Farmers generate own electricity in El Salvador

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The Borneo Post11 Oct 2018
Farmers generate own electricity in El Salvador

— IPS photo by Edgardo Ayala

Juan Benítez, pres­i­dent of the Nuevos Hor­i­zontes As­so­ci­a­tion of Joya de Talchiga, rests on the edge of the dike built as part of the El Calam­bre mini-hy­dro­elec­tric dam. The 40 plus fam­i­lies in the vil­lage have had elec­tric­ity since 2012, thanks to the project they built them­selves, in the moun­tains of eastern El Sal­vador.

       Elec­tric­ity ar­rived when they de­cided to build their own hy­dro­elec­tric dam to­gether, not only to light up the night, but also to take small steps to­wards un­der­tak­ings that help im­prove liv­ing con­di­tions in the vil­lage.

        JOYA DE TALCHIGA, El Sal­vador: In Lil­ian Gomez’s house, nes­tled in the moun­tains of eastern El Sal­vador, the dark­ness of the night was barely re­lieved by the faint, trem­bling flames of a pair of can­dles, just like in the houses of her neigh­bours. Un­til now.

        Now she uses a re­frig­er­a­tor to make “chara­mus­cas” – ice cream made from nat­u­ral bev­er­ages, which she sells to gen­er­ate a small in­come.

“With the money from the chara­mus­cas I pay for elec­tric­ity, food and other things,” the 64year- old Gomez, head of one of the 40 fam­i­lies ben­e­fit­ing from the El Calam­bre mini­hy­dro­elec­tric plant project, told IPS.

This is a com­mu­nity ini­tia­tive that sup­plies en­ergy to La Joya de Talchiga, one of the 29 vil­lages in the ru­ral mu­nic­i­pal­ity of Perquin, with some 4,000 in­hab­i­tants, in the eastern de­part­ment of Mo­razan, which bor­ders to the north with Hon­duras.

Dur­ing the 1980-1992 civil war, this re­gion was the scene of fierce bat­tles be­tween the army and the then- guer­rilla Farabundo Marti Na­tional Lib­er­a­tion Front (FMLN), now a po­lit­i­cal party, in power since 2009 af­ter win­ning two con­sec­u­tive pres­i­den­tial elec­tions.

When the war ended, the largest towns in the area were re­vived thanks to eco­tourism and his­tor­i­cal tourism, where vis­i­tors learn about bat­tles and mas­sacres in the area. But the most re­mote vil­lages lack ba­sic ser­vices, which keeps them from do­ing the same.

The El Calam­bre mini­hy­dro­elec­tric power plant takes its name from the river with cold turquoise wa­ter that emerges in Hon­duras and winds through the moun­tains un­til it crosses the area where La Joya is lo­cated, ded­i­cated to sub­sis­tence agri­cul­ture, es­pe­cially corn and beans.

A small dike dams the wa­ter in a seg­ment of the river, and part of the flow is di­rected through un­der­ground pipes to the en­gine house, 900 me­tres be­low, in­side which a tur­bine makes a 58-kW gen­er­a­tor roar.

La Joya is an ex­am­ple of how lo­cal in­hab­i­tants, mostly poor peas­ant farm­ers, didn’t stand idly by wait­ing for the com­pany that dis­trib­utes elec­tric­ity in the area to bring them elec­tric power.

La Joya is an ex­am­ple of how lo­cal in­hab­i­tants, mostly poor peas­ant farm­ers, didn’t stand idly by wait­ing for the com­pany that dis­trib­utes elec­tric­ity in the area to bring them elec­tric power.

The dis­tri­bu­tion of en­ergy in this Cen­tral Amer­i­can coun­try of 6.5 mil­lion peo­ple has been in the hands of sev­eral pri­vate com­pa­nies since it was pri­va­tised in the late 1990s.

Dur­ing the days IPS spent in La Joya, lo­cals said they own the land where they live, but they lack for­mal doc­u­ments, and with­out them the com­pany that op­er­ates in the re­gion doesn’t sup­ply elec­tric­ity.  It only brought power to a cou­ple of fam­i­lies who do have all their pa­per­work in order.

In this Cen­tral Amer­i­can na­tion, house­holds with elec­tric­ity rep­re­sent 92 per cent of the to­tal in ur­ban ar­eas, but only 77 per cent in ru­ral ar­eas, ac­cord­ing to of­fi­cial data re­leased in May.

With­out much hope that the com­pany would sup­ply power, the res­i­dents of La Joya set out to ob­tain it by their own means and re­sources, with the tech­ni­cal and fi­nan­cial sup­port of na­tional and in­ter­na­tional or­gan­i­sa­tions.

One of these was the as­so­ci­a­tion Ba­sic San­i­ta­tion, Health Ed­u­ca­tion and Al­ter­na­tive En­er­gies ( SABES El Sal­vador), which played a key role in bring­ing the ini­tia­tive to La Joya, where it was ini­tially met with reser­va­tions.

“Peo­ple still doubted when they came to talk to us about the project in 2005, and even I doubted, it was hard for us to be­lieve that it could hap­pen. We knew how a dam works, the wa­ter that moves a tur­bine, but we didn’t know that it could be done on a small river,” said Juan Benítez, pres­i­dent of Nuevos Hor­i­zontes, the com­mu­nity de­vel­op­ment or­gan­i­sa­tion of La Joya. —