Energy in Guatemala

I am in Quetaltenango, Guatemala (Xela) for the next two weeks learning Spanish and volunteering with two different cook stove projects.  My Spanish teacher is also an engineer (mi maestro también es un ingeniero) and finished his PhD in agricultural engineering (doctorado de ingeniera agricultura).  From him, I learned a lot about the different types of energy resources in Guatemala, most of them are from renewable resources (más energías en Guatemala es renovable).  

Most electricity comes from hydropower (más electricidad es de hydroelectrica), but some solar, wind, geyser, diesel, and natural gas are also used.  Solar and wind power (electricidad de sol y viento) are primarily found in smaller residential neighborhoods.  There is a local project nearby Xela for a electricity from geysers (Hay una proyecto circa de Xela por electricidad de geisers).  Electricity from propane and methane (electricidad de propane y methano) is considered very expensive (es muy caro).  Some diesel is also used for electricity generation, but the diesel is not biodisel (pero no es biodiesel).

We also talked about what supplied energy to cars in Guatemala.  I was disappointed to find out that pretty much all cars are run on petroleum fuel, a non-renewable fuel (todos los automóviles usan petróleo, un combustible no renovable).  There is no methanol or ethanol biofuel (no hay methano o ethano biocombustibles).  There is some use of biodiesel in Guatemala (I think it’s used in cars), and the biodiesel in Guatemala is made from a plant or vegetable oil (pinón o aceite vegetal).  Other technologies are clearly too expensive for Guatemalans for powering their automobiles, such as electric cars and hydrogen fuel cells (automóviles electrico y celdas de combustíon de hidrogeno).

My teacher also taught me a lot about different agricultural things in Guatemala (agricultura organica, vermicultura, plantes medicinales, y lentrinas secas).  He even suggested a farm (una finca) where I could visit to see all of these projects, though I don’t know if I’ll have time.  The biggest problem in Guatemala are water, trash, and CO2 (hay problemas de agua, basura, y CO2), and these are additional areas where more research and/or development could be helpful.

Lastly, I learned about cook stoves in Guatemala.  My teacher designed the improved cook stove (mi maestro deseña esta estufa mejorada) that the Spanish school builds for select local Guatemalan families.  The intelligent design is very simple (el deseño intelegente es muy facil): easy to build, easy to understand, and functional, and compared to an open fire, the improved stove uses 55% less firewood (la estufa mejorada usa 55% menos leña).  The stoves consist of a base, a firebox (una casa de fuego), and cook top (una plancha).  The main disadvantage of these stoves is that the metal cook top is very expensive (una desventaje es la plancha de metal es muy caro).

After my morning Spanish lesson, I went to visit a company in Xela that builds and sells improved cook stoves (visito una compania en Xela construyen y venden estufas mejoradas).  In contrast to the stoves built at my Spanish school which are donated at low to no cost to select Guatemalan families, this company operates with a business model where all their stoves are sold at cost, but all families can buy them.  The stoves built by this company are designed to be much more efficient than both a three-stone fire and a normal enclosed cook stove.  I will be volunteering with this company for the next two weeks, working on questions including the design of the entrance for the firewood, the optimal geometry for combustion chamber and internal chimney, and additional heat transfer issues.

I started to do a literature search on cook stove research, and successful designs are (a) backed up by sound principles of heat transfer, (b) targeted to a particular region, (c) require no substantial behavioral modification from users, and (d) provided with follow-up support [Ahuja 1990].  Unfortunately, most of the research in the literature seems to be for cook stoves in rural Africa and India, where single pot stoves are sufficient.  In Guatemala (and other Latin American countries I presume) where tortillas need a plancha to be cooked on and multi-pot stoves are common, the stove designs need to differ from the successful stoves distributed in Africa and India.  One challenge is to figure out how to most efficiently get heat to the rear burners (since the main flame is under the primary burner only), which do not exist in the single-pot stove designs.  Other challenges include lowering the cost, making the stove more easily transportable and deliverable, and designing the stove such that it can burn all day if desired (apparently this is desired by Guatemalan women).