The Global Village Energy Partnership has announced winners of 26 grants of $200,000 each. The grants have been made to companies throughout Central America and the Caribbean with the intention of jump-starting socially responsible businesses with innovative solutions to the most pressing energetic challenges in the region. Grants were made for companies with products ranging from algal biofuels to pico-hydroelectric generators. The idea of creating algal biofuels from algae blooms caused by eutrophication is especially interesting to us as we are located on Lago de Atitlán which has recently been host to enormous blooms of cyanobacteria which have had a number of malignant effects including reducing fish populations (thereby impacting fishermen and villagers who depend on fish for high quality protein), causing rashes to develop on those who enter contaminated areas, and, of course, despoiling the immense natural beauty of the lake. One of the grantees from the IDEAS competition was a team of researchers in Guaetmala who plan to develop a means for converting algae into liquid fuels for transportation and other uses:

Amid the valleys, mountains and volcanoes of the highlands of southern Guatemala lies one of the country’s largest lakes, Lake Amatitlan. Located just 16km south of Guatemala City, the unique landscape surrounding the lake means it is used by many people as a recreation area. However, the proximity of Lake Amatitlan to the capital means the western basin is contaminated with dissolved waste and fertilizers from the city which are fed into it via the Villalobos river. Fertilisers can cause increases in the level of nutrients in the water resulting in the proliferation of algae which in turn deplete oxygen levels essential to other aquatic organisms.

But algae do have a potentially useful function as a new source of green fuel and one of the winners of the 2009 IDEAS Energy Challenge is already assessing the energy potential of the particular species of micro-algae currently polluting Lake Amatitlan. A team from 2 universities, La Universidad Galileo and Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, is researching and developing the processes for filtering micro-algae from the water, extracting their oil and converting the oil into biodiesel.

A laboratory and pilot plant will be established near the lake. 655 industries based around Lake Amatitlan and about a million Guatemalans stand to benefit from this new source of green fuel. And then there are the environmental advantages: removing the algae will, of course, clean up the lake. And there are plans to replicate the project in other parts of Guatemala once the methodology has been refined.

As GVEP’s CEO, Sarah Adams, explains, “If a successful commercial model can be established this can be replicated to other contaminated lakes and rivers in Latin America which are suffering from the same problem, transforming waste into locally-produced clean energy”. A local source of biofuel and improved water quality – two benefits for the price of one project! Click here for full project description.

While we laud the effort to develop new methods of mollifying an environmental disaster while producing economic benefit, we have to comment that it seems unlikely that a $200,000 grant will produce any breakthroughs. If oil giant Exxon’s $600 million dollar investment in algal biofuel technology has yet to produce any considerable quantity of fuel, then we doubt that this grant will result in much. Nevertheless, if there’s a chance that the research leads to a healthier lake we welcome it!

Other promising grant winners include two micro-hydroelectric ventures in Honduras, one of which is described by Mily Cortez in the video below:

All in all it’s an exciting time to be a cleantech entrepreneur in Central America!