Deploying battery energy storage systems will provide more comprehensive access
Investment in renewable energy is skyrocketing, in line with ambitious
By Molly Bilker / Cronkite Borderlands Project
Published June 17, 2015
SABANA GRANDE, Nicaragua — As the sky fades from indigo to black, electric lights blink on in Bertha Maria López''s small, gray adobe house off of Highway 15 in rural northern Nicaragua.
In the kitchen under a bare bulb, she flattens masa into tortillas, sliding them into a pan on the wood-burning stove. When her granddaughter gets sick at 11:30 that night, López turns on a light to find medicine and nurse the 2-year-old back to sleep.
Just eight years ago, the López house was dark by sundown. Her son, now a clinical laboratory student at the University of Health Sciences and Renewable Energy in the city of Estelí, studied by the dim light of gas lamps. A middle-of-the-night crisis might have called for flashlights or gas lamps — or nothing at all.
"Month to month, I''m not paying. With the conventional energy, I would have to be saving money to be able to pay," López said. "That is a great benefit."
Nicaragua is forging a path as a leader in renewable energy; half the electricity from the country''s energy grid comes from renewable resources. Still, about one-fifth of Nicaragua''s 6.1 million residents don''t live in homes connected to the grid. Like López, they gradually are turning to solar panels to illuminate their lives.
Ortega''s government has invited foreign and domestic investment to help grow and stabilize the country''s power sources through multiple energy alternatives — solar, geothermal, wind and hydroelectric.
Solar''s presence in the country has been growing for years as billboards along the Pan-American Highway in Estelí attest, advertising privately-owned solar companies Tecnosol, Ecami and Nica Solar.
But in Sabana Grande, a community half an hour from the Honduras border, it has been the work of a nonprofit organization, Grupo Fénix, that has made the difference in the lives of people like López.
Started in 1996 with a group of students from Alternative Energy Source Program at the National University of Engineering in Managua, Grupo Fenix has been developing solar projects in Sabana Grande since 1999, said Susan Kinne, who runs the program.
Grupo Fénix got its start when Kinne and the organization''s solar technician, Richard Komp, were offered funding by the Falls Brook Centre in Canada to work with land-mine survivors who were affected by the war, Kinne said. Meanwhile, a group of students from an intensive solar energy course Kinne and Komp were teaching asked for help creating a solar energy fair in northern Nicaragua and invited Kinne to join them.
That''s how Kinne and Komp got involved with the Sabana Grande community, which had members who had lost limbs to land mines and needed sustainable work to support their families.
Today, almost all the homes in Sabana Grande have electricity, said Oscar Omar Sanchez López, internship coordinator for Grupo Fénix. Its success is rooted in a program that invites students from universities throughout the world to stay in the community and learn how to build and install solar panels. The cost of the course pays for a solar panel, which students install on a home at the course''s end.
Most of the solar community lives on one side of the highway, down a dirt path that climbs into the mountainous foothills of Sabana Grande. Dogs lounge near the stout adobe houses along the path as women hang laundry and men go about their daily chores.
The community of Sabana Grande, which consists of 2,019 people in 705 families, was a battle site during Nicaragua''s Contra War in the 1980s. A wide, sturdy tree riddled with bullet holes, the ceiba de oro, or "tree of gold," sits in the center of Sabana Grande and acts as a point of reference for the community, where the people play sports or hold dances.
Originally, Grupo Fénix worked in 23 communities throughout Madríz, which is one of Nicaragua''s broad regions, known as departments. However, Kinne said the community of Sabana Grande was the most involved and willing to push for change.
"That was all part of the move to, with limited resources, decide not to try to go everywhere and do patchwork work, but to stick with the proactive community with very little external income, earning from our services provided and creating a change in the paradigm of thinking and empowerment that people were actually asking us for," Kinne said.
In the community, Grupo Fénix does more than install solar panels. Its Solar Center, a small, tranquil plot of land alongside Highway 15, exemplifies a range of renewable energy possibilities.
The back of the Solar Center hosts a solar system that distills water for the batteries used in the solar panels. Two outdoor showers use water heated by the sun in wide, coiled green hoses. Land also is set aside for reforestation, and at the center of the plot sits a squat, brown building, constructed entirely from the area''s natural materials, called El Tesoro del Sol, where the solar youth group meets.
"Mostly government does things at large levels. Those kinds of actions need to be complemented with things that are being done at the low level, at the community level," Kinne said. "Its impact hasn''t been in numbers of panels put up, but in creating a working example of low-income people who have been marginalized — land-mine victims, indigenous women, young people — having a say in doing innovations that are taken up by others."
Perhaps the most popular attraction of the Solar Center is La Casita Solar, a restaurant with slick round wooden tables and chairs set under a wide awning. The restaurant uses a variety of methods to prepare food: different types of solar cookers, an improved firewood oven that produces less smoke and keeps kitchen air fresh, and biomass cookers that burn waste from the area''s sugar cane fields.
Behind the restaurant are solar ovens: bright blue, four-legged wooden contraptions with a pane of glass over a compartment for food and a sheet of aluminum foil on the bottom of the lid to reflect light and intensify the heat. A path leads from the solar cookers to the bathrooms, where pipes are routed to an underground biogas stove powered by waste, both human and animal, Komp said.
The restaurant is open to the public, but business can be slow. Some days, no customers visit at all. While the restaurant is an example of sustainable cooking and the first of its kind in Latin America, according to Kinne, Lyndsey Chapman, the Grupo Fénix international relations coordinator, said it''s also an example of work in the solar community that may not be tailored to the knowledge of the people living there.
The women who run it, a group known as the Mujeres Solares, have little to no experience starting or maintaining a business, Chapman said.
"The women went with it because it was [Susan''s] dream," Chapman said. "I know it''s the biggest struggle the cooperative has had how to make that a sustainable and working business."
The Mujeres Solares, or Solar Women of Totogalpa, also build solar cookers, host students in their homes, teach others how to build the ovens and plan other projects, such as constructing adobe buildings with natural resources, as in El Tesoro del Sol.
López is the spokesperson for the leadership of the Mujeres Solares. She acts as an adviser to the president, and if the president is absent from a biweekly Monday meeting, López attends instead.
The Mujeres Solares are a central part of the solar community. And what they represent goes beyond their solar work. One aim of Grupo Fénix is what Kinne calls "deep empowerment," helping the community build its own foundation to better the standard of living from the ground up.
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