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.