Last year, blueEnergy was selected as one of 25 Tech Award Laureates in the category of Economic Development.  blueEnergy was humbled by being selected as the winner of the Tech Award cash prize in this category in 2007.  This year I returned as an invited speaker and was surprised and pleased to learn that I was speaking just before Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka.  I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Bill after the presentations.  Later on in the evening Dr. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace prize winner for his work with the Grameen Bank, was presented with the Global Humanitarian Award at the Tech Awards gala.  After the ceremony I was fortunate to have a chance to meet Dr. Yunus and explain how blueEnergy works with Kiva and a local microfinance organization, ADEPHCA, to use microfinance to bring electricity in to the homes of families in remote villages on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua.

The following day there was an all-day conference at Santa Clara University hosted by the Center for Science, Technology and Society (CSTS).  The conference gave the 25 Tech Award Laureates for 2008 the chance to present their work to the public and featured presentations and discussions on social entrepreneurship and technology for development.  I participated in a lively panel discussion on the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI), which is run by the Center for Science, Technology and Society.

The two days of events were incredibly fruitful and inspiring.  Thanks to the Tech Awards and the GSBI for giving me the opportunity to participate this year.

Hugh runs his own show at Scoraig Wind Electric.  He's been building small wind turbines for 30 years and has a tremendous wealth of knowledge and experience with small wind turbines, a notoriously finicky species.  Wind power is tricky - no amount of slick marketing from the world's leading small wind turbine producers can change this.  People are looking for simple, plug-and-play solutions and the marketing folks are more then happy to play on this desire by advertising small "no maintenance", "install on your roof" wind turbine solutions that can "free you from grid power".  But the wind is fierce and the dynamics involved are sneaky, and small wind turbines don't produce large amounts of power.  Hugh is the first person to tell you this.  But he will also tell you that if you do a good job and manage to harness the power in the wind, there is almost nothing more satisfying in the world.

The primary objective of Hugh's visit was to have him increase our technical team's understanding of small wind turbines.  Check.

The secondary objective of Hugh's visit was to continue to evolve our wind turbine design to increase reliability (among other factors).  Result - the bluePiggott (below), who's body is based on the blueDiamond design created with Otherpower.com but who's alternator and other small parts are Hugh-designed.  Check.

Finally, we wanted to use Hugh's visit as an excuse to invite other leading renewable energy groups from other parts of Nicaragua to come to Bluefields for a week-long sharing of knowledge and experience and a practical "how to build a wind turbine" workshop.  Attending the conference / workshop were representatives of the UNI (National Technical University), La Salle (Technical school in Leon), ATDER-BL, SuniSolar, Hivos, and INATEC central. Getting these major institutions to come to the remote, isolated Caribbean side of Nicaragua was a major achievement for blueEnergy and reflects blueEnergy's growing influence in Nicaragua.  Check.

Hugh's visit was a great success and very inspirational.  Hugh if you read this - thank you for all you've done to help blueEnergy get to where it is. 

You can read Hugh's report of his visit here.  If you want to learn how to build wind turbines from scratch, I recommend you sign up for one of his fantastic workshops.

I am back down in Nicaragua for the second time in two months.  The organization is coming into its own through an intensive process of human resource needs evaluation, restructuring and development of both soft and hard infrastructure.  Lining up all existing resources in a defined strategic direction is challenging to say the least – but the effort is already showing payoffs.  Members of our now large team of 30 on the ground in Nicaragua are operating in more clearly defined roles and with a clearer vision of blueEnergy’s mission.  Not to say it’s all worked out, far from it, but the process has begun and can be trusted to take us to where we want and need to be.

This trip has been very special for me.  First, my wife Lorelei accompanied me on the first 5 days of trip – making her first visit to Nicaragua.  Since the launching of the organization in 2003, Lorelei has born the title of “Princess of blueEnergy” and she has supported the organization in every way imaginable, from afar.  She is an attorney in San Francisco and her long hours in the office and the courtroom have made blueEnergy possible.  The trade off is that she gets very little time off and getting to our remote location is no easy task.  For Lorelei this short visit was an opportunity to put faces to all the names she’s heard about for a long time and to see with her own eyes what blueEnergy has become.  For me her visit was a very special time and I hope I can get her back down again soon.

