Back in the saddle, such as it is.

Well, it has been more than a year since my last post so I might as well let you know that I'm prototyping a new and improved concentrator that has already blown my mind a few times and will hopefully do the same for you once I show it to you.

I'm not going to do that now.

Boo hoo.

Soon, though, as I'm going to be unveiling it with Chocosol at their Solstice Chocolatada on June 21.

Normality? Where?

And by "normality" I clearly meant blogging getting pushed off the agenda by tasks innumerable.

Things are advancing on the MFC contract: we just finished painting the last of the mirrors for the Helios for MFC. Monday we should go out and buy the materials for the dehydrator and the boiler, and hopefully we will finish them within the week. After work we'll be working (heh) at Djadjé's on a new and improved oven.

That should give us about 1 week for tests and modifications, because after that I am going home.

That's right, you heard me, Ottawa, Canada.

MFC has a project at Timbuktu and I'm welcome and encouraged to work on it because there is money, as well as R&D and pilot project possibilities, but it is not the right time for that. I'm in debt to the point where it is unwise to continue abroad. And as such, I think it is prudent to go home, recuperate financially and physically while consolidating and improving the online presence of the project and plan the next move.

For instance, I’ll have to revise this blog, because it’s called ‘The Solar Fire Project Blog’ but it has so far only served as a blog for me and the Mali mission, while I’ve regrettably neglected blogging about what has being going on with Feu Solaire in France. They’ve been doing great things, so check out the website at www.solarfire.org for the latest info.

Leaving Mali will give me a good chance to test the association that we’ve put up here. We’re working on a deal that would see donors in Canada and the United States provide enough funds for the construction and installation of 3 Helios concentrators with ovens, which Tile Tasuma would provide to interested groups under a micro-loan arrangement where the cost of the machines is spread over a period of time where the income generated by using the machine will pay off the loan, and as the money flows back to Tile Tasuma, they will build more concentrators and start the process over again with new partners.

So much to do, so little time, I should be leaving Mali around the 3^rd of June.

To everyone who has supported my throughout this experience: thank you so much. This is by no means the end, merely a pause to regroup and improve.

ANEJ conference and MFC Helios

On the 3^rd of May, the President of Tile Tasuma, Mr. Ibrahim C Tomota, who has been active on the Solar Fire Project since we arrived in Bamako on the 19^th of December, tells me he saw a banner saying that there was a conference of environmental journalists, organized by the Minister of Sanitation and the Environment, Mr. Agatham Ag Alassane, and maybe we should present there. I pointed out that it was Saturday and the conference started on Monday. He said let’s go see the Minister of the Environment and see what can be done. Months before, the Minister said that we were welcome to stop by his home whenever we had news or wanted to discuss. We did so Sunday night. We told him that we had finished the Butterfly, and he said ‘oh great! You’ve got to come to the conference!’ He got on the phone with the organizers and bam, three days of mixing it up with ANEJ (African Network of Environmental Journalists). I have mixed feelings about this conference though, and I might blog them soon. Here is the Minister at the opening ceremony:

And here is the Prime Minister of Mali, clearly pleased with what he hears, he is flanked by the Minister of the Promotion of the Woman, Child and Family and the Minister of Sanitation and the Environment:

The goal of the conference was to raise awareness of the power that journalists have in society to stress the importance of reporting on environmental issues and bring these things to the attention of decision makers and the general public. Did it work? Well the Butterfly was featured as the ‘pic of the week’ in l’Essor the national daily newspaper. You can read the article, hosted here at www.maliweb.net

Soon enough though, it was back to the grind.

Here is Djadjé painting the new Helios:

And us back at Djadjé’s workshop, working to dusk like the good old days.

And me, hating working with sheetmetal:

And Djadjé, stylish as always, welding away:

Excuses, MFC and plans for the summer

A long overdue greetings, everyone!

Things, including me, have been crazy lately. The future is clearer now than it was yesterday, though still not as clear as I would like it to be. Informative, eh?

At least the next month is fairly clear: this morning Tomota and I, as President and Technical Secretary (respectively) of the non-profit association Tile Tasuma (www.tiletasuma.org) signed a contract with the Mali-Folkecenter, an NGO that is very involved in community oriented ecological and renewable energy projects.

Over the next month we will build and test and, if we have time, revise a solar thermal system which will be used to produce Shea butter. The processes we’re interested in are the boiling and the drying of the nuts. I have been provided with very little data about the drying of Shea nuts, as this is the first year MFC is involved in the project, so I have essentially designed a fruit and vegetable dryer, hoping that it won’t be too far off what we need and that we’ll be able to modify it according to what we learn.

We started buying the materials today, will continue tomorrow and then will work like mad to get another Helios concentrator built ASAP which will give us the most time to develop the applications. The idea is to prove the concept of a solar Shea nut process, which would open the door to a longer, more involved project.

I soon have to make the decision if I am staying in Mali for the summer or not. A great number of factors are weighing on the decision but the deciding factor is essentially whether or not I land a paid contract which would span the summer. If I don’t, I’ll set up the association here with funds to continue in my absence, while I go back to Canada to sort myself out financially and personally before returning to Mali sometime in the fall.

Again, sorry for not writing more often sooner, but things have been more trying than I have let on. Normality has been more or less restored, so expect more frequent blogs.

L

Butterfly Expo

March 31^st 2008

Today AMADER (the Malian Agency for Domestic Energy and Rural Electrification), the group who financed the development of the Butterfly so far, had a demonstration for a department of the Ministry for the Promotion of the Woman, Child and Family. The object of the demo was to highlight the link between energy and the family. AMADER asked that I bring the Butterfly and Helios and do some cooking.

