This Engineer Works to Provide Electricity in Rural Africa Using His Solar Batteries. He built a micro home in Canada to prove that to live totally off-grid can be done.
Living Off-Grid And Not Depending On Fossil Fuels For Electricity
If you ask Caleb Grove, of course, it is. That is his reason why he built a micro-home that is fully dependent on solar power. The house, which measures only 8 x 12 feet, is Grove’s model for a scalable and cheap power set-up. It is powered by solar 12-volt batteries, about twice the size of an insulated coffee mug, that could store enough power for lights, a fan, and a laptop inside the home. He spent $10,000 on this project in a span of six months.
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But the electrical engineer’s solar house is only a representation. His real work is on a small island in Africa called Mbissa, where he already installed 40 similar systems. He was raised on that island for almost ten years because his parents were missionaries. Until in 2000, they decided to settle there. He was 8 years old then. Grove saw how difficult it is to have electricity on that island of 3,000 people, many of which are farmers and fishers. And when he decided to take electrical engineering from the University of New Brunswick at 17, he knew that he would work on helping them after graduating. For him to make his dream a reality, Grove had to find the money.
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While being an engineering student, he took to UNB funding agencies, which were generous to him; he accumulated $30,000, which he used to travel back and forth to Africa and develop solar technology. This Engineer from Africa Transforms Plastic Wastes Into Roofing Material "The people in Cameroon, have, through our technology, a plug and play system," says Grove. "So, someone who wants to put in their solar electricity, it’s straightforward. They don’t need a background in electrical engineering to come up with this product." "And so to be able to take that and do that here would be the same idea,” he added. His idea was to make a solar-powered system that was cheap and made with local materials. Of course, it would want it to be easily installed. “I have to make sure that it’s done so that when I leave if I leave, it will continue. So that means is that it is not the white man coming in to do work. That makes it sustainable. It is theirs," Grove shared.
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Grove indeed left Mbissa eventually, but he trained three local men with the solar batteries and installations he made. This was his benchmark in putting up his own startup; he calls Mbissa Energy Systems, whose goal is to bring electricity to rural Africa regions that had never seen power before.
Cover photo by Caleb Grove
Source CBC News | ONB Canada
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