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Africa: Home-Grown Wind Power
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Oct 4, 2009 (091004)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
Malawian William Kamkwamba, who was forced to drop out of school in
2002 at the age of 14 because his parents couldn't pay the school
fees, is now the author of an inspiring book on how he built a
homemade windmill out of bicycle parts and other scraps to power
his parent's home in the small village of Masitala. His invention
attracted international attention, and he is now on a U.S. book
tour after completing his secondary education at the African
Leadership Academy in Johannesburg.
AfricaFocus readers have often asked for more stories showing
positive African initiatives, and I think this clearly fits the
description. I haven't read the book yet, but there is ample
material on-line for you to make up your own mind. See, for
example, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8257153.stm, and the
review in The Guardian (http://tinyurl.com/yc58d5k), which reminds
readers that Kamkwamba's creativity is typical of hundreds of
others in Africa and around the world who rely on their wits to
survive. Kamkwamba's blog, with reviews and a schedule of
appearances, is at http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com, and his coauthor
Bryan Mealer's blog is at http://bryanmealer.com
The best introduction to the book is the short youtube video featuring Kamkwamba himself. See
http://movingwindmills.org/documentary
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains a short review and the book by
Mark Frauenfelder, and a short question-and-answer session with
journalist Bryan Mealer, who worked with Kamkwamba to write the
book.
For a 5-minute PRI interview with Kamkwamba and Mealer, visit
http://www.thetakeaway.org / http://tinyurl.com/yc8px9p
The potential of wind energy for Africa does not entirely depend on
village entrepreneurs using their own resources, but more top-down
ventures might take some lessons from the example as they expand their
efforts. At an International Workshop on Small Scale Wind Energy
for Developing Countries, held in Nairobi last month with joint
Danish and Kenyan sponsorship, one paper (abstract included below)
cited the multiple problems of sustaining a recent wind power
project.
The Nairobi seminar is one sign of rapidly growing interest in
Africa in expanding wind power, from a very small installed base. The African
Wind Energy Association will be hosting an African Wind Power
conference in Cape Town in May 2001. (http://tinyurl.com/yawvn4r),
and a South African company boasts installation of small wind
turbines at a number of sites in South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique,
and Zimbabwe http://www.africanwindpower.com/installation.htm.
To purchase The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and
Bryan Mealer, visit http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0061730327
Another AfricaFocus Bulletin, posted on the web today but not sent
out by e-mail, contains background on the high world-wide potential
of wind power, from the just published book by Lester Brown, Plan
B 4.0 (http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?0393337197)
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on the environment and climate
change, see http://www.africafocus.org/envexp.php
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African Dynamo
Review of William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, The Boy Who Harnessed
the Wind
by Mark Frauenfelder
Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make magazine and the
founder of Boing Boing. He is currently writing a book on the
do-it-yourself movement for Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin.
http://www.good.is/post/african-dynamo/
September 29, 2009
How a Malawian teenager harnessed the power of the wind.
William Kamkwamba's parents couldn't afford the $80 yearly tuition
for their son's school. The boy sneaked into the classroom anyway,
dodging administrators for a few weeks until they caught him. Still
emaciated from the recent deadly famine that had killed friends and
neighbors, he went back to work on his family's corn and tobacco
farm in rural Malawi, Africa.
With no hope of getting the funds to go back to school, William
continued his education by teaching himself, borrowing books from
the small library at the elementary school in his village. One day,
when William was 14, he went to the library searching for an
English-Chichewa dictionary to find out what the English word
"grapes" meant, and came across a fifth-grade science book called
Using Energy. Describing this moment in his autobiography, The Boy
Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer), William
wrote, "The book has since changed my life."
Using Energy described how windmills could be used to generate
electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity, and
the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric
windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house
and the other houses in his village would mean that people could
read at night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that
they could grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable
gardens, and not have to spend two hours a day hauling water. "A
windmill meant more than just power," he wrote, "it was freedom."
For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and
building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to
be proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country
plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt
government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it's
another thing altogether. It's nothing short of monumental.
William scoured trash bins and junkyards for materials he could use
to build his windmill. With only a couple of wrenches at his
disposal, and unable to afford even nuts and bolts, he collected
things that most people would consider garbage slime-clogged
plastic pipes, a broken bicycle, a discarded tractor fan and
assembled them into a wind-powered dynamo. For a soldering iron, he
used a stiff piece of wire heated in a fire. A bent bicycle spoke
served as a size adapter for his wrenches.
