Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Gary Dirks: Well, welcome everybody and thank you for taking your busy day to come and join us today for our seminar. I’m delighted to be able to welcome Abigail Mechtenberg. Abigail got her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the University of Michigan and a Master’s in Educational Psychology from U.C. Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on sustainable energy systems that optimize energy production, storage and consumption based on cultural values and technology feasibility. She actively engages with domestic and international stakeholders in the energy arena.

Her 2001 American Society of Mechanical Engineering Design Automation Committee Best Paper of the Year award for the U.S. Military Forward Operating Bases analyzed the role of renewable energy for the military in Afghanistan. Her newly nominated Energy for Sustainability Development Best Paper of the Year analyzes the potential of human powered electricity devices as a gateway to microgrid development in Uganda. That’s what is written on this piece of paper.

If I may say it’s been a great pleasure to be engaged with Abigail over the last six or nine months or so. She’s going to speak to us today about healthcare and electricity in the developing world, but I want to emphasize that this is a very multi-talented young scientist. She’s got tremendous interest not just in development, but also in the way that microgrids can function efficiently, especially at very high penetration rates for renewable power where those of you that are familiar with electrical engineering would know instability and how you maintain the integrity of those kinds of systems is extremely difficult.

It is a real pleasure to have Abigail with us here today, and I look forward to a very interesting seminar.

[Applause]

Abigail Mechtenberg: Welcome everyone. I already had this up here, so you probably already read it because that tends to be what we do is read whatever is in front of us when we’re sitting there. However, there’s something that’s different on this slide versus all the flyers, and that is that I crossed out the words in the developing world. That’s a recognition that we shouldn’t necessarily be using that terminology anymore, but it’s the terminology that has a meaning, and it has meanings in different contexts. Some of the meanings increase stereotypes, and so that’s my recognition because we went back and forth on the flyer many times and couldn’t figure out a word that was not going to get to a stereotype, and so that’s my way of talking about it.

I work in electricity innovation. People in Africa are brilliant. The most interesting things that are happening in microgrid development are happening in developing countries. They’re not happening here, and if you’re an electrical engineer let’s have that discussion after my talk because I’m mainly going to focus on the issues as they relate to what we call so-called developing countries, meaning countries or nations that are at a human development index, which I’ll define in a minute—most of you probably know what it is, but not everyone—below .6 or .65. I’m not talking about China, and I’m not talking about India. Those are mid-level. I’m talking about the extremely low.

This is me on the roof of Verica 04:24 Hospital installing a power load monitor and a weather station to take real data, state of the art data. It transmits the data from here to me in Africa, and I can share it with all my colleagues. I have a lot of affiliations. I’m currently a visiting professor in energy systems in the design stream at Franklin Olin College of Engineering. I’m a research scientist at Clark University in the Marsh Institute in international development, and I’m a research scientist at Northeastern University in the mechanical and industrial engineering department.

What is my training? Last time I didn’t put this on, these two slides, and then someone at the end said, “Who are you? Where did you come from? What was your training?” I put this in there because it’s just to give you some sort of context. I’m trained traditionally as a physicist, Ph.D., Master of Science, Bachelors of Science. I went off into education and got my Master’s in Educational Psychology and worked with an anthropologist in studying classroom as a culture, not a traditional scientist because of that experience.

The joke that I sometimes make is that it’s okay to me for things to have duality because as a physicist we have waves and we have particles and those things coexist simultaneously. I’m okay with weird concepts that you see where truth is relative, and you can have two things simultaneously be true depending on what you do in society. Social scientists who initially have to work with me in development go, “Oh, no, not a physicist.” I’m not that type of physicist I’ll say. I do have quirks, a lot of them, but not like that.

My publications are mainly in engineer—I took engineering courses in so many disciplines that there was no way to get a Master’s in engineering because it has to be a silo 06:29 Master’s. I have enough hours, but no one would create that Master’s for me. Otherwise I would have had a master’s in energy, but I have a postdoc in the optimal design laboratory afterwards and do design optimization, and then I publish in energy policies.

