 Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. So we're very pleased to bring you the latest in our 2016 webinar series on the topic of the role of small wind and rural electrification. My name is Yana Aranda, and I am the Director of Programs here at Engineering for Change. I'll be the moderator for today's webinar. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. I see a comment here about folks not hearing, but I can get you all to reply in the chat if you're getting the audio. That would be very helpful. So do you hear me, world? All right, fantastic. I see a lot of replies confirming audio. So thank you so much, everyone, and we will continue. Brilliant. So I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit more about today's webinar. Reaching Sustainable Development Goal Number 7 of ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and moderate energy for all by 2030 requires a systems approach to energy solutions. One approach to ensuring continuous access in underserved rural regions is the combination of solar affordable takes with small wind turbines, enabling energy generation at times of low solar resource and significantly increasing the proportion of the total energy system that can be manufactured locally. Today, we'll explore the challenges and potential rewards of developing locally manufactured small wind turbines for sustainable rural electrification abilities with Dr. John Clark, the Co-Founder and Network Manager for the UK Low Carbon Energy for Development Network, and Dr. John Simonic-Leary, Coordinator of the Wind Empowerment Association, who will share their insights. I'd like to welcome both of you, and thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to acknowledge the E1C webinar series team. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics or speakers, we invite you to contact the team via the email address visible on this slide. Today's webinar is part of our professional development offerings. Information upcoming installments in the series, as well as archived videos of past presentations can be found on the E1C webinar's page. Our next webinar will be in November on the topic of information and communication technologies for development. We'll share details on that page, and E1C members will receive an invitation to the webinar directly. Now, before we move on to our presenters, I'd like to tell you a bit about engineering for change. 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Now, a few housekeeping items before we get started. First, I'd like to see where everyone is from today, and some of you have already practiced out your chat, but I invite all of you to do so now. Enter your location into the chat window, which is located to the bottom right of your screen. If the chat is not open on your screen, you can access it by clicking the chat icon in the top right corner. All right, we see folks from Buenos Aires, from Hong Kong, from Munich, and Milwaukee, Minnesota, and many other parts of the United States, as well as India and beyond. Fantastic. Thank you for joining us. We really welcome you all. Now, during the webinar, we also like you to ask questions, and those questions will be, please, typed into the Q&A window, which is located below the chat. So, if you do not see the Q&A window, again, there is an icon on the top right hand corner. Please click that and do type your questions into that Q&A window so we can keep track of them for the presenters. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. So, I see more replies have come in. Welcome to all of you from Chicago to D.C., to Greece to Orali. Really great to have you all here with us today. Following the webinar to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour, or PDH, for this session, please follow the instructions in the top of the E4C professional development page, and you see the link listed right there. So, with that, I'd like to introduce to you today's presenters. First, we have Dr. John Clark, who works as a network manager for the UK Low Carbon Energy for Development Network, and was one of the founders of the organization in 2012. John works at mapping the UK Low Carbon for Development Research Landscape and coordinating the project funded under the Understanding Sustainable Energy Solutions Research Program. John is a researcher on two USES projects, and he has been a lecturer in human geography in the geography department at Loughborough in a wide range of modules from Level 1 to Paul's graduate. He has also worked as an NGO consultant to different NGOs, including most recently the UK-based Practical Action, who are our good friends who are developing policy documents for guiding strategy. Next, we have Dr. John Leary, a multidisciplinary researcher specializing in appropriate renewable energy technology for sustainable development. He has completed a mechanical engineering master's and interdisciplinary PhD and postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sheffield. He has been involved in fieldwork in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and drew on methodologies from across social sciences and engineering to evaluate small wind turbines as a technological solution to rural electrification. He currently coordinates the Wind and Power Management Association and is a research associate with the LCEBN at Loughborough University. He has developed a structured methodology with Wind Empowerment's Market Assessment Working Group, and he'll be sharing a bit more about that today. So with that, I am going to turn it over to our presenters and look forward to an exciting talk. What I want to do first of all is to kind of outline what John and I do together and how we come to be working together with particular reference, and in this case to small wind, which is that the Low Carbon Energy for Development Network, which we both work with, has as one of its main aims to bring together social scientists, as well as technicians and engineers on the premise that the social is technical when we come to small scale RE projects and the technical is social. We believe in what we call sustainable energy systems, social energy systems, which is to say that the technical understandings and the social understandings of a project and how it works are as important as each other, and we can't rely one on one or the other, but have to have a mixture of disciplines and people with the relevant expertise to make to give a project as big a chance as success as possible. So that's how I come to be working at this from the LCEBN point of view. I'm a geographer and John is obviously there, and we've now been working together for a while, a couple of years or so on a variety of different projects and hope to be carrying on working together for some time. So I'm going to give the first part of this talk, which is going to be kind of setting the kind of global context of projects in which of the environment, sorry, which small wind projects will take place. And then John is going to go on and give you some more specific