As Shane mentioned earlier, he and I spent the whole weekend at a Green Empowerment workshop covering solar, solar water pumps, wind turbines, and a few other topics related to energy development in the developing world. It was about 20 hours of total immersion in how to scope, install, and maintain appropriate technology. Not entirely what I was expecting, but cool nonetheless.
For me, the most beneficial component to the workshop was the hands-on experience in assessing, say, water demands of a village and determining how many watts the solar panels had to provide to the pump in order to meet the demand. Whereas I don’t claim to be an expert in this arena, I feel comfortable in saying I would be a good assistant to this part of the project in the field. It’s also sweet that we now have notebooks full of slides and equations to reference back to. I think Shane and I could definitely put together a whiz-bang session for the fall retreat.
On the other hand, I think I had hoped the workshop would cover more of the cultural/social/political issues you can run into (although these are largely dependent on the country you work in). There’s quirks that come up in every project, and I would’ve loved to hear a roundtable of different scenarios Green Empowerment has had to address. I would’ve also liked to cover project design more in depth, but I suppose that’s why this was a technical workshop and not a learn everything workshop.
Overall, though, it was a great weekend spent learning about how to implement solar and wind installations.
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