Solar Jobs & Energy - Village Minigrids in Lesotho

Hello again to everyone! Let me start by wishing all of you a (belated) happy new year, and I sincerely hope that 2016 has been treating all of you well thus far.

In this installment I am happy to be able to report lots of exciting news from our recent scoping trip to Uganda (mid-January). As you may recall, a team of four MPA students at the NYU Wagner School is working with STG to complete the research component of their academic requirements, specifically developing a Market Entry Strategy for STG into East Africa. Based on the recommendations of the team we worked with last year, their focus is Uganda, and a key component of the research was a two-week trip to Kampala in January to meet with stakeholders, government officials, funders, and potential partners – in total, to gain an understanding of the context and activity in the energy sector. The image with this email gives you a good sense of how enthusiastic these students are!

I was able to spend 10 days in Kampala with the team, and I was incredibly impressed with their professionalism and attention to detail. They packed every day with useful meetings, from the Ministries of Energy and Health to the Energy Regulation Authority to international aid agencies like GIZ and USAID. We also met with faculty at Makerere University and a number of private sector businesses. Overall, we came away with an excellent understanding of what the needs of the communities in Uganda really are, what it takes to operate in the country as an energy provider, and what the upcoming funding opportunities are. Driven by the research led by these students we were able to submit a proposal to the United Nations for electrification of 40 health clinics in Western Uganda over the next 2-3 years – we are looking forward to feedback on this proposal and what other opportunities may arise!

In Lesotho progress is moving forward in development of a completely-locally manufactured tracking assembly for PV panels – increasing the total energy that can be harvested from a single panel, and localizing a higher fraction of the capital cost spent on energy projects. You’ll see our team in the picture I have attached, they are excited to get this demo system installed at a school near Maseru in the next few months! This novel system would never have been possible without the support of our community, so many thanks to all of you who have contributed to this progress over the past year!

Our energy monitoring program is still going strong, and I am looking forward in my next update to sharing more on that front – hopefully also with some STG tracking PV data in the mix!

As always with much gratitude for your support and shared excitement in our work!

 -Matt

Time for more news from the field!

First things first, I am very proud to announce that Jordan Stephens was brought on board in September as our very first Energy Access Fellow.  He relocated to Maseru to work with the team in Lesotho through next spring and has already made huge contributions moving our engineering development forward.  In part Jordan has overseen completion of the prototype of our new solar collector design (photos with this update) - a project we are thrilled to see moving forward and are using to raise visibility for our team's capabilities within the Government of Lesotho and with funders looking to promote solar energy within the country.  We are looking forward to scaling this up over the coming months!

At the same time, the US-based half of the team spent part of October in Belgium installing a STG-manufactured solar system at the University of Liege, to be used for research being conducted by the Thermodynamics Lab there.  As far as we know, this is the very first example of solar technology being exported from Africa to Belgium - and we were thrilled to be a part of it.  The researchers have a little more work to do to pipe the solar collectors to the rest of their research equipment and bring the whole system online, but we will certainly keep you posted as STG's collectors start to collect some Belgian sunlight.  We are working hard to get new photos up in our galleries so you can take a more in-depth look at both of these projects, so please keep an eye out over the next few weeks!

Thank you again for the support you have shown for our team over the past years! For those of you who would like to continue to participate moving forward, we want to let you know that we are currently raising funds to provided continued support for an Energy Access Fellow from March through the end of 2016 – as always donations can be made through the Global Giving page (same one as always, linked below) or sent to us directly (PO Box 426152, Cambridge, MA 02142). We know that there are many demands on your resources at this time of year and that we appreciate all of your enthusiasm as well!

Wishing you all a very happy holiday season,

Matt