Solar Jobs & Energy - Village Minigrids in Lesotho

Hello again to all of you!

Exciting news to share from the Lesotho front!  These past few months our team has been working very hard on a technology validation system commissioned by an Indian technology company looking to scale up solar thermal projects within India.  The system will be shipped out within the next few weeks, to be assembled at their headquarters in Pune, India for testing under local weather conditions.  If all goes well, they may use STG's Lesotho-developed technology to enter the market in India to provide a more environmentally-friendly option for generating the heat needed for, in particular, industrial processes - heating water for use at large laundry facilities, running heat-driven air conditioning or refrigeration units, and much more.  We are incredibly excited to see this cross-continental collaboration developing and can't wait to share pictures of the system (shown here in Lesotho) as it gets up and running in Pune!

On the other side of the Africa continent, our NYU Wagner team completed their final report providing STG with an analysis of the energy market in Uganda and a set of recommendations for market entry strategy.  The team presented these results at the 2016 NYU Capstone Expo in New York on May 10th, and it was incredibly encouraging to see how much interest the project garnered!  We are wishing these four hard working individuals the best of luck with their next steps as they graduate and move on to new and exciting projects.

Closer to home, I am heading down to Florida for the next few weeks to do some data collection at our Eckerd College system with a visiting student from the University of Liege in Belgium who is here working with us on design of an optimized expander component for Solar ORCs.  She has spent the spring semester designing new parts which we have just finished manufacturing, so now we get to take some measurements to vet how much better the new design is!  Once we finish these tests, the new expander will be going to India as part of our ongoing partnership with MIT and the Indian Institute of Technology - very exciting to see this project moving forward as well.

As you can see, we are keeping ourselves busy as always!  Lots of ideas percolating for new projects in partnership with a school in Lesotho, as well as bigger projects being designed by the Lesotho Department of Energy.  I look forward to sharing more about these in the next update.

In the meantime, I would like once again to extend my deepest thanks to everyone who has supported us and stayed with us on this journey so far - it continues to be interesting and exciting, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do this work.  Wishing everyone a pleasant and enjoyable start to the summer,

Matt

Links:

• NYU Wagner team presents at the Capstone Expo

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

The weather in Lesotho is finally starting to warm up, just in time for another update!

I shared progress on many fronts in my last letter: work on a new prototype, an energy monitoring program, new team members, and more. All of these projects are still ongoing, with the addition of a new initiative in the development stage with the Lesotho Ministry of Education, but this month I’d like to dial in on just one topic to keep it brief. (We are working to keep the website up to date for those of you looking for more! New photos should be up there in the next few weeks.)

I thought today I would share with you the pre-feasibility work our team in Lesotho is doing to identify rural (unelectrified) villages that are great candidates for receiving electrification through burgeoning programs aiming to promote minigrid development in Lesotho. The challenge is that the Government of Lesotho (and all governments, everywhere) currently has no reliable model for estimating (1) how much electricity a village will need or (2) how much it will cost to provide that amount of energy to the community. Enter Team STG! Here in the US we have been working for the past year to build an engineering model that can design a cost-minimizing system to electrify any village, anywhere – all we need to know is its location and something about the demographics and physical layout of the buildings. Our team in Lesotho has concurrently spent time in a number of rural villages between Maseru and Semongkong (relatively near to a newly-paved road), working with the village Chiefs and Google Earth satellite images to tally how many houses, businesses, institutions, and individuals are contained within each village. With the data they are collecting and the model we have built, we will be able to provide not only cost estimates but lowest-cost system designs to the government to support their new initiatives! This is a game-changing way of thinking about rural energy system design, and we are extremely excited to see it all coming together.

Final news is a "changing of the guard" in Lesotho.  Sadly (for us here at STG), Tamer left Lesotho in July to start his PhD this fall.  We are incredibly proud of what he learned and accomplished during his tenure with STG, and we are wishing him all of the best with his studies.  In response, in the interest of promoting an ongoing program of developing energy engineers and entrepreneurs and helping STG's work in Lesotho grow, the Board decided this summer to create a new Energy Access Engineering Fellowship program!  This program embodies all the learning and experience acquired through Tamer's time in Lesotho (his successes and challenges, our reflections on implementing this new level of management), and we are extremely excited to see this move forward.  We are very pleased to announce that our inaugural Fellow, Jordan Stephens, will be arriving in Lesotho this September - expect more about Jordan and his experiences in the next update!

As always, I would like to communicate how much it means to our entire team to have the support and following that we do - thank you again for being a part of our work.

Very best,

Matt

Links:

• STG website (check for updates!)

The months fly, hard to believe it has already been three months since our last update.  But much news to share from Lesotho, as always!

Most exciting is the recruitment of a number of new team members in Lesotho since February, including installation of our first full-time Project Manager in Maseru in March!  Tamer, who completed his master's degree at Harvard in 2014, had been working with STG in the USA since last June but was excited to gain some on-the-ground experience in solar research so was promoted to Team Leader in Lesotho.  So far he has been doing a fantastic job, and it is has been great to find someone willing to take on the challenges of this role.

Along with this promotion, we also hired a new Mechanical Engineering Technician and have two new interns working with us, all young and enthusiastic Basotho with technical interests and the drive to have an impact on the challenges they see facing their country.

Together, the Lesotho-based team has been tackling some big challenges, including designing and building out the production-line equipment for our newest version of solar collector.  They have been working from a computer-based model of the new collector to envision the molds and jigs required to create the correct shapes, build lists of the components required and determine the most efficient way to create each component, and thinking about how to most efficiently complete assembly of all of the sub-components.  We are working toward a first assembly of the new design by early fall, which will be unveiled at the Solar Paces 2015 Conference in Cape Town!

At the same time, we continue to push forward our work in rural energy system design, and one of the biggest challenges here is determining what size system will be needed for a place that currently has no access to electricity.  Writing out a list of what might be plugged in at the clinic and in the houses has been shown to be relatively unreliable (since you don't know how many hours each day people will use each item) - we at STG instead believe that there is much to be learned from how villages, clinics, and schools connected up to the national grid are using electricity!  We have thus started a systematic effort in energy monitoring, installing wireless (cell phone communications) electricity monitoring stations at a number of clinics and communities around Lesotho to learn what the daily pattern and volume of electricity consumption actually is.  From this data we will be able to more accurately estimate the needs of rural communities, allowing the government to optimize sizing for community systems and therefore ensure electricity availability while also maximizing the number of communities that can be reached with limited funding.

Of course still activity going on in many other directions, including the new manufacturing facility, working with the Government of Lesotho to push forward their vision for (and then implementation of) rural electrification using optimized solar minigrids, and much more.  We are working to keep the website up to date so that you can visit there any time to keep abreast of our activities.

Thank you again for all of your continued support, and we look forward to more exciting developments during the rest of this year!

With gratitude,

Matt