details about what the practicalities of that start with specific reference to case studies and examples that he has. So I want to kind of talk to you, first of all, about small energy projects in the context of local energy governments. We, as an organisation, firmly believe that energy is never just the pure supply of electricity, but it's all about empowerment, the induction of sustainable livelihoods in the communities, and that if that balance can be met correctly, those communities have a far better chance not just of having electricity for lighting, but can have sustainable energy business services. They can have the chance to develop their own, raise their own standards of living. So within that small scale context, we have to look at locals having a firm place in the global context. You can't discuss the global context of energy governance without this local aspect of it. And particularly with regards to the idea of the energy trial, which is Goldfell's idea about trying relation between energy access, i.e. giving access to modern energy services to as many people as possible, climate change, which we're all hopefully aware of the imminent unpleasant threat of and the idea of energy security, i.e. how you provide people not just with access to energy, but you make sure that the kinds of energy are actually sustainable and secure and secureable for the future. So decentralization is an essential part, and that's not just energy decentralization, i.e. getting away from centralized grid production of electricity, and we find it very ironic that at the time when the developed Western economies are moving away from centralized arcade grid systems, which are kind of industrial-area relics, more and more countries in the global south are being sold the idea of centralized grid as being somehow relevant of modernity, i.e. something to which you aspire as a modern nation, particularly when they have access to a large amount of renewable energy resources themselves. So that political decentralization has central place within the global context of energy trilemma and the local context of that energy trilemma. How you access actually what effects local effects climate change are having and how you make that energy supply secure. The local authorities in the countries that we work at the moment, we've got two projects in Bangladesh and Kenya facing enormous challenges, transfer responsibilities, how they have enough money and resources to make sure that they can start to provide all the people within their authority with enough energy, particularly in countries with rural areas, which have substantially very little electrification, capacity building, how you train people, engineers, administrators, people who could take over businesses, people who can run grids, mini grids and small RE projects and so on and so forth. So that's what we call trans scale coordination, i.e. how you translate a global and a national program into small scale local projects. And at the moment, as the bottom point makes, there's a very low profile of local government's issues in discussions of energy across the global staff. This is something, again, that we're working on and we know needs to be expanded quite rapidly. What we want there for you is sort of an incredibly simplistic diagram that I put up there is a transition, a low carbon energy transition from yesterday's centralized power, which is monumentally inefficient and which even with gas fire power stations, nuclear power stations, waste and all philosophy energy that we actually produce to this tomorrow scenario, which is going to be multiple situations of hybrid energy production, of mini grids, of micro grids, of nano grids, of solar home systems, very much dependent on individual country settings, whether the country has access to substantial renewable energy resources, substantial energy resources, full stop and relying on not just global national policies and international policies and funders, but the goodwill and help of government in devolving responsibility down to local powers. And we should hate to have that goes for countries of the global south as much as it does countries of the global north. We're all in this together, particularly so far as climate change and our necessary response to that comes out. So I'll just move on again. We say therefore that decentralizing the promotion of low carbon transitions are co-constitutive. You cannot have a transition to a low carbon economy without working out how you are going to decentralize your energy system. And this is where all kinds of small scale projects such as you can see the small wind turbine there in Patagonia come into this. And here we all would also say there is no silver bullet technology. You cannot focus on solar wind tied with one particular country or one particular area without having understood the decentralized sociocultural environment in which that project will take place. But there is a definite need for small scale energy governments and technology caused by decentralization occurring across the global north and south. And there is a need for a research agenda, which obviously what we're trying to do as the LCDN is to be part of that component of that research agenda to understanding the role of local authorities, institutions, technologies and sociocultural environments. So important to understand the communities in which you work. And a need to understand the interconnectivity of technological political and energy systems decentralization. In other words, it's all very well saying well we'll have a mini grid here or a small scale RE project here. But how does that work in terms of local government systems? How does it mesh in with livelihoods, rural livelihoods? How does it mesh in with gendered systems of energy understanding operation that already exists particularly in countries of the global south as a complex mixture of interconnected issues that are very, very important in understanding this this holistic issue of decentralization. So from that kind of rather garbled version of the kind of holistic universalistic global local connection of the energy triama of climate change of decentralization so on and so forth. Well, how do we come to the specifics of a project such as small winds and small ever? Well, how do we work out about whether a small wind project would be the most appropriate after all? Well, we come to the understanding that there are niches where certain kinds of technology will be more appropriate than others. And remember, I said that we add that with the caveat of understanding the communities in which they operate. But there is a good deal of literature there, some of which I quote talking about the small niche areas, small islands, for instance, in which small wind turbines and hybrid projects when solar, solar tidal projects are being implemented at the moment, where those particular technologies can be bought to bear more effectively. And there are some good reasons why that should be. There is a trade-off always on a small island community, for