Solar power brings light to quake-darkened Haiti
April 9, 2010
News World Wide — World news headlines: In the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated his country on January 12, Haitian businessman Alex Georges recalls both the darkness and the light.
From the Port-au-Prince house where he had been meeting with his business partner, Georges remembers stumbling into chaos: human suffering and a cloud of dust so thick that he could not see across the street.
But he also saw that at night, even though the shaken city had no electricity, there were bright islands of light-beneath the solar-powered street lamps that his company had installed at two sports fields. People were drawn to the glow and began to set up camps there. World news headlines reports.
Georges believes that solar energy can do more than provide temporary refuge for Haitians; he thinks it can be a permanent boon to the impoverished Caribbean nation.
As the co-founder of ENERSA (Energies Renouvelables S.A.), a three-year-old Port-au-Prince business that has manufactured and sold more than 500 LED solar streetlights with battery storage in 58 towns and villages throughout the island, Georges is one of a group of advocates and entrepreneurs pushing for greater use of solar, renewable, and other small-scale energy in the rebuilding of Haiti.
With a crucial meeting of representatives of more than a hundred countries taking place at the United Nations today to organize commitments for the rebuilding, renewable energy advocates have been urging relief organizations to direct aid toward more than simply rebuilding Haiti’s old power delivery system, reports World news headlines NWW.
Before the earthquake, Haiti had one of the lowest rates of electricity access in the world, with only 12.5 percent of its population of nine million connected to the grid. Those who had money relied on small diesel fuel generators for electricity. The cost of diesel spiked after the earthquake, putting that form of power generation even further out of reach for most Haitians.
“Why saddle people with the variable costs and operating costs of diesel fuel?” asks Jigar Shah, chief executive of the Carbon War Room, the climate change advocacy organization founded by Virgin Atlantic billionaire Richard Branson. His group has calculated that solar and other small power systems could be installed throughout Haiti at a cost of $400 million, a fraction of the $11.5 billion in rebuilding funds that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called for over the next decade.
Vijay Modi, an energy systems expert at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, which works to advance sustainable development, says that renewables can, indeed, play an immediate role in meeting the electricity needs of Haiti. But Haiti also has urgent energy needs for cooking as well as lighting and cell phone charging solutions.
When it comes to household cooking needs, Modi believes that in the short term, people would be more helped by distribution of kerosene or propane. In the longer term, he believes, there should be a focus on more sustainable land management practices to provide the wood and charcoal traditionally used for cooking in Haiti-fuels that can be renewable when well managed, states World news headlines NWW.
Renewable energy advocates working on the ground in Haiti agree that more efficient use of wood and charcoal will continue to be used in the short term for cooking, although biochar (charcoal from agricultural waste) could be a more environmentally friendly solution.
They also worry about the use of kerosene for lighting in the short term for a reason more immediate than its impact on the climate-in addition to the harmful fumes, the fire hazard is acute in the tent camps where so many Haitians are now living. World news headlines NWW has this for now.
Posted by Angelia Kates · Filed Under World news
