Posted on 12/25/2010 3:30:35 PM PST by Pan_Yan
KIPTUSURI, Kenya — For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market.
Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid.
Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning.
That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches.
“My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things,” Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children.
As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Drums would be a better way for her.
Coming to a town near you, if big brother continues this global warming craze.
Good for them! They didn't demand it from their govt for free, nor did they wait for a charity to give it to them.
Dung Huts are renewable.
Exciting efforts are being made by private businesses around the globe to bring energy resources to rural people in 3rd world countries. I recently joined with a group of Hassidic Jews who are investing in the development of resources to bring power to Indian farmers. More than a million farmers will benefit from these efforts by being able to purchase inexpensive basic technology that will transform their lives.
Buying a cell phone when you have no electricity shows a lack of planning.
Ingenious. But note how the Government aid agencies, big NGO’s and local state-owned power companies are temperamentally disinclined to get involved with little people doing such things privately.
Now she can charge her neighbors 40 cents a charge and they will still save money by cutting out the travel.
Jack
I've got a neat all-band radio that will work on solar or on crank.
It came with attachments to fit most cell phones and will crank-or-solar charge them as well.
Thirty bucks.
Roger that, and I hope they do well with it.
Small-scale solar and wind power works well -- household or farm-size. It has been doing well for a few decades in the case of solar electric, and since the 1940's in the case of wind.
Large-scale solar and wind both have problems, mainly storage because the output varies over the course of the day. For large scale I favor hydro and nuclear, and recognize the necessity of fossil fuels at least for the next few decades until we can start building more nuke plants.
Anyway, my house is off-grid, and I've run on solar (PVs) since 1989. Tonight I'm posting this from that same system. The independence is a positive factor, the lack of a monthly bill is nice, and no power outages. Small-scale renewable rocks.
What powers the cellular signal towers?
She can now become a community organizer, and tell her people how to get stuff from goernments the world over.
Maybe they can use their corn for fuel, instead of eating it.
Good for you! There are plans out there for micro nuclear generators that would power individual neighborhoods. Unfortunately, I don't think the government or the power industry is ready to let go of 'The Grid'.
Small scale? Try microscopic. And yet the green idiots think that if we were to go to this it would be all Kum-Bah-Ya for the world.
Later in the article it says she did just that, and that it has paid for itself in fuel savings. Apparently many of her neighbors now have panels as well. Their biggest problem is establishing a supply chain to provide the units.
>>>>Maybe they can use their corn for fuel, instead of eating it.
Better yet, after making the ethanol, they can take what’s left, feed it to chickens... harvest the eggs to use for food, and when they burn out laying eggs, eat the damn chicken.
Why the contempt?
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