0:07
Hi, my name is Alex Zahnd.
And today I would like to talk to you about energy services for
the remote communities in Nepal.
Why I would like to take your attention to Nepal?
Our concepts and the ideas and
the examples are by far, not limited to Nepal only.
Nepal, population of Nepal is about 30 million, and
about 70% live still in rural and remote mountain areas.
The literacy rate is very, very low and
very, very different in cities, very high 40 to 60%, but in the mountains, and
a particular among women, very low, 5 to 40% only.
In Nepal, we have a long-term unstable political government and leadership.
Nepal is still one of the poorest countries in the world.
Poverty has many faces and definitions as we can see.
It denies human beings the chance to
live dignified lives with choices and opportunities for change and development.
1:08
Average annual income per head in Nepal varies between $75 to 1800 U.S.
dollars a year.
We have a fast growing gap between the poor and the rich.
Unfortunately, very common sign in transitional countries and
developing countries.
Nepal has a high unemployment rate between 40 to 50%,
especially among the poor and the young generation.
Poverty alleviation and development depend on the access to
energy services that are affordable, reliable and of good quality.
There are clear linkages between access to energy and reduced infant mortality and
fertility rates and increased literacy and life expectancy.
These are two important quotes, I would like to come back a little bit later on.
Nepal and Energy.
Less than half of Nepal's population has access to
electricity by the flick of a switch.
2:48
And therefore, there are issues such as health,
hygiene, malnutrition, drinking water, indoor air pollution,
increased food availability, basic indoor lighting, improved cooking,
income generation, room heating, deforestation, skill training, education.
Our needs to be understood, and
addressed as a part of a holistic community development program.
On a long term basis, with each project embedded within the others simultaneously.
Only in this way can a multi-sectorial program stand a, a chance to
be sustainable and relevant, enabling synergistic benefits for its users.
3:31
Let me roll quickly to slides back.
Poverty alleviation and development, access to energy
reduces infant mortality and fertility rate and increasing literacy and
life expectancy or through improved access to energy services.
Therefore, we know that one of the key issues in
community development is improved access to energy services.
Needs to be at the heart at the very heart of
any long term holistic community development program.
Therefore, the first step in community development is always to learn and
understand the ways and reasons.
As to why people do what they do and the way they do them.
4:44
This activities indoor cooking, room heating and
indoor lighting through open fireplaces and resin soaked pine wood,
pine wood sticks have a direct chronic impact on people's health.
Extremely low life expectancy for women and a high birth defect rate due to
high carbon monoxide level exposure during pregnancies, or
newly born children, along with devastating deforestation.
The World Health Organization in one of their fact sheets,
states that 4.3 million people die per year prematurely.
And surely unnecessary, sincerely, from illness attributable to
the household air pollution caused by the inefficient use of solid fuels.
And they base their staying up on the 2012 data, so fairly recent.
In the high altitude remote mountain places, in Himalaya, in Nepal,
people burn pine tree race sticks called jharro.
As we can see here, for night lighting, and
open fireplaces, for cooking and heating.
And you can see here, rarely, this is a woman cooking on an open fireplace and is
using jharro, is raising soaked pinewood stick to generate a dim and smoky light.
Here in this picture,
can see the mother with all her children sitting around the open fireplace for
about five to six hours a day to cook the morning and evening meal.
Further, many of these high altitude areas suffer under permanent food shortage,
have poor sanitary conditions.
No toilets, very poor personal hygiene, drink contaminated water,
all in addition to the already harsh conditions.
Extremely low living standards and already poor health of the community.
And what can we see?
Mainly, young women and girls go for firewood collection.
Sometimes, four to five hours a day.
They cook five to seven hours inside the room, and small children are playing
around open fireplaces and fall into the fire, burning themselves badly.
And what do we see here in regard to environment, huge deforestation.
6:59
But, Nepal has poor people.
Yes.
But Nepal is rich in renewable energy resources.
We have water, sunshine, wind, biomass, biogas, and geothermal.
With over 6,000 rivers flowing from the high
altitude Himalayan mountain range down to the Ganges Plain,
provide an economic feasible hydro power generation of 42,000 Megawatt.
But until now, Nepal has only an installed capacity of
607 megawatts with an average capacity factor of 44%.
Very poor.
There's a huge potential left.
With about 300 sunny days per year, the average global solar installation is four
and a half to six kilowatt hours per square meter per day on the plane of
the array, which is about 30 degrees south tilted on solar pd panels.
Wind.
While Nepal is not a wind country per se, many mountain ranges and
valleys, due to their natural valley effect, and high plateaus areas have
good wind resources, complementingâs the sunâs power.
Biomass, increased firewood demand outgrows natural grow rates, and
we have an annual increase in deforestation of almost 2%.
Biogas, in the lower flat part and southern part, towards India of Nepal,
between 100 and 800 meter altitude, most farmers have buffalos and
cows, sows providing dung for an anaerobic biogas digester.