The second major thing happening on this trip is that we are hosting Hugh Piggott, the original designer of the wind turbine blueEnergy uses.  Hugh has been an inspiration to me since before the birth of blueEnergy and has contributed in countless ways to the organization through his knowledge sharing, training, and general insights.  It took many years to coordinate this visit and now Hugh is here for three weeks for a mixture of staff training, a semi-public conference/workshop, public events and cultural tours, of course!

Hugh and Lorelei in Nicaragua.

The creators of the GSBI are true visionaries that have put a structure to their vision.  It is a maturing structure with growing pains, but that makes it that much more credible in my eyes and I suspect, the eyes of the other social entrepreneurs attending.

Jim Koch, co-founder of the GSBI program, laid out his case in the welcome BBQ when he said, (paraphrasing), "The challenges faced by the world are growing at a faster rate than our innovate solutions are growing to resolve them."  With this he laid out his case for the need to scale our social ventures.  While there is much discussion around the virtue and risk of scaling social enterprises, what I think is non-controversial is that for most social organizations there is a huge gap between the impact they have today and the impact they could have if they had a strategic plan and growth capital. For this reason the GSBI's focus is on helping each attendee develop a workable business model and a plan for attracting growth capital.

On day 11 of the program, we presented our business plans to 200 people, including venture capitalists, silicon valley executives, academics, interested citizens.  Watching my 15 colleagues I was amazed at the quality of the visions and presentations, as was the audience.  Such an environment of enthusiasm, awe, hope.

The following day, on our way to the closing ceremony dinner we walked by the new library and saw flowers piled up near the entrance.  We were told that a young student had jumped to his death just after we walked by that exact spot the day before, chatting and laughing, all feeling so relieved that our presentations had gone well. 

We stood there for a minute in shock.  The contrast was night and day... hope and despair.  My mind instantly flashed to a couple years back when my cousin lept out of this world, causing so much pain to our family.  At the core of the GSBI and Santa Clara University and the Jesuit ethos is empathy and at that moment I truly felt empathy  for the young student's family.  The contrast was stark... night and day... hope and despair.

I reflected that this young student's personal despair was a microcosm of the world's despair.  And here we were, an enthusiastic bunch tackling the world's pain, an island of hope in a turbulent sea.

As Jim put it, the problems - the source of the despair - are growing faster than our solutions.  But what I've always known and what was reinforced after the last 2 weeks, is that this doesn't have to be so.  We can create a more equitable, just world.  In fact, we have to.  And I'm not talking about a pie in the sky, "everything is rosy and easy and the world is perfect" vision... I'm talking about hard work - very hard work. Sacrifice. Grinding it out, but always with a smile on your face because you know this is the only way forward and because you feel that the greater good is something worth struggling for.

Through immense difficulties, we continue on and struggle to build the better world we all want to live in.

Education section of my resume should now read:

Undergrad - Berkeley

Graduate - MIT

School of Life - Santa Clara University

I was fortunate to be given a scholarship to attend Santa Clara University's Global Social Benefit Incubator program (GSBI). Every participant is tackling a major social issue such as clean water delivery, health care, education, and energy services.  It's an intensive, two-week business training program that takes 20 social entrepreneurs from around the world and helps then scale up their vision. Everyone comes in with passion and the GSBI helps them refine their vision and develop a strategic plan to achieve their objective given real world constraints.

Joining me in the class of 2008 are entrepreneurs from the Philippines, Nepal, India, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Haiti, and Vanuatu. It's an amazing group and it's an honor to be among them. 

Each of us is facing a seriously daunting task and each of us is at a point where we need some retooling to take our organizations to the next level.  I am really excited to be here and look forward to the next two weeks of intensive learning and sharing.

Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra

Lâl and President Gorbachev at the Energy Globe 2007 Awards in May 2008.

President Gorbachev reading about blueEnergy at the Energy Globe Awards.

