Projects projects everywhere

It's been way too busy a week for blogging, but here I am taking a Friday evening breather. Tuesday and Thursday were class days, with Tuesday focused on geothermal energy including a great guest talk by Salvador Handal from LaGeo. Thursday we took on solar insolation and solar geometry, played around with a pyranometer and some tools I improvised for figuring out the sun's path during the year. Wednesday I made an all-day trip to 5 de Noviembre, one of the four big hydroelectric plants in the country, with engineers from the university and from CEL, the government agency that runs the hydro projects.

I got to crawl inside one of 5 de Noviembre's turbines that was down for maintenance. Seriously claustrophobic but a thrill!

Yesterday El Diario de Hoy published an interview with me. I think the reporter and editor did a good job with it. See it online.

Today about half of the students from the class joined me on an optional field trip to see the on-grid 20kW solar electric project at the Escuela Alemana. A pretty impressive project that has had some history of failed Sunny Boy inverters and wrestling matches with the electric utility to connect to the grid...but seems to have hit its stride and is working pretty much as designed now.

Tomorrow yet another field trip, going back to the Berlin geothermal project that Basi and I visited in January, but this time with the students from the class. We had some drama this week because several of my students are also enrolled in a wave energy class being taught by a visiting teacher from Spain and we double-booked them for Saturday. But we managed to resolve things by making the Berlin trip earlier and shorter and pushing the wave class to a later time slot in the day. I think everyone is happy now.

The Top of El Salvador

Thursday's class featured a short lecture and demonstration by René Aguilar from UDB's Metrology department.   René is an expert in thermal imaging and gave the students a good idea of how this technology can be used to detect flaws in a building's thermal envelope.

René Aguilar demonstrates thermal imaging using a mug of hot water

Friday Nelson and a few others from UDB invited me and Basilia to join them in a memorial gathering for my father. I told them a little about my father, and I shared some photos of him as a child and late in life when Basilia and I last saw him. It felt good to share memories of him with the people I see here every day.

Basilia and I spent the weekend up in the mountains, almost as far up in the mountains as you can go in this country. We accompanied Nelson to the weekend house of his friend Luis in Miramundo, near the Honduran border in Chalatenango department at about 2200 meters above sea level and refreshingly cool. Basi, Nelson and I actually walked all the way to Honduras from Luis's house, which only took about an hour. The countries are separated at this spot by the Sumpul River, which is small enough in the dry season that you can hop across a few rocks to get into Honduras. On the way to Miramundo we stopped at Cihuatan, a precolumbian archaeological site that was bigger and more interesting than Basi and I had expected it to be. We had the whole place to ourselves aside from a few site staff, surprising on a Saturday afternoon.

Basilia in the Río Sumpul between El Salvador (left) and Honduras (right)

Más Bloggers, Por Favor

The weekend was mostly work, but Sunday afternoon I joined Nelson and his friend Luis on a jaunt to Suchitoto, a mellow tourist town an hour or so north of San Salvador by car. It kind of reminds me of Copán Ruinas in Honduras, relaxed with a mix of backpackers and somewhat more upscale/older travelers, but no tacky tourist traps or big five-star hotels. The tourists are clearly what makes the local economy tick, but on a reasonable scale that doesn't overwhelm the place.

The whole city is kind of a living memorial to the 1980-1992 civil war. This was one of the first places where fighting broke out. Nelson and Luis told me the city was virtually abandoned at the height of the war. It's made an amazing comeback and seems to be one of the more peaceful and prosperous places in the country now. The streets were almost devoid of the heavily armed police and private security guards you see so many of elsewhere in the country.

I caught one glimpse of what the country's reconciliation process has achieved. Nelson pointed out an older man walking across the plaza with a couple of companions. He told me this was one of the top military leaders who'd fought against the FMLN (back when it was a guerilla army, not the current president's political party). Here he was strolling unmolested through one of the country´s most adamantly progressive and pro-FMLN communities. Nelson noted that a decade ago you wouldn't have seen this guy in public anywhere without a contingent of 20 armed soldiers.

