"Je suis low batt." In French, this literally means, "I am low battery." It doesn't make much sense on its own, but in the context of how Michaela Wrong talked about it in her book, "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" it is a phrase that she uses to sum up the great wealth of issues which plague the Congo. It harks back to when the first mobiles arrived in the country, which had a very annoying tendency to die after some 20 minutes of talking. Thus, the speaker would typically always have to tell the listener that they were out of battery and had to either switch phones or go charge. The term took on something of a life of its own and came to mean that something in general had run down.

We are at a point now here in Abengourou where the power cuts (or délestage if you will) have become regimented in that they're from 01:00 to 09:00 every day which coincides with no water during that time plus another 3-5 hours afterward as the system rebuilds pressure. Living life around this schedule is not what I would call choice, but it is doable, especially as you know that it's coming.

It just so happens that for the first time today, I heard of someone being asked how late he was out last night to which he replied, "Oh, we were out past-cut." meaning past 01:00. I'm sure that others are saying to make sure not flush the toilet until post-cut as well. As this way of life has become unfortunately ordinary (which is a shame as the resources do indeed exist) we have taken to incorporating it in to everyday language. No one probably even notices this, but happens all the time like when we say, "go Google it" when we mean to look something up online or "grab a Kleenex" when we mean a tissue.

I don't have the perception that people in Africa do this any more or any less than anywhere else in the world, but I find it more noticeable given that when it happens, it's usually a bending of pre-existing words or phrases, whereas in North America or Europe, it's the straight up adoption of a product name given the constant media and marketing blasts that permeate those societies a good deal more. Of course, many people here in Côte d'Ivoire keep insisting that the word for pen is "bic" instead of "stylo" or to grab a "Lotus" (a local brand) instead of a "mouchoir" so, I suppose the jury is out to some degree even still. We humans do enjoy our products; the power cuts, not so much.

In talking with a number of the UN folks here in Abengourou (who in turn have talked to other folks/officials in the area and beyond) a larger picture of what is happening with d'Off d'10 emerges.

As I mentioned earlier, there are some rather large problems with the Azito power station in Abidjan. This actually wasn't news as the station has been under repair for some time now. The repairs took awhile to get going, not because of any issues at a local level, but because this station is owned by a French company who appeared to be a bit lax in getting around to making the repairs. They are indeed underway now and if all goes well, the station should be back up to full potential by mid-March. This is an optimistic estimate, albeit one tinged with a degree of sensibility as even if this station is back up to full potential, there will still be cuts, but only in the neighborhood of four hours a day or so. Personally, I'm hoping that however they end up being, there is at least power through the night as sleeping fanless is funless.

But this power station wasn't the only electrical issue in all of this and the power cuts should have started some time back. It just so happened that there was an event you might have heard of called the African Cup of Nations which finished last week, crowning Egypt as the champions. Once over, the cuts happened. Coincidence? Not at all. For those in the US, it is probably difficult to understand that much as Eddie Izzard proclaimed, "Cake or Death!" it is "Football or Death!" for the rest of the world when it comes to watching the game. If Côte d'Ivoire blacked out during those matches, there would have been riots. People can drink warm beer a lot happier than watching no football, so given this disposition, the authorities realized that more power needed to appear as it wasn't coming from Azito. They turned to their minority power production that exists in the form of hydroelectricity. The dams were opened fuller than they should have been to run the turbines higher and generate more power. While this worked, it has severely reduced the banked supply of energy which is why once Azito comes back online, there still won't be enough power. All the cost of a Football Now, Sweat Later platform in government. So Populist...

Eventually, the rains will come to the far North of the country and the dams will be refilled to produce all the power that is needed. Unfortunately, this happens in May. Until then, it is what it is and the soft, purring sound of diesel generators shall be heard lulling many an Ivorian to sleep.

