Sitting on a bench in the dirt-floor living room of his house in the Amazon, the yucca farmer Danilo Orguera proudly displays the head of a jaguar that he harpooned four years ago in a nearby river: an enduring symbol of the coexistence here between man and nature. Yet while their closeness to wilderness still embodies the Quechua jungle experience, Danilo’s 25-year-old schoolteacher nephew, Jose Daniel, says that what’s needed most now in Amazonian communities like these is photovoltaics (PV). Earlier this summer, engineers came to their remote village, named Curaray, and installed a 1.6 kilowatt array of solar modules; the system now powers three water pumps, filling a 50,000-liter tank which delivers clean drinking water for the first time to all 350 residents in the community.
Now, Curaray’s residents – who spend between $10 and $20 per month (7 and 14 euros) on the diesel fuel, candles and batteries that provide their only source of light – are thirsting for more PV.
»We need solar power for the school. We want to build an audio-virtual station,« says Jose Daniel. »We own [donated] computers that are ready to use, but we can’t do anything with them; we need electricity to teach the kids so they can finish third grade here with knowledge of computers, then go to the cities to continue their studies.«
A middle-aged woman named Gina Frefa, who is standing nearby with her children, echoes him, pleading: »Will you help us get modules put on every house? Can you do everything possible to get [PV] here so that we can light our homes and our children can study?«
The electrification of Curaray – which is located on the edge of Yasuni National Park, one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth – is significant in that it is the first successful, non-diesel-fueled water pump system in this part of the Amazon, and also because it was planned and carried out by local engineers and government officials, paving the way for future locally administered PV programs of this sort, which could bypass the cumbersome bureaucracy, costs and delays of federal planners.
»This has created lots of expectation and hope in the region for innovative solar projects,« said Henry Salazar, a contractor who built the $250,000 system along with Peter May, a German expatriate with the Quito-based PV integrator Codeso. Three additional PV-powered water pumping projects – funded by the local municipality, with the aim of serving 600 families – are scheduled for 2011 in this sprawling region known as Arajuno, where 95 percent of the population is indigenous.
»The people of Curaray never thought they’d have water, that [this technology] would work,« said Franklin Sanmartin, a government technician who coordinated the project from Puyo, the provincial capital. »Now they’re really happy it functions, and the municipality wants to do so much more. PV is a new type of solution for us in Ecuador.«
Outsized solar ambitions
New in some respects, yes, and not so new in others.
The fact is that Ecuador has, for decades, been flirting with photovoltaics as a potential answer for the hundreds of thousands of rural, mostly indigenous poor families that are still living without electricity – from the volcano-strewn Sierra around the capital, Quito, to the remote lowlands of Esmeraldas bordering Colombia and the vast, sweeping terrain of the Amazon rainforest in the »Oriente.«
As early as 1982 the country passed a Ley de Fomento de Energias No Convencionales as it employed scientists at the Instituto Nacional de Energia to research photovoltaic and other forms of distributive renewable power. By the 1990s, it created the Consejo Nacional de Electricidad (CONELEC), a government regulatory and control agency that paved the way for some of the earliest off-grid rural PV installations. Then, in 2000, Ecuador passed Regulacion 0906, establishing a Feed-in Tariff that offered producers a lofty 52¢ per kWh (37 euro cents) of PV energy they generated.
The legislation was flawed, however, in that it failed to provide a legal framework to enforce the payments; as a result, government didn’t pay the utility companies and the utilities didn’t pay the producers. As Santiago Sanchez, general director of the Quito-based solar integrator EnerPro, said: »You were entitled to get paid [for the PV energy you produced] but nobody assured you that the money was available. The FIT was there but it was not applicable at all.«
Nonetheless, by 2003, a 10 percent electricity tax on commercial and industrial businesses was generating tens of millions of dollars annually for the Fondo de Electrificacion Rural Urbano Marginal (FERUM), which NGOs and small solar companies tapped into to install hundreds of early off-grid PV systems across Ecuador’s isolated regions.
Following President Correa’s election in 2006, FERUM was dissolved in favor of a weaker government plan to invest just $10 million (7 million euros) to expand renewables to rural areas. During 2007, however, something bigger happened. The Ministerio de Energia y Minas split into two ministries: the Ministerio de Recursos Naturales No Renovables, and the Ministerio de Electricidad y Energia Renovable. The creation of Latin America’s first ministry – and reportedly only the second in the world, after India’s – devoted specifically to renewable energy has laid the groundwork for more ambitious solar programs to follow.
