PowerWells lights the way in Indonesia!

This is a recent story from our close partner, PowerWells. It's such a good story to demonstrate the fantastic impact PowerWells and their partners have made in isolated communities of Indonesia that exist off the power grid. We are proud to have witnessed the PowerWell's journey from its inception and love lending our space and support in many ways. For example, our Substation33 team have worked with Brad to devolop each iteration of the PowerWells and our volunteers assist in building the battery packs, circuitry, and casings out of recycled components. We'll let Brad take the story from here ...

"A very special moment last week, co-incidentally, a week out from International Education Day.

In 2018, Nicholas Kamols and I installed one of our very first PowerWell prototypes in a School in NData, Sumba, Indonesia. It was sponsored by Jason Lowe, with the support of GEM Energy.

We would travel on the local ferry, Island hopping and would randomly drive around on scooters (often until we got very lost) through the day and night with our paint bucket batteries and solar panels strapped to our scooter. We would look for households, schools and community centres without power and would use google translate to communicate.

That’s how we found this school - it had over 100+ students and about 11 teachers, with some teachers staying the night. They would use kerosene lanterns for light and would travel about 40 minutes into town if they needed to charge their phones.

We installed the paint bucket PowerWell in the school, stacking tables on top of tables to get onto the roof to mount the solar panel. For our first prototype, it did the job - albeit slightly suspicious looking according to some cleaners in London.

We would check in on the PowerWell every 6 months, for several years, until Covid hit, unfortunately that’s when it got stolen.

Last week we went back to the School; this time it was a little different, we had a super team of 8 people from Sumba Sustainable Solutions to do the installation (with a ladder).

We installed our latest PowerWell that was built by the epic team at TechnologyOne. That day, we also lit up two other community centres in the same village.

According to the head of school, there are still over 130 households in their village that don’t have any electricity!

This is just one story from the hundreds of PowerWells we have installed and built with the support of various partners. If you would like to get involved, please get in touch!" Brad Clair PowerWells Check out PowerWells Website.