Chile – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Under her eye: Communicating climate change more effectively

Posted on May 2, 2018April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

My name is Adriana Suárez and I’m a 3rd year PhD Student at the School of Geographical Sciences. I am working on community based water management in rural areas in Chile, where I am from.

I came back from fieldwork two months ago and in a way, I am still getting used to being back in Bristol as it is easy to feel a bit lost when you are swimming in a sea of data. It was an intense fieldwork experience as I spent five months in Chile doing interviews with different participants, collecting documents and texts, and doing participant observation. The method I am using is called Institutional Ethnography, a method of inquiry developed by feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith and which has not been used yet in natural resources management.

My aim is to learn from rural communities who are involved in water management as a way to explore a form of management that is different to the usual way in which water for human consumption and sanitation is provided in urban areas. For example, in most cities like Santiago and Bristol, water is provided by sanitary companies which capture, purify and deliver water to our households. They also collect waste water and treat it to then return it to rivers so it can be used again in other activities. Usually, sanitary companies are for profit corporations that make a profit out of this service.

However, the way drinking water is organised in rural Chile is very different as in these areas the State works in partnership with the community. In this model, the work is done with a social aim and not as a way to make a profit, as opposed to the work of sanitary companies involved in the provision of water to urban areas. On the one hand the State is in charge of investing in the construction and provision of the infrastructure needed to capture, accumulate and distribute water, such as water tanks and a network of water pipes that distribute water to each household. On the other hand, the community is responsible for managing the system. This work includes repairing any breakages, leaks and charging water tariffs to keep the system running.

Coming back from fieldwork is not an easy task and I felt like I had many questions and concerns I needed to discuss with others. I realised I also needed to engage with my data in as many ways as possible, and that meant not only in academic ways. This is why I have been looking for opportunities to engage in conversation with other PhD students as well as with people who are not doing research or are not involved in academia. The ‘Research without Borders’ festival has offered me an opportunity to do this in a non-academic way, and to think of ways of talking about my research I had not considered before.

I also committed to preparing a stall at a public engagement event in Colston Hall on the 9 May 2018, in which I would develop an activity about my research. Someone had suggested me to use a cut out of James Bond to exemplify the gendered patterns of water management in my research. However I wasn’t entirely convinced I could develop a meaningful activity with a real-size cardboard image of Daniel Craig.

So, as I was getting – or not – ready to present my project in an engaging and fun way, I received an email from the Cabot Institute inviting me to participate in the Under Her Eye fellowship program which involved participating in a conference taking place on 1 June 2018 in London. I quickly went on their website and did a bit of research and I soon realised this was an opportunity I could not miss! This conference is about communicating climate change effectively by encouraging collaboration between scientists and artists. Moreover, Margaret Atwood will be the ambassador of this conference! I applied immediately and was thrilled to hear I had been chosen to participate.

Scarborough. Image credit Adriana Suarez.

Last weekend we met in Scarborough with the Invisible Dust team, who are organising the conference and I met the rest of the participants who were from different universities across the country. It was an incredible experience and it opened my eyes to new ways of collaborations I had not considered before. It was an intense and productive weekend, dedicated to improve our presentation skills, to think about engaging different audiences, about communicating and about how to affect change. It was inspiring and thought provoking, and it was a sharing experience among people I had never seen before, but with whom I shared values, dreams and concerns with.

We were invited to think about an activity we would like to develop during the conference and we came up with an idea to involve the public in a sensory experience that would take them all the way to Chile, to explore how avocado production is competing with a rural community and their human right to access water. I had never thought I had a creative facet, but now I’m starting to think I might not know everything about myself yet, which is quite refreshing. The whole weekend in Scarborough was a discovery, an exploration of our own research and of ways in which to look at it from different angles, from creative approaches and involving others in reflecting about it too, which was an invaluable gift.

I did not realise how meaningful the connections made with the other young women participating in this fellowship would turn out to be. We introduced ourselves with a nice ice-breaking activity in which we started drawing connections that would then help us develop conversations around topics that mattered to us such as climate change, gender, vegetarianism and curry. Our love for chocolate and coffee also came up, together with our concern about the risk of losing them as we found out from Sarah Mander’s presentation. Sarah works @TyndallManc and explained the ways in which the UK is working to meet the commitments it has taken to reduce carbon emissions and help combat climate change. She mentioned that if the global temperature rises to 4C we would be losing chocolate and coffee.

Later, we had Laura Harrington’s presentation which I thought was very personal and generous. She talked about her research in landscapes and her interests in geomorphology, especially in the peat bogs of Cumbria/Northumberland. She showed us a video with different takes on the landscape she was working on and I could feel I was there, almost a part of it. She was doing art by recording sounds on a wet day, filming the dripping and melting of snow and the drenched soil which made me feel cold. It was interesting to see the amount of patience and endurance she had to have to be able to film these scenes for hours, waiting, looking and absorbing the landscape through all her senses. I was surprised she enjoyed being there as I thought I would have only been able to stay in those conditions for a little while, comforted by the idea of soon going back to a warm and dry place. She put sensors, cameras, and films under the ground to see how they became part of the landscape after some time there, being exposed to these harsh conditions. It felt intimate as she was telling us what went through her head and what she wanted to do with the equipment. I admired Laura’s conviction and the way in which she would not listen to scientists’ advice when telling her “there is nothing to see here”. These suggestions did not prevent her from going to Finland in winter time and experiencing the landscape for herself.

She praised procrastination, as it is a place where imagination and creativity can emerge, which made me think about how much I fear procrastinating, without really valuing the precious gifts that leisure time can offer.

