U.S. Engineering Students Bring Small-Scale Hydropower to Rwanda

Engineering students from Dartmouth College have designed, built, and installed two small hydropower turbines to supply electricity to a remote mountain village in Rwanda, according to Scientific American magazine. The students from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering built one of the turbines in the U.S. and shipped it to the village of Banda, a settlement of 6,000 adjacent to Nyungwe National Park. The second turbine was built on site using local materials, as the goal of the project is to enable residents of Banda and beyond to make their own turbines rather than importing expensive ones. The turbines now electrify about a third of the village’s homes, since each turbine can charge 30 of the batteries a day that residents use to electrify their homes. A charge lasts two weeks. The students plan to return and install additional turbines on mountain streams to generate 1.5 kilowatts, enough to supply the entire village with electricity. Locally built turbines can provide electricity to a typical household for about $50 a year, the same price residents now pay to light their homes with polluting kerosene.