[Kelly Jiang, undergraduate researcher at the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab]

金盆村 (Jinpen village) is a spectacularly beautiful place in the lush forested hills of Western China, with freshly paved mountain roads winding through steep terraced fields. The fields are filled with all types of crops – ranging from rice and corn, to radishes, greens, cucumbers, tomatoes, sunflowers, lotus, and even crayfish.

Golden hour from a random spot on the road. The single lane concrete road pictured here goes into the fields and was probably paved very recently (in the last 1-2 years) as the Chinese government is working very hard and putting a lot of money into trying to eliminate absolute poverty by 2020.

Jinpen village is partway up the mountain, and provides spectacular views into the valley several hundred meters below. It’s incredibly remote – the drive to the nearest county seat, Nanjiang, takes about two hours on winding mountain roads – and Nanjiang itself is a four-and-a-half hour drive from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Despite its remoteness, the Chinese government has spent a pretty significant amount of money on building up the village. Twenty or so new houses were constructed a couple years ago in an effort to encourage people to move from the fields into the village center. The houses are extremely large: the one we lived in during our stay had four bedrooms and two full bathrooms, and some houses are even bigger.

However, many of the houses are uninhabited – most people prefer to live in their ancestral homes in their fields, since there’s not much for them to do in the village center anyway. There’s one road that goes through the town, an elementary school, a carpentry shop, a police station, two convenience stores, and… that’s about it. So, although it may appear that the area became more “developed” as the town doubled in size with the construction of these new houses, that appearance of development means nothing if there are no economic activities to partake in.

The owners of the house we stayed in don’t actually live in the house, which is why we were able to live there – like many others, they prefer to be close to their fields where they’ve grown up and subsisted off the fruits of their own labor for decades.

The Project

I was in Jinpen as part of the IEEE Smart Village project, which “integrates sustainable electricity, education, and entrepreneurial solutions to empower off-grid communities.” In places where many communities are incredibly poor and lack even basic electricity, installing renewable energy systems in off-grid areas can have a huge impact on those communities’ quality of life. However, merely providing electricity is not necessarily sufficient to achieve economic development benefits – electricity must be but one part of a holistic sustainable development program. Power for All finds that “[m]any factors are critical to establishing PUE [productive uses of electricity] beyond just energy access itself, including capacity development, business permitting processes, access to finance and transportation infrastructure.” [Source] That’s why the smart village project aims to combine energy access with education and entrepreneurship, so that electricity can be an enabler of different types of economic activities such as internet cafes, barber shops, food processing, and much more that would not have been possible without electricity.

For the IEEE smart village project in Jinpen, a 16.2 kW grid-connected solar system was installed on the rooftop of the school. The solar system sells the power it generates to the power grid, allowing the school to save money on electricity and possibly even use the solar energy as an extra source of income. Any extra money is valuable to the school, which is quite cash strapped and has difficulty retaining its teachers due to its remote location.

The population of Jinpen elementary school keeps shrinking as more and more people move from rural areas to urban areas. The graduating 6th grade class this year had 14 students, down from 20 a few years earlier. There are 7 students in 5th grade, and 5 students in 4th grade – 4 next year, after one of the students moves away. There are 84 total students in the school. And Jinpen elementary school is actually one of the larger elementary schools in the area – another elementary school a couple miles down the road has only 5 students. Yes, FIVE students. Across all grades.

The mass migration of people from rural areas to urban cities is happening all around the world, not just in China. It’s happening in the United States, where small towns have been shrinking for decades. Schools in rural America are shrinking and closing, too. So that begs the question: Is this urbanization trend irreversible and just something that we should accept? If so, does it even make sense to be investing so much money in rural areas’ development if people are all leaving? If not, then what kind of economic activities can be developed in these rural areas? These are difficult questions, and we need to be thinking about them a lot more than we are.

