Africa to generate mass energy from dirt

STEPHEN Lwendo, a Harvard electrical engineering student that hails from South Africa, attempts to show villagers in rural Tanzania how energy flows to a light from a fuel cell.

Many of these efforts involve wind or solar power. But one group in Cambridge, 'Mass', is working to develop fuel cells made from the bacteria that occur in soil or waste.

"You can just literally make energy from dirt," said Aviva Presser, a graduate student at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. And theres a lot of dirt in Africa.

Presser is one of the founders of Lebone Solutions, which is being genoursly financed by a US$200,000 ($301,090) World Bank aided grant and private investments. Lebones idea is a microbial fuel cell, a battery that makes a small amount of energy out of materials like manure, graphite cloth and soil, which are common to African households.

But Lebone which means light stick in the Sotho language does not just want to make the batteries and sell them to African consumers. The group hopes that eventually, as the technology becomes more refined, each household will be able to build a battery at a one-time cost of no more than a minimal of US$15.

Van Vuuren, who is from Pretoria, South Africa, and who graduated from Harvard last year with a honours degree in economics, likened the simplicity of the battery to the potato experiment that most of us did in high school class, a two-step reaction that produces a simple charge.

But the bacteria in a microbial fuel cell produce electrons while doing what they naturally are supposed to do: metabolise organic waste, like dead leaves or grass or compost, for energy. The electrons then stick to an electrode, like a piece of graphite, and the chemical reaction that follows creates a small charge sufficient to power a relative small lamp or cellphone.

The founders of the Lebone team were classmates at Harvard, and looking at sustainable lighting technologies for Africa was their class project. Last summer, they took the technology to Leguruki, a village in Tanzania, to see how the batteries work in households. For three hours each night, six families used batteries made of manure, a graphite cloth and buckets, and a copper wire to conduct the current to a circuit board.

While in Leguruki, Van Vuuren said, the group learned as much about the people who used the batteries as the batteries themselves.

People walk an hour or more a day to the local high schools to get their phones charged for two or three days, he said, noting that the phones were sources of light as well as communication devices. The batteries are also used to power radios, Van Vuuren said, as important a medium of communication in rural Africa as the cellphone.

"Ideally, they would like to have a big refrigerator," Van Vuuren said. But right now, their key need is a cellphone.

"We are a group of Africans that have had the privilege of a first rate education," he said. There are very few people who have insights into both. We lived through it. The overall benefits to improvement in the standard of living is the goal of this project.

The group is actively expanding the refined prototypes into Namibia, where, over the next two years, it will examine how more easily available materials and will create electricity. Van Vuuren said his group wanted to test the microbial cell batteries in African settings before bringing them to the American market.

Eventually, Lebone wants to create a new business model for energy distribution in Africa, helping to funnel fuel cells and other technologies tested in Africa to distributors there, rather than reducing developed technologies to meet African needs. These would enable the continent to gain greater economic benefits that would be benefical for socio and economic development.

"If you work within those constraints, you can create something that works in the developing world," Van Vuuren said. Theres no reason that people need to starve or read at night. Africa as a whole is waking up to a new era, the inequalities are reduced.

IPS