Turning the lights back on in Terian

It was a big screen...

On my way back to the UK, I stopped off again in Singapore. While I was there I did a presentation at the Singapore Science Centre about my experiences at TONIBUNG and micro-hydro power.

I also talked about one of the villages which I had visited recently, Kampung Terian.

Kampung Terian's school

Kg. Terian  was the first community micro-hydro system in 2004 but has unfortunately been damaged over time and is currently not functioning. When I went to visit Kg Terian in April, my task was to survey the site to understand what work would be required to get the system running again, and assess how much it might cost.

Surveying

The village is in a really beautiful and remote area of the Crocker Range but they have been without a reliable electricity supply since 2015 when a lightning strike damaged the system. We stayed with a family there who are lucky enough to be able to afford a diesel generator – we had lights for a short time each evening for preparing and eating dinner, and for the kids to do their homework. Not all families can afford to run and maintain a diesel generator, and even for those who can, they were substantially better off when the micro-hydro system had been running. The electricity is limited to a few hours per day (at least for those families with diesel generators and when the road conditions are good enough to get access to fuel) and the constant drone of the diesel generators definitely detracts from the otherwise peaceful environment. There are also less obvious implications; we were told that without the reliable electricity supply, fewer grown-up children were now returning to the village from the towns and fewer people were engaging with the traditional crafts since they have to be more selective about what they do with their few hours of electricity in the evenings.

The number of people involved with traditional craft making
had increased when they had a functioning micro-hydro but has
now declined again

My experience with only a few hours of electricity per day was mainly small irritations. My phone battery died because I hadn’t remembered to charge it in the evening when the electricity was on, I had a lot of trouble trying to find a pen when the lights weren’t on (even with a battery-powered headtorch), and it was even more difficult to try to stumble to the outhouse toilet in the dark after generous servings of local rice wine!

The community have come up with a plan to get the system running again and make some upgrades to the design so that it is more efficient and robust in the coming years. The community micro-hydro committee will work alongside TONIBUNG over the next year to raise the funds, make the detailed design for the system improvements and then make the repairs. All of the work is done as part of a traditional style of community shared labour called Gotong Royong.  The way that it works in Terian, each household is required to contribute one person to support a day’s community work at least once per week. This system is an effective way to make improvements to the village because it keeps costs down and makes sure that everyone in the village is involved.

Gotong Royong (community work)

 The first step will be to replace the Electronic Load Controller which was damaged in the lightning strike. We have a crowd funding page to try and support that so if you are able to help us with financial support for this project, it would be really appreciated. If you want to find out more, my slide packs are here and here, and please check out the crowd-funding page here.

Sugarcane snacks

Continuing the ELC project and the Kinabalu Coders

My last few weeks with TONIBUNG ended up being pretty hectic so these posts are definitely overdue. Although they're a bit late now, I still think it's worth a few back-dated posts to fill you in... I’m back in the UK with a cup of tea, a free morning and no excuses so here’s the first of a few posts to wrap up my placement…

Having now returned to the UK, it’s a good time to let you know where the ELC project got to and where it’s going next. Working with the Kinabalu Coders at the Smart Space in Kota Kinabalu (KK), we finished manufacture of the ELC V2.5 prototype.

I promised before to tell you more about the Smart Space in KK, so keep reading… It is a very similar model to other Maker Spaces around the world and allows anyone to have free access to space and tools for collaborative projects.  The Smart Space in KK has been open for a couple of years as the host space for the Kinabalu Coders. The Kinabalu Coders includes communities which collaborate on software projects, 3-D printing projects, gaming and much more. The space is filled with various ongoing projects…

…including this one to upgrade the mechanical door handles so that they can be operated remotely ( they assured me that this was just to let people IN to the space!)

The Kinabalu Coders also organise regular public events. These include the annual RoBorneo event and Raspberry Pi Jams. Raspberry Jams are meetups for people interested in projects using Raspberry Pis (low-cost, high-performance computers, designed to be easy for anyone to learn to use). The Kinabalu Coders run these events like informal mini conferences with workshops on using Pis and showcasing of Raspberry Pi projects.

