Pilot Project: Nov 04 - Nov 05

Overview

The pilot project was an ambitious program to get blueEnergy established on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua and to prove that its proposed renewable energy systems could be locally manufactured and deliver low-cost energy to communities in need. Funding for the pilot project came from the Energy and Environment Partnership with Central America, a Finnish led Central American consortium working to promote biodiversity and sustainable energy development, and from private donors. The pilot project consisted of the following components:

Establishing Partnerships and a Work Space

The pilot project represents a collaboration between organizations from international, national, regional, local, and community levels. The member organizations of this vertically integrated partnership each bring unique resources and abilities to the joint initiative. Together they are able to combine international finance and technology with local innovation to meet development objectives at the national, regional, local, and community levels.

International Cooperation

blueEnergy, the lead developer of this electrification initiative, has been establishing relationships with a network of American and European institutions, mainly in the Academic realm. It has thus been able to host internships to several international engineering students. In addition, blueEnergy’s work has attracted people with backgrounds in engineering, as well as other disciplines, such as sociology and political science, who have volunteered their service. During the period between May 2004 and October 2005, more than 30 volunteers joined blueEnergy’s development efforts on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. These volunteers helped facilitate workshops, design a turbine manufacturing process, carry out preliminary energy need / market study survey work, establish a wind monitoring program, and build institutional and communal networks. The volunteers hailed from all around the globe, including Nicaragua, France, Spain, England, Germany, Northern Ireland, and the United States.

While much of the financial capital for the project came from private donations both in the United States and in Europe, the single largest souurce was the Energy and Environment Partnership with Central America (Alianza en Energía y Ambiente con Centroamérica). The Alianza is a Finnish Government initiative, introduced at the United Nations World Summit in Johannesburg in 2002. Its membership is comprised of one representative from the Ministry of Environment of each Central American country and two representatives from the Finnish Government. The Alianza’s main objective is to provide grants totalling 3 million euros to develop a strategic plan to empower the sustainable development of renewable energies in Central America.

In order to be eligible for Alianza funding, a project must be approved and promoted by the Ministry of Environment of the project’s intended country of operation. The electrification initiative presented in this document was selected by MARENA, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Environment, as a high priority project and was presented for approval at the Alianza Forum in October 2004, in San José, Costa Rica. The Alianza approved a first round of financing equivalent to over 40% of the pilot project’s total cash requirements.
While blueEnergy and the Alianza provided the bulk of the human and financial capital for the execution of the pilot project, there are other international actors that played an important supporting role. Among them are the French Embassy in Nicaragua, the French Association ER&DE (Renewable Energies and Sustainable Development) which is itself affiliated with X-Développement (the alumni network of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France), and the United Nations Development Program. As blueEnergy's work moves forward, more funding will be sought from international institutions such as the World Bank, other foreign governments, and foundations in the United States.

National Cooperation

On the national level, blueEnergy presented its activities to the National Commission of Energy of Nicaragua (CNE) and received its formal support (non-monetary) in September of 2004. The CNE welcomed this project’s electrification initiative in the RAAS as it is in line with its national development objectives and compliments the work being done in other regions. It agreed to monitor the pilot project’s progress and to help assess its potential for replication in other remote regions of Nicaragua.

The pilot project partnership also worked with a Grupo Fenix, a solar energy organization in Managua. Grupo Fenix was founded in Managua in 1996 by a group of enthusiastic engineering students and professor Susan Kinne at the National Engineering University (Universidad Nacional de Ingeneria, or UNI). Grupo Fenix and the pilot project partnership share a common approach to rural electrification of remote communities and are exploring ways to work together to build hybrid wind/solar energy systems.

Local (City and Rural Community) Cooperation

Before the project began, blueEnergy worked to bring together local institutions that have not traditionally worked together, such as the Bluefields Indian and Caribbean University (BICU), the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua (URACCAN) and the National Institute of Technology (INATEC). All of these organizations have unique regional development and community experiences that together helped guide the formulation of a holistic approach for addressing the energy needs of the communities.

blueEnergy’s efforts were rewarded in August of 2004 with the signing of an agreement between these three learning institutions (BICU, INATEC, and URACCAN) and blueEnergy. This agreement is historic in that it is the foundation of an unprecedented collaboration among local institutions.