The entry to this Suchitoto restaurant is capped by a balance loaded with a bomb on one side and a stack of tortillas on the other

The ostensible reason for our trip to Suchitoto was to check out a musical event on an outdoor stage in one of the town plazas. The first artist was Texan Gina Chavez who sang along with her acoustic guitar. I learned that she´s also spending an extended period here in El Salvador, working with her friend Jody teaching English at a girls' school in Soyapango that's part of the same Salesian order of the Catholic church with which my host institution, Universidad Don Bosco, is associated. She rocked. Check out Gina Chavez's blog, MySpace and web page for more on her music and her El Salvador doings.

The other act was Terpsis, a group of older Salvadoran gents who played sentimental boleros. They had some great harmonies. I doubt they have a MySpace page, but you never know.

Today was day three of my class. We met at the university's main campus in Soyapango this time so we could have a tour of Ing. Valdizon's solar concentrator and do an exercise with constructing and testing simple DC circuits in the electricity lab. After all that I gave a one-hour lecture and we called it a day. Basilia is in Marcala, Honduras at her sister Argelia's house tonight, en route back to San Salvador. Hopefully she'll be back here by tomorrow night, though there is some uncertainty about whether the early bus from Marcala to San Miguel will run tomorrow. Fortunately our friends the Burgos family have good friends in San Miguel who will put her up if she gets there too late for a San Salvador connection. It's so good to know some people here.

On the Radio

Wow, the media blitz rages on. At this point enrollment for the energy class is closed, but the press conference we held last week stirred up a lot of continuing interest on the part of newspapers and radio stations. Over the last few days I got briefly interviewed twice (in tandem with Victor Cornejo or Jorge Lemus) at radio stations, then this morning Jorge and I were asked back to one of the stations for a longer 30-minute chat, this time just to talk about renewable energy in general and opportunities for its use in El Salvador.

It was funny because instead of Paco, the nicotine-voiced older guy who interviewed us last time, today's interviewer was this young woman with a slinky leopard print leotard off one shoulder -- quite a sight at 7:00 a.m. I admit I was expecting her to be a flake based on first visual impression, but she turned out to be a totally level-headed interviewer with good questions who didn't interrupt or go off on weird tangents. It was fine. Listen for yourself. (I love how tech-savvy San Salvador is – they had the interview archived for streaming or download on the station's website within an hour or two of us leaving the station. [To navigate to the show, click on Programas Anteriores on the left, then 92.5 Club in the middle, then Morning Club, then click on the show for 12/02/2010. I think this link will only be live for a week or so.])

Interview at Radio Club 92.5 FM

Day two of the class felt successful. I had been sort of apprehensive about introducing the the group project. I didn't know if the students would be enthusiastic about the project in general or if they would be interested in any of my suggested topics. I expected to have to pull some teeth, but when I distributed the handout the students formed groups spontaneously and started clamoring for the topics. Within a minute or two, six of my seven suggested topics were snatched up by the teams. I was also happy that they had many good comments and questions during the lecture. They were pretty quiet on day one, but in this second session they really had a lot to say. And they're not shy about calling me on stuff. Go students!

In the Classroom at Last

Today was the first day of my renewable energy and energy efficiency course. We wound up with 28 enrolled students, plus a handful of faculty from the engineering department are sitting in.

I felt like it went pretty well. I walked into it feeling kind of stressed -- the enrollment period was officially over last Friday, but the university went on enrolling people literally up to the last hour before class started. This messed with my attempt to have a neat roster of students, have their Moodle (online system for sharing info w/ students) accounts set up ahead of time, etc. Plus the university booked me to go to two different radio stations in the last two days to do interviews promoting the course, eating up time that I had expected to spend polishing the lecture. But it all worked out OK, and the radio station visits were fun.

