Minigrids

Students learn the most from Service-Learning when they find then this trie project challenging and meaningful, when the people they serve appreciate what they do.  Generating electricity with solar panels is more of the most effective services in terms of achieving these goals.  The joy and gratitude expressed by the people who can turn on a lightbulb in their house for their house is one of the most purely enjoyable experiences.  

For these reasons we always aim to provide electricity for more households, and in a more efficient way.  We also aim to train local young people to do the installation and the maintenance, so that they can continue to work after we have left.  Since starting in 2015, we have tried several different designs, depending on the local situation.  When houses are far apart from each other, we install small, individual, complete systems for each house. This way each house is independent, but they cannot share resources.  We have also designed solutions where each house gets a battery and indoor wiring with lights, etc.  They then take their batteries to charging station with larger capacity to be charged.  This way they share the solar panels, which are relatively expensive, but they have to carry the battery to be charged.  

One of the objectives of this advance team is to identity situation where we can install mini-grids.  This is a system where one set of a larger number of solar panels, with a large capacity battery or multiple batteries, serve a number of houses by connecting them together with electrical cables.  For this design to work, the houses have to be clustered in proximity.  Yesterday we went with the local government official and our partner African Evangelical Enterprise to a cell composing of many villages called Bicaca.  There we have quickly identified two clusters of houses suitable for implementing this design. One has ~60 houses and the other has ~40.  

When we return to HK, we will work with the professor in Electrical Engineering who is leading the team that will install mini-grids to come up with a more detailed design.  This way many more households can share the solar panels and batteries  We are all excited about the prospect to do more with the same amount of resources.