As a footnote very much worth mentioning, the elections that were supposed to happen for the last five years, but were truly and like, so totally going to happen last November, probably won't even happen in 2010 now. Some estimates even put them at March of 2011. The reason for this being that the president of the Election Commission was found fraudulently adding 429,000 people to the rolls that didn't exist. Naturally, it makes sense that this fellow was a member of the opposition, but this doesn't do too much for the cause of the opposition as he is now going to jail and large chunks if not all of the electoral process need to be restarted, delaying this election; which the process of having is much like distilling molasses in the middle of January, in Canada, by a couple of moose, who are holidaying in Cuba, watching the Cup of Nations, with full air conditioning through the night.

I was spoiled. Côte d'Ivoire seemed like a tropical vacation initially. Hot yes, but not insanely humid in the current season. A pleasant breeze washes across many places (especially Abidjan) in the evening and it is in general, quite pleasant. I'm here for work, but despite jetlag, I felt like I was on vacation for my first week here.

And then Tuesday hit. Without warning, in the middle of the night, the power went off and with it the water. The two systems are completely intertwined and it appears that there is no backup generator to keep the water pumping once the power stops and thus, the chateau d'eau drains quite fast leaving you in the dark and unable to wash, rinse, or flush.

Honestly, while it means stooping to heavy generalization, I should have known better. I've been to Kinshasa and the friend's place I stayed at, while having a lovely, 10th floor view of Brazzaville across the Congo River, was prone to water outages. They were prepared though and had what must have been a 500L reserve tank as high up as they could place it in the apartment to gravity feed when the water went off. Tuesday, I had no such setup and while there are buckets at my place, my wife and I had neglected to fill them. Dumb was us, but filled from henceforth they shall be.

It is an easy assumption to make that while in Côte d'Ivoire, things such as water and power wouldn't be a problem. The infrastructure is overall, very good. While something like 7,000 (presumably small) villages aren't electrified, all the main cities are properly wired and the grid, at normal times functions quite well. There is also stable internet--at home I might add. The roads are good. The Abidjan airport is very modern and even tops Kotoka in neighboring Ghana. And yes, the railroad, while only for cargo, still functions well. You would never know that the country is technically a divided one, emerged from a civil war less than a decade ago, and has the telltale white SUVs of the UN Mission flitting about the countryside.

Apparently, Côte d'Ivoire has the ability to generate 0.89 gigawatts of power. Not bad, but if they were to make full usage of all the hydroelectric power available, then they would have 2 gigawatts at the ready. The issue is that currently, they're not and on top of that, there is a large degree of electricity being exported to Ghana, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Togo. You can draw your own conclusions as to why this might be when there is currently a 150 megawatt deficit in the country. Naturally, it rubs me the wrong way, having lived in California during the rolling blockouts there that ended up costing the state billions of dollars in corruption waste to companies such as the now defunct Enron. This is on a smaller scale monetarily, but still the same thing.

But, what specifically happened Tuesday?

...a failure occurred on a group of central heat [no idea what this means in French] Azito. "We will be without this group until May. During this period, the country will experience a shortfall in electricity production of about 150 megawatts. So there will be disruption on the network…"

Azito is a gas-powered station in the suburbs of Abidjan. I am unclear as to what "la centrale thermique" is, but whatever the case, it isn't functioning and thus, because of this, there isn't enough electricity. The weird part in all of this is apparently a third turbine is being readied at this station, but they are waiting until demand is high enough to use it. It would seem that domestic demand is not only high enough, but due to it growing at 10% a year; it has exceeded any possible supply that is currently available. I can only figure that they must mean that they're waiting for international demand to be great enough to get this going, since that appears to be who they cater to.

I've no idea how all this plays out, but it appears that it should all get straightened out just about the same time I'm scheduled to leave the country, which seems fitting, given that I'm to blame for the troubles in the first place. It the meanwhile, I just hope that they somewhat stick to the blackout schedule and I remember to keep buckets and jerry cans full.

Until Our Independence also has a take on the situation as well.

I think that it's been for the last 10 years or so that people in the US have been hearing about the amazing possibilities of running data via power lines or PLC. If PLC doesn't sound familiar, it's because Americans were mostly familiar with just one aspect of it which is BPL or Broadband over Power Lines. To date, it's sounded a great deal like snake oil and to a large degree has fallen by the wayside. I hadn't really thought much of it as it seemed to be dead in the water.

