Solar Borehole and Pumping Solutions
Geotech has worked with several farms and communities to install solar powered borehole pumps providing enough water for irrigation, drinking and livestock.
The initial feedback on these partnerships has been positive. Several farms state their harvest has increased, helping them met their goals.
Just like with any other industry, Geotech has also had a number of challenges that more often than not make it difficult to reach this technology’s full potential.
- Most of the boreholes dug in different parts of the country are not done by professionals, many times lacking proper drilling reports which can cause them to either run dry or collapse while in use.
- Lack of Drilling report which is also vital in the selection of the correct pump and design of solar system to power that pump as it will give the actual characteristics of the borehole such as its yield, static water level and pumping water level.
- Many people are easily put off from adapting renewable energy practices by the high upfront pricing. This, is because the costs are paid once covering the cost of the equipment as well as installation instead of the ongoing cost of running and maintaining a generator.(To fully understand the savings you just need to do a comparison. Odeh, Yohanis & Norton, (2006) compared the price of solar powered pumping systems with diesel powered: the upfront cost of a 2.8Kw Solar water pumping system at that time was, $18,188 or KES 1.8M. The upfront cost for the equivalent size of diesel-powered system was $3,840 or KES 384,000.
If you look at the cost of operating these 2 systems over 10 years, you would find that the Solar powered system would have costed $24,888 or KES 2.4 M to operate, while the equivalent size of diesel-powered system gets as high as $60,260 or KES 6.02M for the same period. Meaning a Solar Water Pumping System of this large size would save a customer over KES 2.18 M over 10 years or 34%.
To ease the upfront costs, Geotech is looking to offer different payment options such as a rental program or installments for qualified organizations.