The students enrolled in the course are mostly working professionals, nearly all engineers with a few architects in the mix, probably with a median age of early to mid 30s. One of the engineers is a woman who works for the presidential administration, plus there's a hefty contingent of folks from CEL, the energy agency I visited last week with the big PV system on their roof. About a third of the students are enrolled in UDB's recently launched renewable energy master's program, and they too are mostly energy professionals who take the bulk of their classes on evenings and Saturdays. Given that most of the engineers are of the electrical variety, I felt a little silly about the very basic electricity coverage in the lecture (Ohm's law, series and parallel circuits, etc.), but they were all good-natured about it.

I dedicated the last 30 minutes or so of today's 3-hour class to a life cycle cost analysis of four different water heating options. I put a lot of effort into getting real local cost data based on utility rates and locally available equipment that I found in building supply stores. The students gave me good feedback on that exercise, said they found it very practical. I think I'm on the right track in emphasizing the practical. Beatriz Recinos, who was a Fulbright scholar at HSU last year in oceanography and is now back home in El Salvador, tells me and Basilia that Salvadoran university education tends to be very theoretical, and she found the practical focus at Humboldt refreshing.

Herbert Engel, 1929 - 2010

My father (with drum), with my grandmother, great-grandfather, and Uncle Bill

I learned today from my Mom that my father Herbert Engel passed away in his sleep late last night or early this morning at a care home in Stuttgart, Germany.

He was born in Germany and spent his early childhood in Herxheim, in the south of the country. His mother and father took my father and his older brother Bill (originally Wilhelm) to the U.S. to escape the Holocaust. My father studied at City College of New York and got his PhD in chemical engineering at MIT. He went to work for Shell in California where he met my mother. They married and had me and my little sister Mitzi. When we were still small the whole family, including Genny and Sue, my Mom's daughters from a previous marriage, moved to Switzerland where my father planned to work. Things didn't turn out, my parents divorced, and my Mom brought us kids back to the U.S. My father also returned briefly to the U.S., then moved back to Germany where he spent the rest of his life. Apparently he was one of very few German Jews to return.

I saw him a few times in my childhood and teens when he made short trips to California. We became semi-estranged when I was a young adult, and it wasn't until about ten years ago that we got back in the habit of writing and calling each other pretty regularly. He was kind of a hermit and never really encouraged me to visit him, though I did drop in on him once while I was studying in London for a semester. He had health problems in recent years and never really recovered from a fall he took while boarding a streetcar last year.

I'm glad that our relationship improved over the years. I'm glad that he got to meet Basilia once, and that they liked each other. I'm glad that he approved of what I've chosen to do with my life. I'm glad that he's through suffering.

Auf wiedersehen, Papa.

Teaching in Spanish, Going up a Volcano

When I first saw the announcement for the Fulbright grant to teach at Universidad Don Bosco, it said the assignment would consist of teaching in English. This struck me a bit odd. My impression of Central America up to that time was that not all that many college students are fluent in English. When I checked this with the faculty at UDB, they confirmed that it would be a lot better if I could teach in Spanish. So I pitched that as a strength in my application. And I'm here, so I guess they took me up on it.

As I get ready to start teaching for real in three more days, I'm recalling something I read by physicist Richard Feynman years ago in his very entertaining book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman about his experiences as a guest lecturer in Brazil. I just looked online and found a (probably illegal) downloadable version of the book, so now I can remind myself exactly what it was he said and share it with you verbatim:

I thought at first that I would give my lectures in English, but I noticed something: When the students were explaining something to me in Portuguese, I couldn't understand it very well, even though I knew a certain amount of Portuguese. It was not exactly clear to me whether they had said "increase," or "decrease," or "not increase," or "not decrease," or "decrease slowly." But when they struggled with English, they'd say "ahp" or "doon," and I knew which way it was, even though the pronunciation was lousy and the grammar was all screwed up. So I realized that if I was going to talk to them and try to teach them, it would be better for me to talk in Portuguese, poor as it was. It would be easier for them to understand.

