Solar Jobs & Energy - Village Minigrids in Lesotho

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