instance, because of the limited resources that places like that tend to have. Small islands tend to have limited non-buried biomass biofuel resources, for instance, where they have unlimited, can have unlimited solar. But you have to make the most use of the resources according to what those resources are being used for already as well. Commodities such as copepalm and coconut and land itself, for instance, may be being sold for export or may be in use for making other commodities useful to the island and therefore their use as fuel or as a biofuel may be limited. So when you're looking at small wind projects, what you're looking at is a specific place, a specific sociocultural environmental niches, which have issues, as a lot of small islands do, with deforestation and consequent soil erosion, the very, very minimal capacity for coping with environmental pollution through waste. Substantial food and fuel shortages through price interaction and fuel costs in particular, in say, Pacific islands are substantial. And we know that that is a substantial problem that has to be addressed in any small scale project, RE or otherwise. And when we talk about hybrids, they can be hybrid generators and RE sources as well. We're not restricting ourselves to one kind or the other. And you have to be very careful lastly about potentially adverse effects on water sources. Plainly, there's a very, very delicate environmental balance, which wind itself and small scale wind projects are particularly capable of overcoming. And these need to be taken into account in the project evaluation, impact evaluation and so forth. So I'm not going to go through all of these factors here, which I've put up for you, because I think this is going to go up online, but you can read through them yourself at a later date, if you want to do so. But these are more details on the kinds of factors involved in technology choices, scale, cost, environmental impact, use of modeling tools, stakeholder involvement, particularly important, the use of the community itself to work out what talents and what abilities that community has. And also lastly, keying into regional initiatives, because plainly we have to be cynical about this, where the funding is going to come from, what kind of initiatives can be supportive to all kinds of small scale projects. But over and above us, with small wind and every other renewable energy, there are no technological issues that are purely technical, there are no sociological issues that are purely social, there are only social energy systems. And we can't emphasize this point as strongly enough. And I know John is going to go on to talk to you about some specific case examples. And obviously, he's had some substantial experience of this. So without further doing, I'm going to hand over to John. Right, thank you, John. So I started researching small wind in 2009. And at the time, I was drawn in by this technology that promised so much, it had the potential to produce something electricity at a much cheaper cost than PV. Although PV is decreasing rapidly in price now, so that balance is changing a little bit, as long as you can find a good site for a wind turbine, of course. It can offer diversity and power generation sources if you have complementarity between the two resources. And it offers, perhaps most importantly, the potential to manufacture locally, which you simply cannot do with PV panels. So this is what my opinion was of small wind when I started my research on the subject as an engineer. Seven years ago, I thought, wow, if we can just optimize the efficiency of these machines, then we can solve a great part of the global energy access problem using this wonderful technology. And it wasn't until I started speaking to a variety of different organizations who are actually building these things and installing them in rural areas across the global south that I realized that actually the reality for many of these reality in many places was much more like this, that many of the wind turbines that have been installed were simply not operating in anymore for a variety of reasons. So I set out to find out why that was. Over the course of the next seven years, I started building a model which included all of the factors that I found from all of this case study research that I was doing that influenced the success or failure of any particular project. And don't worry, I'm not going to go through this model in detail. I merely wanted to illustrate just how many factors there are. And these are really just the ones that I found and the ones that I found that were most important. As you'll see on this diagram, there are both social factors, there are technical factors, and there are many which are inherently sociotechnical. The two are intertwined inseparably. So to understand one, you have to understand the other and to come up with a solution to a social problem, the lack of access to energy services. You must understand people as well as understanding the technology that can offer potential solutions. So what I want to do today is focus on two major challenges that small wind faces in development projects. And that is maintenance and the high variability in the wind resource itself. I'm going to use four case studies to illustrate these two key barriers and also talk about ways in which we can overcome them. So the first case study is in Peru. It's comparing two NGOs, Windaid and Solisiones Practicus, which is the Latin American branch of practical action. So they were working in the same context, the northern Peruvian Andes, and they had slightly different delivery models and a slightly different wind turbine. The next is in Nicaragua. Again, it's comparing two NGOs, Blue Energy and Aso Phoenix. And they have the same turbine. They use a similar delivery model, but they work in a different context, the Caribbean coast and the central highlands. The next is Scotland. It's a small community called SCOREG, where small wind turbines have been providing electricity for community members for over 30 years now. And it's the home of the internationally renowned small wind expert Hugh Piggat, who I've seen is actually in the audience today. So back in the 1950s, the photo on the left is what SCOREG looked like. No basic services, no electricity, no running water. And if you look on the right, as opposed to taken in 2012 with Hugh and his family and his very comfortable home using systems such as small wind turbines to provide electricity and other basic services of the same standard that we have in the rest of the UK. The final case study is Inner Mongolia, which is an autonomous region of China. It's based on literature published at the 10th century by Bachelor, Chilean and Lu. So the reasons why I chose these case studies partly were through the opportunities that came up, but also because I wanted to spread across sustainability, which you could argue is partly judged subjectively. But number of turbines, which is perhaps a more objective measure. So you can see that the Inner Mongolia case