~~~

Anyway, back to the project that we were working on – the 16.2 kW solar system installed on top of the school. Funding to build the system was donated by a variety of individuals and organizations, including Sichuan University, various renewable energy companies, etc. The total cost of the system was about US$25,000, or ¥150,000. It was wonderful to see so many people from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors all come together to support the project – it’s been a really long process to raise all the funds and coordinate all the parties who contributed to the construction of the system, and it’s a testament to the generosity and capabilities of the project organizers, especially Xiaofeng Zhang, that this project was able to become a reality.

Since the system is grid-connected, it’s essentially just selling the solar energy it generates to the grid – at a higher price than it costs to buy energy from the grid. Thus, the school is selling (expensive) solar energy to the grid, while buying (cheap) electricity from the grid, resulting in savings.

One of the paths to a family’s home. Yes, this is actually the trail. If you look closely you can kind of see it. That family had electricity.

Since the school is already connected to the electricity grid, as are all of the homes in the area (even the ones that are only accessible by hiking for 1km or more on dirt paths that can be incredibly steep and get super muddy in the rain), putting solar on the school doesn’t really provide a meaningful benefit when it comes to electricity access. It’s worth emphasizing what an incredible accomplishment it is that China has been able to provide electricity access to every household in the country – that’s a huge infrastructure project, and China is probably the only country at this point that could do something on that scale.

(Aside: grid extension is probably not the most cost-effective way of electrifying rural areas, as building out transmission and distribution lines for so many hundreds of miles to carry relatively small amounts of electricity is really, really expensive. A single rural grid connection in Tanzania can cost US$2,300, compared to an off-grid solar system that costs US$240. [Source: Power for All] Thus, in many unelectrified villages, it is far more cost-effective to install solar home systems or microgrids, rather than extend the central grid. Hence, the IEEE smart village project aims to bring solar home systems, irrigation pumps, and microgrids to unelectrified villages, rather than using grid connection.)

Anyway, since the benefit of this system doesn’t come primarily from the fact that it’s providing energy access, it’s all the more important to ensure that the educational benefit to the students is maximized – that the students really understand how solar energy and other forms of renewable energy work, why renewable energy is important, etc. Ideally, the solar panels would also be integrated into the school curriculum on a regular basis.

As part of the focus on education in this program, the solar system was designed specifically to show students some of the different considerations when designing a solar energy system. There were three different kinds of trackers installed on different panels – some were connected to a flat single-axis tracker, others were connected to a tilted single-axis tracker, and others were connected to a tracker that students can adjust to tilt more or less towards the south as the seasons change. There were also, of course, fixed panels tilted towards the south that weren’t attached to trackers. The idea behind this is for students to see firsthand how solar energy is affected by the angle of solar panels throughout the year. Additionally, the students should have a sense of responsibility and ownership of the solar panels that they adjust every two weeks to keep up with the changing angle of the sun.

On the rooftop with the students and solar panels!

Another potential benefit of having solar installed on the school is that it could continue to provide power to the school during power outages. Most unfortunately, the solar system didn’t actually have islanding capability (i.e. the capability to separate itself from the grid during an outage), which pretty much negates the most obvious use case of the solar system for the school. However, if they get a bit more money in the next few years, they can implement the hardware needed for the school to island itself from the grid. That said though, it would have been ideal for the system to be completely designed and built upfront so that the school could have access to all the benefits of the solar system from day one.

But that’s a lesson learned that can be applied to the next smart village project! They’re actually planning to expand the smart village program to 200 schools within the next five years (a “Five Year Plan”), so there are lots of opportunities to improve on the system design for future projects.

It’s also important to keep in mind that sustainable development projects must be maintained over the long term. It’s all too common to do projects like this, put on a show to announce that the project has completed, then walk away without thinking about the long-term impact. Especially as the IEEE smart village program aims to expand to 200 schools in the next five years, I really hope that there’s an emphasis on ensuring that these projects are focused on making the greatest impact in the villages where they are installed. Quality over quantity.

