Form 29 September to 7 December, I was staying in a guest house owned by IBEKA who have implemented community based micro hydropower plant, to visit one of their project sites in Cinta Mekar village.
The village is located around 30 km north of Bandung city. It is near to dormant volcano tangkban perah and a high latitude place.
Project in Cinta Mekar village is one of the representative projects of IBEKA because pro-poor public-private partnership model (5P model) are adopted. The project started in 2004 with donation from UNESCAP, IBEKA and the private company. Micro hydropower plant, dam and water channel are constructed by local people and IBEKA’s construction team and operated by cooperation that comprises by villagers and the private company. Generated electricity is sold to national electric power company and distribute to the village through national grid. The benefit is allocated to villagers and the private company evenly. This is so called 5P model.
Through the micro hydropower project, villagers get access to stable electricity and they used the benefit for community development such as installing electricity distribution line for poor household, scholarship for children in poor family medical clinic and so on.
In addition to project site visiting, I conducted field survey about time use survey and questionnaire survey that aims to understand villagers life style and find their basic demand based on their daily lives.
The first day I visited the micro hydropower plant. 4 villagers are assigned as operators so some of them are in the site and operate the plant in rotation. But I saw that all of the operators gather the site and have lunch together and chatting even it is not his working day.
I could come into the operation house. Finally one of my dreams came true. I was so excited. I stood in front of the micro hydropower facility that I read in some papers before. The water turbine and generator was bigger than I expected. That was my first impression. I had no idea how to construct this facility by local people.
Facility itself was not special, just standard consist of two penstocks, twin turbine and one generator. When I saw, one penstock was closed maybe for maintenance. Generator generates 120kW electricity and big noise.
There is small dam at around 100m upstream of the river. The dam leads just a part of water flow to the water channel and not affect main river stream at all. The water channel goes through in the trees and supply water to the micro hydropower plant. This water channel has a function as water irrigation for rice farm.
Then, how did they construct this facility by community base?
What IBEKA do is first find villagers who have skill such as construction or electronic engineer, then gather unskilled labor. IBEKA’s specialist and skilled villagers do technical part and unskilled villagers support them, for example mixing concrete and carrying equipment or material to the skilled workers.
Villagers mentioned that construction work was not hard because they were not required special skills. The most difficult part was to locate the water turbines and generator at the operation house. They must have carried the facilities at the bottom of a hill without a big machine such as carrying crane. There was one interesting thing that villagers appreciated that IBEKA offered same salary for skilled and unskilled workers.
It is still amazing that it took only one year since the very beginning of the project until they finished construction and started operation.