Lâl and associate Matthieu Poulet accept the Energy Globe Award on behalf of blueEnergy from Mrs. Maneka Gandhi (Former Minister of the Environment, India).

Lâl and Mr. Pöttering (President of European Parliament) at the Energy Globe Awards in the European Parliament building in Brussels.

Lâl Marandin, Colette Grinevald (of linguistic fame) and President Jacques Chirac of France discussing blueEnergy.

Lâl discussing blueEnergy with Mr. Samassekou (Former Minister of Education of Mali).

Lâl discussing blueEnergy with President Chissano of Mozambique.

During my trip the price of petroleum surpassed $5 a gallon and nearly everyone in the transport sector took to the streets to demand government price controls. With a transport strike in place, we were nearly paralyzed in Bluefields. blueEnergy doesn't own its own vehicles, rather it relies on its partner, the National Technical Institute (INATEC), for transportation services. blueEnergy typically has access to the Institute's Land Rover but as happens on a regular basis, the vehicle was in the capital city for repairs since no one is able to service the specialty vehicle in Bluefields. This, combined with the extreme pressure on the remaining vehicle due to the strike (as well as the death of the chauffeur's father), left us high and dry at a time we had over 40 people to move around, materials to purchase, community trips to make (think, getting materials from shop/house/office to docks and back), etc.

Amidst this logistical confusion and difficultly, the real bad news came in - Neuman Puchie, leader of the community of Set Net, blueEnergy champion and person friend to us all, died unexpectedly while on a trip to the capital city of Managua. Just one week before, Puchie had captained a boat full of blueEnergy staff to the Pearly Keys to celebrate the successful water purification workshop. Puchie was the reason blueEnergy ever came to know the community of Set Net. He was often the captain that brought us there, the first to help unload the boat, the one to house the blueEnergy teams, and the first up in the morning making everyone coffee. He had a hand in every step of the blueEnergy project in Set Net and was the community champion.

The entire blueEnergy team was in shock at the news of his passing. Most painful was the uncertainty over the cause of death and the prospect that it may not have been natural causes. Nicaragua is a land where facts and information are far and few between, and the pain this causes in times of crisis can be immense, especially to the family. I was so upset I just went to bed early, something I rarely do. What is certain is that Puchie will be sorely missed and the community of Set Net now has a mountain to climb to get back on its feet.

To add insult to injury, on my last day in the capital, the car I was in was pelted with water balloons by transport strikers as we sped along the highway near the airport. As I was talking to our driver, I caught one right in the face. I was lucky all I got was a sharp scare and a soar jaw... others had been attacked with rocks and oil. When you're helping people, you always hope they'll be appreciative, but the world is complex and there's often a monkey wrench that enters the equation. Often times its nothing personal.

blueEnergy's strength is its persistence through the good and bad times and this trip was surely a testament to that.

The life-cycle cost of energy systems is far more sensitive to quality of implementation then the specific technology you use, within reason of course.  So much implementation in the world is so incredibly poorly done, that you can rise above the crowd and be competitive just by doing what you do well, whatever it is you do.

Many people focus on the technology implemented to calculate cost.  They show you a table that says coal energy costs $X/kWh, hydro energy costs $Y/kWh, wind energy costs $Z/kWh... but what they don't show you is the 10 pages of assumptions that go into the calculation.

A professor of mine at Berkeley once told me of cost models - "remember Mathias, crap in, crap out".  It's important to create cost models, but it's also important to remember that they are just models, not crystal balls.  They are tools used to create policy, rather than a reflection of necessary truth.

Within those 10 pages of unread assumptions lies the key one - that the project is conceived of and executed well.  You take that assumption out and the whole house of cards come crumbling down.  Everyone has to play the "cost game" and brag that their solution is the cheapest option, but remember to take it all with a grain of salt as these cost models are a rather precarious breed.

One of my jobs is to set the guidelines and tone for how much we bog people down with documenting and reporting verses letting them immerse themselves fully in the experience of the moment.  Left to their own vices people gravitate towards the latter.  But from an organizational perspective, that is like letting 100% of the wind flow through your wind turbine without extracting any of its energy, which of course doesn't make any sense.  The organization needs to do work and it needs to tap into the wind to drive its generator.

