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.