Village power at last

From when I first applied for my Fulbright grant until I arrived here in El Salvador, a period of over a year and a half, the picture I carried in my head of my renewable energy experience I expected to have here revolved around household-scale, off-grid projects in remote rural villages. This was the Central America I had become familiar and comfortable with during my two years as a Peace Corps volunteer out in the mountains of Honduras a dozen years ago.

Once I got here, I learned that this type of work didn't really harmonize with the culture of Don Bosco University. The engineers who teach and study here are more oriented toward industrial scale projects that put serious juice into the grid, like the geothermal and hydroelectric systems that account for more than 60% of El Salvador's electricity. While less familiar to me, I was willing to shift gears to adapt to this approach to renewable energy. Things just kind of fell into place via the contacts that presented themselves. In the end, the class revolved largely around field trips to large, megawatt-scale projects and lectures geared to address what we saw on those field trips. I felt ambivalent about this, but the class went well and the students gave positive evaluations, so what the heck.

So now, well past the midpoint of my stay here, I finally had a chance to put on my jeans and go see some bona fide appropriate technology out in the countryside. Today Nelson Quintanilla and I joined Roberto Saravia, one of my students from the course, for a day of visiting his energy projects in remote villages. Roberto works for InterVida, a Spanish NGO that employs around 300 people in El Salvador. Like Peace Corps, their work revolves around rural development and falls into several categories, one of which is natural resources. Within that they have a renewable energy program, which Roberto runs. He took us to see two houses in Berlin municipio in Usulutan department in eastern El Salvador. First we went to the home of Oscar Pineda, who has a small solar electric system and a biodigester that he feeds with manure from his cows. The digester design is very simple but seems quite robust. It's been working for over a year with no serious trouble. It requires little maintenance and produces enough gas to run one burner for six to eight hours a day. Oscar is one of these sharp people you often meet in the countryside who seems to have a real technical knack despite little formal education.

Oscar Pineda demonstrates his biogas-fired cookstove (note white PVC gas supply line coming straight from the digester in the back yard)

Next we went to see a woman named Sonia who has a wood-conserving stove at her house. InterVida has experimented with different woodstoves over the years. They tried the Lorena stove which has been promoted by many appropriate technology groups. It worked OK but tended to fall apart after a year or so and did not really conserve that much energy. They now are using a design called a Rocket Stove. They buy them from another NGO in Guatemala for $150 each. The stove consists of three hollow, cast concrete pieces that fit together and can be mounted on top of concrete blocks or adobes. There is a small combustion chamber inside, and the surrounding cavity is filled with small chunks of locally collected pumice that acts as an insulator, as well as filtering particles out of the exhaust stream, which is vented out of the house via a metal stove pipe. There are two burner openings on top, which each come with a set of four removable concentric cast iron rings. The user selects the appropriate number of rings so the cooking pot just fits in the opening. We fired up the stove and were impressed with how easy it is to use and how cool the exterior remains, a testament to its efficiency and safety.

Sonia looks on while Roberto fires up the efficient woodstove

On the way back, we stopped at an athletic complex in Soyapango where the director is worried about electric bills of $4,000 a month. Nelson, Roberto and I went over the facility's bills with him and gave him some recommendations. Helping him out with an energy audit and a design for a photovoltaic system seems like an ideal project for our fledgling energy institute at Don Bosco.

One of the things that I like about InterVida is that most of their staff work outside San Salvador in one of their five district offices. We visited one of those offices today in Santiago de Maria, a small city about the size of Marcala in Honduras. This strikes me as the ideal long-term job situation for me when Basilia and I eventually relocate to Central America -- working for a European NGO in a small city. Less smog and traffic, closer to the back country, while getting to work for an organization that has its act together and probably won't fold in a year or two.

Last night Basilia and I got together for dinner with Marcela, a young woman from Guajiquiro who is visiting with our friends the Burgos family here in San Salvador. I first met Marcela and her twin sister Daniela when they were in elementary school back when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. They always stood out from the crowd as really smart kids. Now Marcela is going to law school in Honduras, and Daniela is in Cuba studying to be a doctor. You go girls!