It turns out that it actually isn't and in fact, PLC is very much alive and has the potential of being deployed in Africa on a large scale. I got this out of a session I attended at the BarCamp Africa UK which was coordinated by Andrew Boye and Kofi Abban-Sackey of Cactel Communications. In all truth, they were there to pitch the work that their company was doing, but at the same time, in addition to an introduction to their firm, I think that everyone in attendance was able to take away a great deal from the session about PLC in general. Given the questions asked be all of us, I think the potential possibility of this technology was largely unknown.

The biggest point that stuck out at me was the figure of technology penetration, in that power lines have a 55% penetration rate, mobile phone a 30% rate and landlines a 5% rate. Look at that. There is such a big deal being made about data connectivity via mobile phones in Africa when power lines already have nearly twice that rate! This is an untapped resource which could readily be taken advantage of, today.

Naturally, living most of the time in the US and seeing a presentation on power line connectivity, I had to ask, why is it that this would be viable in Africa? Yes, the ability to reach a great many more people is there, but we haven't seen it implemented in the US and like I said, it seems to have just died out. I would never ascribe to the belief that something has to first work in Africa to then work in the US (actually it's quite the opposite), but at the same time, the last group of people in the US to get access to broadband would be readily served by access via power lines as they are quite rural and not served by any connectivity options other than dialup or satellite. This hasn't happened. Why? And how is this able to be mitigated in an African setting?

It turns out (and I was very unaware of this, although it makes sense) that profitability for a power line data connection node is the same as it is for cable, phone, or anything else in that if you have very few people on that node, you will have a hard time making any money from it. This is the reason that it's never taken off in the US. While it would work great in a setting like New York City or San Francisco, there already is a great many options in these places and so installing it doesn't make sense. Stick it in the middle of the prairie in Kansas and you'll lose money. Where it would make sense in Africa, is a place like Accra or many other locations. The power system is already there and all you need to do is plunk down a node for about $200 USD, configure it and off you go. This is in sharp contrast to having to lay new fiber which could take months if not years.

Andrew and Kofi nailed their talk and there simply wasn't enough time to get in to everything that they presented. We ended at their showing a map of a demo project they set up on the University of Ghana campus. There are obviously a great many fine details that were not gone through completely, but I came away from the session with a renewed interest in PLC and feeling pretty good that this could very well be a solidly viable connection option for over half the people in Africa.

Many thanks to Rebecca for pointing out this video. Appears that the solar powered mobiles have hit the market in Kenya and they're selling out like crazy. This video gives good coverage, unfortunately in Dutch, but with English subtitles. The phones look pretty cool, although on cloudy days, one must revert to the way of the charger...

At BarCampAfrica, I met this fellow named Karl from Potenco who was excitedly showing everyone this human-powered generator that he had with him. It looked like an overblown yo yo and you can see me holding one below. It has all kinds of capabilities which they go in to on their website in more detail. Suffice to say, it's a good answer to the mobile power generator issue. This may not seem like a big deal to those of us in the US or Europe as we have constant power, but for folks in Africa and other developing regions, getting at a constant source of power is an issue. You can see this in DR Congo anywhere this is a live power outlet because there will almost always be a mobile phone (or 10) plugged in to it for a charge.

I think what Potenco is creating is cool, although somewhere down the line, we may finally moved beyond the need for such primitive power generation and we'll finally understand solar or some other form of energy. I think that the only real flaw with this group is that they're doing what Americans do best, in that they see a need and they're attempting to fill it for a profit. Their main goal is to find someone like Nokia to sell this device to in order to get it out there. The mobile phone companies are heavily vested in trying to spread phones across developing nations and so a device like this for powering them is going to be needed. Most folks are going to find little use for this device outside of powering a mobile phone unless they want to have an LED light on at night instead of kerosene.

Honestly, there's nothing wrong with this approach, but you're not going to make an evangelist out of anyone with it. Those of us who really care and want to heavily invest our time in to promoting something that we think could make peoples' lives better are going to skip a for-profit product like this because in the end, it's no better than say making a new toaster for people to buy and promoting that. All I can say is, "Hey, good luck with that."