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