In my discussions about rural development with my advisor at Chongqing University, he commented that many development projects in China are completed to the extent that officials will be able to point to their work and say that they hit whatever target the Five Year Plan had set in place. For instance, China has a target of eliminating absolute poverty by 2020, and the Chinese government is throwing huge amounts of money at this target so that they can say, when 2020 rolls around, that this target has been met. However, the real key, my advisor said, is to see the status of rural development in 2025, in 2030, in 2050. After the attention fades away, have the local communities developed new types of economic activities that can be sustained? Or does the government need to keep spending billions on these communities to keep them afloat while the rest of the world moves on?

Read the rest of this post on Kelly's personal blog, The Procraftination.

by Diego Ponce de Leon Barido, ERG PhD Candidate
with team members Javier Rosa (TIER, UC Berkeley), Stephen Suffian (Villanova University), and Odaly (Nicaragua local team)

I feared the worst: The bags had been thrown around at customs damaging our gadgets, the humidity and heat had fried our circuits, mice had eaten away at the cables, and our equipment was now being sold in Managua’s electronics black market.

Our ultimate objective for the trip in Nicaragua was to deploy a wireless sensor network in thirty micro-enterprises and households to monitor and inform the design of a micro-level demand response implementation for renewable energy integration.

One of the most stressful moments of our two and a half-month implementation was the ride back from customs to our home-stay, after recovering all our equipment. On my ride back, I shared a tiny Nissan car with two strangers with some of our equipment being tied to the car’s roof with the rest of the equipment overflowing the Nissan’s tiny trunk. The bags also weighed much less than when we initially handed them off at customs, but stopping to check the bags’ contents in the street could have meant losing even more equipment to petty theft.

We planned to be in Nicaragua for two and a half months. We allowed for failure in our mind, knowing well that we could only plan for the few things that we could control, and left extra mental space and time for the natural uncertainty of bureaucratic processes, as well as all the unforeseen mistakes that our team would surely make along the way.

Basically, we planned for what we could control, and assumed that good luck and hard work would take care of randomness. First, we would forget nothing back in Berkeley. Then, our technology would spend exactly two weeks at customs, and Nicaragua’s National Engineering University (UNI) would help us release it without paying taxes. Because we had tested our hardware and software ad nauseam in Berkeley, our deployment would be a simple "plug and play," and we would "figure out" communications for a demand response implementation "in country."

Customs was a nightmare that required 15 full days of absolute patience, cultural navigation, and polite pestering

Again, our objective was to deploy a wireless sensor network in thirty micro-enterprises and households. We call these "sensors nodes" a FlexBox. In the end, we implemented 29 (out of 30) partially working FlexBoxes in Managua, and kept one for future testing in Berkeley.

Customs was a nightmare that required 15 full days of absolute patience, cultural navigation, and polite pestering (and thousands of dollars paid in taxes). Our hardware passed most tests, but some sensors failed in the field after being exposed to being thrown around, drowning in freezing water, and sharp metal doors searing connections away. We got carried away in what we thought would be useful (but not necessary) software developments instead of focusing on a bulletproof version of our minimum viable product (MVP), and were not even close to "figuring out" a cost-effective communications protocol in Managua.

However, despite our "natural" missteps (things that can go wrong, will go wrong), we have begun developing a unique regional dataset which will allow us to correlate micro-level demand and behavior, to grid level measurements such as system frequency, generation from fossil and renewable resources, and weather data.

Our project also considers increasingly important equity implications of smart grid deployments: How are data exchanges mutually beneficial? How can urbanites be more engaged in a low carbon transitions? How can renewable energy based grids provide higher quality service and useful information to their clients?

To our knowledge, our project is the first of its kind in the region and will greatly contribute to shedding light on how existing grid infrastructure can be used to further increase the equitable penetration of uncertain and variable renewable energy.


SURVIVING IMPLEMENTATION
Throughout this process, our team learned a lot about what it takes to go from plans to implementation. Below are ten takeaways for future implementation that other researchers introducing new technology into foreign countries may find useful as well.

1. Customs
Depending on where you are traveling and what technology you’re deploying, your experience will vary drastically. If you are in a country where rules, guidelines and regulations are carefully detailed and followed your job is easy – read the rules and play by the book and most likely you won’t have a problem. However, if you are in country where everything is routinely improvised, you’ll most likely be at the mercy of a local customs agent at the beginning of your first "in country" adventure.

