It’s 5:30 a.m. and the sunrise casts a soft glint off the crests of waves as 60-year-old Elioterio Mircader and a dozen other fishermen guide their wooden outriggers into the transparent shallows surrounding Green Island.
Wading up to his waist, Mr. Mircader carefully separates a small barracuda from his net and puts it on ice.
The ice is new. As are the satellite dishes that have sprouted on sandy lanes, and a light switch that has been installed in a classroom on this remote Philippine island.
A year ago, about 70 percent of the 450 households had power; but it was supplied by a pair of unreliable dirty diesel generators. A hybrid renewable energy plant funded by USAID and its partners now produce the electricity and ice needed to cleanly sustain the island.Energy demand is rising in the Philippines; and in a country comprised of more than 7,000 islands, delivering basic electricity to the most remote areas, such as Green Island, remains a challenge.
Some 4.7 million households throughout the Philippines have no electricity and many can’t readily be connected to the nation’s power grid.
With technology costs falling, renewable energy is an affordable and sustainable solution to help people like Mr. Mircader make a decent living and support his family.Here, a local energy developer, Solutions Using Renewable Energy (SURE), Inc. and a California company - All Power Labs - is harnessing the power of sun, wind and coconut husks to produce power.
SURE received a small grant from USAID’s Climate Change and Clean Energy Project to establish a combination of purely renewable energy sources that will supply uninterrupted electricity for household use.
SOMETHING NATIVE GENERATES FIRST TIME POWER