Most immediate attention has gone to President Correa’s $52 million (37 million euros) Programa de Electrificacion Rural para Viviendas de la Amazonia (PERVA), announced in September, which seeks to install 200 watt PV systems on 15,000 homes across the jungle region by 2012. The project, whose total of 3 megawatts will more than double the estimated 1.4 megawatts of off-grid PV that is currently installed nationwide, could help fulfill a hefty promise that Correa made: to electrify the Andean nation completely by 2020. With up to 15 percent of the country’s nearly 15 million people still lacking access to electricity, it’s a tall order.
There are supporters, however, who think it can be done despite the costs, distances and other complexities involved in jungle installations. »I’ve been in meetings with President Correa. He’s a very impulsive, very visceral type of person – and if he says that by 2012, 15,000 residential PV systems will be installed, that means, for him, that they will be,« said Milton Balseca, a PV installer and consultant who has played an active role in Ecuador’s rural electrification efforts in recent years.
»For Latin America this is a lot of money. We’re talking about a very serious program,« added Camilo Pazmino, who formerly owned the integrator Isoequinoccial (a subsidiary of Isofoton) and who in September started a new Quito-based PV installation business called Electria Andina, a branch of the Spanish company Electria. »Some 75,000 people will be directly affected [by PERVA] and 100,000 including the people around them. Taking into account that the resources of the state are limited, this is an important base for development,« he said.
And not only is the president’s promise to »see every family living with light during the time of his administration an excellent goal,« added Balseca. But given the country’s privileged geography – located directly on the equator, where light rays hit the earth with an intensity, and a consistency, unsurpassed in most places worldwide – the achievement might just be possible.
Sunlight at the »middle of the world«
At the office of the Corporacion para la Investigacion Energetica (CIE), in downtown Quito, we sat down with Alfredo Mena to learn more about what makes Ecuador such an ideal place for photovoltaics. In 2008, CIE published a 50-page »Atlas Solar,« sponsored by the state energy regulator CONELEC, revealing the extent to which Ecuador’s location at »la mitad del mundo« is responsible for its extremely high solar irradiation levels. The study, which received assistance from the National Renewable Energies Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado, US, and took six years of research to complete, is a valuable tool because it pinpoints how much solar irradiation reaches the country at any location during any month of the year, thus indicating to energy planners the most ideal places to install PV.
»We have an advantage here in Ecuador: we’re at the middle of the earth,« said Mena as he turned the broad, orange- and yellow-colored map pages of the book. After studying high voltage techniques at the Technische Universitat in Braunschweig, Germany, Mena taught electrical engineering at Quito’s Universidad Politecnica in addition to running the state energy company Empresa Electrica in the 1980s, and serving in other high-level positions in the country’s electricity sector.
»If you install PV modules here, it’s enough to orient them for the hours that the sun is shifting from east to west without using a double axis [because] the solar irradiation here is so high,« he said. »We have more irradiation than Peru or Bolivia.«
Just how much is he talking about? On average, the country receives about 2.5 kWh per square meter per day. The region of Loja, in the south, typically receives between 4.5 and 5 kWh; in a place like Pichincha, in the highland Sierra north of Quito, irradiation in August averages 5.4 kWh and can reach as much as 6.52 kWh per square meter per day at its peak. Though Mena led unsuccessful efforts to promote a 50 megawatt PV farm installation in Pichincha several years ago, there is now talk of a Japanese government-financed plan to build a 250 kilowatt grid-tied array in the same, sun-rich spot, which will power water pumps to provide drinking water and irrigation to some 200 farming families.
Aside from producing energy through PV, said Mena, other industries in Ecuador will benefit from the »Atlas Solar« as well.
»Ecuador is, for example, a big producer and exporter of flowers, and flowers need lots of light to be able to grow. We can use these [irradiation] facts to know where to grow those and other plants, depending how much energy gets produced there each year,« he said.
But before the book can achieve the full use for which it was made, he added, Ecuador must »take small but very concrete steps to define a national policy for renewables that is much clearer than the policy we have now. We need legislation that allows solar energy to enter the grid with incentives so it can compete with other forms of energy.«
Grid-tied: few and far between
Mena’s words may sound like wishful thinking, seeing that nearly every PV system installed to date in Ecuador has been off-grid – a trend which, given the needs of the rural population, isn’t likely to change anytime soon. In fact, PHOTON discovered only two grid-tied systems to be operating in the entire Andean country.
