Emergency supply for a hospital in Eikwe – Ghana
About the Project
The St.-Martin De Porris Hospital in the little fisher village Eikwe is located in South West Ghana, just a few hundred metres form the Atlantic Coast, and caters for a population of over 100000 habitants. Due to the generally insufficient energy supply in Ghana the hospital is affected by almost daily power outages from the grid. In case of emergency, the hospital is supplied by diesel generators. However, the time between a power outage and starting of the generators cannot be bridged and the hospital has no electricity for a period up to 30 minutes.
To be able to bridge this period, two members of the regional group Bayreuth, Jannik and Jan-Niklas went to Eikwe to establish 7 battery inverter systems in cooperation with the local company "Flosjem Enterprise". The project is part of a global grant which is financed by the rotary club Bad Driburg.
After a pre-evaluation in January 2016 an efficient solution was worked out. Therefore, all loads which are essential for the emergency supply were decided to be connected to the power back up. On the other hand, unnecessary consumers, such as air conditions, were exempted to reduce the costs as much as possible. Furthermore, the distribution of inverters on the campus needed to be considered since the hospital consists of many buildings and some needed to be connected to the same inverter system.
After a kick-off meeting with the hospital stuff as well as the head of Flosjem Enterprise including inspection the installation of the backup systems was started. Additionally, cables were placed between buildings which were linked to the same battery-inverter system. After three days, all power back up systems were connected and they all work perfectly since then. Therefore, the hospital now has an uninterrupted energy supply which ensures the continuous treatment of patient even during power outage of the grid.
Since most of the metal fuses boxes were much rusted they were additionally exchanged with plastic fuse boxes.
Finally, the hospital staff was trained in the right usage and maintenance of the batteries and inverters to ensure a high life time of the emergency power supply.
Since the established inverters are solar inverters, the extension of the power backup system by adding solar panels can be realized without much effort.
Finally, we like to acknowledge the Rotary Club in Bad Driburg as well as Flosjem enterprise. Additionally, we like to thank Kwesi and Richard from RG Ghana for their effort amd help in the preliminary phase as well as Gerrit Henke, Markus Reinhard and Dirk Scheibner for the helpful technical advices during planning.
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Timespan
April 2024 - now
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