Make sure a handy person in your team is fluent in the local language and culture, you have "extra" money in case you need to hire a customs agency, and that your patience "hat" and best manners are at their best all the time. Two to three weeks is normal operating procedure, if you do everything right. If you make mistakes, don’t have the right permits or forms, or are being regularly scammed because you don’t understand the language well enough, this process could take months.

Our technology traveled from San Francisco...

... to El Salvador...

... to the customs of Manauga...

... and finally to 29 homes

2. Parts
Bring an extra set of cheap "parts" that you may not be able to find in country. Doing your due diligence is very important. Make a list of the things you can find in country and a list of things you can’t find in country. Bringing extra things that you can’t find in country will cause problems at customs, so make sure you have lists of parts. Bring an extra two or three "final products" (whatever those may be). Regardless of how good you think your product is, you’ll have to keep iterating in the field – having a working final product as a test bed while you deploy is very important.

3. Money
If you are working on a tight budget, you’ll have to be very creative about how you spend your money. Besides your technology, and if you have a team, you will all have to stay in the same place (and that place must have a good working space). You’ll also need a car, money for food, extra parts, and many other things that will show up as you begin your project. You’ll also need to hire a local team, both for the deployment as well as for your project’s follow up.

Although "strong collaboration" with institutions is important, and "community ownership" and "partnerships" are essential (these buzzwords are all the rage in development circles), nothing gets people working – at the pace that you want them to work like money. Be wise in how you spend your money, and prepare a detailed budget months ahead of time.

4. Contacts

You’ll soon find out that your Berkeley education and prior experiences mean very little once your project "breaks ground"

Things will inevitably go wrong. Make sure that you have friends and connections in the right places. Our team had signed collaboration agreements with the National Engineering University, the Ministry of Energy and Mines, and a local renewable energy startup. None of these signed agreements meant much until we needed to show that we knew people in high places, and that they were keeping a close eye on our project. Keep those signed agreements handy, you never know when you might need them.

5. Local Team
Nothing – NOTHING - happens without a local team. You might think your clever engineering skills have taken you far in life, or that your Peace Corps experience has turned you into a community relations expert, but you’ll soon find out that your Berkeley education and prior experiences mean very little once your project "breaks ground."

We hired a community liaison (Odaly), an electrician (Roberto), and an electronics engineer (Jorli) to work with us throughout the implementation and to stay with us through follow up. While we handled the implementation logistics and directed everything, they were heavily involved in troubleshooting, surveying, and follow up. They have all learned a wide variety of skills along the way, such as fixing broken sensors, accessing PostGRES databases, and setting up a local WiFi network.

Once you leave, you need to make sure that there is a team of people that will be able to solve problems as they arise. Without a good local team, your project will last only about two to three weeks post-implementation.

6. Build/Deploy Team
A small team needs to be composed of people with interchangeable skills that complement each other well. (Three people sounds about right). One person can be responsible for a lot but not for everything. If your project is technical, then everyone in your team must be able to help, or everyone must be willing to learn (fast). There will be plenty of times for PANIC to sneak in.

If you’re leading, you can never panic. If you’re someone who panics, control yourself. When things get hot, you’re stressed, or you’re panicking, control yourself. Drink water. Take a break. Be respectful. Try not to complain (too much). Nothing sucks more than having to deal with a difficult situation, and with someone who is complaining about it.

Javier and Stephen did A LOT of hacking to get an excellent MVP

7. Respect your MVP
You arrived to your site with a minimum viable product (MVP). You have something that works. Your goal should be to make that product work on site with as little change as possible. Don’t add components (hardware or software) to your MVP "in country." You need time to test new additions, and more time to make them work like you want them to. Additional things can be done once your MVP is fully functional on the field. Until that point, eschew any ideas to make the product better, faster, or easier to use. Any improvements should have happened during the testing phase and can happen when you’re done with your deployment. If you have a short deployment time, respect your MVP.