The agreement described the common objectives of the institutions and laid out the areas of collaboration between them, including the training of teachers in both practical and theoretical matters of the proposed energy systems, the training of students to ensure the longevity of the project, and the execution of wind resource and energy need / market studies to prove the economic and resource viability of the project. The training was primarily a joint effort between blueEnergy and IPCC-INATEC where IPCC provided local technicians and physical facilities for manufacturing operations and workshops, while blueEnergy provided financial and human capital to support these activities. However, professors and students from both URACCAN and BICU also participated in the training activities. The wind resource study was primarily a joint effort between blueEnergy and BICU where they worked together to install wind monitoring stations, collect data, and perform data analysis. The energy need / market study was primarily a collaborative effort between blueEnergy and URACCAN where they worked together (in conjunction with community members) to develop the survey, carry it out in the communities, and analyze the data.

At the communal level the partnership worked closely with the Rama Congress, the governing body of indigenous Rama peoples. The Rama Congress is an elected body that represents the many dispersed villages along the Caribbean Coast and insland. The Rama Board of the Rama Cay community and the Council of Punta de Aguila endorsed the project and agreed to commit labor and financial resources to the manufacturing, installation, and maintenance of the energy systems. Great efforts were made to include Rama leaders in all major decisions and to include the communities at large in information and feedback meetings. The business and management models that guided the operation of the energy system were in conjunction with the Rama leadership to assure that their compatibility with local culture. The partnership was careful to avoid the all-to-common mistake of imposing a foreign business paradigm on an indigenous culture and forcing it to adapt. That being said, the models and their implementation were not without complications (see Results section).

Work Space

blueEnergy established its base of operations in a shop on the INATEC campus in Bluefields. The space was generously donated by the school in the spirit of collaboration, and several professors from the technical school joined in blueEnergy's efforts. blueEnergy fixed some of the school's tools that had fallen into disrepair in exchange for their use and also brought in much needed hand and power tools. All manufacturing activities were carried out in this space.

Capacity Building

The intention of the partnership’s pilot project was to demonstrate that small scale locally made wind power (with solar complements) can be a sustainable energy source for electricity deprived remote communities of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. While the sustainability of the project hinges on several factors such as its environmental impact and its financial viability, the largest factor is the success of local capacity building efforts that focus on the use of local materials and that create the local knowledge base and technical know-how to allow the project to be run locally. The partnership has approached its capacity building efforts with a multi-pronged approach that has sought to combine best practice from around the world with local innovation to create a curriculum that addresses both the practical and theoretical aspects of small-scale wind power. Local peoples, both from Bluefields and the potential beneficiary indigenous communities learned the curriculum in hands-on workshops and classroom seminars. The project further developed local capacity by introducing two new areas of study that are critical to understanding the long-term potential of the proposed solution: a regional wind resource assessment and an energy need / market study. The wind resource study is the first of its kind in the area while the energy need / market study follows along the lines of normal census surveys but focused on indicators critical to the success of small-scale energy systems.

Technology Transfer

Many of the electronic energy system components use technology that was developed in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Items such as deep-cycle batteries, charge controllers, and inverters have existed in Nicaragua for some time and the their technology is no longer considered foreign at a national level. However, most of these technologies have primarily been used on the Pacific side of the country where renewable energy systems are more commonplace. To be certain, technicians in Bluefields are familiar with these types of components generally although many have not seen them as applied to small-scale renewable energy systems. Given that the electrical components of the energy system are the most fragile, the partnership made a considerable effort to transfer the technical know-how of these components from abroad and from the Pacific Coast to the Caribbean Coast.

The heart of the energy system is the wind turbine. The design used in this project was created in Scotland by Hugh Piggott of Scoraig Wind Electric under contract by the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) of the United Kingdom. The contract called for the creation of a turbine that was relatively simple, robust, low-cost, and that could be built by technicians in developing countries. Mr. Piggott consulted extensively with technicians in developing countries (in Peru and Sri Lanka in particular) in the development of the design, thereby making the whole process bottom-up. So while the basic turbine design represents the largest chunk of technology to be transferred to the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, it is not a typical top-down transfer.

