Dear Luke,
Thankyou for your time today and last night.
We would be delighted to help in providing power solutions for the laptops throughout the African Schools.
I have a number of questions:
Do you wish to run the Servers etc from a 12v supply or a 240/110v AC supply?
Are you looking to charge the laptops or just run them directly during daylight hours?
How many hours will they be used for a day?
Do you require additional power for lighting within the school?
Operational times of the building?
Suggested budget for 500w/hour system?
Operational hours of the laptop once charged?
PV with the relevant battery storage and charge controllers etc is a very expensive solution.
Deep cycle batteries are costly and their charge capacity and life span are seriously reduced in high temperatures.
Wind turbines cannot be relied upon to guarantee power. Nature will not provide a sufficient wind speed in all areas for even an hour 7 days a week. To start putting in systems with 4-5 days storage would be cost prohibitive.
Hydrid solar/wind comes back to cost.
Our smaller unit for individual huts providing power for the lights a radio and a phone charger could be adapted to charge the lap top at night. This could then be taken to school in the morning. This would probably provide the most secure wire free option in the class rooms. A single PV panel could then run the server. However, this is way too expensive to roll out on a large scale at present.
We have an adapted PMG that is virtually resistance free. This could be turned by hand for an hour to store 1.5KW. My next door neighbours 5 year old son can do this. This could be adapted onto a merry go round and 2-3 children playing on this for 2 hours a day would easily store 3KW of power for use.
Modified generators running on crops grown within the village could be another solution. The only drawback is the 3-4 month lead time for the crops. As you know we are building upto 1.6MW units running on Rape seed oil, Palm oil etc.
I prefer the home units - this not only achieves lighting within the huts, allowing for an extended family life within the evenings it also allows communication for people living outside the village and access to information from outside the village via the radio. This is a very expensive option unfortunately.
The only other practical cheap solution would be the hand cranked or merry go round.
I trust this may be of some use to you.
I wish you the best of luck in your exciting projects.
If I can be of any further help please do not hesitate to contact me.
Just as an aside, I find it rather ironic that the Dutch are trying to negotiate crops to be grown in Africa to deliver CO2 neutral power for them (50MW). Surely there must be a budget that would allow villages to have their own smaller communal generators and allow them to earn an income from selling the rest of the fuel to the western world. These would also provide the power for irrigation, laptops etc etc.
Kind regards,
Will Dowson
MD Vawtech Ltd
www.profitablegroup.com