Feedback

A busy day today. Basilia and I took her mom out for an early breakfast at a place that some U.S. Fulbright students living in the neighborhood had recommended. I had to hustle off to UDB for a long string of meetings starting at 8:30 am. First Nelson Quintanilla came to talk with me about the organization of the Schatz Lab. The university's Rector (President) Huguet had tasked Nelson with drafting an organizational plan for a new multidisciplinary research center at UDB. Nelson is looking for models of existing research centers to evaluate and perhaps emulate.

As soon as we were done talking about that, it was time for a meeting with a couple of the administrators of El Salvador's Consejo Nacional de Energía. This council was created by a new federal law in 2007 but has only really begun operating in the past several months. They contacted Rector Huguet recently with interest in creating a research agreement with UDB. This was the first meeting between UDB and CNE. They told us about their charter and some of their initial goals and activities.

One of their planned projects is a national incandescent-for-CFL light bulb exchange. They talked about using home inspections as a mechanism for ensuring that the bulbs actually get used. I told them I ran a municipal level program of this sort for Palo Alto years ago and suggested that home inspections might be difficult and unwelcome. I offered as an alternative that they could work with the utilities to monitor bills of participating households and reward homes that achieve the expected level of energy savings from the light bulb exchange with an additional short-term bill discount. This would not work perfectly, as lighting related savings could get lost in the noise of other household energy use patterns, but it could be totally automated and would make a palatable proxy for on-site inspections. The CNE people were receptive to the proposal, and after the meeting Rector Huguet told me he thought it was a good idea.

Right after lunch with Moises Guerra and Nelson, we had a meeting with Carlos Azucena, the head of UDB's mechanical engineering program. Carlos has been working as part of a team designing a small scale pumped storage hydro power demonstration project to provide at least part of the electricity for a new building on the Soyapango campus. It would be an off-grid project with the electricity supplied by PV and the pumped storage being used to distribute the energy for round-the-clock use.

It's an interesting idea that they've already invested quite a lot of thought and design work into. However, on first look I don't think they've quite got a handle yet on the energy losses that the system will incur, and it all seems much too complex. Rather than taking the approach of using the simplest design that will satisfy energy needs while demonstrating the pumped storage concept, they're throwing every engineering trick they can think of into the design. I'm hoping to convince them to simplify the design before we get deeply into economic analysis and pitching the project to the university administration.

My last meeting of the day was with Carolyn Turpin of the U.S. embassy's public affairs office. Since I met her my first day in El Salvador she's been encouraging me to pursue some USAID funding that could help UDB to equip their fledgling energy institute. I had sent her a draft proposal with an equipment list and budget yesterday. When I arrived at her office today she was wrapping up a meeting with people from another Salvadoran university who it turns out are very interested in renewable energy as an area of study and as something to put to work on their campus. Carolyn pulled me into that meeting, and I promised to go talk with their administration about energy.

Carolyn was pleased with my draft proposal language and is going to get Jorge Lemus from UDB to meet with us to go over it before she merges some language of her own into it, finalizes it, and sends it off. Hopefully it will get funded -- she showed me a successful proposal that a Costa Rican university had submitted to the same program, and we felt like ours is at least as complete and well organized.

I got home from all that just at 5, in time to change into some shorts and go for a run in a neighborhood park. The park is pretty small, so we ran laps around the perimeter. There was a little boy there watching a soccer team practice. Every time we passed him, he would take off and run a few yards with us. Very cute.

Today was a satisfying day, I think mainly because I finally got substantial feedback on the work I've been doing (and it was mostly positive, to boot). When you're working in a new and unfamiliar environment and don't get such feedback, it's hard to gauge whether you're even working on the right things, let alone doing good work.