WE Webinar on wind-water pumping

The webinar will be held on Tuesday, April 7th, 2020 at 2:00 PM British Summer Time (GMT+1) (convert to your time) and the presentation will be in English. More information and the link to join the webinar may be found below.

As always, feel free to spread the news wherever you see potential participants.

Abstract of the presentation

This webinar will present an overview of the ongoing knowledge exchange activities taking place under the SEPS project “Joint water pumping project”. A general presentation of the project objectives, methodology and findings will be presented by Jean Alinei. Two case studies will then be presented by Jorge Ayarza and Esteban van Dam. They will respectively present the socio-technical wind water pumping solutions to be deployed in the rural regions of their respective countries. The panelists will take the opportunity of these practical examples to discuss the capabilities of small wind to permit and enable small entrepreneurship for rural communities and the benefits of these productive uses of wind energy for the local development.

About the presenters

Jean Alinei, Mechanical Engineer (Grenoble Institute of Technology, France), masters in Renewable Energy (Polytecnic of Turin, Italy). Jean has trained for the last 5 years the students of Grenoble Institute of Technology on self-built small wind turbines. He is now the coordinator of the technology department at WindEmpowerment. He has been an electrical and mechanical consultancy engineer from 2017 to 2019 for utility scale solar and hydro power plants. He is now working on open source software defined power converters for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Jorge Ayarza has worked for the last 25 years in small hydro, solar and wind energy. He began his work building pico hydro turbines in Ecuador. Solar and wind energy experience was obtained working in the US for the American Wind Energy Association and Southwest Windpower. Worked in all of Latin America doing trainings and installing systems in primarily rural areas. He worked for the Peace Core and UNDP as technical expert for the Rapid comercialization fo renewable energy in Beijing, China. His most recent work is in India where he started Minvayu as a open source training program for rural entrepreneurship with the aim to develop small wind turbine manufacturers in rural areas of India. Jorge lives in Auroville, south India.

Esteban van Dam, Industrial Engineer (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina), Masters in Renewable Energy (Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Argentina), masters in logistics (École Centrale de Lyon, France), co-founder of 500rpm, an NGO that works on the local manufacture and installation of small wind turbines in rural areas, together with technical schools, since 2010; co-founder of Eolocal, a company that manufactures and markets low-power wind turbines, since 2011. Development Manager in Aires Renewables, since 2016, a consultancy company design and development consultant for solar and wind farms (high power). In the past, member of the board of WindEmpowerment (2010-2016), and volunteer in BlueEnergy, an NGO dedicated to rural electrification and development in Nicaragua (2009-2010).