study is by far the biggest in terms of scale. There are over 100,000 small wind turbines there. SCOREG, the community in the Northwest Coast of Scotland, you could argue is on par in terms of sustainability, but it's just one community. So you can see there's quite a difference in the scale of those two. OK, so first of all, on to maintenance. So I want to say, first of all, small wind turbines, they are mechanical machines. They have moving parts, so they're going to have much higher maintenance requirements than solar PV. PV panels often come with guarantees of over 20 years, whereas with a small wind turbine, you'll be lucky if it lasts more than 10. So to prepare a small wind turbine, and in fact, any machine, you need tools, you need spare parts, you need technical knowledge, and you need capital. Someone's got to pay for this. Cars, cars are all over the world. And one of the key reasons why they've been able to spread so universally is because they're supported by a network of garages and trained mechanics. Bicycles, again, they're everywhere. Again, supported by a network of bicycle repair shops and trained technicians. Small wind turbines in the places where they've been successful. Again, they've been supported by a network of service centres and or trained community technicians, because you can't simply drive your wind turbine to a service centre. So with that in mind, let's go to the first case study, which is Peru. So first of all, looking at the NGO WindAid. So WindAid operate on a volunteer-based delivery model. So international volunteers come to their workshop in Trujillo and they build a small wind turbine and they then take it out to a rural community in the northern Peruvian Andes. Well, at least this is the main part of their activities when I visited in 2012 or was it 2013, a few years ago. So the benefit of this delivery model is that you have people who want to learn about small wind turbines and who have money and you have people who need electricity but don't have much money. So by balancing the two together you can receive a good outcome for all. However, the main problem that I saw when I was there was that the people that have been trained on how to operate the small wind turbines on how to maintain them, i.e. those that are part of the construction course are not the people who really need that knowledge. They're the people who go home to their own countries rather than the people in the communities themselves, as you can see on the photo on the right, who live with this technology every single day and really need to know how to make it work. So wind data based in Trujillo, which is on the Pacific coast of Peru and the communities they were working with at the time were all based in the Andes. So it's a minimum five hour drive to any of these communities. Many of them you can only visit in four by four. So this means that any repair that needs to be done had to include a journey around a trip of at least 10 hours and not only is that expensive in itself and time consuming but when you cost in engineer time and the travel costs in terms of accommodation and food and everything that you need in order to make that journey costs quickly spiraled out of control. So at the time that I visited at the end of I guess it was at the end of 2011 according to this diagram. Excuse me, it was a few years ago. All of the turbines at the time were out of order and we actually went to visit three of them. They'd all broken for different reasons and we were able to put some of them back into service but not all of them because we didn't have all the spare parts with us. So you can see what the problem with the delivery model was here. Practical action solution and the practice had a very different delivery model which was focused on community technician training. So the communities themselves put forward nominees for the technician posts. Those people then went to a renewable energy demonstration center and learned about how to operate and maintain small wind turbines. Spare parts were kept in the community and printed manuals were given to each end user on how to operate their machine and how to do very basic maintenance tasks themselves. Again, they were based on the coast and they were working in the mountains. However, they established a service center at one of their regional offices so that there was much easier access to more spare parts and more technical knowledge when that was needed. So as you can see the results here by the way, I didn't quite explain before but each one of these bars has a single wind turbine and it's a timeline at the bottom. So green is working, red is out of service. So you can see that whilst in the community that solution and this practice were working in and where it installed over 30 turbines whilst there were still lots of failures there they were able to be repaired fairly quickly. Due to the fact that there was a community technician two community technicians living in that community and able to make repairs and to their neighbours on their neighbours' machines. So next case study in Nicaragua then there are many issues with lightning with extreme corrosion due to the highly saline, salty and humid air and the wind turbines that blew energy was installing on the Caribbean coast actually spent more time out of service than in. Also the wind resource on the Caribbean coast is very low so they decided that they would do a trial project with another NGO which is based in the central highlands in a community called Quaene Quil. So this is with the NGO Aso Phoenix and they saw the wind and solar hybrid system and actually at the time that I visited the wind part of the system had actually spent more time in service than the solar part. Why was this? Well, the community technicians actually travelled to Blue Energy's workshop and they spent a week building the small wind turbine that was going to be installed in their community alongside the technicians from the NGO. So this meant that not only were they capable of making many repairs themselves but they're also capable of making small adjustments to the machine to prevent failures from even occurring in the first place. The big problem in this community however was that although productive applications were planned at the beginning of the project they still hadn't been implemented two years after installation when I visited and so the cost of the spare parts way exceeded the amount that the community were able to collect from household fees. So on to Scotland and on to Scourag so the ability of people to pay for maintenance services here is obviously a lot higher and this is a single household and the wind turbine is at the bottom the latest wind turbine that was installed in 2009 and you can see that again there had been a number of failures however the machine was quickly repaired and this is the case for most machines on this small community. And the main reason why that is is because Hugh Piggett the well-renowned small wind expert lives in the community and it's only a maximum of 