There's a lot of talk globally about the need to design for low cost for poor beneficiaries. The logic is simple - poor people don't have a lot of money so you need to design low cost products for them to meet their needs on their budget. Without access to capital it's true that poor people can't afford things with a high price tag. Without access to capital they buy the cheapest goods on the market. What many people seem to not understand though, is that these people pay a high cost using the most logical metric of $ per unit service delivered because cheap products are made from cheap parts and fail early. Assuming one can develop innovative financing mechanisms (my friend Matt over at Kiva.org is working on that), then the poor are no longer constrained to pay the high cost of low price.

A lot of people out there are trying to design a cheap wind turbine to meet the needs of the rural poor. Their number one priority is a low purchase price, which means a small machine, a small tower, and cheap parts. To my mind this doesn't make any sense in the remote, developing world context. When transportation is difficult, the environment is harsh (heat, humidity, and salinity), capacity levels are low, most of your system life-cycle cost is not in the energy system itself, but rather in the pre-installation, operation and servicing of the system over it's useful life. Going through all that trouble to put in a tiny machine that requires the same number of trips, same amount of training, and same amount of community relations, but puts out a lot less energy, seems wasteful to me. And shortchanging on quality materials to achieve a low price tag only comes back to haunt you when the harsh environment takes its toll.

In order to guide our thinking for this week of design, I've had to clarify that our #1 core technical priority is durability. It's the old "Penny wise pound foolish" adage - that to save a dollar in construction but incur a $500 penalty in maintenance is foolish. Investing  a little more money up front to create a durable turbine with good energy output means more total energy service delivery, and therefore a low life-cycle cost. Of course there are limits - I'm not saying "spare no expense" - it's just that there are so many improvements that can be had for small amounts of money that it doesn't make sense to pass them up for fear of not being the cheapest turbine on the market.

For the record, priority #2 is some energy production in low wind speeds and priority #3 is ease of manufacture, assembly, and operation.

If you want to read about the Otherpower team's experience with blueEnergy, from there perspective, check these out:

http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2008/2/22/23528/6318

http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2008/2/25/195437/758

Show me a wind turbine manufacturer that claims they aren't continuously rethinking their design to increase reliability, power output, and decrease cost I'll show you a liar.  The wind is a harsh mistress and wind turbines are moving, dynamic systems exposed to the elements.

As DanB said last night, "everything always fails, it's just a question of when", he is alluding to a very important point.  All dynamic machines fail - this is a given.  Sustainability is not achieved by building a machine that never fails, sustainability is achieved by building a machine that is durable as well as an infrastructure that can deal with the inevitable failures when they arise.  Working on these two key elements simultaneously is the strength of blueEnergy's approach.

In order to resolve our design issue, we have reached out to some of the giants in our world (see earlier posting "In the Land of Giants").  We are hosting our first "design conference" in Bluefields this coming week and are honored to have the participation of Hugh Piggott, original designer (participating remotely) and the Otherpower.com crew - DanB, DanF, George and Rich - here with us on the ground for the next 9 days.  We are also fortunate to have another dozen or so experts participating on the ground and remotely, as well as our powerhouse volunteers and local staff.

The goal of the conference is to beef up the design of our turbine to make it more robust.  We've got the facilities and the right people for the job.  Now it's go time.  I'll be posting here with regular updates on the people, the experience and the design progress.

Every organization needs this type of knowledge sharing and retention to a greater or lesser extent, but if you rely on volunteers to make your organization go, it is absolutely critical.  They come in idealistic and motivated, with fire in their belly.  But they are often young and haven’t had much experience leading and documenting projects.  Often times they don’t work full-time and want to focus only on program activities.  But unless your organization’s stated mission is solely to educate and give experiences to volunteers, then your interest in the volunteers is to get them to contribute to the organization, either in the program, administration or fundraising arenas.  But volunteers consume an organization’s resources, both in terms money and time.  Selecting, hosting, training and coordinating volunteers are huge tasks, if done well.  The costs associated with the volunteer program represent resources that could have been invested directly in program activities, so in order to be justifiable, the organization needs to figure out a way to get more value from the participation of volunteers then it invests in them.  It’s a simple equation to understand but “making it so” isn’t so obvious.

From an organization’s perspective, people come and go and by default take their knowledge and experiences with them.  Unless there is culture of sharing and a place to upload this information in a format that is comprehensible to the person’s successor, the organization loses what it spent tremendous resources producing.  Getting people to share is an uphill battle, not because they don’t want to do it, but because of the time and effort it takes to do it well.  But in the end, the one sure thing is that putting in the time and effort up front saves the organization tons of time down the line.

My advice, for what it’s worth – start building that sharing culture early on and give your people the right tools to make it happen.  Online collaboration tools like Salesforce and NetSuite are a good place to start.