Category Archive

Gracias a la Prensa Libre por sacar a la luz la situación pésima en la cual el país se encuentra:

1. El país está en riesgo por daño ecológico, señala informe oficial
2. El Gobierno pide perdón a la Tierra por los daños ambientales
3. Falso perdón
4. Presidente Colom anuncia plan para recuperar el parque Laguna del Tigre
5. Concentración en favor de reserva
6. Medio ambiente y guatemaltecos
7. Rechazan minería y las hidroeléctricas

Por medio de la Prensa Libre:

“Unas ocho mil personas participaron en la caminata, que comenzó con una concentración en El Obelisco, a donde llegaron desde los municipios vecinos.

Después de las 8 horas enfilaron hacia la Embajada de Canadá, en la diagonal 6, zona 10, para entregar un memorial en contra de la compañía minera Goldcorp, que explota oro y plata en San Marcos, que en su opinión contamina las fuentes de agua.

Luego se dirigieron hacia la Embajada de Estados Unidos, donde el jefe de la delegación, Stephen McFarland, salió al encuentro de los manifestantes en un gesto de cortesía, pero los dirigentes alzaron la voz para reprocharle que no necesitaban hablar con él para demandar que esa nación “deje de ejercer prácticas de intromisión en el país”.

Pero el diplomático siguió caminando hacia el final de la columna donde el grupo agradeció su presencia y el diplomático les expresó que los Estados Unidos respeta la libertad de expresión y de asociación y que trata de escuchar a sus críticos y no solo a quienes lo apoyan. Agregó: Estamos trabajando arduamente con otros socios para proteger el ambiente

Poco después, en la misión diplomática de España, reclamaron por que la concesionaria Unión Fenosa, S.A. brinde un servicio de calidad y no imponga precios injustos en los 17 departamentos donde presta servicio.

A continuación, la columna siguió hasta el centro capitalino, donde demandó ante la Corte de Constitucionalidad (CC) el respeto a la consulta popular sobre proyectos mineros -que en todos los municipios donde se han celebrado desde 2005 han sido contrarios a esa actividad-, de la manera como lo establece el convenio 169 de la Organización Internacional del Trabajo.

La jornada terminó en la Plaza de la Constitución, donde los manifestantes demandaron al Gobierno acciones a favor de los campesinos, como el acceso a la tierra y el apoyo para producir, y reiteraron su rechazo a las actividades de hidroeléctricas y mineras.

Entre tanto, la marcha generó atascos a lo largo del recorrido, lo que obligó a la Policía Municipal de Tránsito (PMT) a cortar el paso en diversas calles y avenidas.”

Por medio de la Prensa Libre:

Mantener limpio y en orden Panajachel será una “responsabilidad compartida” de vecinos, empresarios y las autoridades, según el Reglamento de Servicio Público de Limpieza, Recolección de Basura y Sanidad de ese municipio de Sololá, como parte de las medidas para mitigar los daños al Lago de Atitlán.

El reglamento, publicado este viernes establece los procedimientos para mantener el ornato en los domicilios, comercios y la vía pública.

En el caso de la vía pública, incluyendo la playa del lago, todos los vecinos, comerciantes y empresarios deberán limpiarla “diariamente”, mientras la municipalidad se encargará de recoger los desechos.

En el hogar, los vecinos están obligados a limpiar el frente de sus casas, y la basura domiciliar deberá guardarse en bolsas especiales para ese fin y deberá sacarse hasta en el momento en que el camión municipal pase por ella, servicio por el que pagarán entre Q6 y Q50.

Los hospedajes, hoteles, restaurantes, centros comerciales, edificios de apartamentos etc, están obligados a clasificar la basura y depositarla en recipientes apropiados y pagarán entre Q25 y Q1 mil por la extracción de los desechos. Lo mismo aplica para las industrias, que deberán desembolsar entre Q2 mil y Q5 mil por el servicio.

Del artículo en el sitio del Premio Goldman Ambiental:

Humberto Ríos Labrada, científico e investigador en biodiversidad, trabajó con agricultores para ampliar la diversidad de los cultivos y desarrollar sistemas agrícolas de bajos insumos, alentando el cambio en la agricultura cubana: de la químico-dependencia a la sostenibilidad.

