Humboldt is EVERYWHERE

Friday night I got together with Anne Schaufele, one of the U.S. student Fulbrighters here in El Salvador, and Rich Cairncross, newly arrived in El Salvador, to see a movie at the Spanish Cultural Center. Rich is here to do basically the same thing I'm doing, teach about renewable energy, but he's working at the Universidad de El Salvador, aka La Nacional, the country's one large public university. The film was excellent, a Peruvian-Spanish production called La Teta Asustada. See it if you can find it.

Yesterday we made a marathon class field trip, with Basilia, Rich Cairncross, and our friend Mercy Burgos coming along. We left the campus in a hired bus at 8 am and headed north for the Ingenio La Cabaña, one of the country's major sugar processing plants. We spent the whole morning there, getting a detailed Powerpoint slide presentation about the plant followed by an in-depth tour. The plant engineers are wonderful, really knowledgeable about their plant and proud of how it works. The plant really is a wonder, deriving all of their process heat, mechanical energy, and more than twice the electricity they need from the bagasse left over after milling the sugar cane. Not only that, but they have a separate ethanol plant on site that can make 120,000 liters a day.

Our class at the La Cabaña sugar plant

We were going to also visit a second sugar plant, but the La Cabaña visit ended up running overtime, so I called the folks at Ingenio El Angel and they were OK with leaving it for another day. We headed back for San Salvador and got some lunch, then headed for the Hospital Divina Providencia, which is a cancer clinic that has a new solar hot water system on the roof. Folks from SEESA, the company that installed the system, gave us a tour of the system. We spent about an hour and a half going over every component. I was especially impressed with Carlos Martínez, a young engineer who was in charge of the installation and did a great job answering the students' questions.

Carlos Martínez and Roberto Bonilla from SEESA explain solar hot water

From there we headed back out of the city headed south with SEESA's engineers to see an off-grid residential PV system. The owners weren't home, but a gardener let us into the yard to see the system. The batteries, charge controller and inverter are housed in a shed that the SEESA engineers had a key for, so we were able to see all the components. Roberto Bonilla, who is general manager of SEESA, is a very colorful guy who has lots of great anecdotes to tell about the solar industry in El Salvador at the same time as he shows off the nuts and bolts of his systems.

It all looks so beautiful in the tropics...even rooftop PV

Just as the sun was going down and we were headed for the bus to end our long day, the owners of the house came home, a couple with small kids. Ing. Bonilla had mentioned earlier that the woman was from California. I told her that Basilia and I live in CA, and she asked where. Much to my surprise, it turned out that she went to Humboldt State at the same time I did, during the 1980s. We even lived on the same street, Eye Street, at about the same time. Her name is Susan Kandel and she works for PRISMA, an environmental non-profit focused on rural sustainable development. Small freakin' world, eh.