Wim
Senegal 2015: Jeroen Aerts and Joachim Broeders, two of our UHasselt engineering master students construct a windmill to power PC’s in a local school in Warang. Batteries are used to buffer the energy when the windmill produces electricity but there is no power shortage.
One year later: batteries are sold to cover for the increasing costs in supporting pupils going to school. The windmill still works, but is not used anymore for its purpose. Learning: without a clear business plan and awareness creation about the solution, engineering solutions will not be sustainable.
Togo 2016: Kaz Puttenaers and Daan Droogmans, two of our UHasselt engineering master students team up with Lore Van Welde, a master student from economics. The idea is to make a “library” of batteries to be lend out to villages surrounding a farming community in Lomé, Togo. The business plan is built to accommodate the degradation of the batteries: 500+ cycles should be reached to earn enough money to buy new batteries. Six months (approx. 200 cycles later), batteries are degraded or even worse not brought back to the local farming community for new loading.
Tussentitel
At the same time in a primary school in Ukunda, Kenia: Jason Serdons, Sven Bonhomme, PieterJan Oudebrouckx and Simon Wauters, 4 of our students reconstruct a kitchen to replace cooking on
wood solely by cooking with preheated (solar-heated) water and wood. The local construction workers really like the idea (even reverse engineer the solar heater) and see potential in restaurants
along the coastline. However, no financing is available to start up the business.
Learning: Sustainable solutions, consisting out of engineering with integrated business plans only work when the local community adopts the idea and is supported in business creation.
Hasselt/Lubumbashi 2022-2024: A team of Flemish students, under the guidance of Luc Bijnens and Steven Abrams (statistics UHasselt), works on a solar cooker concept from waste materials to accommodate small scale cooking in the Lubumbashi region. The students test their prototype in the summer of 2023 with a visit to Lubumbashi where a team of Congolese students help them re-design their prototype. The academic year that follows, new teams of both Flemish and Congolese students work on an adapted and improved solar cooker prototype, testing it in the summer of 2024 again in Lubumbashi. In the meantime, discussions regarding business creation to bring the solar cookers from local (waste) materials to the market are ongoing. It will probably take one more year, and the involvement of students from business economics and social sciences, to achieve this goal: a sustainable, well-designed and engineered solar cooker.
The examples above clearly state that for renewable energy adoption (globally), technology (eventually combined with business) is not (always) a sustainable solution. Community involvement and the adoption of the idea by the local community is necessary. To achieve this, a “fast” and “one- directional” project where our students implement a solution as part of their masterthesis or a one-year project is not the solution. It rather consists of multicultural and multidisciplinary approaches where different stakeholders learn from each other and combine their insights and expertise to achieve a sustainable solution. Let’s reach out to each other to form global partnerships of multidisciplinary expertise to solve the urgent challenges of this era, achieving global sustainable development.