Light up the World: tens of thousands benefit from pioneering solar project

from Inventors and Remarkable People (107 articles)

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Photonics engineer Dave Irvine-Halliday (c) Rolex / Xavier Lecoultre

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February 18, 2008 When night falls on Tembisa, only candles and kerosene lanterns light the shacks made from metal, wood and plastic sheeting in this township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. Here electricity lights only a few streetlamps, and power cuts are frequent. In the darkness, the shack belonging to Michael and Poulina Mohlala shines like a beacon: each evening two powerful lamps shed light that attracts many of their neighbours.

“It’s a small miracle,” says Michael. “Even when the whole of Tembisa is plunged into darkness, my lights are working.” Fitted with white-light-emitting diodes (WLEDs), the lamps are run from a battery that is recharged daily by a solar panel, and requires no conventional power supply.

Tens of thousands of people living in disadvantaged areas around the world now have reliable household lighting thanks to Scots-Canadian photonics engineer Dave Irvine-Halliday. For ten years he has been supplying low-cost lighting in developing countries through his foundation, Light Up The World, an achievement that has earned him a Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

It is a project with potential to make a huge difference to the world as a whole: each year the kerosene lamps that flare in the homes of the poor liberate 244 million tonnes of CO2. Dave’s solar lighting sets offer huge scope to reduce those emissions and save poor people money at the same time.

It all began on a trek through Nepal. Dave was passing a roadside schoolhouse with a sign inviting passing foreigners to stop and teach the children. Peering round the unlit classroom he thought: “Gosh, it’s dark in here!” Then, inexplicably: “I wonder if I can help?” That simple question changed his life, and is now transforming the lives of millions – bringing light, reducing poverty and curbing greenhouse gases.

Dave says his solid-state lighting sets are a cheap, reliable solution to the lighting needs of thousands of poor, isolated communities: “Diodes give hundreds of times more brightness than a kerosene lamp while using less than one 100th of the energy of an ordinary incandescent light-bulb,” he explains. “They use batteries that can be recharged by sun, wind or hydro power – in other words, renewable, non-polluting forms of energy.”

For several months each year he leaves his teaching job at the University of Calgary in Canada to shed light in remote villages. “Bringing light to the developing world is not easy. Each region has its own unique challenges - isolation, declining infrastructure or scarce resources.” His determination to illuminate the lives of poor people round the world has made him a laureate in the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

“The financial support from the Rolex Award made it possible for us to spread Solid State Lighting in Nepal, India and Sri Lanka, and gave us international credibility in the eyes of those who had never heard of us before,” he explains. Thanks to Light Up the World (LutW), some 20,000 houses sheltering 100,000 people in 43 countries across Asia, South America and Africa now have electric lighting.

In Andra Pradesh, India, for example, Dave’s group has been working with non-governmental organisations to light a village of 110 houses inhabited by 700 Dalits – a particularly disadvantaged group once known as “untouchables”. In the area around Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, solid-state lighting installed by LUTW has improved living conditions for about 100 craftswomen who embroider cloth at home. “They’re not straining their eyes working on very small stitches in dim conditions any more,” Irvine-Halliday says. And in the Chirripo region in the heart of Costa Rica, the group has installed lamps in 135 homes, giving 675 farm families safe, reliable lighting for the very first time.

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