Como coordinador del Programa de Innovación Agraria Local (PIAL) del Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Agrícolas, Ríos ahora dedica su tiempo al desarrollo del sector de agricultura sostenible en Cuba y ha participado en México en proyectos similares de biodiversidad dirigidos por campesinos Frecuentemente usa su talento musical para promover la biodiversidad, con canciones que celebran la agricultura sostenible. Recientemente, el gobierno pidió a los cubanos aumentar la producción de alimentos en todo el país para revitalizar la economía del país. Ríos ve en esto una oportunidad para expandir aún más el trabajo que realiza.

Se puede leer el artículo en inglés aquí

Disfruten de estos links para conscientizarse acerca de la situación que vivimos hoy, y entonces salgan a caminar por un bosque o meditar bajo un arbol Este planeta nos ha alimentado física y espiritualmente, y le debemos todo a nuestra Pachamama! El equipo de Quetsol estamos abrumados por la belleza de esta Tierra, su flora, fauna, y sociedades humanas. Creemos que sí podemos volver a vivir en armonía con ella, y que nosotros todos tratemos de amarla y cuidarla cada vez más.

http://cmpcc.org/

http://www.saviaguate.org/

http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/es/

http://www.gvepinternational.org/news/193/

http://welectricity.com/

Hace dos semanas el director Canadiense James Cameron, quien dirigió Avatar, fue invitado por un par de organizaciones ambientales de los EEUU a ir a Brasil para conocer a los caciques de las tribus Kayapó, Juruna, Xipia, y Xikrin y prestarles su carisma en su lucha en contra de la represa hidroeléctrica Belo Monte. Este artículo de Mongabay.com da una breve reseña de la gira de Sr. Cameron en Brasil y la amenaza de la represa:

Esta semana Cameron ha viajado a Brasil para una visita de tres dias a la zona del rio Xingú llamada Volta Grande, para conocer a la gente y la selva que se verán afectadas por la contrucción de la Presa Hidroeléctrica Belo Monte. La presa, criticada desde hace mucho por ambientalistas y grupos pro-derechos indígenas, destruirá 500 kilómetros cuadrados de selva virgen y provocará el desplazamiento de unas 12.000 personas.

“Para la gente que vive en las riberas del rio, tal y como han hecho durante miles de años, el daño producido (por la presa) destruirá su modo de vida,” dijo Cameron en una conferencia de presa después de su viaje, según la agencia EFE. Pidió a la administración de Lula en Brasil que reconsidere su decisión de construir la presa.

“Cuando los buenos líderes se aplican para solucionar un problema, siempre se encuentra otra solución,” añadió Cameron.

Y aquí el director y una de las protagonistas de Avatar, Sigourney Weaver, nos dan inspiración para este Día de la Tierra:

Este jueves, 22 de abril 2010, es el día internacional de la Tierra. Como mencionó la opinión en La Prensa Libre este sábado pasado, esta linda Guatemala ha sido lastimada y dañada por el descuido de sus habitantes y también por los intereses de compañías privadas que se enriquecen de las industrias extractivas de minería y petróleo. Nosotros todos tenemos la responsabilidad de hacernos conscientes de la situación en la cual nos encontramos y de allí tratar de mejorar nuestras relaciones con el planeta que nos da aliento y vida. Por todo el mundo y por todo Guatemala, ciudádanos están organizando eventos para toda la semana en los cuales harán limpiezas de las calles, plantarán árboles, y manifestarán para los gobiernos y la compañías responsabilizarse por el medio ambiente.

Aquí en Guateamala habrá varias celebraciones y manifestaciones para enfrentar los múltiples problemas ambientales del país. Nosotros, el equipo de Quetsol, estaremos apoyando a Amigos del Lago a hacer una limpieza de basura en las calles de San Lucas Tolimán este sábado, 24 de abril 2010. Aun si usted no tiene la posibilidad de dejar su trabajo o transportarse hasta un lugar donde haya un evento para celebrar el día de la tierra, lo puede celebrar usted mismo por meditar tan sólo unos minutos en la riqueza infinita que le ha dado este planeta y cómo usted lo puede cuidar y enriquecer para mostrarle su gratitud.