8. Time
You should leave, at minimum, three weeks of follow up after you have finished your deployment.  Things will fail and break, and you need time to fix them. You also need time to train your local team on troubleshooting. Leaving a country right after deployment is symptomatic of the "parachute" approach that most "development engineers" work with (drop in, have your adventure, drop some technology, fly off to another adventure). After your deployment, do your due diligence and stay in country to finish the training with your local team, make and solve problems, troubleshoot, and prepare your project for the next few months before the next iteration.

9. Release
Deployments are high-stress situations. Make sure that you’re doing something fun the entire time. Bond. Keep things fun. Remember that no one is forcing you to do this, so make sure that you’re enjoying life while doing it. If not, what’s the point?

10. Humility, Respect
Respect the people you’re working with. Respect your local team. Respect each other. Be humble about what you can accomplish. Accept and apologize when you make mistakes. Accept others' apologies. Don’t dwell. Ignore the little things that don’t matter, but REALLY pay attention to detail. Appreciate your team, you’re part of it. You are all learning from each other.

Our project looks to use thermostatically controlled loads at the micro-level to develop cost-effective strategies for renewable energy integration.

Note: The views expressed here belong solely to the author of each entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.

[Cecilia Han Springer, ERG graduate student]

As soon as we arrived at the Mountain View headquarters, I felt as if I’d stepped onto a playground for adults. It turns out that four (!) ERG alums work on energy and sustainability-related projects at Google...

On Day 1 of the Big Event, ERGies* split up into small groups to embark on a number of exciting field trips. Although I faced a difficult choice – should I go sailing with marine ecologists or hiking in the East Bay chaparral? – one field trip immediately stood out to me: the Google renewable energy tour, led by Sam Arons (MS ’07). While I’ve explored plenty of the Bay Area’s scenic offerings, I had yet to see the strange ecosystem of Silicon Valley tech workers up close.

As soon as we arrived at the Mountain View headquarters, I felt as if I’d stepped onto a playground for adults. Happy Googlers jogged around the campus and zipped by on Google-colored bikes. We passed by a beach volleyball court, a mobile salon, micro-gardens filled with kale, and rows and rows of electric vehicles plugged in to charging stations. In the guest center, I noticed a pile of helmets, which, like the bikes, are passed freely around the campus. Above our heads, a display screen flashed popular Google searches around the world in real time.

Sam led us to the roof of one of the buildings, where Google has installed 1.9 MW of solar panels. These panels generate enough energy to provide 13% of the building’s annual electricity.

It turns out that four (!) ERG alums work on energy and sustainability-related projects at Google  – from Sam’s role in clean energy procurement to analyzing data on Google’s own energy efficiency performance. Another major area of sustainability work at Google is the siting of data centers, considering their massive energy requirements. In fact, data centers consume a little over 1% of global electricity, and Google estimates it is responsible for about 1% of that.

After a Google lunch that truly exceeded all expectations, Sam presented some more information (which I’m not allowed to share) on Google’s carbon footprint, intensity, and offsetting projects. The ERGies on the tour were bursting with questions, and the tour only ended when we were nudged out of our conference rooms by Googlers anxious to get their work done. Although a few questions were left unanswered for lack of time, many of us were heartened by the diligence and expertise of the ERGies steering Google’s sustainability efforts. Keep up the good work!

More information on energy and sustainability at Google: http://www.google.com/green/energy/

*ERGies: ERG alumni, students, faculty, staff, family, friends and ERGlings.


Note: The views expressed here belong solely to the author of each entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.

[by Rebekah Shirley, ERG PhD Candidate]

Can an innovation in charging vehicles turn into the vehicle for more innovation? What works, what sticks? May be risky business to find out, but it’s well worth the ride…

Electric Jeepney (eJeepney) plying on the streets of metro Manila

It is a bright, sunny morning in the steamy Metro Manila. Men in wilting business suits and women waving folding hand fans scuttle into the shady respite offered by blue construction tarpaulin billowing overhead. Yet another new office high rise being built, squeezed into the bursting Manila skyline. Carefully skipping over mud puddles of cement mix, I follow the pedestrians hustling down Tuazon Avenue sharing the roadway with brawny buses, swerving motorcycles, honking taxis and the iconic, kaleidoscopic jeepneys. I am in the Philippines visiting the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (iCSC) - a local Filipino NGO focused on community empowerment and clean energy solutions. They birthed the famous ejeepney, an electric battery powered version of the local minibus - a successful first fruit of clean, electric public transportation for the developing world. With a surging population of almost twelve million metropolitan Manila is one of the emerging cities of Southeast Asia and cleaner, cheaper ways of transporting throngs of people to and fro are now imperative.