Local Technical Innovations and Local Materials

The energy system design that was “brought” to the Caribbean Coast for this project was merely a framework that specified the types of components that make up the system and how they interact and provided guidelines on the class of materials that can be used. The pilot project intentionally avoided the pitfall of trying to a promote a rigid foreign technology by allowing for considerable flexibility through system design modifications, material substitutions, and process development.

From the beginning of the project, local technicians, primarily from IPCC-INATEC, were involved in selecting locally available materials and adapting the system design to reflect local environmental conditions. In addition they made significant contributions to the creation of a manufacturing process that made sense given the availability of local hardware and technical capacity.

The wind turbines were 100% percent locally built while most of the electrical components were brought in from Managua and assembled in Bluefields. Almost all of the materials are acquired in Bluefields or Managua.

One issues that highlights the evolving nature of the material flows for the project was the search for a local supply of car wheels for turbine hubs. It was initially thought that usable spare car wheels would be easily found in Bluefields but that turned out not to be the case. Almost all of the cars in Bluefields are of Japanese or Korean origin and have their wheels welded to the axles. This makes recovering the wheels very labor and energy intensive. Wheel hubs were brought from the United States for the pilot project although a search is underway in Managua to locate a national supply. One possible source are American cars, such as GM’s Cavalier (which have the desired type of wheel-axle assembly), that are becoming increasingly popular in Managua. This increased popularity generate an increasingly steady supply of spare and junked wheels.

Practical Training Workshops

The centerpiece of the pilot project’s capacity building efforts was the practical training workshops. The workshops were held at blueEnergy’s shop facilities on the IPCC-INATEC campus in Bluefields and were an intensive three weeks. During this time participants learned about system design, siting, construction, assembly, installation, and maintenance and community energy management. blueEnergy began by focusing on teaching the teachers so that the replication of the knowledge and know-how could be more efficiently conveyed. Some of the technical teachers (mainly from the National Institute of Technology, IPCC-INATEC) that were trained in this first phase were then involved in the teaching of the more recent workshops. This demonstrated that, at least to a very limited extent, the capacity building efforts had some initial success.

blueEnergy and its partners are committed to train whoever has an interest in, and wants to become involved in, the developing renewable energy industry of the Caribbean Coast. The hands-on aspects of the workshops are simple enough to be taught to technicians with no engineering background and the energy and system management curriculums are targeted to people with only rudimentary math skills.

The aim of the workshops was two-fold: to train a local labor force capable of driving turbine manufacturing, energy system assembly, installation, and maintenance in the long-run and to train indigenous and afro-descendent community members to understand this process and to handle energy and systems management in their own communities. These two objectives are not mutually exclusive as some indigenous peoples will join the long term manufacturing labor force in Bluefields while others will form field teams that handle installations and maintenance of energy systems in their communities.

Theory Seminars

Efforts to build technical capacity to ensure the durability of this pilot project were focused on hands-on knowledge. In other words, the approach was to emphasize how things work while generally avoiding going into depth about why things work the way they do. This is due to the fact that the physics and systems theory that underlies wind power and electrical systems is rather complex and requires an advanced scientific and engineering background to fully understand.

However, the project partnership believed that the entire experience could be reinforced by introducing some basic underlying theory for the systems. The transfer of this knowledge concerning fluid dynamics, statics, and electro-magnetism was clearly not necessary for the success of the project, but could enrich the experience of those with a scientific or engineering background. It also helped open up the possibiltiy that higher level design work could become part of the local industry in the future.

The partnership taught a week-long seminar on the BICU campus to go into these concepts. The seminars required some basic understanding of mathematics but were targeted to the largest possible audience.

New Areas of Study with Significant Local and National Implications

blueEnergy’s pilot project included two studies that have important implications for the long-term success of the initiative. The first was a wind resource study, which shed light on the small-scale energy production potential of the region. The results of this study have helped determine the economics of small-scale wind energy in terms of $/kwh produced. The second study was an energy need / market study aimed at characterizing the energy usage patterns (actual and anticipated) and financial capacity of potential beneficiary communities.

