EarthSpark International

“Atansyon! Atansyon!” megaphone-equipped town criers hollered throughout neighboring towns.  Clean energy was coming to Les Anglais, they announced.

The Clean Energy Store (Magazen Enèji Pwòp) of Les Anglais held its grand opening this week with a full day of events and community outreach in this small town near the tip of Haiti’s southern peninsula.

After a morning of local DJ’s, product demonstrations, raffles, and special guests at the marketplace, Sinema Anba Zetwal, the acclaimed “Cinema Under the Stars” troupe from Port-au-Prince, lit up a giant screen in the town square for a full evening program that highlighted the environment, Haitian culture, and the benefits of solar electricity products and efficient cook stoves.

In this town which has no electricity grid and almost exclusively inefficient stoves (when people have stoves at all,) people carried wooden chairs into the square, set up seats on rooftops, and lined the fences to watch. The program featured short films, cartoons, a vox pop short film of Les Anglaisians’ thoughts on clean energy, live testimonials from fellow-townspeople who had tested the products, as well as explanations from manufacturers and a guest speaker from Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest micro-finance institution. The evening concluded with the full length environmental docu-film “Home” by Yann Arthus-Betrand in Haitian Creole.

Universally, the people of Les Anglais were impressed by the giant screen and professionalism of the event. “Les Anglais has never seen an installation this noble” one of the attendees commented. Another threw her hands in the air stretched far apart to convey how ‘ampil ampil extraordinaire‘ the night had been.

The following morning, a small crowd massed outside of the store before its doors opened at 9 am. Some had come to claim the stoves and solar products they had won in the raffle, and others came to look at the goods. The first paying client that day was a woman from the 9 am crowd who wanted to get a ‘miracle stove’ before her day of cooking at the market. She had heard that she could save 10 gourdes  (approx US$0.25) in charcoal costs each day with the efficient stove, and she was anxious to start her savings when she fueled her business that day.

Very special thanks and congratulations to COREA, CRAN, AVODCA, D+E Enterprises, The Green Family Foundation, Fast Forward Haiti, Sinema Anba Zetwal, and to all of the citizens of Les Anglais for making this opening a success!

A thoughtful interview of Asit Biswas, president of the Third World Centre for Water Management and winner of the 2006 Stockholm Water Prize, on Boing Boing illustrates the striking similarities between the water and energy crises. In it, he makes the excellent point that people always have access to some form of water, though it may not be clean and they may pay a hefty price for it. What he describes as being the essential problem is not a global shortage of clean water. The problem is the lack of access to clean water, the underlying cause of which is the lack of both human and physical infrastructure. One could call the lack of access to clean water and the resulting effects “water poverty.”

Similarly, all humans on earth have access to energy, but 1.6 billion have no electricity and 2.5 billion rely on biomass fuels like dung and charcoal for heating and cooking. The use of kerosene for lighting and these dirty biomass fuels results in health problems - just like drinking dirty water - and are extremely expensive to use compared to clean energy technologies. Again, the problem is not that high-quality, inexpensive clean energy technologies don’t exist, but rather that these people do not have access to them. We call the circumstances created by this this lack of access “energy poverty,” and that is precisely what EarthSpark intends to stamp out.

The similarities do not end there. Biswas recounts the story of the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority circa 1993, a corrupt, poorly managed government water utility with system losses as high as 72%. The Water Supply Authority charged extremely high prices for its unreliable service and depended on government subsidies just to get by. In Haiti today, the government electricity utility, Electricite d’Haiti (EDH), runs one of the most inefficient grids in the world, providing power in most places for just a few hours a day. EDH’s system losses, thought to be in the staggering range of 46.02% to 53.59%, eclipse losses in other developing countries: Nigeria 32%, India 27%, Togo 27%, Kenya 22%, Cameroon 21%. The current electricity rate is a shocking US$0.30/kWh.

Kerosene, central battery charging stations and charcoal are not cheap either. Switching to the clean energy technologies for which we advocate would result in household savings of 50% or better, and would have dramatic impacts on health, the environment and productivity.

The influential blog Haiti Innovation has published a post I wrote about the Jatropha economy in Haiti. I also wrote about how our tree nursery business in Coteaux is playing a part in this emerging market. You can read it here.