14 minutes walk for him to get out to each of the places where he's installed a small wind turbine. So not only can he quickly get there to make repairs but he can also regularly go around and do preventative maintenance such as greasing the bearing as he's doing here and also talk with each individual household and establish whether the energy system is really meeting their needs and if not how to adapt it. Finally and in Mongolia then a network of service centres was established to enable the technology to spread across the entire region. It was sponsored by the government and it extended across every county. Printed manuals were given out to end users and over the course of 30 years the machine was redesigned and the machines there were a variety were redesigned so that most of the spare parts and most of the repairs that need to be done regularly could be done by the end users themselves and in the most successful counties then community technicians were also trained as well. So on to the next issue which is the wind resource itself. So wind is a highly variable resource in both space and time and those differences are only magnified further by the fact that the power produced by a small wind turbine or any wind turbine is proportional to the cube of the wind speed. So doubling your wind speed gives you eight times the amount of power. So first of all let's look at Peru. This is a wind map of Peru. You can see that in the Amazon region you have almost nothing at all the worst wind resources in the world but on some of the tips of the Andes and on some of the coastal regions you do have some good winds. When you zoom in to the Cajamarca province then you can see that there's quite a spread still of wind resource. There's some good areas and some not so good areas. And when you zoom in even further to the community of Alelambrae where solution and those practicates were working you can see that there's an even greater variation and actually if you were to zoom in even further you would see that each tree and each household creates its own wind shadow. So there's even more spatial variation. And what you can see from this picture in particular is that each of the little crosses here by the way is a small wind turbine that you can just about make out and the lines are contours, height contours. So you can see that the wind is mostly on the tops of the hills as you would expect but people mostly live in the valleys because the wind is annoying and lugging all your stuff up to the top of a hill and finding water on top of a hill is pretty difficult. So there's a mismatch between where people generally live and where the wind generally is. Whoa, okay, this slide's gone a bit crazy. That line shouldn't be that long, but anyway. What this is showing is costing out different renewable energy systems. So it's looking at the green line is a small wind system at the one kilowatt scale. The yellow line is a one kilowatt solar system. So this is in Nicaragua and it's showing for the renewable resources that are available across the country, how much will each kilowatt hour cost from a one kilowatt scale system? And you can see that there really isn't that much difference for solar because the power produced by a solar system is linearly proportioned to the resource. While for wind, then the power is proportioned to the cube. So you can see that wind doesn't even start to become viable until above four meters per second. And it's really only above five that you're actually guaranteed to be more cost effective than solar at market prices at the time in 2013. So this is a wind and a solar resource map of Nicaragua. Solar on the left, wind on the right. And you can see that it looks like there's quite a variation in both. But actually, when you combine it with this cost modeling, we modeled for each municipality across Nicaragua, which you can see by these small shapes here, how much does it cost for a kilowatt hour of energy generated from each of these two sources? And the one on the left shows that for PV, there's hardly any variation. It's a reasonable price all across the country. Whereas for wind, in most cases, it's extremely expensive. Only in some municipalities could it potentially be cheaper than solar. So looking at the bottom map, we looked at those particular municipalities in detail. We looked at where is the Nicaraguan National Grid? How many people in these municipalities already have a grid connection? And we found that actually on the South Pacific coast, most people already grid connected, represented by the red slices in these pies. It's actually only really in the Central Highlands where there is a significant number of people without access to the National Grid. And actually, when you look at the Central Highlands, although this is a photo from the Peruvian Andes, the sites are similar. So you have quite a few trees around and most communities being based in the valleys and only a few on hilltop sites like this. If you contrast that with a typical site for Inner Mongolia where you've got endless flat grassland, no trees around at all, and a predominant wind direction, you know that if you locate your wind turbine on the right side of your house in the predominant wind direction itself, you know that if you have a TV and a radio and lights and you can power them for so many hours per night, you know that if you're a neighbor by the wind turbine, they can probably get the same amount of energy services out of it. So you really don't need to do these continual resource assessments for every new site. Whereas if you're looking at terrain like in the photo on the left, every new site you go to, you should really do a wind resource assessment before putting up a new wind turbine there because you have no idea how much power you're gonna get, whether it's even viable to install a small wind turbine. Okay, on to Scotland. Well, the Scoray Peninsula, again, it's not flat. It has significant topographical variations and it has a lot of trees. People plant the trees around their house because the wind is annoying and it's nice to have shelter but it's not so good for wind energy. So, unfortunately, Scoray is the home of Hugh Piggett who knows how to study the wind using a variety of techniques such as dataloggers which can measure using animometers and wind veins. So he's set about studying exactly where the wind is, how it flows around the peninsula and here's a good understanding of where is a good wind site, how to locate a small wind turbine for each particular household in order to get the maximum resource. However, these machines are quite expensive. So what we're doing at Wind Empowerment is developing an open source datalogger that can allow you to measure the wind resource or the performance of a small wind turbine at a much lower cost than you would expect from an off-the-shelf item. The wind resource also has a high-temple variation so you can see in this plot from Ella Lumbrian in Peru produced by Practical Action that there's a huge variation in the amount of wind available