague and there are various ways of generating fuel gas from biomass, but it looks like the project will involve taking a biomass feedstock (e.g. dried coconut husks), heating it up so that it gives off gas which can then be stored and burned to produce electricity in a generator, or maybe used to power an outboard motor. Again something I know next to nothing about but something I am very interested in learning about. More on this later (if it takes off).
Tomorrow I am heading off to a community called Set Net to help carry out repairs on a system that was damaged by the hurricane that passed by north of here late last year. This will be my first experience of what things are like out in the communities we are working with – a chance to appreciate things from their perspective and also an opportunity to understand the complications and constraints that exist there. More about that in the next post!
Till then,
Phil
*Actually, this has been tried and didn’t really work. Nobody wants to buy frozen fish from the communities when they can get freshly caught fish direct in Bluefields.
