For most of us, dealing with a natural disaster on the scale of the Asian earthquake and tsunami – which killed upwards of 170 000 people and made a million survivors homeless – is quite unimaginable, and thankfully a situation that few of us are likely to experience first hand. Yet the amazing speed, scale and professionalism of the international disaster relief response clearly demonstrates that some agencies not only have to imagine but also have to be prepared for the worst. A question for the PV community is how can it best support such relief and reconstruction efforts in future?

For the affected populations, priorities in the immediate aftermath of such disasters are food, shelter and clothing, medical aid and safe drinking water. Sanitation quickly also becomes critical. For relief organizations, effective communications are essential for coordinating the response between field staff and headquarters and inter-agencies, for ensuring security, and for helping to reunite displaced families. Reliable, rapidly deployable energy services can make a positive difference to the aid effort, for instance enabling emergency lighting, pumping and water purification, and establishing critical power supplies for medical facilities and communications centres.

Prior to the tsunami, solar lighting has been used to good effect in a number of emergency relief projects, but generally renewable energy technologies are currently not widely used. In part this is due to the relatively lower capital cost of diesel generators, but also it relates to relative familiarity and accessibility of the options.

Solar photovoltaic systems do offer some clear service advantages, particularly in situations where damage to transport and fuel storage infrastructure hampers the use of diesel generators. Like diesels, PV can be quickly deployed, but they can also be easily scaled to suit a wide range of power demands and they are almost universally appropriate from the perspective of the available energy resource.

At the same time – particularly in the developing country context – what may have been conceived as a short-term fix can come to be relied upon as part of a longer term service solution. As experience in remote professional applications has clearly shown for many years, PV systems can be designed to offer excellent reliability which is not only a critical consideration for immediate aid, but may also have implications if viewed from the reconstruction and development perspective.

One positive outcome of the recent tragedy, in addition to the offers of immediate support and equipment donations, has been the response by some segments of the renewable energy community to establish closer relationships with relief agencies. This is vital both to gain a better understanding of the needs and constraints from the field perspective, but also to help response agencies identify appropriate applications for PV, and particularly to help deliver solutions that can support the longer-term reconstruction and broader development goals for affected communities.

[ Top ] [ Previous article in PV Power ] [ Next article in PV Power ]