About Us
We are a team of university students, with a tag-along professor, from Yale University who are passionate about working with university students from Haiti to bring sustainable energy solutions to communities lacking access to basic energy services in Haiti. With our Haitian friends from the L'Universite d'Etat d'Haiti, and our dependable partners, World Hope International, KAYA Energy, and Shashamane Sunrise, we research underserved communities to determine their specific energy needs and adapt or develop solar energy models that address these needs.
Why it Matters
The devastating earthquake that killed about 230,000 individuals and damaged much of Haiti's infrastructure, including 4000 schools, left the country's education and electricity sectors in an adverse state. Post-disaster, emergency response efforts were hampered by a loss of communication lines and a failure of the electric power system. In order to continue to help Haiti recover from the frequent natural disasters of recent years – and to help protect the nation from the potentially devastating effects of future disasters – improvements to the nation’s electricity and clean energy infrastructure need to be a priority.
Five years after the disaster, three out of every four Haitians live without electricity. Even Haitians who do have access to electricity spend a great deal of time in the dark due to frequent power outages. This, in turn, hinders access to other basic needs like health-care, education, sanitation, and safety.
In particular, Port-de-Paix, the capital of the Nord-Ouest Départment (Northwestern Department) of Haiti with a population of roughly 250,000, is greatly impacted by this unfavorable energy situation. The Nord-Ouest Départment is said to be the poorest region of Haiti partly because of the insufficient government and international attention given to the region. The area has a scattered supply of electricity, and numerous households are disconnected from the national grid.
The project will focus on providing electricity and energy services to L’école Galilean, a school in Port-de-Paix with about 450 students at different grade levels, as well as its surrounding community. The school has no access to electricity, and the surrounding neighborhood experiences ongoing inconsistency with its power supply, leaving students and residents with little to no power at times. Our project is one of the many steps needed to help improve the situation at Port-de-Paix and other Haitian underserved communities. As the nation still struggles to recover from a tragedy that happened more than five years ago, continuing efforts to improve schools within Haiti are important for the future of its youth. Providing clean energy to the students who attend L’école Galilean will improve their ability to compete in a world that increasingly relies on technology and connectivity as its primary currency.
Project Details
We will work with our Haitian university friends to install a 5-7kW solar power system at L’école Galilean, a local school in Port-de-Paix, Haiti. The solar power system will provide clean energy to the school and will also power an Integrated Energy Center (IEC), or a solar hub for short. The solar hub will provide for basic energy services to the surrounding community.
The project will be executed in two phases: research and execution. The research phase, taking place in early summer of 2016, the TMD Solar Outreach team, Haitian friends, and ground partners will travel to Port-de-Paix to research the community’s basic energy needs, topography, climate, and layout. We will gather relevant information that will inform the structure, model, and services of our solar hub through door-to-door surveys, observations, and community panels. More importantly, the research will deepen our understanding of the community and engage its members in the entire process. The goal is to tailor-fit a sustainable solar hub for the local community that accurately responds to its energy needs and wants. Therefore, research and the community’s input will be critical to finalizing the solar hub’s design.
The second phase is execution, implemented in late summer of 2016. Our team and partners will build a 5-7kW solar energy system and a solar hub at L’école Galilean. The solar energy system will power both the school and the new solar hub, which will be stocked with equipment and services that best serve the community’s needs.
A local entrepreneur or selected member of the community will manage the solar hub. Members of the community can easily pay for these services using Mon Cash, a well-known mobile money transfer service powered by Digicel in Haiti. The revenue generated will be used for hub maintenance and to expand our project reach to other parts of Haiti.
How Can You Help?
Our target goal is part of a larger budget needed to complete this project successfully. This amount will go towards four major categories: solar panels, equipment for the solar hub, travel and housing for research and installment trips. A part of it will also provide travel, lodging, meal stipends, and training to students from the L'Universite d'Etat d'Haiti. These students are enthusiastic about working with us to make a difference in their communities, however most of them cannot afford the trip to and lodging at the site in Port-de-Paix. Without their help, it will be next to impossible for us to effectively interact with the members of the community. We need their help to make this project successful, and we need yours to make this project possible!
You can also support us by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and our Website.
NB: All anonymous contributors will receive the same level of rewards, plus a handwritten note from our team, and/or an appreciation call from our professor, Dr. André Taylor.
Meet Our Team
Dr. André Taylor : Dr. André Taylor is the co-founder and director of TMD Solar Outreach. He is an associate professor in the chemical engineering department at Yale University, and the director of the Transformative Materials and Devices (TMD) Laboratory. He has extensive experience and knowledge from his research and work in energy conversion and storage devices, including solar energy technologies and batteries.
Stephen Akwei Maclean : Stephen (Akwei) Maclean is a graduate from Yale College with a degree in Chemical Engineering, and currently with TMD Lab as a post graduate associate. He has experience and knowledge on batteries and solar cells fabrication from his research at Yale and in China. He is passionate about energy and education in developing countries.
Julia Zhuang : Julia Zhuang is a junior at Yale, majoring in Chemical Engineering. She serves as the Installations and Technical Lead for Project Bright, an undergraduate organization dedicated to all facets of solar energy from system design to finance. Her passion for solar stems from her strong belief that climate change can be overcome by human ingenuity.
Mate Nagy : Mate is a 5th year PhD candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, working on various big data problems (medical claims data, journal articles, and biomedical images, just to name a few). He is a member of Yale Design for America, focusing on green technologies for the third world.
Kevin (Qiang) Liang : Kevin is a freshman at Yale College, majoring in Mechanical Engineering and environmental studies. He is in charge of designing the electrical component of the Solar Haiti team for Project Bright, an undergraduate organization dedicated to all facets of solar energy from system design to finance. Kevin is a strong believer in environmentalism, passionate about engineering solutions that improve the sustainability and efficiency with which human beings harness energy.
Genevieve Sertic : Genevieve Sertic is a sophomore Electrical Engineering major and an undergraduate scholar in the Energy Studies program at Yale. She works in the TMD lab as a research assistant and is also the Electrical Engineering Lead in Yale’s solar power student group, Project Bright. Genevieve is always looking for ways in which technology can be of service to the world — both its environment and its inhabitants — and intends to use her experience in electrical engineering to affect positive change towards this end.
Toni Joe Lebbos : Toni Joe is currently pursuing his MA in International and Development Economics at Yale University under the Fulbright Scholarship Program. His experience in development involves mainly working as a Data Scientist for a project in Lebanon aimed at implementing ICT equipment in public schools. He holds a B.A in Finance from the Lebanese American University as well as an MS in Finance from the University of Porto. His research interests include impact evaluations and mobile money as a mean of poverty alleviation.