As the city blossoms it also becomes more vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters - something the island archipelago is already familiar with. Memories of Typhoon Yolanda hang in the air of our discussion at the iCSC head office, a groovy alcove of repurposed furniture and hand painted windows overlooking an old trade fair. “Filipinos have been adapting since before it was en vogue,” Red chuckles. Renato ‘Red’ Constantino is the Executive Director of iCSC and all around visionary. “Mitigation, adaptation, can we truly separate these ideas?” he asks, with palms outstretched, as though holding the very words in his hands. A tattoo snake slithers up his left arm and his wrists are banded with a charming collection of bracelets and amulets. With spikey black and gray peppered hair and red worn boots, he is the stuff of adventure tales. “It is not about warding off danger or merely coping with the times. It is about building better, healthier, stronger, resilient cities, no matter what the future holds.” His philosophy is compelling and indeed, iCSC has had recent success lobbying the government for a legislative fund to support community capacity building - aptly named the People’s Survival Fund.

Rebekah and Reina in Tacloban. In the background is a container ship that is marooned on land by the typhoon.

Red’s team is a select handful of policy experts and technology managers, all home grown and passionate about environmental activism in the Philippines. The beautiful Reina Garcia has managed the ejeepney program since its inception in 2005. She takes me out to see the fleet in action. iCSC has found local battery manufacturers and a local electric vehicle manufacturer able to assemble the jeepneys at low cost. Made of light weight metal and without the need for a rumbling diesel engine, the ejeepney offers a quieter, cooler ride to passengers, all while reaping the savings from no fuel cost. A subsidiary company now operates twenty ejeepneys, routed throughout the metropolitan region. iCSC hopes that the model will be adopted by other jeepney operators in the near future. “They’ve integrated quite seamlessly,” Reina tells me. “Anyone would jump into an ejeepney, most without even knowing they are in an electric vehicle.” We hop into one for a ride to the charging stations and chat with some of the drivers – all women. In fact half the fleet is operated by female drivers, an iCSC strategy to promote employment equality. It is refreshing to see a simple, functional operation working so steadily for years in the tropics. It parallels the team’s action-oriented tone of simplicity and efficiency. Bottom-up technologies that work: no catch, no twist, no hidden charges.

Tacloban City on the island of Leyte, leveled by Typhoon Yolanda

These are exactly the types of solutions that the Philippines needs right now, especially in the wake of Typhoon Yolanda and with the promise of stronger, larger storms to come. Yolanda struck the Philippines last November and went down in history as the largest typhoon ever to make landfall. I got the chance to visit Leyte, the island most devastated by Yolanda, and Tacloban, its capital – which was completely leveled. It was a tremendously moving experience. From the moment of getting off the plane at the ghostly remains of the airport, it felt like being on the set of an eerie end times post-apocalyptic movie. Rows and streets of houses, churches, malls, completely reduced to rubble. Ships stranded hundreds of meters inland. Blue and white relief aid tents stretched for miles on end. iCSC is now expanding the ejeepney operation here, to be part of the respond and rebuild effort as transportation is still a scarcity. Every so often a jeepney passes by with people piled onto the roof, risking limb for a precious ride in to or out of the city. Teddy Arellano is the special project’s manager and he lets me tag along as he travels through Tacloban surveying new the operation sites, signing leases, meeting contractors. The ejeepney holding bay and charging station will be solar powered, Teddy tells me, and they want to try a new idea: mobile charging stations – driving the ejeepneys to communities still left without electricity and charging phones, radios, anything, through the vehicle batteries.