Months later, in front of a crowd of disbelievers who had scoffed
at him for behaving strangely, William lashed his machine to the
top of a 16-foot tower made from blue gum tree branches. As the
blades began turning in the breeze, a car light bulb in William's
hand started to glow. In the weeks that followed, William went on
to wire his house with four light bulbs and two radios, installing
switches made from rubber sandals, and scratch-building a circuit
breaker to keep the thatch roof of his house from catching fire.
He begged his parents to send him to school he had big dreams for
modernizing his village and needed to learn more math, physics, and
electricity to realize them but they barely had enough money to
feed him and his five sisters.
William and his windmill remained a local curiosity for a number of
months, until the head of a national teacher's organization saw the
windmill and recognized the boy's accomplishment as something
extraordinary. A media firestorm ensued, with newspaper articles,
blog posts, radio stories, and a presentation at TED Africa in
Tanzania (TED stands for Technology Entertainment Design), where
William, who didn't know about laptop computers and had never
heard of Google, discovered airplanes, mattresses, hotels, air
conditioning, and the mind-boggling concept of having as much food
as you wanted whenever you wanted it. Befriended by Tom Rielly,
TED's irrepressible and well-connected partnership director,
William was taken on a tour of the United States, where he met many
high-tech millionaires who were charmed by the instantly likable
underdog who never complained about the lousy cards he got dealt in
the game of life. They happily contributed to William's plans to
electrify, irrigate, and educate his village, as well as pay his
tuition at the prestigious African Leadership Academy in
Johannesburg.
With so many tales of bloody hopelessness coming out of Africa, The
Boy Who Harnessed the Wind reads like a novel with a happy ending,
even though it's just the beginning for this remarkable young man,
now 21 years old. I have no doubt that William who is rapidly
becoming a symbol of promise and possibility for the people Africa
will be leading the way.
Question & Answer on Bryan Mealer's Blog
http://bryanmealer.com/qa/
How did you hear about William?
I'd just finished writing my Congo book, All Things Must Fight to
Live (http://www.africafocus.org/books/isbn.php?1596916265),
and was feeling pretty burned out and disillusioned about
Africa. I'd spent an intense five years covering the cycle of war,
disease, rape, and pillage that's become the calling card of the
continent. I'd struggled with this in Congo, but felt there was
little time to cover anything else but that grueling and horrific
conflict. You'd always look out for positive stories, and I'm sure
they were all around me, but the war always had a way of masking
them in its filth. Africans would usually be the ones to point out
this discrepancy, and I'd never have a good answer. The week I
turned in my Congo book, my agent called and told me to look at the
Wall Street Journal. William and his windmills were on the front
page. I thought, 'Wow, this is exactly the story I've been looking
to tell.'
How did you guys go about writing the story?
I spent the next year going back to his village in central Malawi,
living with his family, meeting all of his cousins and neighbors,
interviewing everyone I could find. I spent weeks just interviewing
people about magic, which played a huge role in his childhood. The
famine took most of the other time. Since William's English was
still improving, I interviewed him through a translator - Blessings
Chikakula - which allowed William to speak comfortably in Chichewa,
cracking jokes and telling these great, often silly stories. He's
a really funny guy. Eventually, I was able to mine these core
elements of his speech and give him an English voice. Each night
after work, I'd charge my laptop and transcribe notes under lights
powered by his whirling windmill outside.
How did this experience affect you?
It was an incredible journey, and along the way, William and I
became very good friends. As he often says, "I saw a need to change
something, but couldn't wait on others to do it for me." His story
counters the stereotype of Africans as helpless subjects of corrupt
politicians and international aid groups. For once, I didn't come
home cynical and depressed. I was seeing Africa through his eyes,
and it's a much more hopeful lens. It was exactly the remedy I
needed after those years in Congo, and helped remind me of why I'd
fallen in love with the continent in the first place.
What happens to William now?
William has received a good share of international attention
because of his story, but he seems determined not to rest on his
laurels. Getting an education and providing for his family have
always been his two major goals, and he's still very committed to
achieving them. Right now he's finishing his studies at African
Leadership Academy, a pan-African prep school in Johannesburg,
South Africa, that's filled with other young superheroes like
himself. After that, he plans to attend college in America or South
Africa and continue his effort to power rural Africa. He wants to
teach young people in small villages how to build and maintain
windmills to provide electricity and pump water for crops. That
way, families won't be so vulnerable to drought and famine. His
story will definitely be worth following. He's also the subject of
a forthcoming documentary, Moving Windmills, that kind of picks up
where the book leaves off. I've seen some of the footage and it's
pretty powerful.