The wind study in this pilot project was the first extensive wind resource study ever to be implemented on the coast. The Nicaraguan Institute of Territorial Studies (Intituto Nicaragüense de Estudios Territoriales, or INETER) has recorded historical wind data at the airports of Bluefields, Corn Island, and Puerto Cabezas, but the data has many gaps and is often corrupted. In addition it is significant to note that airports are generally sited in areas with minimum wind for safety reasons and therefore do not accurately reflect local wind potential.

This field of wind resource study is completely new to the Natural Resources Department of the BICU. The data analysis presented an interesting research topic that can be carried out by students and professors during several years, thereby laying the foundation for further developments of wind power in the region.

The energy need / market study was necessary to understand how well the new energy systems could meet the needs of the beneficiary communities and to what extent the communities would be able to support the new energy systems. The study was carried out by blueEnergy in partnership with the URACCAN. The process of acquiring and analyzing this data constituted an important contribution to the research activities of the Community Projects Department of the URACCAN.

Both studies represented a significant new area of capacity that helped local institutions improve the energy situation of the Caribbean coast in a more well-informed and therefore more sustainable way.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing activity consisted of building wind turbines from scratch, building towers and supporting components, and building control panels, dump loads, and sheds to house the electrical components. blueEnergy and its partners built four complete energy systems during the pilot project.

Turbine

The main components of the turbine include: body, alternator, rotor (blades), and tail.

The body is made up mostly of welded pieces of 2 inch angle iron and houses a used car wheel hub which serves as the bearing for the rotation of the blades and the alternator. The body’s is the connection piece that allows the horizontal axis of the rotor to be mounted on the vertical axis of the tower. The body also includes a hinge for the tail vane boom.

The alternator is an axial flux permanent magnet design. It is composed of two magnet rotor discs and one copper coil stator. In the 8ft. diamter turbine model, each rotor disc has 12 rare earth neodymium magnets (NdFeB) mounted on to it and the stator has 10 copper coils. Both the magnet rotor discs and the stator are cast in common boating resin and reinforced with rough fiberglass cloth. In this configuration the alternator produces a 5-phase alternating current, whose voltage depends upon the number of turns in each copper coil. The partnership currently manufactures both 12 volt and 24 volt systems. Finally, the 5-phase AC output of the alternator is rectified by five bridge rectifiers (using diodes) to produce DC for battery charging.

The turbine rotor consists of three wood blades, which are hand carved using primarily drawknives and spokeshaves. Wood is currently the preferred material for several reasons: it is cheap, locally available, strong, and local craftsman already know how to work with it. The wood used is Nancitón, a local tropical wood with a blood-red color that has proven to be very resistant when it dries out. There were some initial problems with blades warping after carving due to the wetness of the wood, but that was mostly solved by introducing a drying period prior to carving. Other woods are currently being tested including Mahogany which is also locally available. Mahogany has the advantage of being easier to work with, however it is a weaker wood. blueEnergy is experimenting with resin-coated Mahogany blades to see how they hold up against the frequent rain showers of the region.

Other experiments are being carried out with fiberglass blades, which would lead to a significant improvement in the standardization of the manufacturing process. Fiberglass is more expensive than wood but is also a material that local craftsman are familiar with due to the boat building and repair industry in Bluefields.

Lastly the turbine is given a tail vain, which serves two very important purposes: keeping the turbine facing into the wind during normal operating conditions and turning the turbine out of the wind during dangerously high winds. The tail is made up of a piece of steel pipe and a piece of plywood.

All the turbines built during the pilot project were the 8ft diameter rotor model although the partnership is exploring the possibility of introducing a 12ft diameter rotor model.

Tower, Guy Wires, and Anchors

The most common tower being built was a standard tilt-up 20m (60 ft.), guyed tower. This model of tower is made of 20-foot sections of 4 inch diameter steel pipe. The sections are connected to each other with couplers that fit on the inside of the pipe. A rebar-enforced concrete base with a steel hinge provides a foundation for the tower and allows it to be raised and lowered.