Otras organizaciones de interés para el día de la Tierra en Guatemala:

Expedición Atitlán – Expedición Atitlán 2010

http://www.todosporellago.com/

http://saviaguate.org/

Things to check out on this sunny Sunday:

1. Solar Power in Paradise:

2. The Economist’s “Growing Pains” – On Solar Growth

Solar energy is popular because it is clean and abundant. The problem is that it remains expensive. According to recent calculations by the International Energy Agency, power from photovoltaic systems (solar cells) costs $200-600 a megawatt-hour, depending on the efficiency of the installation and the discount rate applied to future output. That compares with $50-70 per MWh for onshore wind power in America, by the IEA’s reckoning, and even lower prices for power from fossil fuels, unless taxes on greenhouse-gas emissions are included. The costs of solar are dropping; in some sunny places it may, in a few years, be possible to get solar electricity as cheaply from a set of panels as from the grid, and later on for solar to compete with conventional ways of putting electricity into the grid. But for the moment there would be no significant market for solar cells were it not for government subsidies.

Given that there are subsidies of various sorts in various places, some of which have been very generous, there is a market, and a fast-growing one. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research firm, there will be demand for 10.5 gigawatts of new photovoltaic-energy systems in 2010, up from just 1.7GW in 2006. The consistent engine of growth over those four years has been Germany’s feed-in tariffs, a guaranteed price for solar power that makes every panel installed in the country a profitable investment, at the expense of electricity consumers. For a fair part of that time, global supply was only just keeping up with demand, and prices for solar modules—the assemblies of cells that you might put on a roof, in a field or on a patch of desert—stayed fairly stable.

…The utility market also serves to highlight the flaws and expense of solar power. A typical utility-scale installation produces power at only a fifth of its maximum capacity, thanks to clouds, night-time, dirty panels and so on. To replace a one-gigawatt coal plant running at 70% of capacity with solar panels would require about half of the 6GW installed worldwide last year.

This is one of the arguments for looking instead at another solar technology, solar thermal, which uses mirrors to concentrate heat, produce steam and thus drive turbines. Efficient solar-thermal plants can in principle be built on the same sort of scale as gas-fired power stations, a few hundred megawatts at a time. Such big plants are harder to finance than small photovoltaic installations, and require more planning permissions and infrastructure, such as transmission lines. But they produce a lot of power. Brightsource Energy, based in California, recently received government loan guarantees for a project in the Mojave desert which, if completed, could deliver more power than all the photovoltaic cells installed in America last year.

Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine featured “Building a Green Economy” by Paul Krugman which offers a strong review of the current scientific and economic debate over global climate change and how to mitigate anthropogenic sources of atmospheric contamination.  The economic focus runs through the progenitor of the concept of economic externalities, Arthur Cecil Pigou, for whom the Pigovian Tax is named. Krugman goes on to invoke the work of renowned modern economists Martin Weitzman and Nicholas Stern (author of the 2006 “Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change”) in making his own argument for aggressive policy alternatives in the short term as opposed to a gradual “climate-policy ramp” which would apply a lower price to carbon emissions under a national or supranational regulatory scheme.

All of this heated academic debate comes in the face of market action to make the green economy tangible. A recent article from Bloomberg announced some impressive statistics on the maturing of the global renewable energy game, including the following:

• 31% increase in global investment in renewable energy technology in 1Q2010 over 1Q2009
• Total yearly venture capital and asset finance of $175-200 billion for renewable energy in 2010
• Installed wind power capacity to grow 21% per year through 2014, global installed capacity in 2014 expected to reach 409 gigawatts

Anthropogenic CO2 emissions must be stabilized and reduced through implementation of policy incentives, technological innovation, and altruistic behavioral modification; this is the course that human civilization must take, and sooner rather than later, if we are to leave our progeny a planet worth inhabiting.

Thanks to this article from MIT’s Technology Review, we have become aware of the world’s most recent attempt at energy/water alchemy: the Al-Khafji concentrated solar photovoltaic desalination plant being engineed by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. Saudi Arabia is engaged in an epic game of chicken with dwindling groundwater sources and currently has the world’s largest installed capacity for water desalination. The articles “Peak Water in Saudi Arabia” by Ugo Bardi, and “Water Demand Management in Saudi Arabia” by Walid A. Abderrahman give a good overview of the nation’s profligate use of ground water resources for subsidized agriculture, as well as the recovery/production curve of water for underground aquifers and current desalination plants. As the Technology Review article notes, the primary goal of the new solar powered plant is to reduce the cost of desalination in the long run:

The plant will use a new kind of concentrated solar photovoltaic (PV) technology and new water-filtration technology, which KACST developed with IBM. When completed at the end of 2012, the plant will produce 30,000 cubic meters of desalinated water per day to meet the needs of 100,000 people.