How does this look academically? My academic publications as a physicist, an engineer, lots of math expertise, is design and controls optimization, publications in hybrid vehicle powertrain. I have my own provisional patent for a new hybrid, microgrids for energy, security in the U.S., Afghanistan and Uganda. I have academic publications in energy and sustainable development where I’m looking at not a smart grid, but a resilient grid, and it’s fundamentally different. I’ll come back to that.

I have started an international organization called Empower Design where we’re looking at changing the design paradigm away from design for Africans, away from design with Africans, to design by Africans. It’s a huge issue. If you’re in the design community you know what I’m saying. If you’re not in the design community it’s like, it’s a preposition, how big of a deal is it? It’s a huge deal in how you set things up.

Because of my training and education and teaching in high school—before I went back for my Ph.D. I worked on energy curriculum for fun and lots of different types and stages. I have a physics of energy work where I’m trying to change all physics introductory courses to be energy focused instead of forces and—if you took physics in high school and college they’re teaching the old traditional way that hasn’t changed, and that fundamentally needs to be changed. Physics is a great mechanism and a place at which you can make that change. I can’t talk about that today. What I’m going to talk about is academic publications and energy for sustainable development.

I hope I’m not talking too fast. If you find that I’m talking too fast just kind of raise your hand. It’s a good indication for me non-verbally that I’m talking too fast. I can do that. I try not to.

As a literature review where do I situate myself for this talk? At this intersection between energy and sustainable development. Energy on one side, there’s all types of research on energy portfolios. I look a lot at energy portfolios, and I think of things that are not currently in the discussion. Human power, I’ll talk about. I’ll look at environmental impacts, global climate change, serious issues associated with that in terms of energy. There are high correlations between our issues with carbon and how we’re currently getting electricity and transporting and the results of that environmentally.

On the other spectrum is sustainable development as it relates to healthcare, tons of issues, as it relates to economic development, as it relates to education. At the intersection between these two you kind of have these two different worlds of researchers. Over here we’re talking about energy with electricity. People talk about load shedding, centralized grid, capacity and buffer. The buffer is the peak versus the base load of electricity systems. On this side you’re talking about policy where you’re looking at subsidized costs. You look at accessibility. You look at reliability, very few people in reliability, a couple people.

At the intersection between sustainable development and electricity you have co-designing local solutions for capability building. At the bottom in microgrids, and I’m separating this too because there’s a set of research that is just about microgrids and not broad policy electricity issues, and so you’re talking about optimal design and controls on the other extreme for microgrids, hospital reliability and energy poverty, nexus type intersections with microgrids.

What I’m looking at and we’ll talk about, and these are my publications. If you want to request for a lit review I can send this to you, is using microgrids as backup for healthcare. There are actually other people who have done that and looked at it here in the U.S. What I’m going to talk about is this energy, environments, education, economics, E4, plus health. I don’t know. I like to make everything an equation—and looking at emerging microgrids.

What does this mean? What are these axes? I like to engage the audience. Sorry, I do this all the time, but you might not be paying attention, and it’s really good. Socratic Method is good.

Audience: [Inaudible].

Abigail Mechtenberg: Okay, yes, level of infrastructure development, that’s definitely the meta-level, but if we just go down to specifics, like what is this axis? What does that mean? We might have some engineers in here. What’s human development index?

Audience: [Inaudible].

Abigail Mechtenberg: Well, yes and no. People can argue that. Human development index is actually a metric by the UNDP on education, quantifiable value of education, quantifiable economic GDP per capita. Lots of people don’t like GDP. If you don’t like GDP you may not like human development index, right? It’s a capture of some sort of economic value and the average expected life span at birth, so that’s that axis. What’s the bottom axis?

Audience: [Inaudible].

Abigail Mechtenberg: It’s energy, but it’s not watt hours, right? It’s watts per person.

Audience Member 1: It’s electricity.

Abigail Mechtenberg: It’s electricity in this case, and it’s average electricity throughout the year, so it’s not peak, right? It’s base power. If I were to say that you had a hundred watts per person, okay, in the U.S., you had a hundred watts per person, would your house be electrified? No, right? You need to be way above a hundred watts per capita, okay? In general, the area that’s sustainable is here. This is human development index being one, so I’ve reversed it just for clarity on the graphs you’ll see, and you want to consume no electricity, at least no traditional electricity and have a very long life span, okay, ideally.

