Renewable Energy in the Third World

I just returned from a fund-raiser hosted by dear friends Jez and Lynzie Blacker, who work tirelessly to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor – a great deal of their recent work in Haiti. Characteristically, they’ve been working their tails off over the last few months in an effort to raise money through their charity organization “U2U” to build a new hospital on the Haitian island of La Gonave, an overpopulated, drought-ridden place with horrifyingly few medical resources (one small, primitive hospital with 33 beds for a population of 160,000). Cholera is epidemic, and precious little is being done to stop the toll it’s taking, which is greatest among the children.

If you’d like to contribute, I can promise you that nowhere will you find an institution in which a larger percentage of your donations will go directly to providing help to those who need it most. More at U2Uworld.com.

On the renewable energy front, I met some people at the event from Zimbabwe who asked me if I wanted to get involved with U2U in a greater way than sipping wine and bidding on items in a silent auction. I explained that the main contribution I hope to make to the third world will come with the electrification of places that have never had it before – and that it will take the form of clean energy.

One could say that it’s a blessing in disguise that these nations don’t have tons of oil refineries and coal-fired power plants. We can try to provide for these places a kind of leapfrog effect, going directly to renewables – in much the same way that developing countries never had to incur the expense of building terrestrial telephone lines, and skipped directly into cellular telephony.

We’ll see what happens. But again, here’s that link to U2U.