KACST’s main goal is to reduce the cost of desalinating water. Half of the operating cost of a desalination plant currently comes from energy use, and most current plants run on fossil fuels. Depending on the price of fuel, producing a cubic meter now takes between 40 and 90 cents.

Reducing cost isn’t the only reason that people have dreamed of coupling renewable energy with desalination for decades, says Lisa Henthorne, a director at the International Desalination Association. “Anything we can do to lower this cost over time or reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with that power is a good thing,” Henthorne says. “This is truly a demonstration in order to work out the bugs, to see if the technologies can work well together.”

While the new concentrated PV technology might generate affordable electricity, solar power still costs more than fossil fuels in many parts of the world. But even with those high costs, using it to power desalination makes sense, Henthorne says. “You’re not doing it because it’s the cheaper thing to do right now, but it would be the cheapest thing down the road.”

Whether the plant will live up to its expectations is anyone’s guess. While it is a noble idea, the Al-Khafji plant may be the latest in a long string of expensive failures, as noted in “Desalination – Energy Down the Drain” by Debbie Cook:

Electricity consumption of various California water sources

The story of desalinated water has been largely one of unkept promises. Tampa Bay is a typical case. In 1999 Tampa Bay Water received a binding commitment for water at $557/AF. By 2004 costs were updated to $827. By 2008, after a month of operation, it was estimated the wholesale cost to be $1100/AF. Even if this were an inclusive accounting, there are two factors that work in Tampa’s favor: the salinity of the source water and their electricity rate. Both are critical to calculating water costs.

In 2003, Water International estimated that 44% of the cost of desalination was the energy component. But whose energy costs were they using, Florida or California? Or maybe Saudi Arabia? In 2002, Oil and Gas Journal ran a story on desalination facilities in Saudi Arabia. They reported construction costs of 30 facilities at $20 billion, $4 billion for operations and maintenance, and water at $1356/AF. While there are differences between the thermal process used in Saudi Arabia and the reverse osmosis projects in the U.S., the cost of natural gas in Saudi Arabia at that time was 75¢/Mcf—a fraction of what we pay in the U.S.

California’s checkered history with ocean desalination is equally unhelpful. Of those projects that have operated, the following costs have been reported:

• Gaviota Oil and Gas Processing Plant: $4000/AF
• Santa Catalina Island (built and operated by Southern California Edison): $2000/AF
• U.S. Navy, San Nicolas Island: $6000/AF
• PG&E Diablo Canyon Power Plant: $2000
• City of Moro Bay: $1,750/AF

The City of Santa Barbara built a plant in the 1990s but never operated it. The Yuma Desalting Plant may be the biggest white elephant in the world. At the time it was built in the late 1980’s, it was the world’s largest reverse osmosis plant capable of desalting 72 million gallons per day. The $245 million project was constructed to comply with the 1944 treaty with Mexico to reduce salinity of Colorado River water from 2900 ppm to 115 ppm. The estimated cost of operations and management was $24 – $29 million per year. I’m told it has never operated except for tests.

This paltry record coupled with a lack of transparency in the industry keeps everyone guessing. It is difficult to challenge the wildly optimistic numbers that are perpetually paraded out at public meetings and in the press. Environmental documents can sometimes fill in a few blanks. The Huntington Beach EIR states that the Poseidon project will require 5476 kWh/AF. If Poseidon were paying a Florida rate of 4.5¢/kWh the cost of electricity alone would be $246/AF. If they paid what the average Californian pays (which includes bond repayment for the 2001 energy crisis)—12¢/kWh—their electricity costs alone would be $657/AF. Poseidon stated at one of the Task Force meetings that it was planning on electricity at 6¢/kWh—a rate that is not available to any industrial user in the state. With those kinds of savings they could perhaps purchase enough lobbying to get special dispensation.

As Debbie ends her article, “We are rapidly approaching the time when we will not have enough money to throw at our problems. We may be there now or we may be able to squeak out a few more stranded assets before our future catches up with our present. I’m betting on business as usual.”

For more on solar powered water desalination check out “Solving Our Water Problems – Desalination Using Solar Thermal Power” by Big Gav via The Oil Drum.