Here we are setting up the Helios on the edge of a soccer field. Once the mirrors started going up their curiosity got the better of them and they put the game on hold to come hang out while we set up the machine.

Some of the adults were concerned that the children would burn themselves with the Solar Fire, but teaching the kids some solar safety was easy, even if we didn’t speak the same language. The trick is to get them to put their hand in the focal point, but not at the point of most concentration. They exclaim and withdraw their hand, surprised by the heat. Then you get them to put their hand back in and slowly move towards the point of maximum concentration… they don’t get very close. Then you burn a stick and the message is clear.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to organize any baking of cake, but gathering the ingredients to make a nice pot of rice wasn’t hard. Note the rolling boil we’ve got going on. That’s about 5L of liquid and 1.5kg of rice, plus some veggies and beef.

The ladies from the ministry were mightily pleased. Two of the biggest advantages they see are time saved gathering wood out in the bush and improved cleanliness. Cooking on a fire leaves the pot all black and sooty, which dirties hands, clothes and dishwater while solar cooking leaves the pot as clean as when you started (except if you burn the rice, which we almost did…)

Now granted I’m a little bit taller than the average Malian woman, but the ergonomics of the machine are still quite acceptable for women here. Traditionally, cooking is done on the ground over a fire, and overcoming cultural inertia is never easy, but a number of the women we’ve talked to have said the equivalent of ‘so what if I can’t cook on the ground if I don’t have to go gathering/buying as much wood?’

Now we’re going to embark upon more expensive testing and fine tuning of the Helios bread oven as well as the Iron Butterfly designs.

Meanwhile, administratively things have stalled a little bit. I had left the association to do its thing while I do tech development but their follow-up on the contacts we’ve made has been less than satisfactory. I’ve put my hand back in the mix and we’ll see how things progress over the next couple of weeks, at which point important decisions will have to be made.

High hopes, as usual.

And in this... field...

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Allow me the pleasure of introducing to you, the (temporarily named) Iron Butterfly!

Weighing in at a hefty 51kg, the Iron Butterfly has a reflective surface of 1.8m², and at an elevation of 370 meters above sea level is capable of boiling 4.5kg of water in 30 minutes while INcoming SOLar radiATION (insolation) averages 701 watts per meter squared. *deep breath* Built with 100% locally materials costing a total of 41,305 francs, roughly equal to 90$ Canadian, the Iron Butterfly will soon be showing off it's culinary capacities, it's cooking qualities and last but not least, it's 178 painstakingly positioned mirrors.

Thank you mister boxing announcer, sir, but to write the rest of the blog in your style would be silly, not to mention hard. How does a boxing announcer present scientific data like

and then explain that windspeed was constant at <2m/s, ambient temperature was 37degC and there was 4.5kg of water in the pot?

Right, so, as you've heard the Butterfly has had it's first test flight since we've come to some sort of stable design. It is a lot of work to build, and is heavier than I would have liked, but it is rock solid and durable.

I'll give a brief rundown of the construction process. You should already be familiar with the mold. Around the mold we have built a jig, which allows us to place the lengths of square tubing in the same place every time.

Upon the mold we place the mirrors, face down. In the center of each of the mirrors we place a square of sheet metal to which we have welded a small iron rebar stub. We then lay the lengths of square tubing on the jig and then weld the stub to the square tubing.

The result is the Iron Butterfly wing, minus the mirrors.

Apply glue to the wing.

Apply the wing to the mirrors.

Apply the wings to the structure, and then apply sunlight to the Butterfly and...

Voila!

Back in the saddle, such as it is.

Phew.

After having been thoroughly destabilized for a couple of weeks, and then after having scrambled to catch up, I am back in the saddle, such as it is. My cough is back to its normal dust-and-smog clearing and my mind has found some sort of balance.

Hereunder I catch up a little on the situation reports.

While I was sick I took a day on-work and accepted an invitation from the Mali Folke Center for Renewable Energy (MFC) to come see a village 60km outside of Bamako that will eventually be home to one of their ‘centers of excellence’ a place where techniques and technologies will be taught and shared for the economic, environmental and social benefit of the surrounding villages.

MFC organized the National Forum on the Environment from a few weeks ago. At the Forum I met the director of MFC, and we clicked pretty harmoniously. I met with him a couple weeks afterwards and we determined that we have the same vision and that we must work together, so he set up the trip to the village.

I went, saw things of interest, and then continued being sick. They asked me asked me to get the ball rolling by writing up some initial thoughts and cost estimates on a project which they want to hire me to pull off. They want to empower women and farmers through decentralized, low tech solar thermal. They want mango farmers, onion farmers, tomato farmers et al. to have access to crop dehydrators which would allow them to conserve their produce and sell it off-peak season (in some cases half of the seasons crop goes to waste due to overabundance in-season and the inability to conserve it).

They also want a series of technologies which will serve the needs of Shea nut growers, who produce Shea nut butter, which has a number of nutritional and cosmetic benifits. The nuts need to be boiled, then dried, then heated and mashed. Here they are being boiled:

The difficulty is that the Shea nut season coincides with the rainy season, and so unless they have concentrated solar energy, they often have trouble properly drying the nuts, since they leave them out to dry and before they are dry the rain comes along. Additionally, smoke sometimes lowers the quality of the product, and the women have to spend hours a day hunting for wood or spend thousands of francs a week on wood.

I have just recently submitted my documents to MFC and hope to have an answer soon.

Soon to be blug: thoughts on crop dehydrators, agricultural economics in Mali, advances and specs of the butterfly, my new pad and hopefully, the MFC

p.s. due to some class-A bungling I lost the pictures for the last couple of weeks. L