There’s a famous paper that came out, a thousand watts per capita or one kilowatt per capita, and so that’s kind of this point. Let’s see where all the countries are in the world at 2006. The other two data, if you get a country you’ll see the population, and you’ll see the color at life expectancy. It’s not the three indices. It’s just life expectancy. If you look at this low life expectancy we’re in between here and here where no one, right, is having a high life expectancy, okay? If you’re here, medium life expectancy, so that’s not where I work. I work in this area, the low. Medium life expectancy is going to be China and India, right? Actually, I guess India is kind of in between. It’s somewhere in there.

Then high life expectancy is here, so if you look at this point we have a lot of countries here consuming a lot of electricity, but maybe for hot tubs and not MRIs. Like MRIs lead to higher life expectancy, hot tubs not so much, right? We have to balance these issues and trade these off.

Let’s zoom in now to life expectancy. If you zoom up so now the left, the kind of Y axis as your math teacher would have told you, is your average life expectancy at birth, life span, okay? On the other axis is the same kind of watts per capita, but now I’ve changed it into kilowatts per capita so we can see this, and it’s—it just changes the shape. Anyway, the first limit is that on this first limit no country that consumes a ton of electricity is adding to their average life expectancy above 83 years old. Now, this is at birth. Obviously people live beyond 83, but at birth your average life expectancy.

If you’re consuming a lot here you could be saying oh, wait a second, can’t you consume less and still have good wellbeing? That’s talked about a lot, tons of papers on that, but there’s this other limit that says hey, wait a second. If you’re below 30 watts per capita, if you’re below that there’s no country above 67 years old. What does that mean? That means that there are certain things in medicine that need electricity: MRI scans, CT scans. You have cancer and you want some little thing injected into a tumor so it kills it, like prostate cancer. If you need something you need to have electricity. If you want these higher procedures you need electricity, so there’s this gap here of 16 years that’s really significant from a risk analysis point of view.

On a different note, motivation—so John Holdren publishes a lot. He’s on sabbatical from Harvard. He publishes and talks about the three responses to climate change, which are mitigation, adaptation and suffering. Mitigation, read papers, okay. Adaptation, read papers, okay. Suffering, what? Scientific suffering, what does that mean? Ethics, they have papers on suffering. Okay, but that’s not in a scientific definition for me to use in electricity. I don’t know what that means. You read papers in public health, in animal rights activists who talk about how animals should die at the end, and there are two things that you see: a measurable damage and the fact that this measurable damage could have been avoided.

So what does that mean to suffer with electricity? It has a lot to do with reliability, so reliability, if you have an electricity system that fails you have an unmet load, right? You would be using that electricity, but it’s not there. It’s unmet. We call it unmet or capacity shortage. Now, there are some parts of the unmet load, especially in developing countries that are completely avoidable.

Gary and I last night were talking and I proposed an ethical situation. I said, “What would be your answer?” He said, “I’m not sure,” and I said, “Well, this was my answer.” When you get to avoidable unmet loads—I’ll give you the story just to illustrate it. I’ve gone back and forth whether I will, and I’m going to.

A medical superintendent came to me and said, “This is the situation we run into. The electricity is off for over a week. It’s not coming on, but it could come on at any moment in time. Each day we wait the probably is higher that it’s going to come on because we know the hazard rate of it being off for so long, it’s going to be much higher. We have in the past had people, children, on oxygen concentrators and other such healthcare procedures. If we turn off the diesel generator we know for a fact they’re going to die. However, if we don’t turn it off the wires will melt. It will short out, and then a lot more people might die because it takes us a month to get a new diesel generator. What do we do? It only takes a day to cool off.”

There are two ways to respond to that. There are fancy calculations you can do to try to think about something that’s better than one, some situation that’s better. Then there’s like but why are you in this situation, right? I don’t understand why you’re in this situation. If you have electricity why did we design this system for you? We had to design it for them initially. They didn’t have electricity. Why did we design it and you don’t have redundancy? You don’t have backup systems, like backup systems to backup systems. In healthcare you see this, in the healthcare clinics on a small scale.