The annual RoBorneo event is a subsidised team robotics competition. It has events like robot dualing (think Robot Wars) and is held in a big mall in Kota Kinabalu so it’s easy for anyone to watch and get involved.

As for the TONIBUNG ELC project, we have another EWB-UK volunteer going out to TONIBUNG in July, Dan. Dan has been on a placement in the Phillipines working with SIBAT to develop a load controller there (see my post from our visit to SIBAT in October last year here) so is the perfect candidate to review the design. He will be comparing both designs and testing them further on the rig set-up at TONIBUNG. If all goes well with that then we could be able to put a pilot system in place for field testing in September.

Development and Prototyping

It's been a while since I wrote about our  project to design an Arduino-controlled Electronic Load Controller (ELC) but we've made some good progress so it's about time to give you an update! For a reminder of what the project's about take a look at my post from September introducing ELCs.

Ben and Rory and some of their colleagues at Strathclyde University in the UK have been working hard on the project, and we have been able to start construction of the "ELC V2+" here. The work at Strathclyde has involved students in their EWB-UK student branch and also 5th year undergraduate students who are contributing to the project as part of their masters project. The 5th year project includes some broader, forward-thinking  into how these systems could work as an intelligent mini-grid of several generators, and how the work could also be relevant for other parts of the world, against the backdrop of the Sustainable Development Goals.  Their project has also included a piece of work to develop a data-logging module which TONIBUNG could use to track usage and performance; it could be used to justify investments, and improve the efficiency of system maintenance and future designs.

There are 17 Sustainable Development Goals which came into force in Jan 2016. They replace the Global Millennium Goals and are signed by all member states of the United Nations. Image taken from UN website here. 

We used breadboard for testing the
 ELC prototype and trying out ideas

To develop the design we are building prototypes which means make a few one-off models to test the idea and then making changes to the next prototype design. "ELC V2" was an early proof-of-concept prototype which has now been developed into "ELC V2+" - this is mainly the same design but with some modifications to the connections, and improvements to the software which make it closer to a design which is ready for production. A key change is that "ELC V2+" uses a printed circuit board (PCB) rather than the breadboard and stripboard which have been used in the development of the design.

Breadboard is normally used for initial prototyping because it is low cost, and easy to make changes to the design and test different parts of the circuit in isolation. Stripboard  is an insulating baseboard with a regular grid of holes and parallel copper strips running in one direction across one side of the board. It is more permanent that breadboard so that you don't accidentally move components or wires out of position! Printed Circuit Board (PCB) is used once the design is less likely to change significantly - it has the circuit ready-printed and holes drilled in the right places for the components to be soldered into.

Stripboard was used for the design which was tested in Sept 2016 (right). The underside of the board has copper strips which components are connected to with solder (an example is on the left).

The advantage of progressing the design to PCB is that it is easier to share and replicate the design relatively quickly and without making errors - it is much easier to see when mistakes have been made because there are limited ways that the components can fit into the allocated holes and it is easy to visually compare the board to a diagram. This means it is an easy way for the students in Scotland to share their design with us so that we can construct it on the other side of the world!

"ELC V2+" is constructed on PCB. These pictures show it half-way through manufacture

I have been assembling the PCB with the help of the Kinabalu Coders in their Smart Space in Kota Kinabalu (KK). Their Smart Space is full of cool projects based on Raspberry Pis, Arduinos and 3D printing and is a similar idea to Maker Spaces which have started up in many cities around the world - it's open to the public and free to use. I'll explain more about what they do there in another blog post because we'll be back there later in the week to do some more work on the PCB. In the meantime, here is the team and our friends at the Smart Space in KK with the progress we've made on the PCB so far:

More on the KK Smart Space next week!

Pre-Feasibility Studies in the Upper Baram Basin - by Tash

At the end of January, two teams from TONIBUNG headed to Sarawak’s interior to investigate opportunities for new hydro installations. Travel time often makes up a large proportion of TONIBUNG’s field trips and this was no exception; reaching our first village, Long Palai, involved 2 car journeys, a flight and a short ride in a longboat.