During that first time in Brazil, which lasted six weeks, I was invited to give a talk at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences about some work in quantum electrodynamics that I had just done. I thought I would give the talk in Portuguese, and two students at the center said they would help me with it. I began by writing out my talk in absolutely lousy Portuguese. I wrote it myself, because if they had written it, there would be too many words I didn't know and couldn't pronounce correctly. So I wrote it, and they fixed up all the grammar, fixed up the words and made it nice, but it was still at the level that I could read easily and know more or less what I was saying. They practiced with me to get the pronunciations absolutely right: the "de" should be in between "deh" and "day"--it had to be just so.

I got to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences meeting, and the first speaker, a chemist, got up and gave his talk --in English. Was he trying to be polite, or what? I couldn't understand what he was saying because his pronunciation was so bad, but maybe everybody else had the same accent so they could understand him; I don't know. Then the next guy gets up, and gives his talk in English!

When it was my turn, I got up and said, "I'm sorry; I hadn't realized that the official language of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences was English, and therefore I did not prepare my talk in English. So please excuse me, but I'm going to have to give it in Portuguese."

So I read the thing, and everybody was very pleased with it. 

The next guy to get up said, "Following the example of my colleague from the United States, I also will give my talk in Portuguese." So, for all I know, I changed the tradition of what language is used in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Some years later, I met a man from Brazil who quoted to me the exact sentences I had used at the beginning of my talk to the Academy. So apparently it made quite an impression on them.

But the language was always difficult for me, and I kept working on it all the time, reading the newspaper, and so on. I kept on giving my lectures in Portuguese--what I call "Feynman's Portuguese," which I knew couldn't be the same as real Portuguese, because I could understand what I was saying, while I couldn't understand what the people in the street were saying.

 I'll let you know how this teaching in Spanish thing turns out for me...wish me Feynman's luck.

Today I worked at my office at the university, for the first time on a Saturday. This was in part because I'm feeling some pressure to have everything in order for the start of class on Tuesday, and in part because it's my first weekend without Basilia in town, so I didn't have anything better to do. I spent the morning and early afternoon at the campus. At three Nelson Quintanilla came by the house to take me out for a mystery excursion. We went to Volcán San Salvador just outside the city. In his car it took less than 30 minutes from our apartment to the top of the volcano, which bristles with cafés, broadcasting antennas, local weekend excursionists and tourists (nearly all Latin American) and the inevitable vendors who flock to any tourist destination. Nelson said when he was a Boy Scout as a youth they hiked all the way up the volcano, down into the crater and back to town as a day trip, with none of this civilized stuff along the way. That must have been a hell of a hike.

With Nelson up on the volcano

When we got back to Antiguo Cuscatlán, Nelson came over to our apartment, where we drank beers and played guitar. I loaned him my Beatles fake book, a gift from my Uncle Bill (Swartz, not my other Uncle Bill [Engel]). He told me heartbreaking stories of being a student at the national university during the civil war in the 1980s, when soldiers would storm the campus, burn books, and occasionally haul students off without cause, never to be heard from again. We gringos have got it so good.

Some surprises of the last few days (San Salvador is always full of surprises):

•  Last night en route to the concert at the anthropological museum I noted that the circus that had been set up ever since we got to El Salvador is finally gone, and in its place there's...a heavy earth moving equipment trade show! It's a gigantic event, according to the newspaper an attempt to get the Salvadoran construction industry back on its feet after being practically shut down by the global economic crisis.
• On the steep paved road up the volcano today, we passed several cyclists, in full Lycra gear with nice road bikes. Pretty brutal ride, given the grade, the heat and humidity, and the diesel fumes from many passing trucks and buses. At least they had some substantially cooler and cleaner air to look forward to at the top if they made it.
• At the top the parking lot was thronged with BMW motorcycles, most of them bearing plates from Guatemala and Sinaloa, Mexico. We spoke with one of the few Salvadoran riders, and he said there are over 300 BMW riders in town for a gathering. He said they formed a 2 km long parade on one of the highways - must have been a sight.

