Solar Jobs & Energy - Village Minigrids in Lesotho

Hello again to the STG community!

In the last few field reports I have been excited to share the breadth of activities the team here is working on working toward improving energy supplies for rural Lesotho. Today I’d like to give you an update on progress of construction of our first community microgrid at Ha Makebe.

Over the past several months our team has been working on site preparation (installing fences and preparing the site for the energy system) and installation of the energy distribution infrastructure (poles and wires). We have simultaneously been interfacing with the community to prepare for the first customer connections to come online. The team has completed installation of all of the distribution poles and central wiring and is now making the connections to our first customers-to-be: the school and several households. Seeing things coming together has been extremely rewarding! I am attaching a number of photos with this report as well; I particularly hope these photos will help the vision come to life for you as well, especially so that you can see how much our team has grown in taking on new engineering challenges to complete this project.

As I mentioned in the last update, we are simultaneously working on a funding mechanism to build out the infrastructure for the whole community – still in the works, but I hope to have a formal announcement on that as well soon. Please stay posted!

As always, many thanks to each of you for your continued interest and support, and especially for the enthusiasm you show whenever I have the opportunity to discuss our work in more detail.

With much gratitude,

Matt