If the wind is individuals' experience and knowledge, then we must develop a documenting and reporting system to extract as much as we can - but we must also accept that, like with Betz's limit, we can't capture all of it.

If we try to capture too much we stifle individuals' abilities to experience their experiences and even make them forgo some experiences all together.  So even if their reporting improves, the content they're reporting on becomes less rich.  I realize now that as a "data guy", I was living with the assumption that we should be collecting as much data as possible.  Now I can see that the upper limit of the value of information - itself a function of both quality and quantity - that can be captured by a a reporting system is much less than 100%.  The key is extracting just the right amount such that the blades and generator spin but the wind moves through unimpeded.

blueEnergy is just now breaking the surface and as we do, more and more people are finding us to tell us what we should be doing.  Sometimes they're right but most of the time they're either telling us we should have done something more or should be doing something more now.  There's no doubt we need good advice and help, especially going forward.  But we also know where we've come from and what it took to get to where we are now. 

We see below the water's surface for our particular situation.  People who are now seeing blueEnergy for the first time and think we could have or should be doing more don't understand what it takes to get anything done in the environment we work in.  It takes a significant physical, human and organization infrastructure to lift a noticeable chunk of iceberg out of the water.  And by significant infrastructure I don't mean bloated overhead - I just mean a highly effective body of knowledge, experience, motivation, procedures, facilities and equipment.  And in the environment blueEnergy has chosen to work in, it's a struggle for everything including every inch of infrastructure.

I know in my heart that we have done and are doing all we can with the resources we have.  We will continue to improve our efficiency and as we attract more resources and get them to gel with our existing ones we will be able to do more.  One thing's for certain, this whole blueEnergy experience has sensitized me to the challenges faced by other organizations just breaking the surface.  I look at them now with a sense of awe and admiration and am very careful with my words when offering suggestions.

Innovation is a wonderful thing.  There are always ways to improve the way we build and do things, there's no debate about that.  But does the world really need a new type of water filter or does it need people to execute the myriad of good solutions already out there?  After all, people need clean water, they don't need innovative water purification technology.  Similarly they need energy service to light up their homes and store their medicines, they don't need a flashy new wind turbine design.

Certainly the technology and models used have to be workable... but the chasm between workable and working is large - and people gettin' 'er done is what lies in between.

There are so many workable solutions out there just waiting for motivated, dedicated people with the follow-through to actually execute them.  Having great ideas to help people is one thing but actually going out and dealing with the daily grind, the disappointments and the failures and somehow driving dreams into reality, a reality that actually helps people - that's hard.  blueEnergy's director in NIcaragua (also my brother), Guillaume Craig, is a master doer.  I'm constantly amazed at his ability to turn ideas into reality and the last 3 weeks has been no exception.  Everyone within blueEnergy, myself included, and many outside of blueEnergy have a lot to learn from him.

Am I the first person to reflect on the chasm between ideas and action - of course not - so I'm going to stop and get back to work.  After all, gettin' 'er done is blueEnergy's true innovation :)

This past week was incredible.  I haven't had so much fun on the job in a while.  I started blueEnergy because I wanted to build wind turbines, but of course my responsibilities require me to be behind a desk most of the time.  I'm not complaining at all - I still love what I get to do - but this week was special for me as I got to be in the shop each and every day.

Here's a group shot of the team that got 'er done!

 
Throughout the week we focused on a modification of our existing design along with two new designs.  Our main goal was to create and study several options for a more robust small wind turbine, then make some decisions on which design to hone in on moving forward.  We succeeded in building all three models we had aimed to and ran a considerable number of tests.  We're still busy compiling the results and will be making some final decisions in the next couple weeks on which model we adopt for our next round of production.

We were honored to have the Otherpower.com crew with us on the ground in Nicaragua and to have the remote advising of Hugh Piggott.  For Otherpower.com I think this trip was truly eye-opening and their practical knowledge represented a treasure trove for our local employees and volunteers.  We're out to make Bluefields the capital of small-scale wind power in Central America and the events of this past week certainly strengthened our case.

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.