Wind has historically struggled to find a place in rural electrification in Nepal, being often overshadowed by hugely successful micro-hydro power and a recent widespread use of solar photovoltaic systems. Meanwhile, the country does exhibit significant wind resources, especially in the immense mountaineous regions that dominate the north of the country.

This SEPS project aims to quantify the potential market in Nepal, while identifying the existing barriers and bottlenecks to growth. Once these barriers are identified KAPEG hopes to formulate and implement recommendations and guidelines to improve the enabling environment for small wind stakeholders.

The project is being conducted in three phases:

• Stakeholder interview campaign (identifying difficulties in planning, implementation and maintenance)

• Geospatial and techno-economic modelling (to quantify the market potential and identify suitable locations)
• Stakeholder engagement workshop (to draw on previous results to make final recommendations)

Recently, the project team has conducted the stakeholder interviews in Kathmandu; finished visiting six wind solar hybrid systems across Nepal while collecting data from the end users; and accumulated most of the data necessary for the market assessment (like available wind and solar resources, population data, etc.).

All the collected data are currently being analysed and will be presented at a final market assessment workshop on 18th April 2018 from 9:30am to 3:10pm (Nepal time) at Yalamaya Kendra, Patandhoka, Lalitpur, Nepal. If you would like to attend, please register here.

Wind Empowerment will be hosting Marco Ogno, Adam Lord and Giacomo Senatore, who will present their improved design of a modular lattice wooden tower for small wind turbines. They have constructed one of these towers during a project in 2015; it has a modular lattice structure and is 12 meters tall, with a wind turbine installed on top for local electricity production.

This webinar will be an opportunity to present the enhanced modular wooden tower design and compare it to towers made of metal.

Speakers:

Marco Ogno, MSc in Mechanical Engineer, currently works for Rolls-Royce plc as Production Manager of gas turbine blades. He has been volunteering for I Love Wind Power (ILWP) since 2013, and he has organised three workshops in Brazil since then.

Adam Lord is a mechanical engineer working for Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, in the tower department. His day job is to design the tower internals for one of the worlds' highest wind turbine towers. He has volunteered for I Love Wind Power since 2014, and joined the team for the first time in Brazil in 2017.

Giacomo Senatore, MSc in Space Engineering, currently works for GE Aviation as R&TD programme manager. He joint the I Love Wind Power Brazil team in 2017, volunteering for the workshop in Montes Claros.

Read more and register on Wind Empowerment's website.

This knowledge exchange programme led by ENACT targeted rural communities, energy access practitioners and the broader energy access community through a series of workshops in rural villages in East Malaysia, an online workshop with South and Southeast Asian energy practitioners, and an active online campaign publicising The Minigrid Game.

The community workshops were well received and the three selected communities found the gaming process novel, engaging, easy to use, and fun. Community members reported an improved understanding of their individual and collective electricity consumption and of the limitations of their minigrid’s capacity, as well as finding the game useful for practicing household energy budgeting and methods for improved system cost recovery.

Through pre­workshop social mapping and game facilitation, the project team was able to observe how community members interacted with one another and how they made individual and collective decisions that represented or aligned with their community protocols or rules of conduct, value systems and existing governance structures and institutions.

The online practitioner workshop organised in cooperation with the Hydro Empowerment Network gave the project team and practitioners the opportunity to share experiences and exchange lessons learnt from community energy planning and engagement activities. For practitioners, the workshop also presented the opportunity to try the game for themselves.

The online campaign was conducted using a dedicated website with videos featuring the community workshops and social media feeds. The project team initially believed this campaign would snowball naturally and reach the target communities, but it became clear that the support of paid promotion and advertising was necessary. This was the team’s first attempt at running an online campaign of this nature and much knowledge on digital marketing and online campaigning was gained along the way.

More general information on this SEPS Exchange is available here: Exchange: A Participatory Gaming Approach To Community Energy Planning in Southeast Asia: Spreading Best-Practices on Community Engagement