Standard diesel-powered Jeepney on the streets of Tacloban

“It will be our little experiment” laughs the affable Teddy with a playful smile. Someone has to be willing to take the risk to see what works, what sticks. As we travel through the torn city I marvel at his calm and ease. Teddy greets everyone we meet with a comforting familiarity, jokes ready in hand. He chats to families with deep condolence but also with a pleasantness that makes the air less solemn. He points out to me all the progress, the new stores, the neighbor helping neighbor rebuild what was lost. Positive, purposed and practical, the iCSC team speaks volumes to me about the true meaning of bottom-up engagement. They are not in the business here of bemoaning tragedy or laying blame to a slow emergency response. Rather, the team is taking up the challenge and opportunity to study a new technology’s usefulness and economy in the space of most urgent need. Unlike the stormy waters, sorrow and pain have not yet subsided in the Philippines, but human nature is resilient. If I’ve learned anything from my time with iCSC, it is that hope can bring the change that people need. Hope can make ideas reality. Hope can stand as the foundation for resilient cities of the future. I’ll be sure to stay posted on the ejeepney’s journey to Tacloban.

Read more on the ejeepney's journey to Tacloban here:  http://pacifictimes.org/blog/2014/05/20/630/

Note: The views expressed here belong solely to the author of each entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.

[By Dimitry Gershenson (ERG Grad Student) and Brian Edlefsen Lasch (MicroEnergy International)]

Village Mini-Grid

Symposium: UC Berkeley, April 10 – 12, 2014
Innovating Energy Access for Remote Areas: Discovering untapped resources

Flying out to San Francisco, the hills look like waves of mountains, rolling toward inland California farms. Situated within this amazing landscape is one of the world’s most innovative communities working on inclusive and sustainable energy. Numerous universities, start- up entrepreneurs, financiers, technology companies and consultancies address distributed and affordable energy markets in myriad countries. In less than two weeks, prominent researchers and scholars in this field will arrive in the Bay Area, and spend two days discussing pressing issues in expanding energy access: policy, finance, implementation, technology innovation, and more.

On April 10th, MicroEnergy Systems (MES) and the Berkeley Rural Energy Group (BREG) will be holding the first joint MES/BREG symposium on Innovation in Energy Access for Remote Areas. Hosted by Prof. Dan Kammen (Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab) and Prof. Martina Schäfer (Technische Universität Berlin), BREG and MES have invited over 50 Presenters, academics and practitioners, from around the globe to focus on the special theme of 'discovering untapped resources'. Select papers will be published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, and will also be considered by Springer Press for addition to a special edition book. The local Bay Area Energy Access community, notably through networking organizations such as Energy Access SF, are invited to register their attendance and represent their organizations. For Day 3 of the symposium, attendees are also encouraged to book their ticket for an optional day of exploration and networking. A driving tour will take you across three bridges of the San Fransisco Bay, including a guided visit to the California Academy of Sciences and an outdoor picnic in a Golden Gate Park museum courtyard. RSVP only (to Dimitry Gershenson (d.gersh@berkeley.edu), limited tickets available (cost: $60/person or less depending on demand.)

April 10th and 11th
2 days of presentation and discussion, including light workshop sessions.
30 new papers, presented in concurrent sessions and plenaries.
20+ poster topics, presented during an evening mixer at the Blum Center for Emerging Economies.
4 different venues, explored by participants across campus.

Support this good event by registering at:  http://www.microenergysystems.tu-berlin.de/conference/registration/  (Please Register by April 2nd)

See you soon,
with our best regards,

Sebastian Groh, MES, Dimitry Gershenson, BREG, Jonas van der Straeten, MES, Brian Edlefsen Lasch, MicroEnergy International (MEI), Liisa Andersson, MEI

By Jess Reilly

Thanks to the recent dedication of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS), the corresponding scathing article in the Wall Street Journal, and Dan Kammen and Tonio Buonassisi’s appearance on NPR’s On Point, Ivanpah and solar energy in general has been back in the news.