We kind of have three different sizes. One of my colleagues at [inaudible 19:45] University, a student was on a project with the government in Uganda, collected a lot of data at healthcare clinics. We wrote a paper together, and what she saw were these very small systems, 125 watt solar, 250 watt solar, 500 watt solar. What she found was that all of them talked about the fact that they could decrease the cost by 50 percent if they were just willing to accept some capacity shortage. I don’t know of a USAID project that’s implementing solar panels throughout developing countries that have backup systems to the solar panels, but they need backup systems for the 20 percent of the time that these systems are going to fail, and we don’t even talk about it. This is a problem.

It’s understood why people buy systems that are smaller in these small health clinics because at least they have 80 percent of time of electricity, however for people to be dying when there are simple hand crank systems that can get those oxygen concentrators to give oxygen to the children so they don’t have this ethical debate to deal with is one part of the argument.

Then at Verica Hospital, which I showed you a picture of, we have a similar issue but with diesel fuel. I measured throughout the entire year that the electricity system would fail and the diesel fuel would fail for over 30 minute intervals. If you’re at 5 minutes it happens a lot more often, so 95 percent of the time there’s a significant failure for 30 minutes or over. I was appalled at the stories because I kept hearing them at these regional hospitals both in Guyana and Uganda, and so I gave them a hand crank and they used it, a little hand crank. It’s hard to imagine being in surgery and someone going like this with a Target hand crank, especially when they can build—okay, but they fail after six months of use. It’s not sustainable to do this, so what is sustainable?

Well, first you have to understand these failure events, and you have to know the scale of the failure events. This is the number of failures, and this is the size of the power that they really wanted to use at that time. A system that’s 3.2 kilowatts for an entire half hour, that’s a lot of electricity. That’s potentially a damage of unmet load that we can’t do much about. It’s hard to be avoided, however there’s a set of them under one kilowatt that’s completely and totally avoidable.

Some of these systems here, the hand crank, the bicycle generator, an exercise gym, a cow-go-round generator, incinerator steam generator, solar collector, biofuel, biogas or biodiesel, these are things where you can retrofit current existing generators to run off these alternative fuels. These are, especially the ones here below 200 watts, this is suffering in this kind of scientific definition of suffering that you might consider at, and so that’s kind of how I’ve gone through some of the motivation of some of this.

Now I’ll look at some of my research results. I mean, this was one of them. This risk analysis paper we say, okay, we have levelized the cost of electricity of the system, so dollars per kilowatt hour, what do we pay in dollars per kilowatt hour just for reference?

Audience Member 2: Maybe around eight-something?

Abigail Mechtenberg: 8 cents per kilowatt hour to 12 cents per kilowatt hour to 6 cents per kilowatt hour, if you’re running a backup diesel generator guess how much you’re paying if you’re idling it?

Audience Member 2: 30?

Abigail Mechtenberg: 30 cents per kilowatt hour? No, that’s not idling. That’s a perfectly defined balance of system.

Audience: [Laughter]

Abigail Mechtenberg: $11.00 per kilowatt hour.

Audience: Wow!

Abigail Mechtenberg: Right, it’s huge consequences to a hospital’s bill. They have to turn off that diesel generator, not just because it’s overheated, but because operating costs are so ridiculously expensive. What happens? You have an extreme event. You’re running all your appliances, right, because that’s what’s happening, and so you want to design your system for here. An engineer comes to you and says, “Let’s design the system for this point. This is your extreme point. This is what we design for, all in one system.” The problem with that is incredibly high operating costs. Low failures potentially, remember it’s only a five percent failure rate, but high operational costs. Actually, five percent in the U.S., we would never take that. Five percent is still way too high in risk analysis for backup systems.

Then they have another system of 100 watts in lots of places, so very small solar panel systems but only for lighting, for security. In fact, the lighting is so bad that when I was at the hospital sick because I caught some parasite they couldn’t see my veins, so they had to bring a flashlight even with this. This isn’t lighting even for IVs. This is lighting only for security. We could say let’s take another system and another system and another system and synergistically put these together, right, so you have redundancy.

