Solar Jobs & Energy - Village Minigrids in Lesotho

Hello again to all of you!

I'm excited to bring you more updates - this year continues to bring adventures and opportunities our way, keeping our team busy on all fronts.  We are still deep in negotiations with the government and funding agencies in Lesotho about the best way to frame out mini-grid deployment in the country - very exciting stuff - and preparing for that work by pushing forward our test deployments of more hardware for remote monitoring of energy systems (will let us keep tabs on things at all of our project sites from one location in the capital), improving our mini-grid design tools by comparing them with real operational data, and developing our first school partnership project site where we will install the first Lesotho-designed tracking PV system.

But today I would especially like to highlight the efforts of our team in the design and building of our next-generation CSP (concentrating solar power) collector system, which is (as promised in my last update) on its way to India for installation at our partner's headquarters.  One really exciting component I didn't get to talk about last time is that this new system integrates an glass layer around the main collector pipe to provide extra insulation around this very hot component.  This helps keep the heat in the pipe, rather than losing some of it to the environment, which means the system is even more efficient and therefore cost effective.  It is also something that virtually nobody does for systems at the small scale where we work - so I applaud the ingenuity and tenacity of our team in developing a cost-effective way to build this into our system design.  It took them several months, so I wanted to be sure that effort was highlighted in this report with pictures attached!  The next step is unpacking the box (I've attached a picture so you can see the custom shipping design our guys put together) when it arrives in Pune and collecting test data for a few months to validate functionality under the weather conditions there - if all goes well, we'll then be back in India next spring to help get a manufacturing line up and running!

One last note, I want to commend our team in Lesotho for being very generous with both their time and expertise.  As one example, we often get visits at our workshop from groups of students, government employees, or individuals from companies around Lesotho who want to learn about what we do.  Our employees routinely make an effort to share their enthusiasm and knowledge with visitors - as you can see in the last picture where Marcel is explaining our specialized CNC milling machine to a group of visiting students.  It is great to see the excitement passed on!

Let me close with many thanks to all of you who continue to follow our work and support us.  We recognize that life is busy, and we are grateful to be able to share our stories with you!

Very best,

Matt