Unique solar cells on printed plastic

Eight19 takes its name from the time it takes sunlight to reach the earth – 8 minutes and 19 seconds. Its mission is to replace kerosene with solar power. Due to their successful work, this week Eight19 won the Climate Week Award 2012 for “Best Initiative for a Small or Medium-Sized Business.”

THE CHALLENGE

• Over 1.6 billion people in the world lack electricity
• In Africa, 86% of the population has no access to electricity
• Daily fumes from a kerosene lamp are the equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes
• Globally, kerosene lamps produce 190 million tons of CO2 per year
• 2 million people reportedly dying of the indirect effects of kerosene each year

THE INNOVATION

Eight19’s IndiGo combines solar and mobile phone technology to provide affordable electricity for rural off-grid communities. In return for a $10 deposit families receive a solar cell able to generate 2.5 watts of electricity, a battery that can deliver a 3-amp current to store this electricity, an adapter for mobile phones, and an LED lamp. Once the battery is charged, the system can light two small rooms and power a mobile-phone charger for seven hours. After the deposit, IndiGo costs approximately $1 a week to run using the following mobile pay-as-you-go system:

• A user purchases a scratch card from a local vendor and sends the scratchcard number along with the number of their IndiGo system to a local phone number by SMS.
• The message is passed to the Eight19 server, which replies immediately with a short passcode back to the user’s phone.
• The user types the code into their IndiGo device and credit is applied for a period of time such as a day, a week or a month.

Users may feel as though they are paying an hourly rate for their electricity. In fact, they are paying off the cost of the unit. After buying around $80-worth of scratch cards—which Eight19 expects would take the average family about 18 months—the user will own it. They will then have the option of continuing to use it for nothing, or trading it in for a bigger model.

In addition to using innovative payment structures, Eight19 uses unique solar cells based on printed plastic. The solar modules are flexible, robust, lightweight and benefit from high-speed manufacturing and low fabrication costs. As a result they are easier to transport and cheaper to purchase.

THE IMPACT

The Eight19 pay-as-you-go solar model is cheaper than kerosene, the most common source of power for most families, and significantly cleaner and safer. Eight19 reckons that the average Kenyan spends about $10 a month on kerosene and $2 a month to charge a mobile phone at a nearby market.

With access to electricity, communities are more easily able to educate their children, extend working hours outside daylight and gain access to communication and the Internet via mobile phones, enabling them to break out of the poverty trap and accelerate their growth and prosperity.

To date several hundred Kenyan families have utilized IndiGo, while another 4,000 solar units are being rolled out in Kenya, Malawi, Zambia and South Sudan.

Successful initiatives, such as GUARDIAN, in densely populated countries like India were key to achieving the MGD. GUARDIAN, an Indian Microfinance Institution (MFI), is the first organization to offer microloans designed to connect households to water and sanitation services. GUARDIAN, a spin-off from the NGO Gramalya, is an acronym for Gramalaya Urban And Rural Development Initiatives And Network.

THE CHALLENGE (all stats from WHO)

• Despite meeting the MGD, 11% of the world’s population – 783 million people – are still without access to safe drinking water.
• Only 63% of the world currently have access to sanitation, a figure only projected to increase to 67% by 2015, well below the 75% aim in the MDGs. Currently 2.5 billion people still lack improved sanitation.
• 75% of India’s surface water is contaminated by human and agricultural waste and industrial effluent. This contaminated water supply results in life-threatening illness.
• Lost productivity and other consequences of unsanitary water and inadequate sewage treatment have significant negative effects on GDP.

THE INNOVATION

• GUARDIAN is the world’s first MFI to provide households with microloans to purchase individual water and sanitation assets. These include connections to municipal water supply, toilet construction/renovation, rainwater harvesting equipment, household water purifiers and bio-gas plants.
• In conjunction with their loans GUARDIAN provides technical services to assist clients purchase, install, and monitor usage of water and sanitation facilities.
• GUARDIAN lends to members of existing women’s self-help groups, each with up to fifteen members, and to five-member joint-liability groups that  GUARDIAN helps form.

THE IMPACT

• By facilitating access to water and sanitation services, GUARDIAN is helping create a healthy and safe environment for its clients and their families.
• GUARDIAN’s Reach as of February 2012:

The size and layout of the Pallet House is flexible depending on family size, need and preference. With time and the increased availability of other materials, the Pallet House can become a more permanent structure by incorporating materials such as stone, rubble, straw, earth, mud, styrofoam, plaster, concrete or corrugated metal. Pallet Homes are sturdy and can be assembled by only several people using basic hand tools, nails, straps or even zip ties. Homes range from 100-300sq feet and can cost as little as US$500 and as much as US$3,000. The larger ones more expensive one are permanent, fully clad, and include pallet furniture and solar panels.

