From: SciDev
by- Syful Islam
Go on a tropical beach vacation and chances are you'll sip a piña colada or a mango passion as you watch the waves lap at the shore. The waste generated to make the key ingredient in those cocktails could be used to power up rural communities in South and Southeast Asia, a study suggests.
Researchers in the United States say agricultural waste from coconut and mango farming could generate significant amounts of off-grid electricity for rural communities in South and South-East Asia.
Many food crops have a tough, inedible part which cannot be used to feed livestock or fertilise fields. Examples of this material — known as 'endocarp' — include coconut, almond and pistachio shells, and the stones of mangoes, olives, plums, apricots and cherries.
Endocarp is high in a chemical compound known as lignin. High-lignin products can be heated to produce an energy-rich gas that can be used to generate electricity.
The researchers identified high-endocarp-producing regions of the world – and noted that coconut and mango agriculture account for 72 per cent of total global endocarp production. Coconut production alone accounted for 55 per cent.
Most coconut endocarp comes from South and South-East Asian countries, including Bangladesh, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.
They then overlaid these findings with energy consumption data to identify communities with little access to electricity, who could benefit from endocarp-based energy.
"We noticed that production was unevenly distributed around the globe, which could make a very significant contribution to the energy budget in some countries like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines, [as well as] regions of India," Tom Shearin, co-author and a systems analyst at University of Kentucky, United States, told SciDev.Net.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences , the researchers said endocarp bioenergy could meet up to 30 per cent of total energy needs in Sri Lanka, 25 per cent in the Philippines, 13 per cent in Indonesia, and 3 per cent in India.
Shearin said endocarp was preferable to crop-based biofuels as it had no value as a food item. "Its exploitation as energy source does not compete with food production," he said.
Wais Kabir, executive chairman of the Bangladesh Agriculture Research Institute, told SciDev.Net that most of the country's agricultural waste, including non-edible by-products, was already used to generate bioenergy.
"I don't think that supply of adequate volumes of coconut shell, [for example] to run a power plant, is possible at this stage until we go for its production in a planned way," he said.
The researchers acknowledged that efforts to scale up infrastructure to deliver decentralised bio-energy in developing countries would face economic, technical and social challenges.
Advocates of an endocarp-based energy sector would also have to persuade investors that it would be financially viable.
Abser Kamal, managing director of Grameen Shakti, a renewable energy firm in Bangladesh, said: "We have to check if these are cost-effective or not".
Islam Sharif, CEO of the Infrastructure Development Company Limited (IDCOL), a state-run renewable energy financing firm in Bangladesh, said IDCOL would encourage investment in endocarp-based energy production if it was found to be financially viable.
Original Article From: Imperial College
Green light to a prototype device for harvesting energy and clean drinking water from human waste.
A project from a team of researchers from Imperial College London, the University of Manchester and Durham University beat more than 2,000 other proposals to receive funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a prototype system for recovering drinkable water and harvesting hydrogen energy from human faecal waste.
The researchers believe the technology could provide an inexpensive device for people in the developing world to generate clean water and energy from waste and a sustainable source of hydrogen energy that could be used to power homes in developed countries.
The researchers say that the device will be portable, allowing installation in homes and remote locations. The technology is based on a porous scaffold that holds bacteria and metal nano-particles. When faecal sludge is filtered through the scaffolding these particles will react with the waste mater to generate the recycled resources. These can either be used immediately or stored for later use.
The first stage of the project will see the team developing a stand-alone sanitation device, making it easier and cheaper for people in developing countries to adopt the technology where large sewage networks may not exist. Where sewage infrastructure is in place, the technology could be hooked into the system, minimising implementation costs for home owners.
In the long-term, the researchers aim to further develop their device into a ‘pick and mix’ series of recycling units that can extract the types of resources most useful for users such as: electrolytes, used for generating electricity; methane, for energy; and ammonia, which is a widely used fertiliser. The team says their device would be an advantage over other systems currently on the market that can only recover one or two resources at most.
Dr Martyn McLachlan, Department of Materials at Imperial, says: “In the future, we may see homes in the UK generating their own clean water, energy and fertilizer simply by doing what comes naturally to us all once or twice day. More important are the implications for developing countries, where the provision of clean drinking water is essential for supporting life and self-generated energy could be used to support economic growth.”
The researchers plan to have a prototype ready to demonstrate by 2013. The project team and the concept were a product of a recent Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council "Inspire in the Physical Sciences" workshop.
From: Future Of Tech
by- Ariel Schwartz
Solar power has become the clean energy source du jour for the developing world, and for good reason — it’s relatively inexpensive and many solar panels are robust. But solar panels are often shipped internationally (or at least from distant locations), which makes them less than ideal, especially if a part needs to be fixed or replaced. Access:energy wants to bring a different kind of renewable energy — wind power — to Kenyans by teaching them to make their own turbines out of scrap metal and car parts.
More than 80 percent of Kenya’s population (about 30 million people) lacks access to electricity. The easiest way to get that power to residents is to teach them to make it. So Access:energy — a division of the Access:collective, which invests in appropriate technologies for East Africa — is teaching local Kenyan technicians to build the Night Heron wind turbine — a product that the organization calls the first "commercially viable, zero-import wind turbine."
The turbine generates power at two to three times lower cost than equivalent solar PV panels, can generate enough power for 50 rural homes (about 2.5 kWh per day) and, most importantly, can be built using locally sourced materials. The Night Heron turbines can also be laid out in modular arrays to accommodate growing need.
The uses are virtually endless: allowing people to charge mobile phones from home, giving clinics enough power to keep vaccines cool, providing non-polluting (read: non-kerosene) light for kids who want to study, and providing refrigeration for fishermen.
By teaching locals to build the turbines, Access:energy creates skilled jobs and breeds energy independence at the same time. It’s a big mission, but the organization is making progress. Access:energy recently announced that its first customer had put down money for a wind-powered "energy hub" for his house. Another energy hub is being built for a community radio station. And Access:energy has raised more than $15,000 on an IndieGoGo campaign (one perk: a hunky Kenyan mechanic calendar).
Check out the campaign here.
"We noticed that production was unevenly distributed around the globe, which could make a very significant contribution to the energy budget in some countries like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines, [as well as] regions of India," Tom Shearin, co-author and a systems analyst at University of Kentucky, United States, told SciDev.Net.
