Posted on 12/25/2010 3:30:35 PM PST by Pan_Yan
KIPTUSURI, Kenya — For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market.
Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid.
Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning.
That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches.
“My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things,” Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children.
As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“Why the contempt?”
What I want to know is, if Africa is the Cradle of Mankind, why haven’t they got the damn place wired yet?
a wonderful place for our environment college grads to move to and stay put in!
E-zackly. It doesn't take much money to be ready for a disaster, just planning and common sense, as you say.
Which reminds me, it's time to stick a couple of cases of diapers and powdered milk in the garage, in case we get a Winter Weather Event and can't get to the Walmart for a few days.
I have an inexpensive crank radio from Harbor Freight. It actually works.
I’m guessing not solar or wind alone.
You actually know better.
Smart you!
Yep, I ate up all the meat....I had fun with the whole thing.
Glad you made the most of the situation HG! :)
6nRetail Price: $24.99Sale price: $24.99
A flashlight and radio that never needs batteries!
Charges by built-in solar panel and hand-crank generator. Also can be used to power cell phone in case of emergency.
Lots of others out there, too...i.e.
Combination- Hand Crank AM-FM Radio/ Cell Phone Charger / Flashlight;
Ambient Weather WR-088 Emergency Solar Hand Crank AM/FM/NOAA Weather Radio, Flashlight, Cell Phone Charger (Blue), etc.
Those hand crank radios are junk.
Invest in some solar panels, charge controlers, inverters and batteries, and also a good CCRadioSWP portable (not the regular CC)
The radios in the crank models have poor antennas, and front end tuners, and the crank generators fail easily.
Also, if the ‘emergency’ is serious, your cell phone will be useless without access prefixes, which get changed frequently, and the systems tend to go down easily too.
"What powers the cellular signal towers?"
Thanks for the picture, Catnipman; now I understand perfectly.
HYDROPOWER! The ox pumps water; that runs down to a set of turbines.... *<];-')
The hand crank generators on old rural phones did not "charge" the phone. All they did was to generate a brief burst of AC to ring the operator.
All too true, which is why I don’t have one. But, neither do I lived in a ‘mud walled hut’ (per the article) in rural Africa.
Dependable generators (3, if I need them); a good inverter in the vehicles; a good supply of kerosene for the lamps; a gas fridge in the barn, if I need it....
The one time we did go down long enough for it to matter to the freezer, we still had time to cook & can, or to corn or smoke, all the meat & veggies.
Of course, corning those briskets was almost a crime, but my wife is Irish descent, so....
Well, obviously it works pretty good because you can see all the power transmission lines in the background.
I used to tell my kids that back before light bulbs everybody had to watch TV by candle light.
Thanks! Yes, one heck of a project. I've presently got the body of the generator mounted at the top of an 80-foot free-standing Rohn tripod tower, minus the governor and blades. The governor seized and stripped the internal pitch-control gearing, but I've got it dismantled in my shop, new bearings and some old replacement parts located, and with luck she'll go together this summer.
Then I get to figure out how to lift the (large, heavy, cast-iron) governor up there safely.... gin-pole or rented crane? I enjoy climbing the tower and working at the top, but a mistake with that heavy a weight at 80-feet can be deadly.
All information is eagerly appreciated!
Amen! She saw a solution to her problem, and used her own money to purchase it!
Signing off for the evening.... Merry Christmas!
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