The first one that was installed here, in 2002, is a 10 kilowatt roof-mounted array consisting of 100 100 watt Isofoton modules, which the Spanish company donated to the Museo Guayasamin in the Bella Vista zone overlooking Quito. The system stands next to a giant stone mausoleum known as the Capilla del Hombre, built in honor of Ecuador’s most famous modern painter, Oswaldo Guayasamin, and has become something of a landmark in the city. The modules, which are arranged in the eight-pointed symbol of the Tuncahuan sun god – in Quechua, »Inti« – are located atop an excavation site where 12 pre-Colombian tombs were discovered in 1999, immediately following the artist’s death. Guayasamin’s son, Pablo, who runs the Fundacion Guayasamin, said the solar array fulfils a piece of his father’s dream.
»It’s about supporting culture and defense of the environment, and showing the whole world that human beings, with new technology, can make a better world without oil consumption and harmful energy production,« he said. »It’s an attraction to the public, to know that we are using solar energy.«
The country’s second grid-tied system, which the Quito-based company EnerPro installed at a remote football field in April of 2009, gives a clearer perspective on the frustrations involved in connecting to the grid in Ecuador – and the reason why more people aren’t doing it.
The 7 kilowatt, $150,000 array, funded by the Ministry of Electricity and Renewable Energy, consists of 40 175 watt ET Solar modules along with 2 Outback inverters and 12 Coopower batteries which serve as backup. Located in Juncal, three hours north of the capital, the system generates enough power, said EnerPro’s general manager, Santiago Sanchez, to light up half the football pitch. Yet without any clear regulations in place since the FIT was revoked last year, »you are allowed to connect to the grid but you’re not entitled to get any money for it. You just give away your energy for free,« he said.
Sanchez, who received one Masters degree in power engineering from Iowa State University and a second one in renewable energy from Oldenburg University, Germany, formerly served as the Sub-Secretary for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency in the Ministry of Energy and Mines, before it split into two ministries. Nowadays, his 6-person company is one of the most successful integrators in the country, recording some $4 million (2.85 million euros) in PV sales since 2008 and installing about 1,200 off-grid residential systems nationwide. Most recently, EnerPro completed a $1.6 million (1.14 million euros) project installing 150 watt systems, using Hengji modules and Samlex inverters, on 574 households located in 29 separate communities throughout the Amazon.
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The challenges of installing in such remote places – the extreme cost, distance and time of transport; the uncertain weather conditions; and the lack of knowledge among locals about how to maintain smoothly functioning systems – pose special difficulties that integrators in more developed countries rarely face. (For example, the expense of transporting materials by plane and boat into the Amazon, then training new users how to maintain the system, typically raises module costs to high as $16 per installed watt.)
Not to mention the other, special risk of installing PV in the Ecuadorian jungle: attack by guerillas. In the Esmeraldas region of the north, members of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombiana (FARC) frequently cross into Ecuador, and often stay living there, using the border area as a refuge point. On numerous occasions, the FARC have stolen PV systems from the communities; as Diego Egas of the Corporacion Electrica del Ecuador, said: »They need this type of energy and they’ve learned how the systems work, so when they find out a new [PV array] has been installed, they rob it.« While the risk of actual violence is low, installers in guerilla zones have learned to use discretion. »You don’t see, you don’t talk, you don’t hear – you just do your job [installing the systems] and that’s all,« added Sanchez with a half-smile.
Darwin’s zero carbon legacy
In addition to the Amazon, Esmeraldas and the small island communities around the Gulf of Guayaquil, which is in the country’s southwest, there is a fourth (and even more idyllic) area where Ecuador is establishing a strong presence of photovoltaics: the Galapagos Islands.
Located some 1,000 kilometers west in the Pacific Ocean, the bio-diverse archipelago that Charles Darwin brought to the world’s attention with his 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species is now on the cusp of a new ecological era: Net Zero Carbon. Thanks to foreign investment and a United Nations-sponsored project called Energias Renovables para los Galapagos (ERGAL), PV already exists on the islands in the form of a 21 kilowatt solar park, located on Isla Floreana – and that is just the beginning.
According to Leonardo Zaragozin, who heads the ERGAL project from his office in Quito, the goal is to create a renewable energy mini-grid on the islands – which receive up to 200,000 visitors annually – so that they are fully (or close to fully) powered by renewable energy by 2020. But installing PV, wind and biomass stations in the Galapagos is a more delicate task than it might seem, said Zaragozin, due to the fragile formation of the earth there. »The Galapagos isn’t just any place; it has completely different conditions. For example, to mount installations on ground formed by lava as opposed to solid rock,« he said.