The Baram river

At present, electricity in the Sarawak interior usually comes from household level diesel gensets. As well as being highly polluting, they are also exceptionally expensive to run; a single household can spend up to RM300 per month on fuel for basic lighting, charging and refrigeration needs. That’s £55 – or around 20% of the average monthly household income for rural Sarawak. The tariffs that TONIBUNG implement with their micro-hydro systems are designs to significantly undercut diesel alternatives (a typical example would be a tariff of RM1 / kWh, coming to around RM160 per month for an average household), providing the community with a clear incentive to switch to hydro power and support TONIBUNG by providing free labour and materials.

In the evening an open meeting was held to provide the villagers with an overview of micro-hydro and how TONIBUNG operate. Despite the late hour, levels of interest and support seemed high, which I suspect was fuelled by the enormous amount of betel nut being chewed throughout! We described the kind of rivers characteristics we were searching for and some locals agreed to take us to a couple of sites the next day.

Check out those ear lobes!

We set off into the jungle the following morning, escorted by a group of eager locals. It was sweaty and tiring, with bugs jumping out from every angle, treacherous tree roots trying to trip me up and the occasional river trying to sweep me away as I crossed it. The locals, however, seemed to effortlessly glide through the terrain at a ridiculously fast pace! We checked out two different sites, taking GPS coordinates and flow measurements, of which only one seemed feasible. The other lacked sufficient head to be financially viable. The potential is still unlikely to be sufficient to power the whole village, so a hybrid system would be recommended in Long Pasia.

GPS data

Once we had showered and de-leeched we crossed back over the river by boat, jumped back into the car and headed to Long Apu. Our visit followed the same format, with a village level meeting in the evening and more river exploring the following day. We identified two small rivers that could potentially provide hydro power to the village. Their proximity to each other means that a system with two separate penstocks feeding into the forebay could be feasible, allowing the hydro potential of both rivers to be harnessed.

Taking flow measurements

The output of these visits is a report that will be submitted to the Bruno Manser Foundation (BMF) in Switzerland. If you’ve never heard of Bruno, you should give him a Google. He was a Swiss botanist who spent time living with the then-nomadic Penan tribes and documenting Sarawak’s wildlife. He was responsible for first attracting conservation attention to Borneo, and eventually disappeared into the jungle with the Penan in 2000, never to be seen again. The report will contain information about the villages and a rough cost estimate for installing renewable energy systems in the villages. It’s BMF’s responsibility to decide how to allocate funds.

Despite systems being technically feasible in both villages, it is more likely that funding will be allocated to Long Apu due to social reasons. The population in Long Palai is both ageing and shrinking. This means that it would be difficult to mobilise a local workforce, and that the system may end up being underutilised as people from the village continue to move to other areas. The headman is unpopular and also ageing, and is expected to stand down in the next couple of years. This change of leadership so early in the project could lead to conflict. By contrast, Long Apu is growing in population, with a new longhouse currently under construction. The village is led by a very supportive headman, who even expressed some commitment to helping fundraise for the project.

Safety on Saturday

This morning I held a Health and Safety training session for TONIBUNG staff on electrical safety. The work here at TONIBUNG installing renewable electricity for remote communities can involve some potentially dangerous situations with electricity. It's also important that the communities are left with a safe system which they know how to look after without endangering themselves. Although we haven't had any serious accidents, we are making an effort at the moment to try and improve health & safety in the organisation and the communities we work with. Today was one of the first activities for 2017.

Having never run a session like this I wasn't sure how it would go but I think it was a pretty successful morning - everyone got involved with the activities and we had some good discussions about the risks and responsibilities involved with the work here. I'd put the pack together based on material from a course I'd done at work, information from the internet and some feedback from the guys at Engineers Without Borders UK. With some help from our new assistant manager at TONIBUNG I added some Malay translations to the slides and we ran the session in a mixture of Malay and English (sadly my Malay hasn't developed quickly enough for me to be able to do it in Malay!). I've put the English version of the slides here. Please get in touch if you can help improve these for next time or if you'd like a copy of the Malay/full powerpoint version.

Here are a few photos from earlier:

Brainstorming the risks in the workshop, when we commission systems, and in communities

The team who participated in the training session

The theory

It was good to get the younger guys working with the more experienced staff