Guy wires are used to stabilize the tower and maintain verticality. When the tower is standing up, most of the weight points along the axis of the tower and the tower itself supports the weight. However, during the lowering and erecting of the tower, guy wires support most of the weight through the use of a ginpole. In addition, when wind strikes the turbine it creates a force (which creates a moment about the hinge at the bottom of the tower) that tries to topple the tower in the direction of the wind. The guy wires act to resist this toppling force. For a 60 foot tower, the guy wires are made out of threaded stainless steel, 1/4'' in diameter. Wires are attached in all four directions every 20 feet.

The guy wires are anchored at the four corners. The anchors (also called “dead-men”) are made of two pieces of steel I-beam welded together, providing a resisting area of approximately 4 square feet. They are painted with an anti-oxidant paint and buried one to two yards deep depending on soil characteristics. Metal chains are attached to the anchors and rise to the surface where they are connected to the guy wires.

Dump Load, Control Panel, and Power House

The partnership does not currently manufacture charge controllers, inverters, or batteries, although it does build a current overflow device called a dump load. Like hydro generators, wind turbine should always have a load on them to regulate their rotation speed. When the batteries are full and the turbine is generating current, a device called a dump load is employed to dissipate the extra current. The simplest type of dump load, and the one build by the partnership, is an heater. The partnership built dump loads using locally available spare filaments for hot water shower heads. In order to organize all of the electrical components in a logical, easily accessible, and safe fashin, the partnership built control panels and housed them in small sheds that protected them from the children, animals, and the elements.

Wind / Solar Energy System Installations

blueEnergy and its partners installed four complete energy systems during the pilot project; one in Punta de Aguila (Rama Community), one in Pearl Lagoon (Creole Community), and two on the INATEC campus in Bluefields. The system in Punta de Aguila is a community battery charging station, the one in Pearl Lagoon powers an auditorium (lights, speaker equipment, and electrical insturments) in a k-12 school, while the two at INATEC provide energy to blueEnergy's shop and backup power to key school events.

Energy system installation consists of 5 major phases: siting, digging for foundations and anchors, assembling the tower, raising the tower, and wiring the electrical components. Installation, like manufacturing, is a joint effort between blueEnergy’s team, workshop participants, and community members.

Siting

Choosing a good site for a system is vital for its success. It is very important to fully consider the local environment to assess the levels of turbulence, caused by obstacles or mere site geography. Turbulence reduces the amount of available energy in the wind and can produce severe stress of mechanical components leading to early failure. Other significant siting concerns include local development plans, proximity to points of usage, and visual and audio impacts. The partnership solicited heavy community participation in the siting process in order to generate solutions that met both the communities’ desires as well as the technical requirements of the system.

Installing Foundation and Anchors

The most labor and time intensive part of an installation is the digging for the tower foundation and the guy wire anchors. The partnership relies heavily on the participation of community members for this activity. The area and depth of the holes depend entirely on the soil types present at each specific location, but generally vary between 1 to 2 meters deep (1 to 2 m3) for the tower foundation and 1 to 2 meters deep (2 to 4 m3) for the anchors.

Once the holes are dug the team casts the rebar-enforced concrete foundation and positions the hinged base. The anchors are laid into their respective holes and attached to chains that rise to the surface and attach to the guy wires. Once everything is positioned, the holes are refilled and compacted.

Assembling and Raising the Tower

The tower is assembled by fitting together 20 ft. sections of pipe using connection joints. The tower is positioned onto the hinged base and the guy wires are attached. A ginpole is attached at a 90 degree angle to the base of the tower (i.e. sticking straight up when the tower is laying flat) and is connected to the tower with a cable. The ginpole serves as a lever to provide a strong mechanical advantage during the lifting and lowering of the tower. Cable, which was fastened to the top of the ginpole before it was attached to the tower, is then fed into a “come-along” or winch. The tower is raised by slowly pulling the cable attached to the ginpole

The raising of the tower is the most dangerous part of the installation process and blueEnergy employs stringent safety standards in line with those used by leading tower experts from the global, small-scale wind industry to promote the safety of all participants. The most important safety step is clearing all people and animals from within the “fall-zone”, which is defined as the area in which the tower could strike in the case of a major failure.