Today Bloomberg ran a story titled “Solar Prospectors Chase Italian, Israeli ‘Gold Mines’ “ which traces the correlated development of solar manufacturing and power plant installation with government subsidies. It notes the market response to government policies which establish price premiums (“feed in tariffs”) for solar photovoltaic  power plants, sometimes more than quadruple the price per kilowatt-hour for gas and coal generation:

The solar industry is “built on subsidies,” said James Britland, an alternative energy analyst at Allianz RCM in London. “This is a non-competitive industry that has to be subsidized.” The investment rush has a downside and can lead to a boom- and-bust cycle as seen in Spain’s collapse of solar-panel installations, Phoenix Solar AG Chief Executive Andreas Haenel said. “Markets that explode make politicians nervous,” he said in a March 3 interview. “I don’t like gold mines and gold rushes because they can come back like a boomerang and destroy the whole market.”

The last quote is a fresh reminder of the effects of irrational exuberance in all energy markets, most marked in the oil and natural gas markets in the past 3 years (not to mention the obvious political tension currently caused by gold’s astronomic increases). Nevertheless, in forecasting long term growth of alternative energy all it takes is a quick glance at the supply (production/new discoveries) and demand curves of fossil fuels and minerals to see that there will continue to be mostly upward price pressure on brown fuels (especially given recent threats and projections of new and higher government taxes) and increasingly downward pressure on green fuels.

Unfortunately the article references only the southern United States as the world’s dream market for solar pv power plants. Granted California’s Assembly Bills 32, 510, and 920 (which have attracted increasing numbers of Chinese manufacturers to establish manufacturing capacity in the state) as well as the EPA’s recent move to declare carbon dioxide a threat to public health, combined with the optimal combination of intense incident solar radiation and urban hubs, analysts are quite right to be enthusiastic about the region’s potential:

The real opportunity for solar investors will come when the sunnier U.S. states offer bigger incentives, said Matthew Page, who manages about $50 million in alternative-energy shares at Guinness Atkinson Asset Management in London. “We’re all waiting for the U.S. to take off,” he said.

While the southwestern region of the United States is indeed an attractive area of high growth potential, we see equal potential in other regions with large deserts, urban hubs, robust economies, and/or political sensitivity to environmental concerns (e.g. Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico).

1. Grid connections turn slum communities into legal, paying customers using community organizing, technological innovation, and complementary business lines. These enterprises, in Sudan, Colombia, or Argentina, are economically viable without subsidies and very attractive to their customers. With some work to overcome hesitations from utilities and slum dwellers, grid connections could reach more of the 1b people currently living in slums.

2. Devices such as solar lanterns and efficient biomass cookstoves provide energy for lighting and cooking and are affordable to the poorest of the poor. Both solar lantern and cookstove enterprises demonstrate high potential for profitability, and are receiving social venture capital. Growth goals are ambitious and entrepreneurs expect significant scale over the coming years.

3. Solar home systems (SHS) provide electricity for households and home-based entrepreneurs with a stand-alone solar photovoltaic panel wired into lamps and a plug. SHS enterprises have demonstrated profitability, but are vulnerable to the expectation of free help from governments and the swings in input prices that have characterized the solar PV market. SHS entrepreneurs expect strong growth, and are working to reduce complexity in their operating models.

4. Rural cooperatives take the challenge of providing sustainable power supply and create income generation opportunities that increase people’s ability to pay for the electricity generated. Such models are technologically neutral as they can use biomass gasification, wind, or hydro. But rural cooperatives require local maintenance and administration and often an effort to set up local enterprises to use the increased power supply. Economic viability is possible in theory but remains an unmet challenge. Expanding rural cooperatives requires complex relationships between governments, enterprises, and communities.

The following article, Greening Deserts for Carbon Credits, over at Renewable Energy World touches on some of the most important points as we look towards creating a more sustainable civilization. As we all know, over-grazing, over-plowing, and overall deficient farming practices all over the world have resulted in desertification:  what used to be lush, productive land is turned into a barren “wasteland”.  The argument for stopping and even reversing this process goes beyond the simple self-centered attitude that deserts are useless to us; desertification greatly disrupts the immediate and surrounding ecosystems and the whole balance of life.

Naturally, the benefits of healthy and productive ecosystems cannot be overstated. However, one specific benefit is highlighted in the article: carbon sequestration. Dr. Rattan Lal of Ohio State University estimates that potential use of economical carbon sequestration may be up to 1.1 billion tons a year for the next 50 years, enough to reduce atmospheric CO2 by 50 ppm by 2100. A very interesting project in China is highlighted as a potential means of economically reversing desertification. Farmers there are growing sand willow in appropriately-developed farm, which they sell for income. The economic benefits of this have attracted many other farmers to do the same. Once the pastures and the trees provide shade from the harsh desert winds, the microclimate changes. This allows other species to move in and replenish the land. There are even plans to build a Solar PV plant to extract electricity from incident solar radiation in the desert and use the sand willow biomass to generate electricity when the sun does not provide enough.