Newsworthy

The marketing folks at Universidad Don Bosco decided to put out a press release on the energy class that starts next week. I was surprised to see several newspaper and TV folks show up for the event. What with all the recent murders having El Salvador beat Colombia for the highest homicide rate in Latin America, I wouldn't have thought the energy class to be very newsworthy. But there they were, with cameras and notebooks. Rector Huguet, Dr. Lemus and I each said a few words, had our pictures taken, and a young reporter from La Prensa Gráfica asked me some very good questions. I brought along some visual aids in the form of a small solar module, a fuel cell, and an LED light bulb, which gave the photogs something to snap beside us old guys in neckties. Here's some TV footage and the La Prensa Gráfica reporter's story.

Tonight I went with Nelson Quintanilla from UDB and his wife Norma to a free concert at the anthropology museum. It was sponsored by the German embassy and featured a German cellist and a Swiss-Spanish pianist, both very talented young women. It was a nice event, and the auditorium at the museum has great acoustics. I've been hearing that they show free movies there on Tuesday nights, courtesy of the U.S. embassy.

I'm finally starting to feel almost ready for the first week of the class. I'll put in some work this weekend, but after a couple of productive days, I don't feel frantic like I did a couple days ago.

Got some good news about my father via my sister Genny -- his health has improved some, and he's been moved out of the hospital into an extended care facility, which is where he's spent most of the past several months.

Lonely for Awhile

We set our alarm for 4:30 a.m. so Basilia and her mom could catch their early bus to Honduras this morning. They were gone by 5:00 and from there onward I had to face the day alone. I used to spend years on end with no one to come home to, but now it feels so unnatural. In addition to escorting her mom home and having a visit with the family, Basilia also plans to meet up with our friend Margaret, who is visiting Honduras from New York to start work on a documentary film she's been planning for several months. Basilia expects to be gone at least a week, maybe two. I can understand, chilling with the family in Guajiquiro has got to be more enjoyable than the next couple weeks with me would be. My class starts in less than a week, and I've got a ton of work to do by then, so I'm not gonna be the life of the party for awhile.

Today Victor and I went to meet with a group of engineers at CEL, which used to be the government-run electric utility for the whole country before a privatization process began in the 1990s. Now the transmission, distribution, and a large chunk of the generation has been spun off to a bunch of private companies (though many of them are subsidiaries of one bigger company; so much for diversification!). CEL remains as the operator of the four hydroelectric plants on the Lempa River that together make up about half the country's electric generating capacity. Plus they're dabbling in some smaller scale renewable energy ventures, including a wind feasibility study in Metapán and a planned utility scale solar photovoltaic project.

Up on the roof of CEL with their engineers and Victor from the university
Chichontepec (San Vicente) volcano is in the distance

The engineers gave us a tour of their rooftop 25kW solar project, which came online in June 2009. It's grid-connected, one of very few small renewable energy projects putting power into the grid in El Salvador. It's also the largest PV array in the country. It consists of three separate arrays, one each of monocrystalline, polycrystalline and amorphic modules. They have a display in the lobby of the building, much like UIHS's in Arcata, that uses an SMA interface just like UIHS's to show instantaneous and cumulative output from each of the arrays, providing an opportunity to compare performance of the three technologies. The two crystalline arrays have almost identical output, with the amorphous array lagging just a few percent behind. The engineers told me the system has been almost trouble-free, apart from a tendency for the modules to develop a dark, gritty film on their surface, no surprise given the building's location in San Salvador's traffic-clogged downtown.

Display showing output from the three PV arrays