Talking to Engineers and Wind Power
Got a rare treat last night and not just talking about the roasted cow meat without all the bones in it. Several of the Peace Corp Volunteers were in town before heading out to paint a room in the house of one of the volunteers who teaches physics. They were looking to spend some time with a prior Peace Corp volunteer who now works for a company as their local liaison for one of their big projects. We ate dinner with him and two of his consultants who were engineers. (They even treated) I forgot how much I enjoyed talking to engineers and discussing challenging projects that are very large scale. It was not all about engineering and projects but still the engineering mindset is one I have missed since being here for discussions of any type.
Their project is fascinating and one of those I would relish in my days of engineering work. They plan to build a wind farm just outside of Singida and sell the power to Tanesco the local power company. Currently Tanzania has about 1 Megawatt power generation for the country. The problem is that almost all is produced by hydroelectric plants very far away from the locations that use the most electrical energy and there is a lot of power loss due to those long transmission lines. There is talk that with the discovery of Natural Gas reserves just off shore, they will build a Natural Gas power generation site near Dar. That is a long way off because they first have to capture or harvest the natural gas and then build transportation to get it to the end use sites and then build the power plants and all the political crap that will go along with those items.
This group is planning to build a 100 KiloWatt Wind Farm (yeah 10% of the country's total production). It will be closer to use areas in the western side of the country and therefore less power loss in transmission. The challenges are the roads are not really designed for transporting the items necessary especially the wind blades and the turbine. They are currently developing routes for moving the items and figuring out if things will have to be moved or if bridges can handle the loads. Round abouts or circles of death as we call them in USA are the biggest challenge next to the poor road construction not being able to handle the weight loads.
They actually hope to have their farm up and running next year after the rains. Here is to them meeting that schedule because it will be a big boost for an area that experiences regular power outages throughout town.
Mainly I just enjoyed talking about it with them.
Their project is fascinating and one of those I would relish in my days of engineering work. They plan to build a wind farm just outside of Singida and sell the power to Tanesco the local power company. Currently Tanzania has about 1 Megawatt power generation for the country. The problem is that almost all is produced by hydroelectric plants very far away from the locations that use the most electrical energy and there is a lot of power loss due to those long transmission lines. There is talk that with the discovery of Natural Gas reserves just off shore, they will build a Natural Gas power generation site near Dar. That is a long way off because they first have to capture or harvest the natural gas and then build transportation to get it to the end use sites and then build the power plants and all the political crap that will go along with those items.
This group is planning to build a 100 KiloWatt Wind Farm (yeah 10% of the country's total production). It will be closer to use areas in the western side of the country and therefore less power loss in transmission. The challenges are the roads are not really designed for transporting the items necessary especially the wind blades and the turbine. They are currently developing routes for moving the items and figuring out if things will have to be moved or if bridges can handle the loads. Round abouts or circles of death as we call them in USA are the biggest challenge next to the poor road construction not being able to handle the weight loads.
They actually hope to have their farm up and running next year after the rains. Here is to them meeting that schedule because it will be a big boost for an area that experiences regular power outages throughout town.
Mainly I just enjoyed talking about it with them.
Comments
Post a Comment