By Charles Pickering, PhD
President of Pickering Energy Solutions

In 2005 I found myself in a very hot, dark and utterly destroyed powerhouse of a large remote hospital, a 4 hour drive on a very deteriorated road northeast of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, Africa. Phebe Hospital, built by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the 1950s, is located in Bong County. I was a part of a mission team of engineers restoring the power to the compound which had been without power for about 2 years. All of the generators had been stolen, the electrical equipment had been removed, and nothing but empty power conduits remained.

The civil war in Liberia destroyed Phebe hospital, in which 20 employees and nurses at the hospital perished in service to the community. As we spent almost a year designing the repairs, purchasing and shipping the equipment, repairing and rebuilding the power system, we developed a deep relationship with the community and the Liberia Ministry of Health.

Upon the restoration of power to the hospital in 2006, two important things happened that caused a dramatic turn in our mission outreach:

The first was a meeting with Dr. Gwenigale, in which he challenged us to begin bringing solar power and refrigeration to bush clinics in Liberia. We learned that in order to have vaccines available to villagers that would come to the remote clinics, the vaccines needed to be maintained at refrigerated temperatures from production to use, referred to the as maintaining the “cold chain”.

The second was the awareness of a deep relationship of support within the region from a group from Pittsburgh, PA, Brother’s Brother Foundation.

When I returned to the US I reached out to Brother’s Brother and we began designing and planning projects together.  We developed a standardized footprint for solar power at clinics, with the ability to scale them to larger sizes as clinics expanded, added night operations, and added birth and neonatal services. We learned that the provision of power at a remote clinic by itself increases the probability of a healthy birth in a complicated delivery by 20%.

Some facilities also have laboratories co-located on the sites as Malaria is the most prevalent and preventable disease in Africa, but its symptoms are disguised as they resemble the symptoms of several common tropical ailments.

In the nearly 20 years that have followed we have completed approximately 60 clinics together, including clinics in Bong, Grand Bassa, Lofa, Nimba, Montserrado, Grand Cape Mount, Margibi, Maryland, Grand Krue and Sinoe counties in Liberia. Additionally we have provided solar power to 5 hospitals, 4 orphanages and a regional laboratory in addition to multiple educational facilities of all types from elementary schools to post-secondary.

Over the years we have used lead-acid batteries (similar to what you would use to for the starter in your gas-powered car.) As technology has developed, we are in the process of upgrading our batteries to Lithium-ion batteries which will provide more power than a lead-acid battery can but also offers a significantly extended operating lifetime. These are the same batteries that are now being used in electric vehicles.

Our program focus for 2025 is to re-visit up to half of our clinics that have aging battery systems and provide upgrades to these batteries, which will provide them with 7-10 years’ worth of safe and reliable operation.  The challenge with providing these upgrades are that the roads are virtually impassable for about six months out of each year, so the replacement of batteries not only depends upon the funding, design and shipping constraints but also upon the annual rhythms of travel in Liberia.