There's a lot of talk globally about the need to design for low cost for poor beneficiaries. The logic is simple - poor people don't have a lot of money so you need to design low cost products for them to meet their needs on their budget. Without access to capital it's true that poor people can't afford things with a high price tag. Without access to capital they buy the cheapest goods on the market. What many people seem to not understand though, is that these people pay a high cost using the most logical metric of $ per unit service delivered because cheap products are made from cheap parts and fail early. Assuming one can develop innovative financing mechanisms (my friend Matt over at Kiva.org is working on that), then the poor are no longer constrained to pay the high cost of low price.

A lot of people out there are trying to design a cheap wind turbine to meet the needs of the rural poor. Their number one priority is a low purchase price, which means a small machine, a small tower, and cheap parts. To my mind this doesn't make any sense in the remote, developing world context. When transportation is difficult, the environment is harsh (heat, humidity, and salinity), capacity levels are low, most of your system life-cycle cost is not in the energy system itself, but rather in the pre-installation, operation and servicing of the system over it's useful life. Going through all that trouble to put in a tiny machine that requires the same number of trips, same amount of training, and same amount of community relations, but puts out a lot less energy, seems wasteful to me. And shortchanging on quality materials to achieve a low price tag only comes back to haunt you when the harsh environment takes its toll.

In order to guide our thinking for this week of design, I've had to clarify that our #1 core technical priority is durability. It's the old "Penny wise pound foolish" adage - that to save a dollar in construction but incur a $500 penalty in maintenance is foolish. Investing  a little more money up front to create a durable turbine with good energy output means more total energy service delivery, and therefore a low life-cycle cost. Of course there are limits - I'm not saying "spare no expense" - it's just that there are so many improvements that can be had for small amounts of money that it doesn't make sense to pass them up for fear of not being the cheapest turbine on the market.

For the record, priority #2 is some energy production in low wind speeds and priority #3 is ease of manufacture, assembly, and operation.

If you want to read about the Otherpower team's experience with blueEnergy, from there perspective, check these out:

http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2008/2/22/23528/6318

http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2008/2/25/195437/758