First, I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving with their families, and we were certainly thinking of ours, as we completed the array install and finished the day with the normal Kenyan meal of ugali, goat, and rice. Second, my apologies for not getting this out sooner! It’s been very busy since our arrival in the village last weekend, rarely a moment to connect to the internet or sit alone long enough to write an update. Everyone is intrigued by our visit here, especially to welcome Kimeli’s return and his accompanying “mzungus” (Barret, Geoffrey, Michael, and I), so there has been a steady stream of local friends, villagers, and elders making the trek (usually miles by foot) to come visit with us. Our journey from Nariobi to Enoosaen village began 2 Fridays ago, November 20th, after we unexpectedly experienced 4 days of delay clearing our shipment of PV equipment from the States through customs in Mombasa. On the 4th day of delay, we were told by our freight forwarder to meet at their Nairobi warehouse, 9:00 AM, to pick up our goods. Upon our arrival, we were told that the truck would be arriving in 10 minutes. So we waited “10 more minutes” again and again for 4 hours, finally demanding a search party go out and track down the truck. Since the drivers weren’t responsive to the managers’ calls, the growing theory between both our crew and Jihan Freighters was that the drivers had taken our gear hostage for ransom. This may sound absurd, but we
were duly warned about this and other forms of corruption being rampant throughout Kenya. Twenty minutes after Barrett and the Jihan representative left in pursuit, the box truck came bouncing in the pot-holed, eroded dirt driveway. Naturally, our crates were at the front of the truck, so we waited some more while every other piece of cargo, non-crated, were removed individually by hand. By the time our crates were ready for unloading, we had become calloused to the reckless driving of the warehouse forklift driver, and were eager to have our equipment tranferred into our truck for the cross-country trek to rural Enoosaen.
were duly warned about this and other forms of corruption being rampant throughout Kenya. Twenty minutes after Barrett and the Jihan representative left in pursuit, the box truck came bouncing in the pot-holed, eroded dirt driveway. Naturally, our crates were at the front of the truck, so we waited some more while every other piece of cargo, non-crated, were removed individually by hand. By the time our crates were ready for unloading, we had become calloused to the reckless driving of the warehouse forklift driver, and were eager to have our equipment tranferred into our truck for the cross-country trek to rural Enoosaen. 
The boxes were unloaded, and almost everything looked good. There was a gash in the top of the heavily wrapped module pallet, and upon further inspection we realized that a crate had been carelessly maneuvered onto the top of our “DO NOT STACK” module pallet, damaging the top module. The irreplaceable 12 volt compatible SPR-90 (SunPower stopped producing in 2008), brought along to provide power for our tools and camera equipment throughout the installation, was irreparably damaged – no, smashed. As the forklift driver quickly swooped up the rest of the pallet to load onto our truck, we stood paralyzed as he placed the pallet partially into the truck, tilted the forks up to reposition, and used a purely Nairobi-forklift-driver maneuver to use the module pallet to push 3 pallets stacked behind it beyond the threshold of the rear cargo door. The resulting crunching sound could only be the tips of his forks protruding up through the bottom of the pallet into the glass laminate of the bottom module in the stack. Kudos to Alyssa Newman, Director of the SunPower Foundation, for scoring the extra 2 modules for our project, just in case. Safe.
We left Jihan Freighters about 5 hours after our arrival there and headed to our local electrical sub-contractor to pick up the “load-side” equipment - all the lights, fans, switches, outlets, and misc. wiring gear we decided to source locally (for the purposes of local compatibility and serviceability). Luckily, this hand-off went according to plan and we were off on our 8 hour drive to Enoosaen.We arrived at Jackon’s home, Kimeli’s brother, in Enoosaen at about 2 AM on Saturday morning, took a rest for a few hours, then proceeded to move the truck as close to the school as possible before moving the 2 tons of equipment the rest of the way by hand and foot. Facing challenges every step of the way – including an ominous mud pit (yes, we got stuck), we were able to get the truck within about a kilometer from the school.
Our arrival spurred an enthusiastic 
welcome, and the students and villagers managed to transport the entire contents of the truck the final uphill kilometer in less than an hour. Many hands do make quick work, as long as they’re well organized. We spent the next several days working out kinks in the organization of our installation crew – 20 local twenty-somethings, trained for the prior 3 weeks by Barrett Raftery (using a brilliant off-grid solar design/install curriculum developed by SunPower’s own Mark Mrohs, specifically targeted for rural village technicians). After a bit of trial and error, we managed to sculpt the team into a venerable construction crew, led by Construction Manager extraordinaire, and SunPower RLC Commercial System Inspector, Geoffrey Shuey. With this team, we could easily stay in Kenya and start the first African SunPower Dealer!
welcome, and the students and villagers managed to transport the entire contents of the truck the final uphill kilometer in less than an hour. Many hands do make quick work, as long as they’re well organized. We spent the next several days working out kinks in the organization of our installation crew – 20 local twenty-somethings, trained for the prior 3 weeks by Barrett Raftery (using a brilliant off-grid solar design/install curriculum developed by SunPower’s own Mark Mrohs, specifically targeted for rural village technicians). After a bit of trial and error, we managed to sculpt the team into a venerable construction crew, led by Construction Manager extraordinaire, and SunPower RLC Commercial System Inspector, Geoffrey Shuey. With this team, we could easily stay in Kenya and start the first African SunPower Dealer! 
Disclaimer: the following paragraph may be a bit technical for some readers, my apologies in advance! It turns out that it is possible to use a 40+ volt SunPower module in a 24 volt battery/inverter off-grid system, we learned this out of necessity. When we lost our SPR-90 module back at Jihan, we knew we would have to improvise with the charging of our cordless power tool batteries. After we blew out the battery chargers of each of the afore mentioned cordless drills - in a series of disconnected follies (lesson: more than a 50 watt step down transformer should be used when powering a 120V cordless drill battery charger with a 230V supply) - we had to step up our creative solution generation machine. We rented a 24 Vdc, 230Vac battery inverter and a 230V corded drill
from Nariobi, and carefully wired 2 parallel SPR-230s to only utilize 2 of the 3 cell strings (caution: this may void module warranties!), giving us ~28 volts – enough to push current onto the 24Vdc system. Manually charge controlling by disconnecting and reconnecting the PV inputs by hand when the battery reached certain voltage trigger points, we were able to bleed off any surface-cell-polarization by connecting the positive leads to ground when the modules were “floating.” And this, my eco-conscious, solar friends, is how we avoided using a petrol generator to power the installation of the Emprukel school PV system J.
We worked through some more challenges last week, including a shortage of hangar bolts for roof array mounting, the loss of 32 GB of choreographed group photos and documentary video footage, and daily afternoon rain showers, to name a few. We did, however, manage to successfully install the solar array, battery bank, lights, fans, switches, outlets, and associated wiring. This week, we are crossing our fingers that our inverters will make it out of Germany, clear customs, then make the trek from Nairobi to Enoosaen in time to be installed and operational by our December 5th grand opening. It’s going to be close, but synchronicity has been on our side this far along and we’re hoping for the best. We will also be making finishing touches on the system and spending time reviewing the training materials with our local technician team. We have prepared an Off-grid PV Design and Installation course certificate for the team to provide them with credentials for entering the growing Kenyan solar industry. The program includes 4 weeks training, including 2 complete installs - the 5kW school install and a small, single panel, DC system for the caretaker’s home, concluded by a final examination we will be administering this Wednesday. They have completely surpassed our expectations and we are confident we will be graduating 20 new solar technicians this week!
Fresh goat and banana! (When I say fresh I mean slaughtered for the occasion in the previous hour)
