Clean Pursuits + Somos Amigos = Solar4Somos
On October 16, 2010, I am running the Oil Creek 100 mile endurance run in Pennsylvania to promote the Solar4Somos project. The Clean Pursuits team aims to raise $35,000 to support a sustainable energy solution for the clinic and school buildings in El Naranjito.If all goes well, we'll be back to El Naranjito in a little less than a year to install a new solar energy system for the Somos Amigos clinic and school buildings.
Great new site redesign: http://thegreenlightdistrikt.com, and on FB now too.
The system, the funds, the run - details coming soon.
More about Somos Amigos: http://somosamigos.org.
Along with a group of engineering students, a team of Villanova students are currently working to implement a Micro-Hydro Electrification System in the area of Arenas Blancas in Waslala, Nicaragua to provide 60 households with electricity. By providing this community with electricity, businesses will develop, health and living conditions will improve, and the average level of education will increase. As experienced in a nearby community, Ocote Tuma, with a Micro-Hydro Electrification System in place, the number of households increased by 40% in two years, bringing economic growth, new business opportunities, and a tighter community. While the system is being built in Arenas Blancas in the spring of 2011, the team will concurrently implement an educational program about savings, payment programs, and maintenance of the system itself to ensure long term sustainability.
As in my recent GLD post, I'd have to disagree. Grunts need new jobs. New jobs require breakthroughs, or else, the carbon quo.
Our love affair with dazzling inventions and famous visionaries now imperils humanity. It endangers us because we're in an unprecedented crisis — climate change — that distinctly, even uniquely, requires not new ideas and technological innovation but a regrounding in brass-tacks-dirty-fingernail implementation of what we already know, coupled with enormously hard work almost literally for its own sake. And a solution to the problem emphatically replaces fame, glory, and radical innovation with the same kind of rote collectivism that made settling the West possible.
But wait! you say. Aren't great thinkers going to innovate us out of this mess with amazing new clean energy technologies?
Returning from the Somos Amigos energy and water systems audit trip to the DR. Lots to follow, but some of the highlight pics before we go wheels up.
My first contribution to the Green Light Distrikt - an amazing online/ offline resource for all things Cleantech in Boston (and beyond):
http://thegreenlightdistrikt.com/2010/06/08/cleantech-development-vs-deployment/Then DC > Tampa > Miami > and finally to the DR, where JK and I will rendezvous with Somos Amigos in the town of El Naranjito. We'll spend the next few days sizing up the electrical and water systems, and supporting clinic operations. If all goes well, we'll return in good time with some solar and/or UV technology solutions.
More info:What a way to see Africa.
