Perched on a serene hill in the shadows of the Lukla-Ri peaks, the Pasang Lhamu-Nicolle Niquille Hospital is less than 10 minutes’ walk away from the Lukla Airport (2,860 meters above sea level). And for over seven years now, Gopal Shrestha, an illiterate carpenter who first arrived to work on the construction here, has been its default energy manager and gardener.
Since its establishment in October 2005, PLNN Hospital, managed by the Pasang Lhamu Mountaineering Foundation (Nepal) with technical and financial support from the Foundation Nicole Niquille Hospital Lukla (Switzerland), has remained a critical medical service provider in the region. But even till a few months ago, if the PLNN Hospital needed to perform X-Rays, use the operation theater, or use other equipments that required a lot of energy, Gopal would have to walk down about five minutes to the local Lukla transformer and temporarily shut down power supply to parts of the mountain village. All that changed when the hospital added its the
solar power system some six months ago.[break]
Nepal Telecom also uses solar power for their station in Lukla.
With the hospital’s own micro hydro plant now combined with its solar unit, PLNN Hospital is energy independent and no longer uses the local Lukla grid. And the Lukla grid in which the hospital had also invested is able to serve the Lukla village without interruptions. If there’s a power crunch, Gopal only needs to decide which parts of the hospital should get its power supply briefly interrupted.
Sun and rain
PLNN Hospital’s micro-hydro has an installed capacity of 20KVA. “But we hardly get that, probably not even during the rainy season,” Gopal explains.
Nepal’s domestic electricity production is run-of-the-river-based, a model that depends entirely on the flow of rivers fed by the snowmelt in the Himalaya and rains. In the dry winter season, Nepal endures perhaps an average of 12 hours of daily blackouts.
The solar power unit at the hospital has an installed capacity of 6kWp with 30PV panels of 195watts each. Installed in collaboration with the Groupe E Connect SA (Switzerland), it took about five days to put up and solved a problem that the hospital had dealt with for more than five years.
Gopal learnt everything about solar energy in those five days when he worked on the installation. Since he cannot read the manual, he uses a photo manual to troubleshoot if the need arises. “Otherwise, I just ask the doctors to read the English parts and translate it to Nepali for me,” Gopal explains.
“Right now our batteries are charged both by the sun and the river,” Gopal explains. “But on gloomy days like this, I like to save the solar battery and let the hospital run on hydro. So the battery is off and just charging at the moment.”
To toggle between just hydro, or hydro and solar, Gopal simply needs to unplug a large hose-like cable and plug it into the source he wants. To demonstrate this, he pulls the cable out of the hydro port and plugs it into the solar one.
“See how the lights are brighter now? Now we’re using our full energy supply,” he explains, pleased with the result. “But I like to make sure the battery is at least 75-80% charged as you never know when you may need that extra power.” Demonstration over, he plugs the hospital back to hydro only.
“Now the village doesn’t have to lose power if the hospital needs it, and the hospital doesn’t have to worry about not having enough power,” he says, smitten with the technology. “Sure, I don’t have to run off to the transformer now, but I have to admit, it’s a fulltime job making sure the battery is at the optimum level while everyone’s getting to do what they need to at the hospital.”
The constant gardener
Gopal, originally from Solu, still has his wife there. Three of his daughters are married, and his son is studying hospitality management in Kathmandu. He has lived at the hospital fulltime for seven years, taking only several weeks of annual leaves.
The hospital, here in Khumbu, is his home away from home. And when not watching the battery levels like a possessive mother hawk, he works on the hospital’s garden, simply because he likes to.
Gopal´s dedication is inspired by late Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, whose poster he keeps hung at his room´s door.
“You won’t believe it, but I remember winters when we would just go home for a month or two because the snow and the cold made it impossible to work,” he recalls. “Now, look at this flower. For more than a year it hasn’t stopped blossoming even once, even during the winter.”
Last summer, he grew isles of corn on both sides of the pathway that leads to the hospital building. “It looked really nice, and I ate the corn too,” he explains. He also grows spinach and other vegetables as well as flowers.
“I would’ve never imagined I would be able to grow so much here. But now people come here and take photos of what is growing and ask me about it.”
At first, Gopal thought it was simply a result of his efforts. Then he added, “I realized the weather itself has changed. It just isn’t cold like it used to be.”
Gopal’s observations aren’t just hunches. There are several new peer-reviewed scientific studies that show greenhouses gases have contributed dangerously to global warming in the last century.
Before the PLNN Hospital installed its solar power system, Gopal would have to walk to the transformer and turn off power to a part of Lukla every time the hospital needed to use heavy equipments such as the X-Ray machine.
Lessons from the Gateway to Everest
The PLNN Hospital’s micro-hydro isn’t the only one suffering from lower than projected energy production. There are recent cases of larger private micro-hydro projects that have become unable to produce their installed capacity due to unexpected reduced river flows, forcing them to face losses. The need to consider solar energy’s role in Nepal’s micro-hydro sector has perhaps been never more important.
While Gopal’s flowers have surprised even him by blossoming all year long, he’s also worried about the growing year-round presence of pests in Lukla. How will the changing vegetation patterns, and the reasons for it, affect Nepal’s agro and hydro-sector as a whole?
Gopal´s dedication is inspired by late Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, whose poster he keeps hung at his room´s door.
The decision to build a hybrid energy production system has enabled the Pasang Lhamu-Nicole Niquille Hospital to move to energy independence.
“My life revolves around making sure the hospital is as energy efficient and secure as possible,” Gopal says proudly. “I could be doing other things if I wanted to make more money, but here, I get a sense of satisfaction from doing this job.”
These flowers at the PLNN Hospital have blossomed all year along, even through the winter, surprising Gopal the gardene
There are important lessons here, in this hospital on the gateway to Everest, for Kathmandu’s globetrotting policymakers.
The author is Niti Foundation’s Renewable Energy Policy Fellow 2012.
kashish@350nepal.org
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