Solar Televillage
World TeleSchool & CyberClinic Development Project
A Strategy to Bridge the "Digital Divide" to Mitigate Poverty and
Keep the Best and Brightest to Create a Sustainable Future
in the Developing Countries in the Digital Age and the Solar Century
Satellite and Solar Televillage Concept
The Solar Televillage: World TeleSchool & CyberClinic Development Project is an innovative strategy to provide remote villages with instant, mass-produced "Solar Teledomes" containing solar-powered distance-learning schools, telemedicine clinics, clean water facilities, community solar kitchens, and even e-commerce centers. In addition, these Solar Televillages, where appropriate, will provide comfortable accommodations for eco-tourist resorts as well as emergency and transitional housing. The mass production of these plastic domes will make them broadly affordable to developing countries.
The modular and economic Solar Teledomes can be packaged with lighting, computer work-stations, and a range of other electrical applications powered by solar photovoltaic cells. GTI will work with developing countries to address the needs for electronic schools and telemedicine clinics.
A Solar Teledome Distance Learning School with 12 computer stations
Dome office interior
The physical nature of the Solar Televillage is modeled after the Dome Village for the Homeless established in 1993 in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, California.
Dome Village in downtown Los Angeles
The Dome Village in Los Angeles is composed of 20 domes that provide housing and supportive services for 18-24 individuals and family members. Eight domes support community uses including an office dome and separate domes for a kitchen, community room, separate women's and men's bath facilities, a laundry, and a computer learning and education center. The remaining domes are residential, each partitioned in half and providing private living space for individuals. Hot showers are provided with energy from solar thermal panels, and wastewater can be treated with an artificial marshland treatment technology developed by NASA.
The entire GTI Solar Televillage, powered by photovoltaic solar cells and appropriate renewable energy systems, is connected to the "information superhighway" of the Internet and World Wide Web through microwave and low-orbit satellite communications.
Solar Televillage
These frameless dome structures are portable, easily assembled, durable, storable, and impervious to extreme weather conditions, from arctic winds to tropical heat.
Construction of dome in four hours
Each Teledome contains 314 square feet and can be installed in four hours by a team of two with no more than a stepladder, screwdriver and wrench. A GTI Teledome can be taken apart in two hours. Doorways can be adapted as connectors between domes so that any number of domes can be joined into a modular cluster.
Food preparation center and laundry facilities
The igloo-like Solar Teledomes, suitably shaded with vegetated arbors and solar photovoltaic panel-supporting structures, can house many village activities, in particular the following:
· E-commerce and
e-mail center
·
Telemedicine clinic·
Distance learning center and digital library·
Water & power center·
Entertainment center·
Agriculture development extension station.
Solar and other "appropriate technologies" could provide the following sustainable-technology applications:
·
Solar electrification·
Solar coffee- (and solar-rice, tea-, fish-, etc.) processing and drying facilities·
Solar water pasteurization system·
Solar cooking by families and the village·
Solar autoclaves (medical sterilizers)·
Solar bicycle transportation·
Solar water pumping for irrigation
Coffee farmers view solar water pumping demonstration
·
Wind turbines·
Mini-hydro power systems·
Biogas system·
Artificial marsh wastewater treatment system.
A
"Light Road" Network for Bicycles, "Solar Bicycles," and Hybrid Bicycle Vehicles
The rural areas of the developing world, and the developing nations, could benefit tremendously from the creation of a paved "light road" infrastructure designed for bicycle and hybrid-bicycle vehicles. A "mini" paved-road infrastructure can be designed to carry a variety of pedal-powered and small electric motor- and fuel cell-powered bicycles, tricycles, and hybrid-bicycle vehicles that carry single and multiple passengers and goods and produce. These paved "ribbon roads" would connect the Solar Televillages established within a region, and the farms, cooperatives, and towns. All of the goods and produce to be imported into or exported from the rural regions could be transported by the small and mid-size carriers that travel on these roads – only in smaller units. The roads and bridges of this light infrastructure, not as massive as those required to carry heavy motorized vehicles and trucks, would be much less costly to build and maintain. This light-road network could be created more quickly, and serve a larger territory. And this network of "mini-roads" would be much more environmentally benign.
A network of roads designed for light and very light vehicles might even lead to the creation of new national and regional industries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that develop new varieties of foot-powered, solar photovoltaic-powered, and fuel cell-powered bicycles, tricycles, and quadricycles to carry people and goods in the developing and developed areas of the world.
Green Technology Institute's Green Commuterä program has pioneered the installation of solar photovoltaic bicycle charging stations in several cities in California and Oregon in the United States. This growing model for the world's first solar-powered transportation modality is applicable to the developing world.
Palm Springs Green Commuter Program
GTI is working with electric bicycle manufacturers to develop new varieties of bicycle-oriented transportation, including a solar-electric tricycle, topped with a solar-photovoltaic canopy, for transporting passengers and goods. For more information, refer to "Solar Bicycling in Palm Springs," Solar Today (www.solartoday.org) (published by the American Solar Energy Society), July/August 1998.
