Despite excellent healthcare from Niall Conroy and his dedicated neonatal medical team, infant mortality at Bo hospital was unacceptably high.
The problem outside the team’s control was the daily power cuts – lasting a few minutes, hours …or occasionally, days.
Babies die of the cold very quickly – even in Sierra Leone. They need heated incubators, oxygen provided by oxygen-separators, and the overnight nursing team need light to monitor the babies in their care – looking for signs of change in colour or behaviour. During power cuts they used to rely on the torch facility of their mobile phones to check on babies in their care until their phones ran out of charge.
A power cut lasting just twenty minutes is long enough to affect the outcome for some sick babies.
The usual recourse to diesel generators did not provide the hoped-for solution, says Neonatal Head Nurse, Juliana Conteh – the fuel was too expensive, or sometimes it was stolen. During one power cut of more than 24 hours, the diesel supply simply ran out. Parents of the sick children on the ward at that time clubbed together to raise cash, and then rushed to the local service station to buy more fuel.
These days that has all changed. Thanks to a fund-raising initiative by Michael Liebreich of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; and Richenda van Leeuwen of Sustainable Energy for All; a new solar energy system has been installed in a secure compound. A solar array of 92 panels, together with battery storage of 77kWh provides reliable electricity to match the quality of medical care from the team.
Speaking of the change, Dr Niall Conroy says: “There are babies in our care, right now, who wouldn’t still be alive without our solar power system.”
Solar energy from the panels is harvested by three solar charge controllers – two are the high voltage SmartSolar MPPT RS 450/200 chargers, suitable for long string PV arrays and a 48V architecture; the third, controlling a smaller second PV array mounted with a different aspect, is a SmartSolar 250/100. All charge controllers are daisy chained to ensure that each charger is sending the battery optimal power for its state of charge, regardless of aspect irradiance.
There are five banks of BYD lithium batteries with a total story of 77kWh which is converted to AC electricity by three Quattro Inverter/Chargers. Quattro’s have two AC inlets – automatically switching to the live source – and two AC outlets; the second AC outlet will disconnect non-essential loads when the AC source (grid or generator) is lost.
The power supply, harvest and storage can be monitored locally using the GX Touch user interface which gives access to a powerful menu of historical analysis, programming, and live data.
A Cerbo GX communication centre device acts as the data communication gateway and controls the system; it also provides remote management – allowing the system to be interrogated and programmed from a phone or laptop anywhere in the world, without the need to visit site. Remote reporting is enabled by the internet based platform Victron Remote Management (VRM) which is free to use. VRM monitors hundreds of thousands of installation – allowing users and engineers to interrogate or control a single site or hundreds of sites. It is not necessary to check in with the system as VRM can provide automatic push notifications or emails when any alarm parameter has been reached. Intelligent sorting and grouping of sites makes fleet control simple.
The Neonatal ward’s new energy system also provides power to a water pump. For two years water had to be collected in buckets because the pump was broken – but now there is also a reliable water supply!
Work to improve electricity supply and health standards at the hospital are ongoing. You can help support the project by visiting projectbo.org
Let’s take a look at what has been achieved so far in the documentary below.
