Category: Myanmar

In-country exchange: Myanmar Round table

2/26/2019

Building onto HPNET's commitment to indigenous micro hydro practitioners in Myanmar, on February 25th HPNET, in partnership with the Renewable Energy Association of Myanmar (REAM) and the association Hydropower for Community Empowerment in Myanmar (HyCEM), organized a a multi-actor round table to facilitate dialogue between international development partners and Myanmar practitioners.

With the presence of HPNET’s Board members, comprising of senior practitioners from Germany, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, an insightful dialogue resulted.

The discussion reflected on best practices of micro/mini hydro development in S/SE Asia, including enabling financing, grid interconnection, technology development, and community ownership. It examined how Myanmar's indigenous practitioners achieved financial viability in community-led projects; and identified financing bottlenecks and solutions to further scale the work of indigenous practitioners in Myanmar. The discussion closed with identified opportunities for coordinated strategy among development partners and with local practitioners.

U Zaw Min of HyCEM presenting at the HPNET- REAM-HyCEM Round Table in Yangon, facilitated by members of the the HPNET Board. Photo Credit: Dipti Vaghela

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VIdeos: HPnet at the IRENA iorec 2018

11/9/2018

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If you missed us at the 4th International Off-grid Renewable Energy Conference and Exhibition (IOREC) in Singapore, Oct. 31 - Nov. 1, 2018, organized by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), you can check out the videos below of our side-event!

The panel focused on Accelerating Financially Viable Hydro Mini-Grids: A Closer Look at Small-Scale Hydropower in S/SE Asia, including case presentations from Nepal and Myanmar, and a multi-stakeholder panel discussion, with the most senior experts of the sector!

Part 1: Nepal Case Study, Barpak Micro Hydro Project, presented by Mr. Bir Bahadur Ghale, founder of Hydro Energy Concern Pvt. Ltd. Mr. Ghale has been a pioneer of enterprise-based micro hydro development in Nepal.

Part 2: Myanmar Case Study, Mae Muk Waterfall Micro Hydro Project, presented by Ms. Dipti Vaghela, Network Facilitator and Manager of the Hydro Empowerment Network. The project is an example of Myanmar's self-financed, locally manufactured, indigenous micro hydro projects.

Part 3: Panel of Experts, moderated by HPNET Board of Advisors member, Dr. Binu Parthan of Sustainable Energy Associates (SEA). Panelists included Mr. Bikash Pandey of Winrock International, Mr. Kapila Subasinghe of DFCC Bank Sri Lanka, Senator Adrian Banie Lasimbang of Malaysia, Ms. Tri Mumpuni of IBEKA, Ms. Rana Ghoneim of UNIDO, and Mr. Gerhard Fischer of the the ASEAN Hydropower Competence Centre -- each with decades of micro hydro experience! Speaker bios can be found here.

Thank you to IRENA, the panelists, and the HPNET Secretariat for making the side-event possible!

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Myanmar micro Hydro Evolution: the Impact of ground-truthing and Multi-actor dialogue

3/30/2015

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Micro hydro in Myanmar has blown us away.

Thanks to ground-truthing research done by the Renewable Energy Association of Myanmar (REAM), we came to know that Myanmar's micro hydro practitioners quietly, over the last few decades, have been designing, fabricating, installing, and sustaining several hundreds of community-owned micro hydro projects -- without external funding or technical support!

This type of simple, steady, and scaled implementation of micro hydro is rare without external support. HPNET member U Sai Htun Hla has commissioned 150 pico/micro hydro projects in the last 15 years. His mentor, over 80 years old in age, U Khun Khaw, has commissioned over 100 projects and has stopped counting. :) There are several others, including new practitioners from a younger generation, Ko Khun Aung Myo and Ko Zaw Min, who bring university training to micro hydro engineering and design processes, e.g. CAD tools for drawings and Google for self-training.

These practitioners have self-financed most of their projects, allowing the communities to repay the capital costs within 5+ years of commissioning. Because the projects have been commissioned on very low budgets -- affordable by local communities -- they have been forced to use low quality hardware and no load controllers, leading to frequent technical issues.

But things are changing for the better:

In Nov. 2014, HPNET member U Aung Myint, General Secretary of REAM, spearheaded a practice-to-policy exchange on micro hydro, with support from the WISIONS SEPS grant and many others. The exchange brought proven experts from Indonesia, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to Myanmar to firsthand dialogue with policy-makers, civil society groups, international aid organizations, and practitioners.

REAM's Nov. workshop encouraged the SE4ALL initiative -- led by the Myanmar government and the World Bank's off-grid energy program -- to invite the local practitioners to give their first-ever Power Point presentation and that too to an audience of high-level government, World Bank, and other national decision-makers!

HPNET invited 2 Myanmar practitioners to its 2nd Annual Gathering of Practitioners, in Bandung, Indonesia, with WISIONS' support. The practitioners were immensely inspired by the Indonesia's thriving private sector for micro hydro. They saw the resulting transformation of turbine and load controller fabricators who had started with little experience but now offered standardized and fail-proof products. With support from GIZ, the Indonesian fabricators had long formed an association of micro hydro developers, the Asosiasi Hidro Bandung, which has 100+ members committed to high quality micro hydro development and to lobbying for supportive policy. The Indonesian progress relayed much-needed confidence to the Myanmar practitioners to build high quality hardware, be financially sustainable, and attract talented young engineers to their micro hydro work.

The Myanmar practitioners were so inspired by the Indonesians, that within days of returning from the HPNET meeting, they kick-started their own association. The Small Hydro Power Association of Myanmar (SHPAM) is now collectively voicing for targeted financing, technical knowledge, and institutional capacity building to upgrade their work.

We eagerly await to see whether SHPAM's requests are answered by the agencies involved -- particularly the World Bank, as it is assisting the Myanmar government to design its SE4ALL program this month! We are hopeful that micro hydro and other renewable energy mini grids are equally prioritized with mainstream but disenfranchising electrification paths being considered by the government and international financiers (including the World Bank).

This evolution is an example of how ground-truthing and in-person exchange can rapidly lead to new developments. Without REAM's study of the field situation and multi-actor dialogue, the local micro hydro practitioners in Myanmar would have remained invisible to the government and the World Bank, during a very critical phase in Myanmar's energy planning. And without the Myanmar practitioners' visit to Indonesia, their confidence to form an association to lobby for solutions to improve their work would not have quickly transpired.

We will keep you posted on how the micro hydro (r)evolution in Myanmar continues. :)

By Dipti Vaghela, HPNET Coordinator

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the flow

In-country exchange: Myanmar Round table

VIdeos: HPnet at the IRENA iorec 2018

Myanmar micro Hydro Evolution: the Impact of ground-truthing and Multi-actor dialogue

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