March 2008 Archives

It's been a busy week here in London. It's been wonderful to have Pedro, Ricardo and German from the Avina Foundation visiting us. As you'll remember, the Avina Foundation are a leading South American organisation and they are helping us set up our solar programme in the region.

So we went to Cardiff in Wales on Tuesday to meet Peter Davies, Vice Chair (Wales) of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, and John Pontin from the Converging World, an excellent organisation that is driving ahead with wind power for developing countries with a pioneering model of contraction and convergence.

We also had a meeting with a new foundation based in Wales that funds projects tackling climate change and poverty around the world. We'll be applying to them for some initial funding to help us get the project going.

However, it's unlikely we will manage to get all the funding we need from trusts and foundations, which is why your help is so urgently needed. So please click on the 'support' button and donate!

We're now back in the UK and trying to raise funds for this South America solar project. It's really exciting to be doing all this work. However, we really do need the funds urgently in order to start a pilot project in Argentina very soon.

Just £20,000 would allow us to do the pilot project while we try to raise the funds for the whole programme. With that £20,000 we could pay for a volunteer solar engineer from the UK to spend six months with Warmi in order to start training them, buy a first lot of solar materials, start setting up the systems and identify the best places for solar installations for when we start scaling up the programme. The photo above is of a solar system on a home in rural Bolivia - a place the electricity grid will never reach. So please give!

Nick

Yesterday we had a 12-hour drive from Argentina to Bolivia, with a three hour stop at the border. It was an eye-opener: while just about everyone else was walking straight through, Raul, who has been guiding us through this trip, had to get a dozen forms signed and stamped, visit half a dozen border offices, get photocopies, get them stamped again, visit another office, wait in line for ages, etc, etc. As he explained to us, the border guards were asking for money 'for beer and food', but each time he refused, so they kept on making him go through the bureaucratic process.

But we got through in the end and then drove hundreds of miles through Bolivia's poorest region: scattered mud and brick huts, mad dogs running after our 4x4 as we drove through small villages, across deserted plains and through rocky valleys, leaving swirling clouds of brown dust behind us. As Raul frequently pointed out, there is a huge need here for solar energy as most communities we came across had no access to electricity.

John

So we met with Rosario and members of the communities yesterday. They love the micro solar idea, but they also want solar thermal to heat water and solar cooking - so two new areas to explore.

They're very entrepreneurial and highly organized, so it should be no problem setting up a micro solar business here. When I asked Rosario how many solar chargers she thought they could sell, she instantly replied 'around 20,000 to 40,000, because each family will want several and because we can sell to other areas too'.

They also want larger systems and we've been discussing helping them set up a solar business here that would sell such systems. The only solar companies are in Buenos Aires and they have no interest in this region, so one option could be for us to help Warme set up a solar company that would sell and install solar systems on homes, schools, medical centres, etc.

The promising element is that the government is legally obliged to provide electricity to everyone in the country, even those with no grid access. Hence the government may pay for all solar systems installed - a direct subsidy for any solar company that Warme sets up.

So that's it for now. Better go as we're about to have a meeting with 160 leaders of local communities to discuss all the above.

The sun's now shining brighter outside - it's going to be another very sunny day!

Solar regards,
John

The Highlands
Monday we flew up to Jujuy, right in the north of Argentina, where we were greeted by Raul, an anthropologist who works with the Avina Foundation, the organization that invited us here. We drove a few hours up into the Quebrada de Humahuaca, a broad gorge of stratified vividly coloured rock, with pretty towns and oasis villages - a region recently made a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

On Tuesday we drove further up into the highlands, up to 4,000m, across stunning near-desert plains where a few stray lamas graze and dotted with the occasional adobe huts that are typical of the region.

The weather here is perfect for solar. They have 6-10 days of overcast sky a year. The rest of the time, it's a perfect blue, with not a cloud in site. Raul (see photo above) told us that this is because of micro-climatic conditions caused by different air masses and winds surrounding the region. In winter, they have 6-8 hours of strong sunlight a day; in summer it can be up to 12 hours.

Nick