Solar PV electric charging station
Solar electric bicycle – Costa Rica
Creative Financing Strategies
We must develop creative financing strategies to deal with these massive problems of rural poverty, urban overload, waterborne disease, illiteracy, poverty, and other ills with the concept of "e-trade, not aid." The present financial and commodity distribution system, controlled by just a few multinational companies, has contributed to the impoverishment of the people in the developing countries. We in "the North" are addicted to oil, cocaine, coffee, tobacco, alcohol and chocolate – all commodities that are produced or grown in the countries of "the South."
Take oil. The developing nations comprising the major oil exporters formed an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and successfully gained control of oil, from the well to the pump. The oil countries took control of their economic destiny.
The coffee countries can do the same, and should. The production and processing of coffee is controlled by five major companies in North America. These corporations, together with a number of intermediary brokers, have pursued their businesses in a manner that basically has impoverished many of the coffee farmers in the developing nations. GTI has established an online direct-marketing "cyberclustering" strategy around coffee. By embracing solar energy and telecommunication technologies, coffee-exporting cooperatives can now sell directly to coffeehouse and foodservice retailers, consumers, and home "coffeepreneurs" in North America and other developed areas – in-shop and in-home roasters using the new-generation micro-roasters – and receive a higher price for their premium green coffee beans. The World Bank Group and international donor countries, along with the national banks of the Coffee Belt region, can use their power creatively, with a determination to solve problems and improve conditions before they reach a crisis stage, to do great good in the world's Coffee Belt!
Green Technology Institute is working directly with Latin American and African coffee farmers and their cooperatives to help them finance solar energy applications. Whenever possible, GTI is bartering "Green Technology for Green Coffee" in order to eliminate the high interest rates (generally more than 30% per annum) charged by local financial institutions for loans to purchase equipment. Solar and high-efficiency hybrid and electric coffee dryers, solar-photovoltaic electricity systems, solar-thermal water and milk pasteurization systems, and solar medical autoclaves (medical instrument sterilizers) are among the items of sustainable technology being bartered or soon to be bartered in this "Green For Green" program.
Other creative financing strategies should be considered. Micro-enterprise loan funds that help individual (mostly women) rural entrepreneurs to set up village-level small businesses should be expanded to include village "e-preneurs" who sell local products of many kinds to the world – along with the creation and funding of a new category of mini-enterprise loan funds to make agricultural coop- and village-level investments such as solar crop drying systems and other commodity value-adding facilities, PV electric systems, and other Solar Televillage components.
There are over fifty coffee- exporting countries in the developing world. Their governments have a window of opportunity to fund many of their national development projects and programs in rural communities, if they combine privatization and rural development into project financing packages. For example, a Coffee Belt country such as Uganda or Cambodia or Peru may privatize its national communications company or award telecommunications contracts to multinational corporations: What if the national government tied the privatization of its communication systems to the funding of Internet-connected rural community distance-learning centers and telemedicine health clinics as a condition of the deal? The requirement would be to develop a communication center for open-access electronic mail (which would also facilitate low-cost rapid communication with relatives who have moved to the U.S. and other countries), a distance-learning school, and a telemedicine clinic in carefully chosen remote villages. The World Bank could provide gap financing and a Coffee Belt government could give tax incentives as a strategic part of awarding the concession.
Another example: If companies wish to bid on a mining concession, one of the requirements could be a trade of resource development rights for a company's help with rural Solar Televillage infrastructure development, or help with solar water pasteurization and wastewater improvements for rural villages.
Coffee Belt nations must develop an integrated strategic framework for community well-being that includes social, cultural, economic, physical, and environmental elements and that incorporates appropriate technologies to create sustainable development. The ultimate goal of this strategy is the provision of community empowerment: the opportunity for local people everywhere in the world to determine their own economic and cultural destiny, given the best available information to make that decision.
Solar Televillage Network
GTI proposes the establishment of a network of Solar Televillages in the world's developing nations as a strategy to mitigate poverty and slow the rural migration to those countries' urban centers in developing countries.
A successful attempt to create a prototypical, replicable model Solar Televillage could be the beginning of a network of these Televillages throughout the equatorial nations, the belt of land between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. By creating a demand for the Solar Televillages, the cost would be reduced dramatically. The proposed network of Televillages would be connected by the "light road" infrastructure created for bicycles and bicycle-hybrid vehicles, described earlier.
These Solar Televillages are the point at which the Digital Age and Solar Century could most dramatically and usefully converge. A network of Solar Televillages is a strategy to bridge the "digital divide" between the rich and poor countries as well as between the rural and urban communities. Solar Televillages could become the prosperity-building and sustainability-ensuring community economic units for rural coffee, rice, tea, hemp, aquaculture, and other farmers of all kinds throughout the developing world.
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Les Hamasaki is COO of Green Technology Institute, Inc., a sustainable planning and development company specializing in solar energy, communications, and clean water technologies. Mr. Hamasaki is a professional community and urban development planner, and was involved with two 20-year plans (1975-95 and 1995-2015) for the City of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the United States.
Hamasaki served as a City of Los Angeles Planning Commissioner and Airport Commissioner. Hamasaki serves on many community boards, including the Tom Bradley Foundation, the International Student Center at UCLA, the Japanese American Community and Cultural Center, the Uganda Investment Authority West Coast Office, and the Peru-California Partnership Council.
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