Mathias Craig, Co-Founder and Exec. Dir. of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a not for profit, NGO working in Caribbean coastal communities of Eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation and other services. Blueenergygroup.org

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 3:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30 ] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of loads 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] and news. 

Speaker 4:        Hi listeners, my name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum. We present part two of two with our guests, Mathias Craig Co, founder and executive director of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization working among the Caribbean coastal communities of [00:01:00 ] eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation, and other essential services. Monte has, Craig is an engineer by training from UC Berkeley and MIT. He talks about what he and blue energy have learned about adapting and localizing technology through projects they undertake with remote isolated communities. Monte has also talks about the future of applied technologies and blue energy in developing areas. Here is part two. [00:01:30 ] As you work with the technologies that you choose from, how much are you changing those technologies? Are you able to feed back to the people who are actually manufacturing and designing those things? 

Speaker 1:        When we started the organization, we thought of ourselves as sort of a technology creator. When we started working with small scale wind power locally manufactured small scale wind turbines, you know, we were early pioneers in that working with the earliest pioneers like Hugh Pigott, as I had mentioned in another group up in [00:02:00 ] Colorado, went by the name other power. We really saw ourselves as the primary design. We spent a lot of time. We did design workshops, we did a lot of cad drawings and we were really deep into the technology when we thought that technology was going to be 80% of what we could contribute. What we learned a number of years later was that that's not where we can add the most value. There's a lot of people around the world that can work on technology that had better setups and more experience, more resources to throw at the problem, and we needed to leverage [00:02:30 ] that. 

Speaker 1:        That was one key realization. Now, on the other end of the spectrum though, we know that just taking technology from around the world and plugging it in never works. It's a lot of romance about that, but the reality is there's tweaking. There's adaptation that has to take place generally not with a cell phone, not with a pencil against her self-contained units, but with systems. These are systems, not products generally and for that you need adaptation and so we started thinking ourselves as technology [00:03:00 ] tweakers or packers, hackers or we use the word localize a lot to mean not inventing, but how do you take something that is successful somewhere else in a completely different context or if you get lucky, you find something that's operating in a relatively similar context and you say, okay, what needs to change for that to be effective where we are? 

Speaker 1:        We have a ton of examples of this and we found we're very good at this and it's a place where we can add a tremendous amount of value. One example is you have [00:03:30 ] the mayor's office in Bluefields, which is where we're, we're operationally headquartered there on the Caribbean coast has a lot of requests for latrines to be installed for the communities. It's very poor sanitation in the area. They want to comply with that request. Right now there's thousands of latrine designs out there. How does a severely under-resourced government office figure out which one is going to be appropriate for the local context? The answer is they can't and it's just paralysis there and that's an example of where [00:04:00 ] we've built very strong partnerships and where we can add a ton of value. We can do that study, we can look at the designs, we can go visit a design in Honduras and check it out and say, oh, this design Central America.

Speaker 1:        Certain cultural similarities. Certain cultural differences can be very different environment, so let's try it out, but it seems promising. Let's test it for a year and let's study. Let's study the the decomposition of the waste. Is it working? Is it not working? And we did a pilot a few years ago looking at a solar latrine where [00:04:30 ] you you use passive solar heating, sort of greenhouse effect to help decompose the waste faster. We thought it was very promising. It didn't work in Bluefields because very high humidity, the rainiest part of the country and it didn't work like in the highlands of Honduras, but we saved a ton of money by studying that for a year rather than going out and building a thousand units because there was demand for latrines, so we did a lot of work on that. We've done that now with the water filters, with the well [00:05:00 ] drilling techniques and technology done that with cookstoves biodigesters everywhere in the technology portfolio. 

Speaker 1:        I'd say we've had a hand in localizing the technology, adapting it and seeing what's going to work and then helping to roll it out slowly. At the end of last year we built our first latrines and built 55 latrines. We'd been studying and working on the trains for over two years. And one of the key elements of being able to do that technology localization are [00:05:30 ] the students and the international fellows that come work with us on the ground for either short term programs in the summer summer fellows that come in or longer term fellows that come for three months, six months or a year and work with us on adapting the technology. So behind that latrine program of two years, they was, you know, over half dozen students that did research that contributed to their schoolwork on campus and pushed the design forward. [00:06:00 ] So that's part of our global leadership program. They get the benefit of learning what real technology design is like in the field and learn about that social element that they don't hear about in class generally. 

Speaker 1:        And what we get is we get to move along sort of the r and d side of things. And do you have a good relationship with local governments? Is that one of the things you try to cultivate? Yes, and I think that's something that sets us apart from a lot of nonprofit organizations in development, [00:06:30 ] generally speaking, but also in Nicaragua's, we've chosen to engage the government directly. The government in some form is what is going to be there and is representative of the people's will in some form. There's always challenges and just like we have in this country about how representative is it, et Cetera, but at the end of the day, it's the ultimate authority in the region and so if you choose to go around it and not engage it as many organizations do, we feel that you severely [00:07:00 ] limit the potential for your longterm impact. So we engage directly.

Speaker 1:        It's not always easy and we engage at different levels. We engage the national government. We have an office in Managua and the capital city where we're in constant contact with the ministries, with all levels of national governments. We engage there over on the coast. We engage with the regional government. We engage with the indigenous and creole territorial governments. It's a semi-autonomous region. [00:07:30 ] It's a very complex governance structure in the country, but we engage at all those levels. To discover what their plans are, to help build capacity where we can, you know, we learn and we teach. And then in the best cases to coordinate, you know, we've done a project with the Ministry of Health. We work with the Ministry of Health, the local nurse. We designed an energy system, install it, the Ministry of Health puts in the vaccine freezer and fills it with medicine and we both train the nurse. Well now that is a very [00:08:00 ] challenging collaboration to manage, but it leads to very big impact if you're willing to do it the right way. 

Speaker 1:        You know, one of our strongest partners is the municipal office of Bluefields, the municipal government, the mayor and his staff where we're collaborating on a number of initiatives both within the city of Bluefields and the surrounding communities around water and sanitation, around building a biodigester for the slaughter house so that all that animal waste will cease to be dumped into the river untreated [00:08:30 ] and will actually become a useful byproduct of methane for cooking. And how many may oriel administrations have you dealt with in the Bluefield? There's been sort of three that we've worked with. Nicaragua is a highly polarized country, politically even more so than the United States. You know, we like to think where the extreme example, but not even close. When you look at the world that Greg was highly political and highly polarized. And when I say highly political, meaning that many [00:09:00 ] government functions and the services that they deliver are dictated by political affiliations. 

Speaker 1:        So the risk of engaging as we do is that you end up on o