Then if you look at the whole power load, okay, this 950 watt, that can be run off the system in backup. The 200 watts here, if your diesel generator breaks could be run off of a cattle-go-round generator, right, so now you have two redundant systems. Well, this one plus the solar panels, but if everything fails, there are clouds, the cows got sick, and your diesel generator doesn’t work, then you have a 50 hand crank system or bicycle generator, so you have redundancy. The total costs of electricity of dollars per kilowatt hour is less. There are lots of different permutations of possibilities, but this is the concept.

Here’s Verica Hospital, all these backup batteries, right, this is what it looks like in AC, theater, children’s ward, maternity ward, labor ward, radiology, laboratory administration, private and general wards. The grid is also unreliable. It goes off, destroys medical equipment when it comes back on, their x-ray machine, because the grid is unstable. It spikes, right, so you have to put all these protection systems on all your medical things, so they have a bunch of backup systems, diesel fuel, hand crank, small solar, medium solar, but again, it has to be very, very small amounts of power, so it’s critical loads. We could be adding, changing the diesel to biofuel. At the Children—the nurses tell me that the siblings are always getting in trouble at the hospital, so there’s something called free energy or energy harvesting.

Audience: [Laughter]

Abigail Mechtenberg: The kids want playground equipment. You could be easily, and we have models of this, of how much electricity can be made. This is not slavery. We’re not talking about slavery. We’re talking about energy harvesting.

Audience: [Laughter]

Abigail Mechtenberg: It’s a fundamentally different thing, and I’ll get to that point in a second. Cow-go-round generator, farmers who want to do this so they can be making income. Instead of just feeding their cows and waiting until slaughter they could be having a little bit of income all the time. Medical waste incinerator, currently they incinerate it and make no electricity from it. Solar collector generator, exercise gym, the administration is like I’m so fat now. I just sit on the computer all day. If we could have an exercise gym and I could have my computer running that would be so nice. It is their choice what they put. I don’t tell them what they put, so maybe they don’t want an exercise gym, so a whole set of options.

How do you get this done? Oh, well, before we do that—I’ll get to that in a second. Then I started thinking well, wait a second, we’ve got enough capacity. We have a microgrid. They could just run without the grid, and then they don’t have the spikes because it’s not constantly failing with massive amounts of electricity like with the grid. You put it together. You have a controller, one to control the micro grid, however then you have a resilient set of networks where you have a controller too that then communicates with the centralized utilities company. It’s kind of like smart grids except here we’re doing it for very fundamentally different reasons. The solutions are different, although I think both these worlds will mix.

The other difference is this is AC/DC, okay, so in Africa when you walk into a building like this, especially in a hospital, they will have two systems. They will have an AC backbone and a DC. It’s not like here where everything is AC. Okay, so I created a set of curriculum that I’m constantly revamping in multiple different stages and work with technicians to design their own systems. In the last year we’ve made a ton of progress since January, and I’ll go through all of this. Instead of talking about it from technology to technology, this is a wind turbine, this is a solar panel, this is, you know, all these different technologies, I’ve done it through their physics because I’m a physics educator. These systems fit within mechanical to electrical, so they’ve all taken A-level physics. That’s what they call it.

I say to them, “So, do you know potentially kinetic energy?” Oh, yeah, sure, they quote it. Great, potential energy MGH, kinetic energy, ½ mv2, so all of these issues are brought into the education level that they already have, physics for mechanical to electrical engineering. A motor is a generator, a generator is a motor, you learn that in physics, but they didn’t apply it. It was out of context with Ampere’s law and Faraday’s law, so this is like brought into real life context. Then thermal to mechanical, we have a cooker, and we are putting it with the Seebeck effect, this little circuit, and able to charge a cell phone while they’re cooking. It’s like the power pod and the bio—and they’re doing their own version of it. They don’t need it imported.

