Conference in Cajamarca, Peru

Following up our stay in Ecuador we left for Peru. Just stoping by Lima fo the night and straight to Cajamarca, in the north of Peru. Cajamarca is a little town, high up in the Andean mountains (2500m) with many more shops than in Bluefields, opening up till 8pm.... CRAZY! Even with this big city feel, lots of people here go around in traditional clothing that is, for women, a dark color woolen trouser, a bright colored skirt with many white petticoats underneath, a bright colored woolen top and the very traditional shawl used most of the time as backpack to transport huge amount of green herbs, wood, buckets full of stuff, merchandise for sell or babies....

But we didn't come here to look at the fashion, we were in Cajamarca to attend the 13^th edition of ELPAH (Encuentro Latinoamericano y del Caribe sobre Pequeños Aprovechamientos Hidroenergéticos). The ELPAH went for 5 days from the 20^th and begun by... a transport strike including road blocks and stoning of taxis if they dared work. Considering the ELPAH was held at CEDECAP (Centro de Demostración y Capacitación y en Energías Renovables, their very own mature version of CERCA), some 15km away from Cajamarca, the first morning was slightly messy on the time schedule. But all was perfect: the participants were for the most of them amazing people with incredible experience in rural electrification with renewable energies.

The talks were tremendously interesting and we learned a lot. Amongst participants, a Colombian engineer specialist in renewable energies, environment and human development gave a talk on river turbine (kind of wind turbine but using the flow of water to spin the blades), an Argentin Doctor gave a course on where and why it is best to place wind turbine depending on the landscape, a Spanish Doctor explained the program her team is designing to calculate the differences of cost versus electricity production between puting individual small wind turbines or bigger ones with micro grids, all depending on the space between houses and the wind resources of the community.... Amongst participants were also a representant from Green Empowerement and one from Hivos.... and us, I presented blueEnergy projects on Thursday.

The presence of D. from Hivos as well as M. from FEDETA (whom we had just visited in Ecuador) couldn't have been more timely. Indeed, the idea is to do a joint project between FEDETA and blueEnergy to exchange expertise. But for any projects, fonds are necessary.. and here come the representative of Hivos South America, announcing Hivos South America would like to start sponsoring renewable energy projects!

Also represented at the conference were several Central American and Carribean organizations from Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba, Guatemala and obviously us from Nicaragua. It was a first for ELPAH and it was decided that the next edition of ELPAH (in 2011) would take place in Central America for the first time. To include a bit more these countries in the ELPAH process, we all got invited to the last meeting of HydroRed, which is a network of organizations working on rural electrification with renewable energies, and their members invited us to join their network. This network is based on solidarity between individual and/or organization working in the field, with knowledge sharing, international courses on different topics, consulting services... A great opportunity for blueEnergy!

The conference also included a field trip to one of the ITDG/CEDECAP community near Cajamarca to instal several individual 100W wind turbines. Unfortunately only Ismael made it as I was feeling sick and the idea of being sick at more than 3500m high is not a encouraging one. Ismael had the opportunity to see how they install their towers and wind turbine on the field. His first words when coming back were “men it's cold out there” then “blueEnergy is really good in terms of safety matters compared to them”... Apparently during this field trip, a tower fell, fortunately not on anybody, but it left people a bit shaken!

The conference ended on Friday, with the closing words of thanks (I got chosen to say some words in the name of the participants of the conference...) and a speech from the Cajamarca's mayor... without forgetting the little glass of pisco. Then everybody was off for the closing dinner held in town with distributions of honors to old members of HydroRed and a show of traditional dances. We will keep in mind lots of good memories from this conference, but above all, that we at blueEnergy are not the only crazy ones fighting to electrify remote communities, there are many organizations doing that in Latin America with tons of experiences (bad and good ones) that are just waiting to be shared.

trip to the jungle... almost...

So we were in Ecuador with Ismael to work with this organization called FEDETA doing rural electrification... yeah, same as blueEnergy and that's exactly why we were there, to learn from these big brothers that have more experience! FEDETA stands for federación Ecuatoriana de tecnología apropiada. This organization created more than 15 years ago works to bring energy to isolated communities in Ecuador, mostly on the coast in the amazonian region with indigenous communities.
The goal of the visit was to learn from FEDETA extended experience on rural electrification and get to know more about their “modelo FEDETA”. The modelo FEDETA is a method to lead a project to success, starting from the pre studies of communities, the installation, the training of the beneficiaries, and a method of administration of the systems put in a communities because lets face it, in blueEnergy there is room for emprovement on this point and we are all working hard on filing this room.
On the first day, after a short meeting with both directors, we presented the activities of bE to volunteers (there are 4 at the moment) and directors. The second day FEDETA explained to us their project and told us a bit more about their method. The rest of the week was spend reading through their material and asking all the questions we could have on their project... and we had a lot! Most of the questions got a replied but instead of explaining in details their model in an office, the directors of FEDETA decided it would be more useful and appropriate to make a joint project together and learn from each other. The last days were thus spent elaborating the draft of an agreement to enable future joint work in Ecuador and Nicaragua.
On our last day we went with a group of FEDETA to visit some communities for a pre study of a possibilities of electrification. Getting to the communities, although done by road, was far from easy. The four wheel drive was undoubtedly very needed and made us miss our “smooth” pangua rides! The communities resembled very much to our communities on the Caribbean coast by their lack of access to all commodities of the modern world. The meetings were short but efficient with carefully chosen questions.
This trip also gave us the opportunity to witness the damage of the oil industry in the countryside of Ecuador... Just 2 months before our visit, a big pipeline had broken due to an earthquake and crude oil had spilled all around in one of the community, first to the land than to the river. The oh-so-nice oil company did clean up their mess well from what the people of the community was saying... but the same people also told us they kept on fishing in the river, bathing and drinking this same water that they think is not poluted... All the same, at dinner that night in a nearby village, I didn't eat the locally fished trout!