Now in its closing two months, Scene’s precision solar irrigation project in Uganda – REFRUIT - is excited to share its findings to a wider audience, The eighteen-month project comprised a series of participatory farmer workshops, technology development and integration, two sets of dry and wet season technology pilot trials, and final data analysis, and reporting.
The REFRUIT project team – Scene Connect, Farm-Hand, Futurepump, and GADC – are now excited to share and reflect on the results of these pilot trials through an Industry Conference: Improving Irrigation for Small-Scale: The Benefits, Challenges & Strategies to Irrigation in East-Africa.
The Industry Conference will be held on:
Thursday 19th November 2020, from 13:00 – 16:30 GMT (15:00-18:30 East African Time).
We are seeking an Operations Director to oversee Scene’s East African project work and play a key role to developing our business activities in the region. Ideal candidates should be enthusiastic about innovation and technology solutions for sustainable development, and have the experience to introduce new processes to start-up enterprises. You will start a new team for us in Kigali; be expected to travel for field work and business development activities in Rwanda, and in the central/east African region (DRC, Kenya, Uganda). You will form the key link between Scene’s African operations and our international team based in the UK.
In Kigeme refugee camp in Rwanda, the focus of much of HEED’s work, the project has set up a micro-grid that provides power to three community spaces in the camp. The long-term aim was to co-design energy interventions to meet the needs of the user as much as possible, and gradually implement a financial model which will eventually be taken over by the camp committees, along with the micro-grid itself.
Every year the global picture becomes clearer for the need to act ever more urgently, so much so that for many there is a sense of defeatism – what can one person really do? Individuals have been doing what they can, increasing recycling, eating less meat, flying less (with some companies, including Scene, enabling their staff to do so by offering paid journey days through a Climate Perks programme) – but, aside from this, effecting the necessary systemic change requires collective mobilisation across society, and a fundamental change in policy direction from national governments and global corporations.
As I begin to write this at 19:25 on Sunday 15th March 2020 the UK’s national electricity grid is being powered by: 31% renewables (mainly wind & biomass), 11% nuclear, 44% CCGT, and 11% from the inter-connectors via our close friends and allies in Europe. I’ve chosen a random time, my guess is that a Sunday evening is a time with a fairly high electricity demand – and with 37.8GW currently being drawn that seems to be the case, and yet there is no coal required by our grid at all.
This week we are celebrating the announcement of a multi-million pound award from the National Lottery to Abney Park Cemetery in Hackney, a part of which will enable the Borough’s first park-based renewable heat scheme to be installed.
Scene is looking for a skilled researcher with an interest in the community and locally-led approaches to renewable energy. The role will be based in our Liverpool office working with a small research team, primarily focused on conducting community energy research between January – May 2020. The role will include stakeholder engagement, surveying and outreach, data management and analysis and contributing to a number of high-profile research reports.
This piece was originally posted by the HEED project here.
Following the installation of the micro-grid in Kigeme refugee camp in Southern Rwanda, the HEED team returned to the camp on the 28th of November 2019 to host a workshop to hear from the community on the current and potential use of the micro-grid and to showcase the user interface designs.
In the final week of October, Scene went to Uganda’s West Nile region, ready to host the second series of participatory workshops for the REFRUIT irrigation project before the start of the pilot trials in December. Begun in June 2019, the solar-powered precision irrigation project provides a unique product and business approach for irrigation solutions in East Africa, combining the expertise of its four project partners Scene, Farm-Hand, Futurepump, and the Gulu Agricultural Development Company (GADC) in Uganda.
Scene is delighted to be selected to develop an operational pilot for the Perth Smart Energy Network project. We will continue to work alongside Perth and Kinross Council and develop and pilot a smart energy management platform for two of its buildings, and install new solar PV panels and smart IoT devices at a local primary school.
