Having strapped two wind turbines to the roof and a solar panel inside our yellow Pajero named Beryl, we took to the road bound for Mfungano Island. We drove from Kisumu to Luanda K’Otieno where we took the car ferry to Mbita. From there, we loaded all the equipment onto a small wooden passenger boat.

Mfungano is a wildlife rich island on Lake Victoria with a population of around 30,000. Early settlers came to the Island from Uganda, escaping accusation of an attempt to assassinate the King. We were there to install two wind turbines and a solar panel on top of the mountain, Soklo. This will provide power for the new Ekielo Kiona community radio station and a high-speed line-of-sight internet link from Kisumu. 

The youth-driven radio station will broadcast in Suba and Luo language, and facilitate community-driven programs aimed at raising health and nutrition awareness, mobilising youth activism, improving social solidarity, promoting sustainable agriculture and fishing innovation, and preserve the endangered Suba language and cultural identity. This project is part of Organic Health Response’s fantastic work on the Island. 

The Island has just one road around its circumference. So we had to carry all our tools, the turbines, the solar panel and batteries all the way up the mountain - it was back breaking! But the beautiful views made up for it, and it was great to get down to work with lots of help from the local community, including Mr Ekelo, the local Mze who generously donated the land for the tower and turbines.

To find out more about this work, visit accessenergy.org

Bringing electricity to fishing communities on Lake Victoria

Dotted around the shores of Lake Victoria are hundreds of villages that depend on fishing. As night falls, thousands of fisherman row out on boats to catch omena, nile perch and tilapia. The lake lights up like a city, as a thousand paraffin lamps flicker through the night, attracting omena fish to the surface so fishermen can sweep them up in their nets.

Grid electricity is not available or affordable in these villages which means that the catch must be sold within hours, before the fish rot. Ice filled trucks arrive in the morning to take away the night’s catch to be sold in fish markets as far away as Europe.

I’ve recently spent a few days visiting some of these villages to scope out the potential for a project to install wind and solar systems that can power cold storage for the fish and charging stations for electric lights. I was with a group of university professors and two NGOs that we are partnering with to design this project. In our interviews, we talked with Beach Management Units (BMU). Each bay as a BMU that everyone involved in the fish trade are members belong. From experience, we had decided not to approach the fishing villages to tell them our ideas, but rather gather information, understand their greatest challenges, and understand the suitability of an energy project and how it might fit.

Establishing cold storage facilities would enable the fisherman to have greater bargaining power, enabling to sell at reasonable rates on their terms. The other major energy opportunity is providing renewably powered lights for omena fishing boats. Omena are small fish, caught at night time and dried during the day. They are used in cooking but also as feed for chickens and other animals (we feed omena to our cat and he loves it).

So what’s the opportunity for replacing paraffin lights with electric lights charged during the day from renewables? Each omena fishing boat has four fishermen and four paraffin lamps that are used all night. The fuel cost is significant, around KSh 600 per night (about US$7). For a typical village such as Got Kachola, this amounts to over a daily expenditure of KSh 21,000 per night. At this price, renewable energy quickly becomes within easy reach.

We aren’t the first to think of this. Osram are an organisation that have built solar powered charging stations that lease out solar lamps to locals. When interviewing the fisherman, they spoke highly of the idea, but most complained that the solar lamps could not hold enough charge to last the night. So the challenge is to provide longer-lasting lights, and get them within easy reach of the fishing communities (Osram stations aren’t always located nearby).

There’s one other important benefit to getting affordable electricity into the fishing villages. The fisherman we interviewed often talked about a trend of declining catches: overfishing on Lake Victoria is occurring and well-recognised. To try and manage this, there is an omena fishing ban from April-September. Some fishermen probably ignore the ban, but most switch to catching tilapia and nile perch, or continue on the Ugandan shores where no ban exists. Declining fish stocks means declining jobs and these villages don’t have many other means of income. Providing electricity provides opportunities for new businesses, for example, video stores, barber shops, manufacturing facilities. This is an indirect but important reason why fishing communities need affordable, clean electricity.

How wiring solar panels is a bit like having a party. A cartoon from a splendid girl called Sylvie, who has lots more pictures on youtookthatwell.com

A short video I put together yesterday in the workshop. We are testing a wind turbine made exclusively from readily available components that can be found across East Africa, as explained by my colleague Allan from access:energy.

Macynlleth and back.

I’m cruising back to London on the train from mid-Wales, where I’ve been on a quick round-trip to visit friends in Cardiff and Macynlleth, home of the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT). Lots of deep green, drizzle and wind turbines are whizzing past out of the window, and I’m feeling recharged from my trip, like a deep cycle battery. 

I haven’t been to CAT for years. They have some good displays there, but for me, the real experience is finding out what’s going on behind the scenes. First stop was a really informative chat with a chap called Toby, who was manning the information desk. I had been recommended his expertise from friends, and he didn’t disappoint. We chatted wind, hydro and PV, and he showed me some of the PV-tracking experiments that were going on – that were exploring the potential for mirrors (also known as ridge concentrators) to boost output. Some of these ideas are outlined in this paper by Poulek. It could be interesting to explore this some more for their applicability and potential in the East Africa context.

He pointed me to the useful PV-GIS website where we looked up the additional benefits of tracking on a single axis – seems to be up to 35% in East Africa which is good! It feels tracking has good potential if there is space and a simple tracker is easy to manufacture, otherwise, why not just invest in one extra PV panel, and have them fixed in place? Then you don’t have to worry about the tracking going wrong – because if it does, then you will have even less generation than a static panel. 

As for the mirrors and their potential to further boost generation, the effect of increased temperature on the panels needs to be considered, since the efficiency of generation is reduced by increased surface temperature, but this relationship depends on the type of panels. All very interesting stuff to investigate.

Next, I met up with an old friend Suneil, who showed me to his office where he is working on a 3D-printer (info here). This is an open-source project, involving a worldwide community for developers. He showed me how he is using the wonderful Arduino chips to control the axis and plastic extrusion. Lots of potential here for enabling localized production of affordable components for engineers. We also talked about the potential for quick fabrication of cheap wind turbine blades and other components using this system, and some of the open source turbine projects going on.

All in all, a good trip. CAT is an inspiring place, and doing some really important work. The people I met were full of ideas, enthusiasm and were very welcoming, and very lucky to be in such beautiful surroundings.

More photos over at Flickr.