In fact, when I sent them the curriculum that we were going to do they Google’d it and had already built the circuit before I came. They found the materials, put a hot temperature on one, put a cold temperature on one, got a small voltage and were like this is awesome. You have to go through a lot of prototype stages to go from that’s a really cool demo to I can actually do this for a customer and charge their cell phone, so we’re in that process. Now, chemical, which is why Gary and I talk so much now, is a where we’re going in the summer, this summer. We have lots of different ways to make biodiesel, to make biogas, for methane and ammonia and hydrogen.

At Maker Faire, the African Maker Faire, three girls took their urine, cracked it to get hydrogen, dehumidified it and put it in a generator. People were like whoa, you can make electricity from urine? There are a lot of things we can do with waste products. Then they’re already as they go through starting into the learning the controls for micro grid, so let’s look at the first one and first really understand the situation that we’re at globally.

Human power, we don’t talk about that as a portfolio option. What’s our portfolio option? Coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar panels, right? We can all name it. It’s in the newspapers. We all know what the portfolio is. We may not be doing it, but we know what it is. Human power, are you kidding me? Like really, where does that come—actually, people are working on it. These little electric backpacks, how is it funded? Research and development, this is real research. We’ve got soldiers with little things on their knees. They walk, charge their cell phone. They’re on 72 hour missions. Healthcare, you’ve got a pump. We’re constantly having to do surgery to take out the battery for the heart pump and put it back in. Well, why don’t we just make a little piezoelectric so it’s constantly charging it, and then we don’t have to go back in and do unnecessary surgery.

Research and development, well, what about the hand crank generator, bicycle generator—oh, that’s old school. That’s just aid. That’s us helping them, but there’s research and development in being able to do this, not in engineering necessarily, but engineering is not the only people who get to design. We are needing to design for humanity, not design for profit only, not design for prestige and recognition of patents. I’ve got 50 patents. I’ve got four patents, right, like we’re supposed to be designing to meet human need, and if this meets human needs in a unique way that potentially should be called research and development. By not calling it research and development, there are a lot of problems with that.

However, I will say that human power, there’s a lot of different ways of looking at human power in terms of the food calories, in terms of this free energy issues, in terms of the economics. Basically I said, “In Africa for development human power makes sense as an educational gateway to the rest of these devices.” You can feel it, and with that said there are people who are purchasing—we’ve got a catalog of devices, who are starting to purchase the bicycle generator because of these awful events. It may economically be viable, but it’s a transition to something where you don’t have to sit on a bike and be generating electricity.

In terms of education, these are snapshots of some of the things we’ve designed. You’ve got the hand crank. I’ll just show a video and let you see. The electricity has been off for a long time. Technicians take their phone, they have it set up with the fly wheel so they can do it, and then it keeps spinning. They can stop, and they use it to make phone calls, not to charge it because to charge it would take a long time. You would have to do it for a long time. In that emergency situation they can make a call. Bicycle generator running the color TV, that’s a great way to deconstruct their knowledge about what can and can’t run a TV because TV to them is like huge especially in the villages.

Merry-go-round generator, so you can see we don’t have this actually. This is for testing. You can see the magnets and coils here. Hydro, we actually have our third hydroelectricity, and since we’ve recently done a program with the bricklaying—they have a professor who has purchased this and have built a run of the river system. By merging with bricklaying they’ve been able to do that. We have wind turbines on a ten meter high tower, waste incinerator, generator, we have it producing electricity for some light bulbs, but we’ve not merged it with a steam engine, and we’re going to soon merge it with a turbine.

Let’s talk a little bit about how this looks. In the beginning of this energy education pathway you’re pretty much aid dependent in the beginning, but I don’t like aid. It should be called research and development, but okay, we call it aid. Fine, I’ll use the word aid. Then as you go, and working with a business professor it becomes economically empowered because customers purchase it. When customers purchase it they can then have enough money to pay themselves and to buy the equipment. They no longer need you, right?

The gray dots are mechanical to electrical systems. The red dots are thermal to mechanical to electrical systems, and the blue dots are chemical to thermal to mechanical to electricity. I know I talk like a physicist, but it’s how I like to think not about technology, but at the systems level. Here we have a bicycle generator. It’s not passing the line yet and becoming a business venture, but it has been used at customers and it may soon go to the business venture cycle. It has gone through the lecture stage. It has gone through the prototype where you build a little one like in labs in the design phase. They design it, not me. It’s designed by Africans.

