Besides some bags being lost-then-found a day or two later, we arrived intact and ready to go on Thursday evening, sans a set of clothes for meetings! Rwandan culture tends towards the formal when it comes to dress, so the jeans I had spent the last 48 hours in probably weren’t going to work.
On Friday, after bartering for a set of secondhand dress clothes at the market to replace the ones in the missing bags, we headed down to Centre Ville to meet up with e.quinox, a wholly-student run organization from Imperial College London that installs solar charging kiosks, and currently are taking on a 6kW hydro project. It was a pleasure to finally talk talk to them in-person, and had a worthwhile discussion regarding the challenges involved in making financially sustainable rural energy businesses, and heard some valuable firsthand experiences regarding parts availability and project permitting. Afterwards, we headed over to Remera sector to the Energy, Water and Sanitation Authority (EWSA) offices to meet with the Deputy Manager of a 60+ site microhydro installation contract this year, across the country. EWSA is synonymous with national-grid electrification, and are pushing hard to bring more generation sources online as well as expand the transmission network as much as possible. Problem is, there are still areas that they cannot reach, and some that will take an interminably long time to eventually cover. Shared the picohydro project concept with him, and in return received quite a bit of goodwill, and a good number of future contacts for more potential installation sites. It was encouraging to hear that we can move forward without creating problems for EWSA, as our scale of work is rather tiny compared to anything that they currently consider implementing.
As it turns out, there happens to be a trade show currently taking place in Kigali — so Saturday we went over there straightaway. We wanted to see what sorts of other devices and systems were being marketed for small-scale generation, and came across a number of companies:
- Barefoot Power : Systems ranging from 55 lumen LED desk lamps to larger systems involving a battery, fan, and multiple lights.
- Synergy Rwanda : Solar chargers (for cellphones) and LED lights. They were being manufactured by “Pisat Solar Ltd”, and they appear to operate with Clean Water Environmental, out of Grand Rapids, Michigan
- Multiple Vendors : An assortment of standby and continuous gensets were also on display, and their prices/specs were duly noted.
Gathered other information as we were able, including where to purchase electrical machinery (Sofaru or Beta), pricing on CFL bulbs, electrical and plumbing supplies, and some approximate prices for the motors we saw in a coffee processing machine.
Next up was a brief meeting with an engineer at the Rwandan Caterpillar dealer to get a bit more data on their synchronous generators, particularly some of the smaller ones that could potentially be used in hydropower. Then it was off to Nyamagogo to find the location of some suppliers mentioned at the Expo, as well as to scout out used alternator pricing in Kigali to compare to those sourced closer to the villages. Turns out that Toyota alternators are the easiest to get, and you can even snag a used one with some semblance of a warranty.
On Sunday, the university student interns (Jean de la Croix and Moises) invited us to a local church, and afterwards we briefly met up over some Fanta to get to know one another better. We parted ways for the evening, and Kyle and I took care of some preparations for the conference on Tuesday and the hydro site visits, as well as a bit of curriculum review for the student orientation on Monday.
Monday began early with a trip to Butare to visit with the Center for the Environment, Entrepreneurship, and Sustainable Development (CEESD) at the National University of Rwanda. Continuing with our original theme of lost bags, we got off in Butare and quickly realized that bags remained on the bus — which were retrieved about 20 minutes later from the bus on the return trip from its final stop. Fortunately, this one wasn’t enroute to the Congo border, or that may have turned out quite a bit differently!
Meeting with faculty of CEESD brought up some great questions, such as how to define a better partnership between NUR and UC-Davis, and how to sustain that tie outside of this particular picohydro project. A core element of CEESD is an interdisciplinary approach to problems — no particular department or faculty works for CEESD full-time, and students/faculty from all fields are encouraged to participate. Defining the different roles of our project compared to the Blum Center as a whole gave us a great chance to discuss the difference between an academic partnership and an entrepreneurial venture, and Dieudonne from CEESD kept good questions coming (how to make the experience valuable for student interns, how to begin new projects, etc).
Later in the day, we returned to Kigali and met up with the student interns an orientation to go over the basic concepts of hydropower, discuss examples of intermediate (locally sourced, lower complexity) technology, and asked the students to define their expectations for the trip. Getting a room with a chalkboard was easier than you might expect, and the students seemed pleased with the crash-course introduction into hydroelectrics. Spent some time afterwards discussing the social aspects of power (why might villagers (not) want it, who would (not) benefit from the system, would the government be supportive, etc). Parted ways once more, to meet up in the morning for the Energy/ICT Luncheon!
A final note – Starting a business in Rwanda as a Rwandan appears to be a rather easy affair — multiple sources confirm that the turnaround can be as quick as 24 hours from the time of application submission to the time of approval. We have yet to go to the Rwandan Development Board to examine the paperwork, but definitely worth keeping in mind!