To us this is sounds like a very simple and positive solution. Lately, it seems that the solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems are actually quite simple and economical, the barrier is in cultural adoption of new habits or alien devices, not to mention entrenched business interests that stand to lose market share as clean energy technology becomes more widespread. Let’s hope we can agree to get to work together on these sooner rather than later.

Here is the article again, very recommended.

Greetings to all our visitors from across the globe.   We wanted to officially announce our 2010 Summer Intern Program and invite any interested parties to read the program description below and contact us for more information.   Please see our previous post for images of our headquarters.   Also, feel free to share this info with anyone you think might be interested and qualified!

__________________________

QUETSOL 2010 SUMMER INTERN PROGRAM (SIP)

www.quetsol.com www.quetsollife.org http://twitter.com/Quetsol

GENERAL PRINCIPLES:

- We hate waste. As a group QUETSOL staff and participants in the SIP will constantly work to optimize all processes. This includes from all site waste management, energy generation, conservation, internal logistics and all around way-of-life. All relevant things will be quantified and optimized. Our intent is to build sustainability, and eliminating waste –be it refuse, paper, water, money, or energy lost as heat – is the first necessary step.

- We operate in a doacracy. Whatever needs to get done will get done, by someone. You will be expected to carry your own weight; if you don’t, well, everybody will notice. The QUETSOL 2010 SIP will provide ample enough projects, opportunities, tasks and overall general experiences to have everybody engaged at all times.

-  We are driven by our love for the Earth and its Peoples. Our efforts are geared to using technology wisely to solve many of the grave problems that afflict our dear planet and all societies that dwell on it. As we treat Gaia, Gaia treats us.

DIVISIONS:

Engineering (9 members)

There will be a variety of ongoing engineering work throughout the summer. Some stand-alone projects will be completed, and other work will be speculative R&D, which may or may not result in patents. Individuals within the engineering group will have ample freedom to choose amongst the variety of tasks going on simultaneously, but we will ensure that everything gets completed as a group. You will have the tools and materials necessary to accomplish these tasks, as well as some flexibility in budgeting additional material as it becomes necessary. Projects might be completed faster than we expect, and might lead to other projects, etc. In general, we will try to accomplish as much as possible. As a sample of the projects currently in mind:

-  Reverse engineer all of our product line, which is currently manufactured in China (we have their consent).  Our systems are currently mostly photovoltaic, some eolic. We will create a DETAILED map of how to manufacture them, with an emphasis on process optimization. This will allow us to calculate the price of manufacturing locally.

-  We will also adapt existing products and design better prototypes. As a simple case in point: one of our lighting products is made by an American company based in China and is effective, durable, practical and cheap; however, the background right around the LED lights is white plastic. We have mentioned to them that you could greatly boost lumens by having a reflective surface instead. They claim that it would be too strong. We disagree and we hope to prove it by building a better one.

-  The batteries in many of our systems are not necessarily optimal.  We will determine the best battery system for a variety of products and determine the local availability and/or economic cost of importing.

-  Develop alternative ways to achieve the same functionality and durability of our products, but perhaps with better, more robust, or cheaper systems.

-  By mid-summer, we will be testing solar-powered internet transmitters and relay stations with a large bandwidth transmission radius of 100km.    We intend to make Late Atitlán fully free WIFI.    Once the system has been tested adequately, we will then commercialize it on a mass scale.   During the summer, members of the engineering team will be responsible for any technical troubleshooting with the system alongside QUETSOL staff.   They will also participate in the quantification of test results.

-  Conduct pheasibility studies on a large-scale photovoltaic plant in Guatemala’s deserts.

-  Develop all-new technologies and systems altogether. This will not be restricted to photovoltaics and or eolic. Basically ANYTHING GOES, as long as it is under the purview of our intent to build a model of SUSTAINABILITY. This includes, but is not limited to, energy generation, transportation, efficiency, storage, waste disposal, water treatment, etc. If an individual or group of individuals within the engineering team wishes to undertake such a project, they must first consult with QUETSOL staff.