Gone through the design and okay, what materials do we have in Africa? What’s at the junkyard? What’s at the market? How can we build this, and then they want me to tell them. I sit down, and I’m like, “No, this is my time to do research, like you design it.” Now, it takes a long time, but once they get it then even if you want to tell them you’re going down the wrong pathway, they’re like, “No, we’re going to try that.” Then it fails and they try something else, which is awesome.

Then once you have it built you test it. This has to go through a bunch of cycles. Initially when you do this it’s kind of like well, but it failed. We’re failures. I’m like, “You know what? I’m bringing an engineering project from the University of Michigan and showing you what they did.” I brought it, and they were like, “This is what engineers built?” Yeah, in the prototype phase. They’re like, “This sucks.” Duh! You’re in the prototype phase, right? Get to the final ready to be deployed phase, and then have customers test it out. Do they like it? Do they not like it? What are the gear ratios? What’s going on? How expensive is it? Do they have the ability to pay? They may have willingness to pay, all kinds of issues like that. Then you say okay, but now you need an actual business to sell this, your technicians, so working with business students.

We have the hand crank, merry-go-round generator, wind turbine, wind turbine 2, hydro—we actually have a wind turbine 3, hydro 2, hydro third design, cattle-go-round generator, a cook stove with electric charge, waste incinerator generator, solar collector generator and biofuel generator. When all of these systems get into the business venture you have microgrid development. Now, does this scale up? Does it make sense? Let’s think about that. This is a transition stage.

Do we have questions at this point? We’ll transition for the whole country, so I’ve kind of modeled the whole country after this. Okay, so let’s look at this city by city, what makes sense in what cities. With Google Earth you can tell a lot of information in colleagues in Uganda about what the layout is in Uganda. For a bicycle generator—only for backup, not primary, but they need a lot of backup. Merry-go-round generator, that’s energy harvesting, a set of assumptions there. Cow-go-round generator, there has to be cattle.

You can look at layers of the government and Uganda has all these layers in their GIS maps, and these are just different layers in the GIS and cattle density is one of them. Okay, so you can really see where the cities are that have a lot of cattle. Rivers, well, that’s on the maps. You can find out where the rivers are and then you can get a layer of like how fast they’re flowing in GIS. Change in elevation, population density—if you have a lot of population you have a lot of waste, right? More people, lots of different things. Solar collector, it needs to be open to the sky, and biogas in this version of using animal waste, you need animal density.

You take all of these things together and you have three to five large status quo power plants. It’s significant. Let’s look at this. This is where they’re at right now, 927 watts per capita, so not even at the 100 watt level that I asked you if you could live on, much less than that. Hydro and thermal plants, this is what the ministry of energy wants to get to, and everyone is saying they’re not even going to get there. Even if they get there the centralized grid isn’t going to get deep in the villages, so those health centers and health clinics are still not going to have access to electricity. It’s only the people on the grid.

What about generation with local? Now you get up even higher, so the idea is you’ve got here, you can double here and you can triple here, right? Let’s look at modeling this. I had modeled this in MATLAB and have since learned GIS and Python, but I don’t think it’s necessary to put that in the model for this particular paper. The way this is set up is every little matrix entry is a kilometer by a kilometer. When you do that you figure out where all the cities are, and there are 30 cities, so K is 30. You know the population of the city and you know the area of the city, so then you can get the density for each city.

Then you say well, but each matrix is a smaller area because we’ve split the cities up into these different areas. You take this density, multiply it times the area of the matrix, and you get this kind of, you get this population of each little tiny area, so the population here is zero, right, because there’s no cities, there’s no nothing. Then there’s a lot of population here, right, in this little square. All right, I just want to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Now, we have all these cities so we go through and we put either one, yes, the city has a bicycle generator. Pretty much every city is going to need backup because these things fail, so we have one small bicycle generator. For the merry-go-round generator everyone has schools. For the cattle-go-round generator some of the cities have cattle; some of the cities do not have cattle. You have the rivers. Some cities have rivers; some cities do not have rivers. You can go through this for all the devices, and you can figure out what the total potential power is based on this watts per capita because we know how many people live in each one of these little areas.