The Galapagos, whose population of 17,000 is spread our across the four inhabited islands of Isabela, San Cristobal, Floreana and Santa Cruz, produces 75 percent of its emissions through road and sea transport, while the remaining 25 percent comes from electricity production. Initially, through the German development group, KfW, and a Japan International Cooperation System (JICS) project, the goal was to install – and connect to an inter-island grid – up to 500 kilowatts of PV capacity. But in September that number quadrupled when the Ecuadorian and South Korean governments signed an agreement to build a 1.5 megawatt PV facility. That, combined with a 2.25 megawatt wind farm and a 2.4 megawatt biomass plant, is estimated to get the islands to about an 80 percent production of renewables by 2020. The goal is to develop a fleet of small electric – or entirely solar-powered – vehicles that operate on the road and sea, ultimately raising that figure to 100 percent and fulfilling the Galapagos’ Net Zero Carbon aim.
»We’re talking about an inexhaustible fuel: the solar resource on the Galapagos will never be used up,« said Zaragozin. True, residents and tourists are continually increasing the energy demands through greater use refrigerators, air conditioning and other modern amenities, he added. But, »if PV electrification works well here, there is talk about repeating this kind of program on [Chile’s] Easter Island. The Galapagos renewables project is one of the pillars of our government’s energy plan.
»It is ambitious, but it can be done.«
No PV without sustainability
Yet these days, whether it is in the Galapagos, the Sierra or the rainforest east of the Andes, there is one word that PV enthusiasts across Ecuador are using to describe the eventual success, or failure, of the country’s solar project: sustainability.
»The problem is a problem of sustainability,« said Alfredo Mena of CIE. »The modules need maintenance and care, the batteries must be changed, the equipment kept clean.« Camilo Pazmino of Electria Andina echoed him: »We need to make an inventory of all the PV that’s been installed in Ecuador, because most of it is abandoned for lack of organization in the communities. It’s about sustainability. With very little money you could make them work again.«
Indeed, one of the reasons that installers like Santiago Sanchez, Pazmino and others are forced to charge between $10 and $16 per installed watt of PV – and a reason why the government’s PV rural electrification program appears at times to be moving so slowly – is the intense effort required, both in hours and resources, to train local people how to maintain and maximize their PV systems.
One of those especially in tune with the concept of sustainable PV development is Guillermo Verdesoto, the founder and president of Fundacion Ecuatoriana de Tecnologia Apropriada (FEDETA), an NGO that has installed some 1,500 PV systems in indigenous communities throughout the country. In 2001, the group participated in a multi-national project with Peru and Bolivia called Opciones Energeticas para Comunidades Aisladas de America Latina, aimed at increasing PV in places where the grid didn’t reach.
By 2003, FEDETA was installing small projects that served dozens of families at a time; for Verdesoto, making systems succeed not only meant installing them and leaving them in the communities, but training the users how to upkeep them. »This is our strength. There are cases where people ask you to install, then in the execution of the project they say, ›No, let us do the rest,‹ and it never works. In a short time the modules are serving as tables to eat off of. We look for alliances with communities [in our PV jobs]. We emphasize the social factor.«
Compared to Peru, which plans to install solar modules on 140,000 households over the next four years, Ecuador’s commitment to electrify 15,000 homes in a way looks meager, added Verdesoto. »It’s just 10 percent of what they’re doing in Peru; we’re talking about 1 million people (250,000 families) without electricity in the Ecuadorian Amazon. 15,000 installations is nothing [when] we need so much.«
Many here, in fact, doubt the effectiveness of the government’s PERVA program – and, for that matter, its other rural PV installation projects – precisely because of the under-emphasis placed on training. »I don’t see a real interest from the government in this. To install PV in some isolated areas perhaps, yes. But not with any concrete program,« said CIE’s Mena.
An even more skeptical voice comes from Milton Balseca, the Quito-based PV consultant who once worked for Ecuador’s Instituto Nacional de Energia and, later on, tried to develop a profitable business model for installing off-grid PV through the EU-financed Servicios Basicos de Iniciativa Local para la Amazonia Ecuatoriana (SILAE). »No somos ingenieres, somos misionarios de la electrificacion rural,« said Balseca, describing his decades-long commitment to bringing solar to rural communities. »En vez de la Biblia, vamos con un inversor.«
More than anything, however, Balseca has watched rural installations fail, one after the next, due to installers simply leaving the equipment in the communities without training or helping when those systems need repairs. Above all, he said, the communities themselves must invest in the projects in order for them to work.
»The [installation] business has to provide the energy to the communities, but the residents have to involve themselves, too. Everything the government has given them for free does not work, because the people don’t take care of it.«
A new platform raises hopes
With the adoption of not only PERVA, but other policies under President Correa, Ecuador seems determined to change that approach – and to start getting better results. Since suspending its ineffectual Feed-in Tariff last December, the Ministry of Electricity and Renewable Energy has promised to release a more concrete national renewable energy policy, perhaps as early as the end of this year, which could offer new incentives for the private sector to get behind solar investments.