Tortoise at Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

ISEGS is a concentrating solar plant (CSP) driven by technology from BrightSource Energy: it uses mirrors to reflect the sun’s light to the top of tower, where the heat turns water to steam. This steam then turns a turbine and generates electricity. CSP has the added benefit of heating a salt medium that can store the heat with minimal losses. Therefore, the plant can provide electricity to the grid not only during the day when the sun is shining, but at night as well. This storage reduces the intermittency of the CSP energy supply and allows the plant to compete with other ‘baseload’ energy supplies like coal and natural gas.

ISEGS happens to be the largest example of concentrating solar in the world, with 360,000 garage-door-sized mirrors and three giant towers sprawled over 5 square miles of Mojave desert. It generates electricity just north of Interstate 5 at the Nevada-California line and transmits to southern California.

Burrow excavation at Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

I walked nearly every inch of those five miles when I worked as a biologist at ISEGS. I was there from the moment the first bulldozer broke ground in the Ivanpah Valley in 2010, under the regal summit of Clark Mountain, until I came to ERG as a graduate student in the fall of 2012.

Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

I returned to graduate school in large part because I could not stand to supervise the destruction of the desert anymore. Having lived and worked in this fragile and biologically diverse desert since 2001, I watched my backyard plowed under for energy that would feed the demand of 140,000 homes hundreds of miles to the west. It did not seem environmentally or socially equitable. After living and working in the Ivanpah valley for two years, I promised this valley I would not let it be further destroyed, and I went back to school to figure out how to protect it.

Here’s what I have discovered:

Solar power protects Ivanpah Valley.

Horned lizard at Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

This is not to say that Ivanpah got it right. I was witness to painful foibles throughout the process as it stumbled forward. It has been a learning experience for everyone involved, from federal agencies to technology innovators.

Yet the very plant that displaced hundreds of tortoises may be the very thing that will save these individuals, their species, and ours.

An energy system built with renewables is necessary if the Mojave desert ecosystem, including the desert tortoise and all its migratory birds, are to survive into the coming generations. Previously, I did not fully understand the implications of a grid that continues to rely on fossil fuels.  But at 400 ppm of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and rising, many habitats and backyards are changing. Global sea level rise is now almost 7 inches higher than pre-industrial times, with the rate of increase today nearly double that of the last century. The extent and thickness of sea ice has dropped dramatically. Glaciers are retreating, and cities that rely on their consistent water supply are looking into a near future where they have no water for their millions of inhabitants.

Kangaroo rat at Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

Therefore, utility-scale CSP is an effective way to bring renewable energy online right now, in tandem with rooftop photovoltaic solar and other renewable technology. In addition, stumbles at Ivanpah have provided the agencies and the industry with the experience for doing things better in the future, and a paper that thoroughly details these possibilities can be found here. In addition to wildlife impacts, solar energy can consume water resources, increase particulate matter in air, and have an unknown impact on soil carbon (sequestration of carbon in soil and rock.)  Yet even this article addresses the cobenefits that the BLM and companies such as BrightSource have learned:

• we can use degraded land and avoid pristine habitat
• we can co-locate energy with agriculture and other renewable technology
• we can carefully address siting with each individual project with thorough consideration given to local environmental, cultural, and social impacts

Dust winds at Ivanpah (J. Reilly)

I am the person who picked up dead lizards, mice, or birds at Ivanpah. I am the person who dug up the tortoise burrows and removed them from their homes. I cried many mornings on my way to work. But I am also the person who, along with the men driving the bulldozers and road blades, stopped equipment to catch and remove lizards, mice, and rattlesnakes. And now, I am a person fighting to preserve the habitat not only in my backyard in the desert, but in rainforests and coral reefs as well, because climate change is insidious: it is often only with extreme events that we are able to take note of changes.

In a sense, I have broadened my backyard: it now includes Los Angeles, the Philippines, and Beijing. And it is only by protecting the environment and fighting climate change in these places that we can hope to preserve a future for the desert tortoise and the peregrine falcon in my desert home.

The views expressed here belong solely to the author of this entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.