The I-Beam designers state that over 150 million pallets are discarded in the US alone, an amount that can house all 2 million displaced Haitians. The reason for few Pallet Homes, despite their ubiquity is more for political than economic reason – especially considering land rights.

Worldwide rural women account for nearly half the agricultural labor force. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that if women farmers have equal access to fertilizers, seeds, tools, credit, and land titles they could raise their farm productivity by 20-30% percent, increase national agricultural output by 2.5-4.0%, and ultimately, lift 100-150 million people out of hunger.

Farm Radio, realizing the potential impact of empowering rural women, as well as the prevalence and affordability of radio in rural communities, works with over 400 radio broadcasters in 39 African countries to fight poverty and food insecurity. They provide broadcast training and develop radio scripts, information packages, as well as a weekly electronic news service. Topics covered include crop production, environment management, farm and household management, food safety, nutrition, HIV/AIDS and agriculture, children on farms, farm safety, youth in rural areas, and farm income.  Because such a vast number of farm laborers are women, 75% in Africa, the broadcasts are designed to target women.

The shows differ from traditional radio, in that they often give voice to local farmers (men and women), are lively, entertaining and provide value to farmers. As a result, in villages where the only extraordinary intervention was information from the radio campaign about two thirds of the population said they listened to the broadcasts regularly and half could correctly answer a set of questions about what they had learned. Most significant of all, at least a fifth decided to try the improved practice.

Through the program over 2,000 mobile money transfers will be received by 1,000 low-income families during the following 3 months. The subsidies, which will total US$500 per family, will be used to purchase construction materials such as cement, iron and wood at project-certified stores to ensure affordable price and high quality.

In addition to providing households with much-needed capital and housing materials, the program will bring people into the formal financial sector. Program recipients are provided with a mobile checking account, thus addressing the fact two-thirds of the Haitian population has access to mobile phones but only 10 percent have bank accounts. Access to a mobile checking account will encourage savings as it provides a safe location for money and many transaction costs are avoided.

Cash transfers or seed grants are especially effective means of poverty alleviation for the extremely poor and vulnerable, as they often can’t afford to assume additional risks that might come along with a loan for example.

The Mountain Band-Aid project, submitted by Yiting Shen, Nanjue Wang, and Ji Xia, Zihan Wang into eVolo’s 2012 SkyScraper Competition and awarded 2^nd place today, addresses the both the ecological and human cost of mining and industrialization.

The Mountain Band-Aid, a skyscraper structure is built into the mountainside and covers it like a blanket. It is also comprised of two layers:

• an inner layer that restores the mountain’s natural irrigations system by recycling domestic water, used to grow plants that stabilize the terrain and provide a livelihood for the Hmong;
• and an outer layer where the Hmong people can live in the traditional Southern Chinese architecture, Chaun Dou, that reflects the layout of their former villages.

Chuan Dou, where residential blocks constitute the framework for villages, is emulated by the Mountain Band-Aid they but arranged vertically onto different floors. If adopted the Mountain Band-Aid will allow the Hmong people to return to their traditional lifestyle, while preserving the environment.

What do you think of the Mountain BandAid, will it work or eventually come off like other BandAids?

An estimated 2.6 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate sanitation, and in Africa alone 115 people die every hour from diseases transmitted via water contaminated by human waste (include diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and hepatitis A). In India, the Ganges River has 1.1 million liters of raw sewage dumped into it every minute, a shocking figure considering that one gram of feces may contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1000 parasite cysts and 100 worm eggs (World Health Organization).

In response to this need for expanded access to basic sanitation, a Pennsylvania State University team led by Professor Bruce E. Logan, designed the MRC by combining two types of energy-producing technology: a reverse electrodialysis system (which produces electricity directly from the salinity gradient between salty and fresh water), and a microbial fuel cell (in which bacteria consumes organic matter). Their findings, published in the March 1st edition of Science, describe how the limitations of each technology are overcome by combing the two. Furthermore, by including an ammonium bicarbonate salt solution, the sewage plant can be far from a salt water source. As a result, the device can successfully produce 0.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram of organic waste. In contrast, sewage treatment usually consumes 1.2kWh per kilogram of organic waste.

Microbial reverse dialysis test cell. (Credit: Penn State, Dept of Public Information)

Listen to Lead Researcher Bruce E. Logan describe findings in the podcast.

Our question, is how can Airdrop be implemented in poor, remote areas where farmers have few safety nets protecting them from environmental conditions? Considering Airdrop’s low-tech, independently powered characteristics, the potential seems quite high!

Edward Linnacre borrowed the Namib beetle’s survival trick and applied it to Airdrop.