In the meantime, 2010 has seen the creation of a new state agency, the Corporacion Electrica del Ecuador (CELEC), within which a Gerencia de Energias Renovables will manage all future government plans relating to photovoltaics and other renewables. As the single government body responsible for energy generation, transmission and distribution throughout the country (taking over for the job currently assumed by 18 state-owned distribution companies), CELEC clearly has its hands full; but according to Diego Egas, coordinator of the agency’s PV development efforts, ambitions are running high. “First we’ll [electrify] the Amazon, which is the most vulnerable zone in our country, then the coast in another year, and we’ll attack the Sierra after that,« he said.
Doing a price breakdown on PERVA, Egas acknowledges that each installed system comes out at a supremely high cost: based on the $52 million (37 million euros) budget, each of the 15,000 home PV systems will price at close to $3,500. At 200 watts per system, that’s a sum of $17.50 (12,50 euros) per watt. However, Egas rushed to defend the program’s cost, claiming that the materials, transportation and installation price was only one element, and that the »capacitation« and »socialization« aspects – ie, what is roundly being called »sustainability« – are absorbing a great part of the cost.
Egas refused to say which installer companies would be contracted for the giant job, or which modules and other PV technologies would be employed. What he revealed, however, is the new payment scheme – akin to the kind suggested by Balseca – which will be in effect: rather than receiving the PV systems for free and owning them, families will »purchase« the energy they generate through $5 (3,60 euros) monthly payments, which they’ll deposit into a savings account that will serve for maintenance and repairs to their systems. As most families currently spend between $10 and $20 (7 and 14 euros) on their monthly lighting needs, the program will amount to great savings.
More importantly, said Egas, the plan could inch Ecuador one step closer to the boom in solar power that many have been waiting for. »We’re opening the field. Renewable energy was always an unknown entity in our country; to talk about renewables, until today, was something rarely done,« he said. But now, »we are promoting and demonstrating [PV], and educating people about it with concrete works,« he said.
Bringing power to the tropics
Back down in the tropical Oriente, in a small village called Nueva Libertad, we met with a 37-year-old school teacher named Klever Grefa, who showed off the recently completed installation of a photovoltaic »telecentro« at his school. Like the PERVA project, Euro-Solar’s $6.6 million (4.7 million euros) campaign to install 91 telecentros across Ecuador’s off-grid regions is both extremely costly ($72,500, or 52,000 euros) and extremely bureaucratic, partly because it’s driven by the same goal to »capacitate« communities with the knowledge they need to sustain their systems.
The 1.1 kilowatt array in Nueva Libertad, identical to the 73 other Euro-Solar arrays that have already been installed, is composed of 7 160 watt monocrystalline modules made by Perlight, which are mounted on a 4-meter-tall aluminum tower behind the new cement learning center. With a FlexMax Outback regulator, 2 Steca AJ Sine Wave inverters, and 12 2-volt gel batteries, the school is now powering the five computers, refrigerator with vaccines, water purifier, projector, telephone, printer and internet service that formed the Euro-Solar package. And for students like 12-year-old Marco Grefa, who is a cousin of the teacher, the access to technology is opening up a new world. What is it he likes most about the machines? »To see other people. To play games. To write,« he said.
»Before there was nothing. It’s extremely important for us to have these,« said Klever, pointing at the modules. »All studies are based on the internet today. And our kids are growing up without that knowledge, so when they leave for high school they run into problems. We want them to get that base education here, and now they can.«
Further into the Amazonian interior, in the village of Curaray, the German installer Peter May was looking over the 1.6 kilowatt array of Zytech modules that he installed this summer, which are currently powering three water pumps that deliver clean drinking water daily to the entire village. Soon, with the help of the Arajuno municipal government, he intends to install 21 50 watt Lorentz modules in the neighboring village of San Jose, putting in a pump system there as well.
May, who is tall and wiry, with leathery skin and dusty blond hair, moved to Ecuador from his native Hamburg nearly 25 years ago. Since then, through his company Codeso, he has almost single-handedly installed PV systems in some 60 communities across the country. There are never enough resources to give communities all the solar power they need, he said. But system by system, village by village, he is working to at least bring them something.
»“They have no services. They need drinking water. Between three and four out of 10 children die because of conditions in the jungle, mostly water related to sickness,« he said. For that reason, »if a town must decide between [installing PV for] lighting or water, in most cases I suggest water. There simply isn’t money for both.«