Setting up and Wiring the Electrical Components

Batteries are the heart of a renewable energy system. They are used to store the irregularly produced energy from the generators and allow the operators to use the energy when they desire. The project promoted the use of deep-cycle batteries, which are best suited for use in renewable energy systems as they are designed to handle many deep discharges. While they have a higher upfront cost than car batteries, they are much cheaper in terms of kwhs delivered per dollar if they are well maintained.

Batteries are also the most sensitive part of a renewable energy system and must be protected from overcharging as well as over discharging. A charge controller is used to regulate the charging of the battery by diverting the energy produced by the generator to a dump load when the battery is full.

The battery bank provides DC power. If AC appliances are desired then an inverter is installed to convert DC to AC. In the case of battery charging energy stations, inverters are not needed as the sole function is to charge DC batteries. In these cases individual users may employ inverters in their homes.

Finally, a power house is constructed near the base of the turbine tower to organize all the electrical components and protect them from children, animals, and the elements.

Wind Resource Study

The wind resource study was launched by blueEnergy together with BICU in July and August of 2004. During a four week period, a wind resource expert was brought in and the team worked in blueEnergy’s shop to assemble the wind monitoring stations (NRG Systems Wind Explorer) and set up the data collection and analysis software. One metal, 10 meter tower was built and installed on the INATEC campus and data collection began July 29th. Two expeditions were then carried out to the communities of Rama Cay and Punta de Aguila. In order to keep costs down, wood was collected by Rama leaders from their land and used for the towers in both Rama Cay and Punta de Aguila. Both towers stood at 10 meters and were erected with full community participation. Data collection began on August 13th in Punta de Aguila and August 15th on Rama Cay. In April of 2005 the tower at Punta de Aguila and INATEC were removed and the equipment was moved onto the turbine towers at a height of approximately 48 ft. This was the hightest the equipment could be installed without interference from the turbines.

The data loggers that form part of the wind resource monitoring stations store information on removable chips. Chips were collected during maintenance trips and the data was analyzed by blueEnergy personnel. Work is being done to transfer the analysis task in the future to the Natural Resources Department at BICU.

Market Study

The energy need / market study was an important component of the pilot project that helped the partnership better understand the communities it hoped to serve. By gathering information on energy consumption and financial capacity, the partnership was be able to make informed decisions about system design and operation in the project communities and to identify which communities it could service in the future.

Environmental Impact Assessment

An activity’s long-term sustainability is strongly tied to its environmental impacts. In light of this, the partnership worked to identify the impacts the project had on the local environment and to mitigate any negative results. The primary impacts were visual and audio impacts on the community members that live near the energy systems. The turbine towers modify the often traditional landscape and are highly visible. The turbines themselves generate noise when the blades rotate, although most often this noise is not much louder than the wind itself. The partnership tracked community perception of these visual and audio impacts with periodic surveys but to date has only found positive reactions to the presence of wind monitoring equipment and energy systems.

The system component that is of most concern from an environmental standpoint is the batteries, which contain lead and acid. The partnership provided training on their proper handling and is working to set up a system to deal with their disposal when they are no longer usable.

The partnership worked to assure that it operated within local, regional, national, and even international environmental frameworks. The partnership was well aware of the Atlantic Biological Corridor project (proyecto Corredor Biológico del Atlántico, or CBA), started in 1998 with funding from the Global Environment Facility. This initiative, which represents the Nicaraguan portion of the MesoAmerican Biological Corridor project, aims to protect biodiversity while promoting sustainable community development. In light of this, the partnership worked closely with MARENA to ensure that the systems were installed with minimal impact. The electrification initiative was in line with the CBA framework and actively sought ways of complementing it. In addition, the partnership was aware of the tension that sometimes exists between these international and regional initiatives and local indigenous communities that feel their autonomy and right to self-determination is infringed upon. To address this, blueEnergy held countless meetings with local groups to integrate their comments in the entire process.