Electricity for >2000 people in rural Haiti

Dear friends,

To say the last six months has been a whirlwind would be a comic understatement. The ground has been shifting in many ways. But you know what? We've been finding our footing and pressing forward -- supported by fantastic partners and a phenomenal team.

Just look at this great thumbs up from Omelia, grid ambassador in Tiburon, this week. She's on site at the solar generation land to welcome engineers and builders from Green Energy Solutions and GENINOV, two companies working together with EarthSpark to repair and expand the microgrid solar generation system in Tiburon, Haiti this month. 

And that's not all. The Haitian Ministry of Public Works has been working with the EarthSpark team to hold kick off meetings with mayors from the six towns where we are preparing to build new grids. The careful orchestration across local and international engineering teams, municipal and national government representatives, public and private sector participants is happening in person, in virtual conference rooms, and over dozens of WhatsApp channels and official documents. Sometimes the power goes out and communication drops. Sometimes all air travel is cancelled and roads are impassible. But everybody adapts, and together we make progress.

Not all the news is good. Security in much of Haiti continues to deteriorate. EarthSpark lost a critical $250,000 in USAID funding which we are currently scrambling to somehow replace. Our exciting but nascent work in Puerto Rico has seen the termination of an EPA Community Change Grant to our local partner which was to support, among other things, the development of a much needed solar+battery microgrid in a vulnerable community in Puerto Rico.

But look at these "ground screws" that are going to support new solar panels in Tiburon! They're taller than Jean, our director of microgrid operations! These screws will be used to anchor the expanded solar array to the ground in Tiburon as we relaunch service there -- a full recovery with a bigger and better grid after the container fire disrupted service nearly a year and a half ago.

In a complex world, we know that local, renewable energy systems deliver outsized benefits to communities, and we are thrilled to be expanding in Tiburon and breaking ground on new grids across the region. We will continue to share updates here as we make progress toward energizing new towns in the coming weeks!

Links:

• EarthSpark's blog with this update and other progress!

For years – after Hurricane Matthew, after the earthquake that rocked the South, after the roads were cut off by gangs, in the midst of fuel crises, my ever-positive colleague, Jean, who had lived through the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake and gone on to earn an electrical engineering degree, would unfailingly laugh when a new challenge arouse and say, “well, at least it can’t get any worse!”

About two years ago, not long after the Haitian president’s assassination, Jean stopped saying that. No one knows what’s going to happen next in Haiti, and there’s good reason to believe it might get worse.

In parallel with the cascading crises, many people are working very hard to make things better.

From the pinhole vantage point of Haiti that is EarthSpark, I see the dedication of colleagues, counterparts, and community members. A community member is working to donate land for a future microgrid solar array. A government engineer is out assessing sites for civil works. Teams of familiar voices report regularly to video calls from their homes in Port-au-Prince.

It’s jarring to absorb the constant political and security updates, ever-contingency planning while also working to stay the course for the long-planned microgrid expansion. As we scan increasingly grim news, we also celebrate small advances.

The solar-powered Les Anglais community microgrid continues to power on. The microgrid-connected solar+battery system we installed years ago in Tiburon to provide ‘redundant resiliency’ to the health clinic and the telecommunication tower is doing its job.

Conditions have not been easy in the rural areas where we work, but we are relatively very fortunate.

In October, right before the fire in the Tibuorn generation system, kidnappings and terror had arrived in the region where EarthSpark’s grids operate. Indeed, the first images of the plumes of smoke I saw from that fire sent me into a panic that it was a trap set to draw our colleagues to the scene to be kidnapped. (I have to laugh with tears as I type, “Fortunately it was just a normal awful fire – yay!”) A successful police raid of the incumbent gang in the Tiburon mountains has restored relative security in the area, and everyone is extremely grateful for the relative calm if leery of more violence re-erupting.

We achingly wish we could do more right now, but we remain committed to working alongside communities and partners to deliver reliable electricity and build opportunity in spite of the challenges. We are hoping and planning for better days. Whatever comes next, local, reliable energy systems will remain a helpful input to the peaceful prosperity we all hope to see soon.

Thank you, as always, for your kind and continued support of our work.