Editors' blog
Martin Wright, 15 Jun 2010
So just how clever is Barack Obama, eh?
There we were, puzzling over the waves of ...
Downloading the sun in Suruacá
There is no road to Suruacá. The river’s the highway for small Amazonian settlements like this. A full six hours by boat up the Tapajós from the nearest sizeable town, it’s not where you’d expect to find the model for a modern, linked community. Yet Suruacá’s 100 or so families are pioneers in a project bringing internet access to local people – via the region’s first solar powered telecentre.
Providing access to energy is one of Brazil’s great development challenges, with an estimated 12 million people currently living out of range of electricity supplies. Sunshine, though, is something the country does have in plenty. And for the last six years a 2kW photovoltaic system on the top of the telecentre in Suruacá has been turning that sunshine into electric power. It’s enough to run four computers for eight hours a day, plus a local radio service that’s on air for four hours a day, the satellite that hooks the whole thing up to the internet, and a set of associated printers, scanners and cameras.
Initial funding came from the US development agency USAID, working alongside local NGOs with the GreenStar Corporation as technology providers. The idea was that an emerging internet enabled network should become increasingly self-sustaining by stimulating local entrepreneurial activity. So project manager Bob Bortner helped create a Community Empowerment Network to provide ongoing assistance, encourage the creation of more local telecentres, build internet awareness and skills – and facilitate relationships via the web.
For instance, the community of Xixhua, 500km to the northwest, already has some experience of how internet access can open up a market for ecotourism and local art and artefacts. So links with Xixhua can help Suruacá see some of the opportunities – and the pitfalls. For all the benefits of email and web access, the community wants the technology to sustain their way of life, not undermine it.
It’s been part of the essence of the Suruacá project that it is community driven. It was local people who designed and put up the telecentre building, right next to the school – where the children soon found out that computers were for education as well as playing games. Access to information over the internet has helped hugely with healthcare too. It has also inspired the launch of a micro hydro scheme to improve the availability of electricity for local homes. And with Suruacá’s existing generator only switched on in the evenings, local interest in off-grid renewables is surely set to grow.
Access all areas
The mean streets of São Paulo seem far removed from rural Amazonia – but lack of electric power points in poor communities is a common thread. So is the potential for solar powered internet solutions. And Professor Marcelo Zuffo at São Paulo University, a powerhouse of innovation in what he calls “interactive electronics”, has now come up with “wifi access in a box”. It doesn’t need plugging into anything, and it’s inexpensive and small enough to hang from a lamp-post or a tree, but Zuffo believes it could turbocharge such “IT for all” access initiatives as the global One Laptop Per Child scheme.
Essentially what he has done is combine a solar panel with a cheap motorcycle battery to store the charge, and some electronic circuitry to run a mini wifi access point. If a number of access points are set up in a honeycomb configuration, each one will provide relaying services to the others, giving a wide area network with the best available links to the internet. The hard part is the energy management.
It’s good enough already to keep running for two days without sunlight, says Zuffo, but he’s aiming to stretch that to ten – enough for real standalone capability even in the dark days of the rainy season. – Roger East
The mean streets of São Paulo seem far removed from rural Amazonia – but lack of electric power points in poor communities is a common thread. So is the potential for solar powered internet solutions. And Professor Marcelo Zuffo at São Paulo University, a powerhouse of innovation in what he calls “interactive electronics”, has now come up with “wifi access in a box”. It doesn’t need plugging into anything, and it’s inexpensive and small enough to hang from a lamp-post or a tree, but Zuffo believes it could turbocharge such “IT for all” access initiatives as the global One Laptop Per Child scheme.
Essentially what he has done is combine a solar panel with a cheap motorcycle battery to store the charge, and some electronic circuitry to run a mini wifi access point. If a number of access points are set up in a honeycomb configuration, each one will provide relaying services to the others, giving a wide area network with the best available links to the internet. The hard part is the energy management.
It’s good enough already to keep running for two days without sunlight, says Zuffo, but he’s aiming to stretch that to ten – enough for real standalone capability even in the dark days of the rainy season. – Roger East
Sun and speed
Energy giant Petrobras is taking a first step towards solar power for the nation’s vast motorbike fleet, with a new charging station in Rio de Janeiro. The station, which uses grid power at night, is powered by photovoltaics while the sun’s up. There are currently just a few hundred electric bikes on Brazil’s roads, but Petrobras hopes to raise awareness of solar technology and the potential for change by providing infrastructure for bikes in places where it is hard to park, for example. According to the head of Petrobras’s distribution division, Edimar Machado, the solar charging stations will build “environmental awareness by showing people that it is possible to use energy without harming the environment”. – Ben Tuxworth
Energy giant Petrobras is taking a first step towards solar power for the nation’s vast motorbike fleet, with a new charging station in Rio de Janeiro. The station, which uses grid power at night, is powered by photovoltaics while the sun’s up. There are currently just a few hundred electric bikes on Brazil’s roads, but Petrobras hopes to raise awareness of solar technology and the potential for change by providing infrastructure for bikes in places where it is hard to park, for example. According to the head of Petrobras’s distribution division, Edimar Machado, the solar charging stations will build “environmental awareness by showing people that it is possible to use energy without harming the environment”. – Ben Tuxworth
– Roger East
8 March 2010
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In Suruacá, PV has powered four computers, eight hours a day, for six years.
credit: istockphotos9731034
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wifi in a box contraption
I like the sound of this 'wifi in a box contraption'. People are starting to see an internet connection as a basic human right due to its knowledge sharing capability. Whilst many people are restricted from access by poverty, initiatives like this open up the possibility of a good internet connection and the resulting benefits to many more people, particularly in remote communities.