Joshua Milburn & Kyle Gaiser, UC Davis, Mechanical Engineering
On Friday, after bartering for a set of secondhand dress clothes at the market to replace the ones in the missing bags, we headed down to Centre Ville to meet up with e.quinox, a wholly-student run organization from Imperial College London that installs solar charging kiosks, and currently are taking on a 6kW hydro project. It was a pleasure to finally talk talk to them in-person, and had a worthwhile discussion regarding the challenges involved in making financially sustainable rural energy businesses, and heard some valuable firsthand experiences regarding parts availability and project permitting. Afterwards, we headed over to Remera sector to the Energy, Water and Sanitation Authority (EWSA) offices to meet with the Deputy Manager of a 60+ site microhydro installation contract this year, across the country. EWSA is synonymous with national-grid electrification, and are pushing hard to bring more generation sources online as well as expand the transmission network as much as possible. Problem is, there are still areas that they cannot reach, and some that will take an interminably long time to eventually cover. Shared the picohydro project concept with him, and in return received quite a bit of goodwill, and a good number of future contacts for more potential installation sites. It was encouraging to hear that we can move forward without creating problems for EWSA, as our scale of work is rather tiny compared to anything that they currently consider implementing.
As it turns out, there happens to be a trade show currently taking place in Kigali — so Saturday we went over there straightaway. We wanted to see what sorts of other devices and systems were being marketed for small-scale generation, and came across a number of companies:
- Barefoot Power : Systems ranging from 55 lumen LED desk lamps to larger systems involving a battery, fan, and multiple lights.
- Synergy Rwanda : Solar chargers (for cellphones) and LED lights. They were being manufactured by “Pisat Solar Ltd”, and they appear to operate with Clean Water Environmental, out of Grand Rapids, Michigan
- Multiple Vendors : An assortment of standby and continuous gensets were also on display, and their prices/specs were duly noted.
Gathered other information as we were able, including where to purchase electrical machinery (Sofaru or Beta), pricing on CFL bulbs, electrical and plumbing supplies, and some approximate prices for the motors we saw in a coffee processing machine.
Next up was a brief meeting with an engineer at the Rwandan Caterpillar dealer to get a bit more data on their synchronous generators, particularly some of the smaller ones that could potentially be used in hydropower. Then it was off to Nyamagogo to find the location of some suppliers mentioned at the Expo, as well as to scout out used alternator pricing in Kigali to compare to those sourced closer to the villages. Turns out that Toyota alternators are the easiest to get, and you can even snag a used one with some semblance of a warranty.
On Sunday, the university student interns (Jean de la Croix and Moises) invited us to a local church, and afterwards we briefly met up over some Fanta to get to know one another better. We parted ways for the evening, and Kyle and I took care of some preparations for the conference on Tuesday and the hydro site visits, as well as a bit of curriculum review for the student orientation on Monday.
Monday began early with a trip to Butare to visit with the Center for the Environment, Entrepreneurship, and Sustainable Development (CEESD) at the National University of Rwanda. Continuing with our original theme of lost bags, we got off in Butare and quickly realized that bags remained on the bus — which were retrieved about 20 minutes later from the bus on the return trip from its final stop. Fortunately, this one wasn’t enroute to the Congo border, or that may have turned out quite a bit differently!
Meeting with faculty of CEESD brought up some great questions, such as how to define a better partnership between NUR and UC-Davis, and how to sustain that tie outside of this particular picohydro project. A core element of CEESD is an interdisciplinary approach to problems — no particular department or faculty works for CEESD full-time, and students/faculty from all fields are encouraged to participate. Defining the different roles of our project compared to the Blum Center as a whole gave us a great chance to discuss the difference between an academic partnership and an entrepreneurial venture, and Dieudonne from CEESD kept good questions coming (how to make the experience valuable for student interns, how to begin new projects, etc).
Later in the day, we returned to Kigali and met up with the student interns an orientation to go over the basic concepts of hydropower, discuss examples of intermediate (locally sourced, lower complexity) technology, and asked the students to define their expectations for the trip. Getting a room with a chalkboard was easier than you might expect, and the students seemed pleased with the crash-course introduction into hydroelectrics. Spent some time afterwards discussing the social aspects of power (why might villagers (not) want it, who would (not) benefit from the system, would the government be supportive, etc). Parted ways once more, to meet up in the morning for the Energy/ICT Luncheon!
A final note – Starting a business in Rwanda as a Rwandan appears to be a rather easy affair — multiple sources confirm that the turnaround can be as quick as 24 hours from the time of application submission to the time of approval. We have yet to go to the Rwandan Development Board to examine the paperwork, but definitely worth keeping in mind!
Joshua Milburn & Kyle Gaiser, UC Davis, Mechanical Engineering
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