Legal (2 members)

Interns in the legal division will participate in a variety of tasks in domestic and international jurisdictions. In particular, strong emphasis will be placed on the intellectual property side as we expect some patents to arise from the SIP, as well as ongoing patent work that QUETSOL has already begun. Other relevant issues will revolve around the establishment of QUETSOL subsidiaries in other Central and Latin American countries. As part of the legal team you will be interfacing with QUETSOL legal counsel. You will also be doing a lot of research on your own, on a variety of topics that might include, but not be limited to, the following law branches: environmental, labor, education, taxes, insurance, etc.

Media (1 member)

The media intern will be an integral part of our marketing efforts, nationally and abroad. QUETSOL will feature a multi-channel media and educational campaign that targets both our customer demographic, but also other corporate, governmental or civil entities. We believe that at QUETSOL we have a very creative and unique approach to marketing and media, as well of intimate experience with local and global media amongst our staff. Tasks will include interfacing with local media, production/handling of marketing material, participation in the creation of educational campaign and strategies, extensive use of social networking (both real and online). This candidate must be able to speak fluent Spanish.

Applicable/desirable skills and qualifications:

We prefer individuals who treat work as creative playtime, and who enjoying creatively playing with solar photovoltaic cells, LED lights, cellular phones, agricultural irrigation systems, water purification systems, battery/electrical storage systems, hydroelectric and wind turbine generators, waste water treatment, and organic/ecological agriculture. Backgrounds in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, renewable energy, international development, carbon finance, and business administration are all ideal.

Ideal candidates would be fluent/bilingual in at least two of the following languages: English, Spanish, Tz’utujil, Kaqchikel, K’iche, Mandarin, or Hebrew. Depending on other skills and assets we will consider monolingual applicants.

*Important note*
Quetsol is a for-profit model and will maintain ownership of all intellectual property produced by interns in the program. Contact Quetsol if you have any questions.

We may offer the potential of future employment for interns, and at the very least will provide letters of recommendation to students that complete the program.

Timeline:

The dates for the summer internship program are flexible, but in general we expect to have participants arrive and depart more or less according to the standard summer vacation of sponsoring academic institutions (e.g. MIT affiliates would arrive between May 24^th and June 7^th and depart sometime before fall classes begin – Aug/Sept). Obviously both Quetsol and interns benefit from longer participant stays, that being said we are amenable to shorter stays (no less than 28 days) if you believe that you can accomplish productive work in that time frame.

Location/arriving/living situation/logistics:

Our headquarters is in Panajachel, Guatemala on the shores of the beautiful but imperiled Lago de Atitlán. We may be able to offer free accommodation (perhaps greatly subsidized, no more than $65 per month) and some communal meals, though interns would have to purchase/prepare their own food. If participants do not wish to stay at our headquarters, we can provide recommendations for home-stays with local families or other mid-term living arrangements. We recognize that Guatemala is an attractive destination that abounds in cultural and historical sites of interest; therefore we understand and encourage participants to make brief excursions throughout the country throughout their stay. We also may arrange SIP group bonding excursions such as kayaking, volcano trekking, and other exciting adventures!

APPLY:

-           Please send a CV to tono@quetsol.com

-          We will respond to all participants and set up a phone interview, ideally via Skype.

Este será un post corto con una serie de imágenes de la sede de QUETSOL, con oficinas, vivienda, talleres y jardines donde desarrollaremos modelos de sustentabilidad a través de la tecnologia apropiada.   Serán de particular interés a las personas que estén interesadas en participar en nuestro Programa de Internos de Verano 2010.

This will be a brief post with a series of images of QUETSOL headquarters, featuring offices, living space, work shops and gardens, where we will be developing models of sustainability through appropriate technology.   These will be of special interest to those people that are interested in our 2010 Summer Intern Program.

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!

This brief video produced by the Climate Works Foundation provides a fascinating glimpse into the belly of the Chinese Manufacturing Behemoth. We will refrain from commenting here on the recent cyberattacks on western IT and software firms operating in country, suffice to say that these events are outside the purview of our expertise. Click below to peer into the present:

Interesting notes from Dr. Wang Wanxing:

• China produces 35-45% of global photovoltaic products, exporting 95% of them
• Solar needs economies of scale and reduced costs, as well as realistic pricing of fossil fuels (as opposed to current externality-laden subsidization) in order to become a serious source of global energy generation
• Current solar PV pricing estimates of 1 yuan ($0.14-15 cents) per kW/hr

Here we have to ponder the wisdom of the current bias toward large-scale installations in the global market. The ongoing financial crisis has had a deep impact on the finance and demand side of photovoltaic installations, as expounded upon last year in a report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which concluded that:

The financial crisis has had a significant impact on the PV industry, primarily through increasing the cost and reducing the availability of investment into the sector. These effects have been more immediately experienced by PV installations than by production facilities, due to the different types and duration of investments, and thus PV demand has been reduced by a greater proportion than PV production. More expensive financing is also directly reflected in PV module and system price declines, as other constituent costs have had to decline to maintain necessary rates of return for PV installations.