Geothermal resource, we do have as well because the energy pattern debate and
tectonic plate movements make geothermal heated water often accessible at
the surface.
So you say, well, there are all these renewable energy technologies available.
Why don't you just pick them from the shelf and install them?
Truth to some extent.
However, we need to go and develop contextualized technologies,
technologies which are defined based on the local resources and
the local needs of the people identified.
The local energy services demands identified and
understood, along with the resources, the technology should be developed.
So, what is needed in order to provide the locally identified energy services that
utilize the available renewable energy resources, are solutions and technologies
which comply with, and compliment the local culture and traditions.
Are developed and manufactured locally?
Are affordable, and can be maintained by the locally trained end users.
Therefore, a renewable energy technology is contextualized when its design has
emerged based on the identified energy service demands of the end users.
The living conditions, economic power and
the ability to operate and maintain, the new
technologies with the newly acquired technical skills through training.
And here are some of the appropriate new contextualized technologies,
I have developed with RIDS-Nepal and Kathmandu University.
And I will come, little bit later back to a few examples.
Let's see some of the examples we have applied, and implement through RIDS-Nepal.
Pit latrine, addressing the millennium development goals.
Four, seven and eight.
And I will not repeat it every time, but various technologies and concepts and
infrastructures address directly the millennium development goals we
all work towards it.
10:30
A smokeless metal stove.
Like here, cooks the food the way the people like the food to be cooked,
and the kind of food which grows locally.
And the smoke metal stove is designed is manufacture locally providing just
[INAUDIBLE] new skills and new entrepreneurship.
Contextualized Solar PV Technologies providing improved access to
indoor lighting.
Well, we can say solar panels are there.
So what make a big fuss?
Well, it depends very much how the local community is,
has build up it's community and houses.
For example, sometimes houses stand alone.
So we have a single home system with a 60 watt solar PV
panel with an adjustable angle and three one watt LED light.
We have maybe sometimes clusters up to ten homes, and
we can have it with one 80 watts solar panels.
We can generate light, three wide LED lights, up to eight, maximum ten, homes.
In some villages, we have people clustering their
homes very closely together and building up on each other.
And therefore, we have developed the two axis tracking system,
which the local people can adjust one axis manual, that's the monthly axis.
And the daily axis from west east to west tracks manually.
And therefore, we can provide for a whole community power.
Minimal power for indoor lighting.
So, one technology for a particular design context.
Also drinking water is very, very important, because people so
far have only had access to dirty and contaminated water.
We have constant food shortage in these high altitudes,
because we can only grow three to four months a year, but is the new defined and
designed high altitude green house.
Which we have designed based on the local people's identified food
availability and demands.
We can now grow up to 10 month vegetables and not just for the families but
they can also, sell on the market and have another income generation.
12:47
Based on 20 years Experience in
Practical Community Development Projects in Remote and
Impoverished Mountain Villages in Nepal, and recognizing the Urgent Need to Address
the Multi-Faceted Needs Identified Locally by the millennium Developement goals.
We developed the two new holistic Community Development Concepts,
the family of four and the family of four plus.
The family of four concept consists of a pit latrine, a smokeless metal stove,
basic indoor lighting, can be through solar PV, can be through a micro hydro,
can be through a wind turbine, it doesn't matter, it depends on the local
available renewable energy resource, and access to clean drinking water.
The family of four is a more stern and rigid concept, because every family
in the village has to agree and work with us to implement all these for, so that
health and hygiene and improvement can take place in every family of the village.
The family of four plus is a second approach of a holistic community
development concept based on the family of four, because once the family of four is
implemented, then people have better lives and health has improved massively.
The all of us often say, that they are more hungry, so we need more food.
The more food we grow we can dry and can eat it in the winter times,
plus we can sell it in the market.
We can save firewood because we have a sunny area.
So we can cook on solar cooking.
We have slow sand water filter.
We have even up to scholarships for apprenticeships.
We have hot water bathing center, because scabies is the most common skin sickness.
Because people just don't wash enough.
So hygiene is very, very poor.
But with hot water, heated by the sun, we can have at least every two weeks or
maybe even every week a shower.
Non-formal education because the girls as we have seen in the previous pictures go
for firewood collection, so they have no chance to go to school.
And through basic non-formal education, they can increase in literacy and
numerical skills.
14:52
Thank you for participating in this lecture.
And if you have any more information, please send me an email,
visit our websites.
And I would like to refer as well to my PhD thesis on the role of renewal
energy technology in holistic community development which is basically a summary
of my last 20 years experience summarized in a more readable and
digestible way for practitioners who want to put their hands really in the mud,
so to say, and want to work with bolts and nuts.
And with those people who have never had chances like, you and I to good
education and family background, and to enable them improve living conditions.
Thank you very much.