blueEnergy works with Midland high school to inspire and train tomorrow's sustainable energy leaders

By Mathias Craig -- For the last few years, blueEnergy has been giving wind turbine building workshops to students in the US and France as part of its Global Leadership Program. In the workshops, students learn about how electricity is made from the wind and get to build a wind turbine - carving blades, winding copper coils and assembling all the parts together. But beyond getting a thrilling hands-on experience, students are inspired to think about their relationship with energy and how our energy choices affect the environment and our culture. These students will be tomorrow's sustainable energy leaders.

Last year blueEnergy gave a workshop at Midland high school (more here) and we are returning again in April of this year. Midland is an amazing school with a deep commitment to environmental sustainability. I was fortunate to attend Midland from '94-96 and have been very impressed with the evolution of their environmental program under the leadership of Lise Goddard. Lise recently wrote a very articulate article that lays out a vision of how we can move towards sustainability - a vision that both Midland and blueEnergy share. The article is published in the National Association of Independent Schools Magazine and begins:

Although this generation’s greatest challenge is to stabilize our planet’s climate system while transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, a working set of blueprints for how to do this is hard to come by. When faced with the immensity of the problem, the impenetrable economies and sway of the fossil fuel industries, and federal and state governments that haven’treally gotten behind renewable energy as a bridge to a brighter future, the easiest path is… to procrastinate.Some hope that, one fine morning, an elixir will appear: a technological or cost breakthrough that will take some of the sting out of the upfront price tag associated with long-term thinking about energy use. Others fall into despair — thinking, since small steps aren’t enough to prevent de­stabalizing climate change, why bother taking any steps at all. Even among folks outraged and motivated by the problem, the path to a brighter future is littered with traps. The challenge of shifting our culture toward solutions is compounded when kids absorb our inaction, or when our actions and stories scare our kids, on whose shoulders we have placed a burden we are too weary to lift.
But procrastinating and fatalistic thinking are not viable options. We need to change the story — its voice, its tone, its tempo, and its plot line. We need to take courageous steps and commit to moving in the direction of sustainability — always, in increments. We need to acknowledge to ourselves and show our kids that the technology to meet our electricity needs with renewable energy exists today, and then help build the infrastructure with them, side by side. And we need to realize that, if we do it right, we will produce much more than just clean kilowatt-hours. We will produce young people who possess the skills to continue building, scaling up, and evolving the infrastructure for a sun-, wind-, and water-powered future. We will produce a generation that can’t imagine procrastinating the way so many adults do today.

I encourage you to read the full article, available here.

In addition to these select wind turbine workshops, blueEnergy's Global Leadership Program also includes opportunities for people to experience our community development work in Nicaragua. From internships (spring break, summer and flexible start dates) to volunteering opportunities, there are a lot of ways to get involved, get inspired, and contribute to blueEnergy's mission of creating a more equitable, sustainable world. I encourage you to learn more by visiting our website here.

bE hosts ¨Exchange Forum of Technologies and Methodologies: Solar Latrines¨

By Angela Cacciola - When you make a commitment to work in a geographically isolated, former war-zone, where heat, humidity, salinity and hurricanes wreck havoc on obtaining and maintaining resources, logistics are quite complicated.As these problems compound with various social issues, including low-level economic activity, inadequate formal education levels, parallel governments, and multi-ethnic and multi-lingual groups, a holistic approach to the development of marginalized societies becomes required.

As blueEnergy Nicaragua Country Director Guillaume Craig states, Bluefields “is not the ideal place to re-invent the wheel.”Instead, it’s the place to learn how the wheel was made, find the sturdiest, cheapest, most available tools to build a modified wheel, and then find locals who can carry out the technical work.Accordingly, while blueEnergy invests in research and development, a key strategy in its overall plan includes catalyzing national networks and “bringing them together to work on the common goal of community strengthening through… interchanges.” Collaborating technologies and strategies with partners and beneficiaries is vital to blueEnergy’s organizational success.

Angel Rivas explains double pit, waterseal,
composting latrines to conference attendees.

In the first week of December, blueEnergy organized and hosted the Exchange Forum of Technologies and Methodologies: Solar Latrines.The two-day conference brought together a variety of local development partners, including FADCANIC and FUNCOS (NGOs), INATEC (technical school), and BICU (university), along with a representative from the Bluefield’s mayor’s office. Special guest, Angel Rivas, came from El Porvenir, an NGO based in the United States that works on the Pacific side of Nicaragua.

Over the past 20 years, El Porvenir has completed 740 projects in water, sanitation, reforestation and education.It currently provides 105,000 people with drinking water, and has planted 530,425 trees and built more than 888 improved stoves. In 2009 alone, El Porvenir helped villagers build 584 latrines, 9 washing stations, 26 wells, 2 gravity flow systems, and 151 low-fuel stoves.