Production of commodities creates, and is the one and universal cause which creates a market for the commodities produced.

We apologize for our delay in posting on the utterly heartbreaking tragedy that has ensued after a series of earthquakes essentially destroyed the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding areas. We would like to ask for your help in supporting organizations that are on the ground providing relief services, as well as for the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG), an organization with which Quetsol has a special relationship. The AIDG will be providing longer term aid in rebuilding the country. Please see the updates and videos below, reposted from the AIDG’s blog:

Dear AIDG Supporters,

At approximately 4:55 pm Eastern on Tuesday Port Au Prince experienced a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, with aftershocks of 5.9 and 5.7. There is widespread damage to infrastructure with numerous collapsed buildings. It is anticipated there will be a high casualty rate

Additional photos can be found here: twitter.com/photomorel

Here is what we have learned:

The National Palace has collapsed (eyewitness photo)
The UN headquarters has been seriously damaged (source: UN)
The Hotel Montana has sustained collapse with 200 missing (source: associated press france)
A Hospital has collapsed (source:NYtimes)

We will provide more information by twitter. www.twitter.com/aidg and our blog www.aidg.org/blog as it becomes available.

We are currently developing opportunities for AIDG to aid in reconstruction with the help of partners. We will make another announcement on this shortly.

As you all know we are a small organization. We require some basic additional budget resources immediately to help run an assessment that will determine this longer term response aimed at infrastructure and reconstruction. If possible mail checks to:

AIDG
P.O. Box 104
Weston, MA 02493

We will actually receive these funds faster than online donations. We will be running a larger campaign in concert with our reconstruction announcement.

For those wishing to have an immediate direct impact on populations in Port Au Prince we are recommending supporting the medical response teams of Partners In Health. www.pih.org They are working with a field hospital set up by the UNDP that immediately needs pain meds, bandages and other medical supplies.

We ask you all to hold Haiti in your hearts and prayers as this tragedy unfolds.

Sincerely,

Peter Haas
Executive Director, AIDG

Please also see this interview with AIDG’s Deputy Director, Catherine Lainé who has been in Haiti for the past couple weeks running AIDG’s operations there:

See the original post on BoingBoing here: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/15/haiti-earthquake-upd.html

Other organizations to whom you can donate to help in immediate relief include:

http://www.yele.org/

http://www.foodforthepoor.org/

http://oursoil.org/

Our thoughts and prayers are constantly with the people of Haiti.

Spot on the local TV station/corto de televisión local:

Reposted from the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group’s blog:

http://www.aidg.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,34/p,1561/

Quetsol is a new business that will provide high efficiency, low cost solar technologies that aim to increase access to basic illumination, electricity generation, and water pumping in Guatemala. Their mission is to help their clients save money and improve their quality of life through the use of appropriate technology.

Hoy tratamos sobre un informe producido por la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe acerca del papel que la energía desempeña en el cumplimiento de los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio. El documento calcula que en todo América Latina hay unas 30 millones de personas que caracen de acceso a energía eléctrica, basado en datos de las Naciones Unidas, representando un 5.5% de la población total. De igual manera, el documento resalta la ineficiencia de los servicios existentes de energía eléctrica, los cuales cuentan con un servicio intermitente y con tarifas exorbitantes. Los gastos en energía son aún más sesgados para familías de escasos recursos económicos, como acota el informe:

…Dentro del grupo de países analizados, el gasto energético para el quintil de ingreso más bajo oscila entre 5 a 18% de su ingreso mensual medio; mientras que para el quintil más alto sólo representa entre 0.5 al 3% del ingreso mensual. Al interior de los países se registraron grandes diferencias entre el mayor consumo y gasto energético del quintil superior, respecto del inferior. Llegando a ser el primero entre 3 a 21 veces mayor que este último, todo lo cual refleja y acentúa la inequidad social en la región.

Marta Ortega de Wing en su terreno natal, cortesía del New York Times