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For a video report on the solar engineers of Hyderabad, check the category ‘media’.

Four dark-skinned women in multi-hued saris hunch over a solar power-generating circuit at the National Institute for Rural Development (NIRD) in Hyderabad, fleshing out details about solar lamps and panels for Indian villages. Chennamma, Yelamma, Kalavati and Zayda, all illiterate women in their 30s who previously worked as stone crushers in South India’s quarries, have left the furnace-like heat of their previous jobs to use the sun to a better purpose. This is the Women Barefoot Solar Engineers Association of Hyderabad. Exploitive employers, 10 hours of backbreaking labor and a long wait in queues to collect a wage of a dollar a day pretty much summed up these women’s bleak existence in the quarries. But today, after the institute’s Rural Technology Park helped train them as solar engineers, the women manufacture and maintain solar lamps and travel across India’s vast rural landscape to install solar power generators.
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We wanted to set up a rural technological centre. A campus built only on green technologies.
We started to develop the solar section in 1988, funded with the royalties from the book The City of Joy. We were told about the advantages of photovoltaic solar panels to bring electricity to remote villages. We wanted to set up an open concept that everybody understood, so we started with trainings. The purpose was to inform all the rural people and tell them how we could upgrade our standards of living together.
I started to learn about solar systems: understanding photovoltaic panels, the batteries, production and maintenance. That time I was teaching science and maths in the night schools, and the project gave me the opportunity to learn about new techniques. I got more and more interested in the matter.
Today I have trained more than 400 Barefoot women solar engineers. (more…)

Sita Bai is one of the Barefoot SolarCooker Engineers. Together with 3 other women she runs the solar-cooker section of the College.
Some years ago she decided to start a 6 months training as solar panel engineer, and she continued her education with a focus on solar cookers.
Today the women are responsible for the construction of the large parabolic dishes, covered with regular pieces of mirror.
They tailor them precisely according to the blueprints of a German Engineer, Wolfgang Scheffler, with whom they still collaborate and improve the reflectors and machinery when needed.
They organise their smithy, weld and solder the mechanical parts for the cookers out of recycled bicycle parts. Their apparatus are sold to organisations in India who use them in community kitchens.

Scheffler’s Community Solar Cooker
Scheffler’s Solar Cooker - pdf

 For videos on the solar workshops, check the category ‘media’.

At Barefoot College, ordinary men and women -whatever their qualifications- can learn about solar energy. Roles have to be flexible: the teacher can be the learner and the learner can be the teacher.
The whole environment is one of creative learning, demystifying technology and unlearning through processes that are natural, non violent and respectful.
At present time, 32 Buthanese girls and 6 Mauretanian women follow a 6 months training to become a solar engineer in their home villages.

They are selected by their communities to be trained in the installation, repair and maintenance of solar photovoltaic units. They learn the necessary skills to repair inverters and charge the controllers for the solar units they will look after.
Every family of the remote village communities pays a small sum for the equipment and the services of the solar engineers. As such, every member of the community takes his responsability in this ecological project of sustainable energy.

solar energy installation manual download pdf
solar energy maintenance manual download pdf

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Preparation of the Making Off Stand-Alone Nodes in Meshed networks
Scenario 1: Stand alone PhotoVoltaic-system

Step by Step description by Bartaku.
Date: 2007 12 22.

Vernacular Observation:
Setting up the system coincided with the moment the plants start growing
towards the sun again… winter solstice!

Set up location:
OKNO rooftop, center of brussels (50°50′13″ North, 4°22′3″)
Set up time: from 11am to 5pm, with numerous interuptions
(normally feasible with 3 persons in 2hrs max).
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