You take this watts per capita, multiply it times the actual number of people there, and you can get the watts potential. Then you can model it and HOMER Energy to move from watts to actually the average kilowatt hours. HOMER Energy is a software program that allows you to model electricity systems, microgrids in particular. You can add error and uncertainty, but I’m not going to talk about error and uncertainty. Even though everyone is going to say wait a minute, that’s really uncertain. Yeah, I know, but we don’t have time to talk about all the uncertainties right now.

How does that grow over time? It’s not a step function, right, like I’ve defined it here as a step function, zero, no local. Then we go up to maximum local based on these assumptions. You have a growth function, and you say here’s the maximum that’s possible. Here’s where they start and look at how they could grow over time, and then you just take this growth function and you can analyze it based on assumption, and so there’s a description of that to see where it gets to in kilowatt hours after a certain amount of time.

Here you can see with the 30 cities where you get to, and if all of the cities, which have technical institutes, were to deploy this you would in ten years reach the same level. You would double the electricity production. That’s this point right here. You still have a ton of amount to get to that theoretical level. This is a point where development talks about developing countries needing to travel a different pathway than the developed countries. This is an example of how that could happen, right? I think it’s important for real empowerment. Oh, yeah, I guess I had it there too, so that’s the point here for the growth function.

Again, here the research result is a pathway that would take ten years to be able to double it. This is in areas which currently do not have access to electricity at all.

In conclusion, and I can’t believe I did this in 50 minutes, redundancy systems in Africa would benefit by prioritizing avoidable unmet power loads in health centers and regional hospitals in current backup microgrid systems, and have defined that in terms of suffering category instead of just mitigation of climate change. I’m currently working on this as how much climate, how much carbon would we be avoiding if we implemented this system. This would increase reliability without the dramatic costs associated with overdesign of storage or incapacity. I gave you that example of the diesel generator being two kilowatts even though their average base load was one kilowatt and how they were idling. There are other ways to increase reliability by having redundancies, which are not overdesigned, which are well designed for the system.

This gets into an interesting thing I noticed in a lot of the publications in this area is that people talk about oh, there needs to be repair and maintenance capabilities of local technicians. Pretty much all of these policy papers have that line in there. One thing that failed is because technicians could not repair the solar panel system. I mean, it’s in every one of the papers. I think it’s important to directly talk about this in policy because even in the U.S. there is a need when we install these wind turbine systems to have local repair and maintenance, and CTI and a whole set of ITT Tech schools are doing this in the U.S., and they have phenomenal curriculum programs. In Africa they’ve done that for solar panel systems.

In fact, that’s one of the reasons why when you track those systems you can see a new designed engineering product will be successful if there’s a group of technicians who can regularly maintain that. It’s definitely something that needs to be there, but I think actually could be there and be a pathway.

One of the discussions that I had with someone in CTI was that in developing countries the technical institutes are their engineering schools, right? I mean, if you take the assumption that everyone in a particular country has the same Bell Curve of intellectual capability, the people who are holding up the country are the technical institutes, not necessarily the engineers, because a lot of times the engineers from the big universities go into either government or business, right? Yeah. If they go into government and business they’re not even necessarily working on the engineering issues, and who is? It’s the technicians that are. They have the potential.

One of the things in the certification program that we’re creating that the ministry of education is talking to the ministry of energy in Uganda is they want their title to be technical engineer because they’re designing and they’re building and they’re testing and they think they’re being engineers, right? I’m trying to navigate politically that new term. The linguistics will understand you think that a new term is easy, but it’s actually really hard to implement because the engineers say well, but they should have the title engineering. The technicians are saying we have to have the definition of engineer, so technical engineers where we’re coming with that.

I talked about the energy education paradigm shift. I work also on energy education a lot here in the U.S. The curriculum that I create there I then bring to the U.S. because we need a systematic energy course. We tend to teach energy from component to component to component level, and a complete systems approach is what people are wanting. These other two issues, I think you’ve already read.

I’ll open it up for questions. Thank you very much.

[Applause]