During the morning of the first day, Mr. Rivas presented El Porvenir’s style of double pit, water seal composting latrines. These latrines have been well received by their beneficiaries and many of the first latrines installed are still in use today. Mr. Rivas noted the pros and cons of each latrine design, along with their technical standards, material designs, and costs. He also addressed the equally important social concerns of implementing the projects with regards to monetary contributions, labor, and community involvement.

FUNCOS liason discusses the composting process used by the farm.

On the second day, conference attendees visited FUNCOS, which provided technical information on water, sanitation and improved cook stoves. Attendees also visited blueEnergy solar latrines, composting toilets, bio-arena water filters, and Baptist wells. The event culminated in presentations by local partners on additional cook stove technologies and a large group discussion on the potential for implementation on the Atlantic coast for the various technologies presented.

From this knowledge-exchange workshop, Angel Rivas says he is “most interested in the solar latrine,” which he thinks “could be a viable technology for use in the rural mountain areas where El Porvenir works.”blueEnergy will be using the information learned during the conference to identify the best model for future community development projects.Overall, as blueEnergy Nicaragua Country Director Guillaume Craig notes, the gathering was a “very productive and enriching experience,” and yet another progressive step in blueEnergy’s continuous work “for a more equitable, sustainable world.”

L-R, Vladimir (bE), Angel Rivas (El Porvenir), Thibaut Demaegdt (bE), Guillaume Craig (bE) and Jorge Ramos (bE)

Teaching kids to teach themselves about the environment

By Marcy Ostberg -- For the past four years I have been a teacher in Boston, Massachusetts. During the school year my focus is devoted to the student’s questions and interests. As a result I like to spend my summers traveling and exploring my own personal questions. This year I had the opportunity to spend three weeks as a service learning intern with blueEnergy. I came to Bluefields wanting to learn more about alternative energy, but as I reflect on my time here I realize I have learned far more than originally expected. I have witnessed the resilience of a community up against many challenges and along with the bE staff have grappled with the complexities of finding sustainable solutions to these problems. I have filled many pages of my journal with new ideas and deeper questions. In this Blue News article I will focus on one small snapshot of my experience here, an opportunity I had to see how education can be used as a catalyst to change.

Marcy distributing trash

Unfortunately one of the first things I noticed as a visitor to Bluefields was the trash. The streets and waterways are littered with plastic bottles, water bags, chip bags, and other items such as diapers, cigarettes and beer bottles. I began asking questions looking for the cause. I learned that part of the problem is an ineffective waste management system. There is an open dump on the outskirts of the city yet the trash pickup is inconsistent at best. Although the dump trucks have a schedule it is rarely kept and therefore the residents are unsure when to bring out their trash. It is also difficult to get trash to the trucks, especially for families who live down winding alleyways, deep within the barrios. This ineffective waste management leaves few options and many choose to pile and burn.


One of the first steps to improve this situation is teaching the community to reduce the amount of waste they produce. blueEnergy wanted to capture my experience as a teacher and asked me to develop a lesson plan around this topic. The goal was to help students in Bluefields critically think about this issue and introduce waste reduction as one part of the solution.

Gabriella helping Marcy teach about waste in Bluefields

The lesson was designed around a teaching strategy called experiential education. The basic idea is that students have an experience with the topic, reflect on the experience, learn more about the topic and then apply what they have learned. I wanted to use this strategy to help the students really engage. For the initial experience students made hypothesis about the type of trash that would be most common. They then tested their hypothesis by sorting through trash I had collected from the street and counting the most common items. They found that the small blue bags for drinking water were the most common item, followed closely by chip bags and plastic bottles. Following this experience students brainstormed questions in response to the prompt. They came up with some excellent questions about why this problem exists, how does waste management work in Bluefields and what are possible solutions. I was impressed by their concern for their city. One student said in her reflection, “I love the topic because I learned about how to help my Bluefields.”

Students asking tough questions

Many of their questions were then incorporated into a lesson about how to reduce waste. There final reflections demonstrated that they learned a lot from the lesson. Many of the students made comments about no longer throwing their trash on the streets and had ideas of ways they could improve the situation. One student wisely commented, “It starts from home with your family.” Some students left the lesson really wanting to make a change. One such student said, “We can try something. I promise you when you have a next visit you will see everything change.” We even had some future environmentalists in the group like this student who wrote, “And a word of advice to all. We have to learn that if we continue putting the rubbish in the street it will harm the environment and can cause many diseases such as malaria or dengue. Please do not throw trash on the street and protect our environment.” With comments such as these I felt the lesson was a huge success and left hopeful that the situation would change. I turned back as I left the classroom and saw the school motto painted brightly on a sign. It read “knowledge is power” and after my experience here I would add to that, knowledge is the first step towards change.

Creole-speaking high school, Bluefields, Nicaragua