each month and remember that if you double the wind speed eight times the power, so you look at in December 2008 below three meters per second and September, you've got September 2007, you've got almost six meters per second so that's a huge difference in terms of resource availability and the energy yield that you can expect from the system. And if you look even closer, some days in some places some days are windy and some days are sunny and sometimes those coincide, sometimes they don't, sometimes the mornings are windy, always the middle of the day is the sunniest but where the wind sits in terms of diurnal patterns is different in each place and it's important to understand the complementarity of those two resources. So this is again a picture from Skareg and this is John Davy installing a solar panel on what was previously a wind-only system and the reason why he's doing this is because the prices of solar PV have fallen incredibly in the last 10 years and even in very high latitudes as you can see by the angle of these solar panels it still makes sense to install solar in a hybrid system with wind and especially in a place like the northwest coast of Scotland because although it's a very high latitudes you get a lot of sun in the summer and a lot of wind in the winter. So a wind and solar system here really makes sense. Another key factor in mitigating this extreme variability in the wind resource is the willingness and ability of end users to adapt their behavior around the availability of the resource. So this is a photo taken in one of Hupigit's neighbor's houses the number that you see there, 14.97 is a voltmeter that measures the battery voltage on what is a 12 volt battery bank. So if you've got over 13 volts you've got a decent amount of energy in there and that's how they make daily decisions such as how will I boil water for a cup of tea? If it's above 13, then they'll use an electric kettle but if it's below 13, then they'll use the gas hob and save electricity for more important uses. So what are we doing at wind and power? Well, we're conducting a global market assessment. As you can see from this wind back of the world the wind is not evenly distributed. It's scattered all over the place. And what we're looking for is big regions of high winds like you see in Scotland or you see in Somalia or in Mongolia or Patagonia where the technology can spread across without having to do individual resource assessments for every single site. We're matching that up with where is the solar resource and looking at other environmental factors such as how many trees are there? Looking at human factors such as what kind of enabling policies are there in place? What is the existing level of local technical capacity and what kind of finances are available in each country around the world? And then matching that up with where are, how many people are there that are living off grid that don't have access to electricity or are using diesel to generate electricity? And we're lucky enough to have a PhD student from the University of Strathclyde, the Wind Energy Doctoral Training Center who's just started as of a few weeks ago and will be taking this project on over the next three years as his PhD research, so that's Alfie Alsop. So to conclude then, small wind does have a role to play in rural electrification. However, it is a very niche technology. It's potentially fundamentally limited by the availability of the resource itself and the fact that you must establish social infrastructure in order to assess that resource in the first place and offer maintenance services after installation. What's the future for small wind? Well, the focus has to be on capacity building and on empowering community technicians, establishing service networks and raising awareness about what small wind can and perhaps more importantly, cannot do. And so at wind empowerment, we're conducting a global market assessment to identify where small wind fits in the world then we'll be conducting local market assessments to identify locally appropriate delivery models and we're also developing an open source data logger to identify the viability of specific sites. If you'd like to find out any more about these projects then please do log on to windempowerment.org. And yeah, I would like to thank everyone for listening and especially to Hugh Bigget for attending today and for all his help in conducting this research. So thank you. Thank you so much. That was a very rich and rapid presentation. So with that, I'd like to open it up to the audience, all of our listeners for any questions that you may have regarding your project and specifics around the presentation itself. So while those questions are coming in, you mentioned that wind empowerment is working on this open source data logger. I was wondering if you could provide just a little bit more detail as to where you guys are in that process, how far along in the development you are and when you expect that resource to be available. All right, thank you. Yeah, so there are already resources available. So if you look on windempowerment.org then there are links to plans for prototype devices. And so at the moment, you can build an open source data logger, but we haven't tested it immensely. So what we want to get to is the point where we have something that is robust that you can leave out in the field and you can be confident that it will still be there, logging data when you come back in quite a few months time or even better, we'll be sending you data over the internet. So what we've done so far is we've linked together some of our members who are already working on projects like this. And I see that Raphael Oliver is actually in attendance here today. And so here's one of these people who's been working in the south of Patagonia for many years developing data loggers, Matt Nitzel of the New Orleans Univation and Jilou of the Chipaleum in France. They've all been producing data loggers. So by getting them together and sharing ideas and pushing things forward, we hosted a workshop in Toulouse in France earlier, well, last year actually. And we've been developing a project this year by reviewing international standards on the measurement of the wind resource and the performance of small wind turbines. This is something that we hope to present at our conference that we're hosting in Patagonia next month in November. So if anyone's interested in attending, then it's still possible to attend. There are details on windempowerment.org and remote participation will be possible for some of the sessions. So please do get involved. We have an entire working group, actually. That's probably the best way to get involved, specifically if you're interested in the design of the open source data loggers. So just look for the measurement working group on windempowerment.org. And there's a forum in there where you can get involved. Yeah, if it's possible to perhaps share a link with our participants via the chat regarding the event that would be very helpful as well. It does look