December 22, 2024
Friends & Family Letter
2024-12-22
Happy Holidays and Malawi Update ....
Dear Friends, Family and Compatriots:
I hope these holidays are treating you well. I wish you and your family peace and love amidst this crazy world we live in.
Note that December/January is when my Malawi colleagues and I buy in bulk the solar pumps that we will be distributing the next year in Malawi. We need your help to buy these pumps because rural Malawians just can't afford the full cost. Please be generous: every $100 you donate helps buy another solar pumping system for a rural Malawian family that will help them grow at least an extra $1000 of food during the dry season over the coming years. Thus is a huge benefit for a family that is typically surviving off of about $100/month.
Donate at:
https://www.omprakash.org/global/solar4africa/donate
When you go to the donation site, you will see that we raised $132K last year from all of our donation campaigns. This got 700 solar pumping systems to Malawians and supported research, development and distribution of solar electric cooking systems to hundreds of customers. I'll describe some of our cooking research results later in this letter.
For 2025, we are starting pump procurement anew. We have maybe $30k pledged so far, but need quite a bit more than that if we are going to get solar pumps to 500 or more households this year. Please help.
Now for the update
The Best Small Solar Battery in Africa
One of the things we were able to do last year with the support of some targeted donations was to do a nice demonstration production run of our Lithium Titanate (LTO) solar battery. I am certainly biased, but I think they are absolutely GREAT. The inventor/designer Skyler Selvin and I gave a nice technical webinar on the battery a few weeks ago.
You can access a recording of the webinar that we gave at:
For the next step in battery development, we plan on doing a production run of about 500 batteries in the next six months, and then publicly publishing detailed, in-field performance data so that academics around the world can verify scientifically that we have basically the best solar battery in Africa.
After that, my hope is that we can then work with development agencies to figure out how to organize support for the large-scale production and distribution of the batteries.
Needless to say, I think this battery is so great, that it does not look like I will be able to retire from this volunteer work anytime soon. Maybe I won't be traveling to Malawi so much, but there is still a lot of "LTO Battery Advocacy" work that I can and will be doing from Berkeley for the foreseeable future.
Do We Have the Most Affordable Off-grid Solar-Electric Cooking in Africa?
Our last two years of research and development has also produced what I think is the most affordable solar electric cooking system in Africa (and probably the world) as measured by the $/kWh cost of electric cooking it provides.
Our research has been supported by the Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS: https://mecs.org.uk/) program of UK Aid and Loughborough University.
We published the final report of the previous 1.5 years of research on their website at:
We are now selling solar electric cooking systems to hundreds of rural Malawian households who never had access to electricity before.
Like with the solar pumps, rural Malawians can only afford to pay about half of the cost. Currently we are using our research grants to provide the current subsidy temporarily, but eventually we have to convince the development agencies to provide this subsidy at large scale.
If you look at the recent announcement that the development banks made at the big annual climate conference:
You will see the money is there. The problem is that folks like the World Bank like to spend their money subsidizing the profits of private companies that are serving richer customers. They are not so good at serving the interests of the really low-income customers that we are serving.
We will see if we can convince them to spend some of the budget on something that is more cost effective that actually serves lower income households. Maybe this is possible, maybe not. We will see.
Peace on Earth.
In love and struggle,
Robert VB