Community Hydropower Dam Illuminates Life in Salvadoran Villages
By Edgardo Ayala
Benilda Membreño and her son Jaime Márquez enjoy a television programme, a luxury before
2006, when the village of Potrerillos in the eastern Salvadoran department of San Miguel lacked
electricity. With the technical and financial support of national and international organisations,
the inhabitants of Potrerillos were able to install a mini community hydroelectric plant.
CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS
By Edgardo Ayala
CAROLINA, El Salvador, Sep 30 2020 (IPS) - Ermelinda Lobos’s life has improved substantially since she and the rest of the people in her small village, hidden in the mountains of northeastern El Salvador, worked hard to build a mini hydroelectric plant and become self-sufficient in energy.
Now the seamstress sews on an electric machine and has light bulbs instead of the kerosene lamps she used before 2006, when there was no electric power in the village of Potrerillos in rural Carolina, a municipality of some 6,000 inhabitants in the department of San Miguel.
“I used to sew with a pedal machine, and I used a kerosene lamp for light and ironed with a charcoal iron that burned my hands. Now I sew with an electric machine in the light provided by light bulbs,” Ermelinda proudly told IPS.
The mini power plant, with a capacity of 34 kilowatts (kW), harnesses the waters of the Carolina River to move a turbine that activates a generator to produce enough electricity for 40 beneficiary families, not only in Potrerillos, but also in another nearby community: Los Lobos, in the neighbouring municipality of San Antonio del Mosco.
The work in Potrerillos started in 2005, with the assistance of the Basic Sanitation, Health Education and Alternative Energies (Sabes) association, which has promoted similar projects in the country, such as the El Calambre mini-plant in the hamlet of Joya de Talchiga, in the municipality of Perquín, also in the northeast.
The funds for the project in Potrerillos were provided by the government of the Spanish region of Navarra, and funds for the electromechanical equipment also came from the Energy and Environment Alliance with Central America, which promotes sustainable development in the area with funding from European countries.
The total cost of the project was 120,000 dollars.
More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/09/community-hydropower-dam-illuminates-life-salvadoran-villages/