like one of our... Yeah, it looks like one of the attendees has a question around wind turbine projects in Kenya. And perhaps we can broaden this more so and speak to any case studies if you've done any case studies or you're familiar with any case studies that have been done in Kenya specifically. Okay, just based on the link into the chat. Kenya. Thank you. Yeah, I was in Kenya this summer because John Glowk and I have been working on the solar nanogrid's project. So we've also had a number of member organizations from windempowerment who are based in Kenya. Most of them are not actually active anymore. Kenya has quite a diverse range of renewable resources, especially in the North and on the coast there are good winds, but a lot of the country has a lot of... Well, the entire country has a great solar resource, but a lot of the country doesn't have good winds. So many of our members that were working on and building locally manufactured small wind turbines were actually operating in areas that don't have the greatest wind resource. So we're refocused on some other areas, primarily on solar or on to mini-grids. What we're hoping to do, we've been working with the Ministry for Energy and Petroleum and looking at carrying out a market assessment in Kenya. So we've carried out a detailed market assessment in Malawi and we had a representative from the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum in Kenya who was peer-reviewing our study there and we hope to carry out a detailed market assessment in Kenya to work out. Is it the right technology for that country? And if so, how and where should it be delivered? Fantastic. And do you have a sense of the timeline associated with the release of that? No, it's not set up yet. We don't have any funding for the project at the moment where we're in dialogue with the Ministry about that. If we find some funding for it, we could begin it tomorrow, as soon as we recruit a team. So... Absolutely. So I'm not seeing questions coming in from the audience regarding any other specifics. I'd like to encourage everyone, should you have questions? Just as soon as I said that, I believe that that was a magic request, but just as a reminder, everyone, please do add your questions in the Q&A window. So a question came in. You were talking about decentralized energy resources being important due to losses that occur in centralized systems. How do you foresee small-scale power generation interacting with newer centralized grid technologies such as superconducting cables? That's a very difficult question to answer. Where the country, it depends on the topology and geography of the country, I suppose, is the most immediate answer. And, i.e., how spread out the rural areas, how feasible are different kinds of... Different ranges of power sources. But for me, decentralization isn't just about the provision of power and electricity, it's about empowering communities and people themselves. I mean, that might sound kind of high and mighty, or a bit pie in the sky, but what we're trying to look to do here is to hand people back more control over their communities by using their own power sources to help them take control over what's going on on a localized basis. So it's more than just a question of supplying electricity, electricity efficiency, if that makes sense. We all know of large numbers of countries where in rural areas, particularly, it really is never going to be efficient or in any way a good idea to be trying to make a grid system go out, even a kind of regionally centralized grid system go out to the more outlying areas because it just is a bad idea. So there's two aspects, well, there's different aspects to it. There's the topical one, there's an empowerment issue, there's renewable resources issues and all kinds of things that need to be taken into account before you go, well, a system of a certain kind is best for one country or one community, if that answers the question. I think it's a really important point. I think respecting the fact that every place is different, both in terms of physical geography and in terms of people. So what people want to use energy for is completely different. If you've got a huge factor, it's obviously completely different from a household that's just interested in getting lights, TV and a radio. So the technologies that are employed in each place need to reflect what people want to do with energy and what resources are available in that place and what kind of technical capacity there is. And there are so many factors that play into the equation that I don't think, I think having these decentralized options and that are available now just opens up the playing field to find a more appropriate solution for more places in the future. Plus, I would say, sorry, plus I would say, we've all seen the massive pop in the costs of solar technology over the last, say, 10 years or so. But the other thing that is going on at the moment is there's a massive amount of new technology in terms of types of storage, types of systems available. So there's a real revolution going on in technology, but I think within a few years, the kinds of production distribution equipment that we now have available are going to look archaic. I really hope so because I think that decentralization is desperately in need of a radical variety of new technologies. That sounds like a good call to engineers worldwide, to me. Definitely, yes. With that call for new types of technology, there is a question here regarding, and based on your case and your investigation, what measures are being undertaken to scale of infrastructural development of wind power in terms of production, and in this case, the production of products and training specifically in Africa. Basically, John, based on your current market assessments in the countries that you have, maybe you can speak to that. Yeah, so the Wind Empowerment Association, we have members in Senegal, in Tanzania, in Mozambique, in Kenya, in Ethiopia. And the biggest barrier I see for small wind in Africa and, in fact, anywhere in the world is the most fundamental, the availability of the wind resource itself. So there have been various efforts in the past to establish manufacturing hubs for small wind turbines in various different countries. I know Hugh has been involved with many of these personally. And unfortunately, many of them have been in places where there simply isn't enough wind resource to make it a viable technology. So what we really want to do with Wind Empowerment now is take what we know about where the wind is. There's a huge amount of data available now through and we've been using the arena and Global Atlas for Renewable Energy to look at not only where is the wind resource, but all of the other factors that play into the equation or all of the others that are easy to map and then really focus in on our efforts into areas where we really think it has the potential to be a scalable solution. In Ethiopia, for example, we conducted a national market assessment identified the Somali region as