Power from the People: The developing world generates innovative strategies for renewable energy
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May-June 2009
by Elizabeth Ryan
Off the West African coast on the Cape Verde Islands, reports the IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks) news service (Jan. 9, 2009), the Serra Malagueta community of Santiago Island is pioneering a technique called “fog harvesting,” which uses giant double-sided netting to collect fog and filter it into the water supply. The area boasts three times as much rain as the country’s annual average, making it an ideal location for the 15 nets. One local water engineer estimates that on a day with ample wind and fog the 200 square meters of netting can capture some 4,000 liters of water—invaluable for a country that’s faced mass emigration and death due to drought conditions.
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Beyond targeting specific renewable resources to mine, one community has focused on a model for managing them. Lucia Ortiz writes for New Internationalist (Jan.-Feb. 2009) that some 6,000 people in southern Brazil resisted the region’s mid-1990s shift toward energy privatization and have successfully managed their own energy cooperative for more than a decade. The group holds open assemblies to discuss key decisions, generates its own electricity—mostly from two small hydro dams—and uses sugarcane to produce ethanol fuel. To determine their bills, community members track their own energy use and report it via an honor system—which eliminates the cost of monthly meter readings (staff members read meters annually for verification).
The group’s move toward independence has inspired other co-ops in the area to localize their energy economies. In Porto Alegre, Ortiz and other residents have formed a movement called “How to live in the city in times of climate crisis and peak oil.” The group’s monthly gatherings cultivate an exchange of ideas about urban and rural living. “Everybody is learning more,” Ortiz writes, “and rethinking the way that we can be organized to be less energy demanding.”
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