International Workshop on Small Scale Wind Energy for Developing
Countries
Sponsored by the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark,
and Institute of Energy and Environmental Technology (IEET) of
Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT)
September 14-16, 2009, Nairobi, Kenya
http://risoe-staged.risoe.dk/Conferences/Kenya_workshop2009.aspx
http://tinyurl.com/ydoywpw
[Report contains abstracts of a number of papers including this
one]
Wind Energy Blows a Bright Future for Tsagwa Village
Njeri Waruingi Kahiu, Institute of Energy and Environmental
Technology ,Jomo Kenyatta University, Kenya
The availability of electricity in rural areas of Kenya is about
ten percent (10%) resulting in deforestation, use of scarce
resources to buy expensive fossil based fuels and in-door air
pollution. To mitigate against these challenges a novel concept was
developed in 2003. In the Wind Home System (WHS) concept each
household was to be wired, a solar battery and energy saving lights
provided. The battery would be recharged every three to four days.
The nearest charging station was forty kilometres away. With wind
speeds ranging from 5m/s to 12m/s, wind generators were a viable
option. To demonstrate this concept of providing clean energy in
Tsagwa village in Kilifi District, north of Mombasa Town on the
East Africa coast, a grant of US$48,321 was received from the
United Nations Development Programme, Global Environmental
Facility, Small Grants Programme to provide a wind charging station
within the vicinity.
The charging station was a hybrid of two wind turbines and three
solar photovoltaic panels. Each of the solar photovoltaic panels
was rated at eighty five (85) watts. The wind turbines, each
supported by a twelve (12) metre guyed steel lattice tower,
comprised of three phase generators with a maximum output of 800W
and a rated output 600 W at 12m/s. The rotor blades were made of
glass-fibre reinforced polyester with a diameter of 2.2 metres. The
twelve pole brushless permanent magnet generator had a maximum
frequency of ninety (90) hertz. The alternating current was
converted into direct current in the voltage control system, which
contained a built in rectifier bridge. A dump load prevented
overcharging of the batteries. Power from each generator was stored
in six, 200 Ah lead/acid batteries. The system voltage was 24V. The
battery charging station was housed in a community centre which
comprised of two workshops and a multipurpose room. The centre was
equipped with one computer, printer, telephone, VCR and TV for
recreational and educational purposes.
The community contribution was land, materials for the community
centre and labour for all construction relating to the project. It
had been envisaged that a total of 100 households would be provided
with the WHS but only sixty four were provided with this service.
The shortfall was due to failure of the community to honour their
pledge and the project money was used to build the community
centre.
To sustain the project a caretaker was appointed to manage the day
to day affairs of the community centre with co-ordination with the
management committee. All connected consumers were to pay fifty
shillings per month towards the caretakers' salary. Income was to
be obtained by hiring out of the workshops, battery charging fee,
community telephone charges, wiring charges for new customers,
educational and recreation activities in the community centre.
The wind charging station initially worked well but six months into
commissioning problems started. One wind generator experienced
fatal failure when the magnets came off from the generator rotor
affecting the performance of the charging station. There was no
repair shop in Mombasa which could handle the job. At extra cost
the rotor was returned to the supplier and he supplied a new one.
Soon after the other wind generator failed and on inspection it was
found that water had entered into the bearing housing causing
corrosion of the shaft and contamination of the lubricant.
Identical bearings and seals were not available on the market and
the bearings were replaced with the nearest equivalent but the wind
turbine did not perform.
The project demonstrated that wind energy does work but delivery of
energy services is much more than technology functioning. The
people dimension is a crucial. The main challenges were lack of
spare parts, use of non-deep cycle batteries resulting in short
lifespan, poor community participation and lack of ownership by the
community. Lessons learned from this project are first, it does not
follow that all people living close together can unite for a common
purpose. Other criteria like track record of other successful
community ventures should have been considered. It was wrongly
assumed that lighting is such a dire need that in a community of
one hundred households a volunteer would be easily available.
Secondly, the grant should have included a one year stabilisation
period for promotion and marketing. An entrepreneur could have been
identified through competitive bidding to manage the community
centre for a year to assess the actual revenue.
A lot of effort and time have been invested in this project and the
wind speeds in Tsagwa are adequate. Installation of more sturdy
wind generators and a management structure based on the energy
business model would ensure the success of this demonstration
project and enhance adoption of small wind energy systems in
developing countries.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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