having high potential. And we conducted a couple of pilot projects at a local technical college. And we trained students to build a wind turbine and it was installed for a local business. And so the plan is to continue this project to evaluate what's been done so far and if it's been successful and if we still think it has potential to scale it up across the region. And this is a model that I see it's possible to replicate in other places. So this ties into a couple of questions that have been posted regarding the role of government. One of the questions is really how important of a how important of a role does public policy play in setting up and scaling a small wind rule electrification and specifically how much of a barrier or a neighbor of small scale power does the government play in regions that you've investigated? Well, I think it can definitely be both, don't it? I mean, in Kenya, as we found the Southern Ana Grids project, the fact that the government had for years promised to expand the grid out to many rural areas but hadn't actually done it was a huge enabler because it meant that there were a huge amount of huge number of people living off grids. And we ended up in a very strange situation with the Southern Ana Grids project because as we arrived to install our upgrade systems, so the grid actually turned up and installed a bunch of poles and almost connected the communities that we were working in. So absolutely, it can be both an enabler in terms of creating subsidies for not necessarily even subsidies, but import tax exemptions, for example, for renewable energy equipment or by simply by not doing anything and leaving a bunch of people without electricity. It can also be a problem if I could just butt in there in that the only reason realistically that the Kenyan government was expanding what called its last half mile project of the grid was that they have presidential elections coming up next year. And everybody I think on this list will know about the way in which grid connectivity in terms of the Global South is used as a political weapon or a promise for electoral favor. And therefore, yes, public policy, it has to be policy devolved from the grass roots upwards from the communities themselves by empowerment through choice rather than an imposition of centralized government. And that's another form of decentralization that I kind of touched on, i.e. how you empower those communities to make their own choices about their energy type, their electricity type and their future direction. So we're going to swing a bit from the technical increase in policy into a more technical question here. One of our listeners wants to know what is the range of overall efficiencies, small wind turbine designs that are currently available? Yeah, okay. Yeah, as you would imagine, there's quite a range. So you can get anything from some of these vertical axis machines, savonius machines, which are very, very low, maybe around 15%. You can get the more conventional horizontal axis machines, such as the ones that we saw during the presentation, which you'd see around 20 to 30%. The physical limit for efficiency for wind turbines is 59% is just not possible to convert more of the kinetic energy in the wind into rotational energy for the blades and then electrical energy. So this is actually just the limit for taking the kinetic energy in the wind and turning it into rotation for the mechanical part of the machine and then the generator will have its own efficiency as well. So the machines that we commonly work with in wind empowerment, they're the PIGIT design and we've done a number of tests on them and power curve measurements. And the efficiency obviously varies according to how much wind there is and different operating points of the machine, but you might expect a peak efficiency of around 25%. And for those of you who are E3C members, we will be featuring the PIGIT wind turbine in our Solutions Library soon and you'll be able to see more data on that but also you can find more information obviously on the wind empowerment site. So one last question before we have to close out and perhaps you could speak to this about the two experience, how much NGO cooperation currently exists between those focused on local adoption of photovoltaics, wind, wash and so forth. So are there, what are the groups that are coordinating efforts or perhaps tying the efforts of all of these electrification organizations? In my experience so far, not really very much, I think. NGOs tend to stick to their market niche, would that be fair enough to say? And we have begun to work ourselves with more NGO partners, but I had the impression when we've begun to do so that they weren't actually terribly used to doing that. That might be unfair, but that would be my impression. John, did you have any answers? Yeah, I would say that because of most fundamentally because of the extreme spatial variation and where the wind resource is available, that most NGOs that are working with solar won't be working with wind, but that almost all of the NGOs that are working with wind will be working with solar and using it as a hybrid system. I mean, the price of PV is so low at the moment that it just doesn't make sense not to include any PV in your system because it just means that your batteries are so much more likely to be full. We have a number of NGOs that are members of the Wind Empowerment Association that are focused specifically on providing services, energy services and improving quality of life in general in specific regions of the world. We have CometMe in the occupied Palestinian territories. We have Blue Energy on the Caribbean coast in Nicaragua and they actually work with the provision of clean water as much as energy itself. I mean, the energy is a derived demand. It is about the provision of energy services rather than simply electricity. So most of our members that are based in the Global South are focused on providing those energy services to people in their local area. Well, I encourage all our listeners to explore the Wind Empowerment site as well as LPDN and we will be posting a recording of this webinar after the event. You can see all on your screens, the link to where the recording will be. I'd like to, with that, close this webinar and thank John and John for your contributions today. Incredibly insightful and we're so grateful for you taking the time to join us. For those of you who are seeking PDH credits, the code is listed on the slide. Please follow the instructions on our website to receive your PDH. If we didn't tackle your question, we do apologize. Do feel free to follow up with the email address listed on the slide. We'll try to get John and John to answer them as to the best of their abilities. And we invite you to join us as E4C members and join us for the next upcoming webinar and to receive our newsletter and other member benefits. And thank all of you for joining us today and wish you all a good afternoon, good evening or good morning, depending on where you are. Take care. Bye-bye now.