Wind Power Can Help Bring Education to Off-grid Populations in the Developing World
Regular reader and terrific human being retired M.D. Larry Dobson sent me this “TED Talk” on online education, in which the speaker emphasizes how incredibly difficult it is for impoverished people in developing nations to acquire the knowledge and skills required for prosperity.
When I see things like this, I’m reminded of my clients with off-grid and micro-grid wind solutions, whose products can be coupled with high-efficiency lighting and computing, providing the possibility of bringing educational solutions to hundreds of millions of people for the first time. I’m thinking largely of WindStream in micro-wind and Continental Wind Power in midsized-wind, both really solid solutions.
Thanks, Larry.
That is one place where wind power could be very useful. If the power is not entirely reliable, they are nevertheless better off with power that sometimes fails than with no power at all. Whether micro wind power or PV power would be better under those circumstances may depend on location.
It doesn’t require much power to operate a few very small efficient LED lamps which children can use to do their homework in the evening, or to recharge cell phones. Notebook computers also require little power.
When I visited the Fijian island of Rotuma, which was quite remote, each village had timer-operated Diesel generators which were automatically started at sundown and stopped at about 10:00 PM. The generators were annoyingly noisy (although the technology to silence them is not difficult), a maintenance problem, and the island sometimes ran out of Diesel fuel. That was a situation where renewables would have worked well since the amount of power required was very small, total reliability was not totally essential, there was no hope of ever being connected to a grid, and for such a small power requirement, renewables would probably have cost less than the Diesel generators they were using. Although it was in the tropics, there was always an ocean breeze and the temperature never became high enough to make air conditioning essential.
But again, that is very different from providing adequate power for large prosperous countries.