After this intense afternoon, we went for a nice walk into the TEC Campus, a beautiful place where we would get our own room, and space to walk, to meet, a great Canteen and friendly staff who were all the time accommodating to our needs. On the Friday, we worked on different ideas, especially about what makes as curious and thoughts we wanted to develop. We had an interesting talk by Julie Doyle, professor of media and communications at Brighton University. We worked on a critical reflection on media types, and on examples of effective and ineffective ways of communicating climate change. We also discussed the gendered aspects of some media depictions, we saw ways in which irony was used to spark discussions and we talked about different art forms and exhibitions that can reach audience’s attention while entertaining them and also offering a hopeful message. We mentioned the importance of responsibility when communicating climate change impacts, especially when talking to younger generations, so that we avoid making people feel disempowered.

We then had a Skype workshop with Gayle Chong Kwan in which we talked about the changes people can make in food consumption, and how we can all relate to food, which was one of the things that came up in our first ice breaker exercise. This was a great workshop in which we became active participants in the preparation of the Microclimate Banquet taking place at the Conference in June.

Gayle showed us pictures from the late XIX century were ice was brought from Norway to London as customers demanded ice for food preservation, for making ice cream, and for medical use. She also showed pictures of cattle in jails, as a way for us to imagine how meat production and food supply was organised in the past. This was a great prompt for starting a conversation on the impacts we have on the environment by consuming fruits that are grown in faraway lands, or products that travel long distances to get to our tables, like the avocados from Chile.

After lunch, we had the valuable input of Sarah Cartwright who taught us several tips for communicating effectively and present our ideas with confidence. We learned about the importance of breathing, of concentrating in our body and grounding ourselves so that we can be assertive and authoritative. Many of us were impressed with the fact that the content of our presentations is only 7% of what counts to make an impact. The rest of attention is related to our body language, the way we speak, and the tone of our voices. We learned tips for warming our vocal cords, making eye contact and on what to do with our hands. It is surprising that we hardly ever get advice on how to communicate our research, which makes me think of the important challenges that academia faces when researchers try to connect with people located in other spheres of knowledge such as the arts. These so called “soft skills” are generally overlooked and we spent more time working on our content than on the way we deliver it and the impact we make.

After this we split into two groups and we developed in 15 minutes, a 5 minute presentation in which we would use these suggestions to structure our talk. We all received very valuable feedback on our presentation style and were able to see what we were doing well and what things we could improve.

That night we watched the short film ‘Pumzi’ by Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu, a sci-fi short film that pushes us to think about alternative futures. We also watched/heard Sabrina Mahfouz’s potent poem on climate refugees ‘‘The Environmental Refugee Holding Centre (ERHC)’.

Under Her Eye group of fellows.

Towards the end of the weekend we worked on learning how to make our ideas happen by applying for funds, doing a proposal pitch and looking for funding sources. This was practical advice on how to concretise our ideas.This weekend has boosted my curiosity and my practice of reflecting on the what, why, how and why of climate change action and communication. Moreover I made 14 new friends who I will be working with in the next six weeks leading up to Under Her Eye. It has been inspiring and a luxury to take time off to explore and celebrate the role of women taking action on climate change, and I appreciate the opportunity to have been part of this experience.

This weekend was a gift, as I could dedicate three full days to pause, reflect, write and share ideas and dreams with like-minded women. This time, when experienced, becomes an avenue for exploring our own abilities but also for creating in collaboration with others possibilities for transformation and hope, which are essential when communicating and engaging audiences in climate change action.
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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Adriana Suarez, who is a PhD Candidate in Environment, Energy and Resilience at the School of Geographical Sciences. She is exploring community based water management in rural Chile through Institutional Ethnography, a feminist method of inquiry into social relations.

Adriana Suarez

Twitter: Adri_H2o
Email: as15606@bristol.ac.uk

‘Under Her Eye’ is curated and produced by award-winning arts science organisation Invisible Dust and supported by the Wellcome Trust, Euston Town BID, Creative Scotland, Mooncup and Arts Council England.

Challenges of generating solar power in the Atacama Desert

Posted on February 8, 2017April 5, 2023 by janet.crompton

My name is Jack Atkinson-Willes and I am a recent graduate from the University of Bristol’s Engineering Design course. In 2016 I was given the unique opportunity to work in Chile with the renewable energy consultancy 350renewables on a Solar PV research project. In this blog I am going to discuss how this came about and share some of the experiences I have had since arriving!

First of all, how did this come about? Due to the uniquely flexible nature of the Engineering Design course I was able to develop my understanding of the renewable energy industry, a sector I had always had a keen interest in, by selecting modules that related to this topic and furthering this through industry work experience. In 2013, the university helped me secure a 12 month placement with Atkins Energy based near Filton, and while this largely centred around the nuclear industry it was an excellent introduction into how an engineering consultancy works and what goes into development of a utility-scale energy project.

In 2015 I built on this experience with a 3 month placement as a research assistant in Swansea University’s Marine Energy Research Group (MERG). I spent this time working on the EU-funded MARIBE project, which aimed to bring down the costs of emerging offshore industries (such as tidal and wave power) by combining them with established industries (such as shipping). This built on the experience I had gained through research projects I had done as part of my course at Bristol, and allowed me to familiarise myself further with renewable energy technology.

Keen to use my first years after graduation to learn other languages and travel, but also start building a career in renewables, I realised that the best way to combine the two was to start looking at countries overseas that had the greatest renewable energy potential. Given that I had just started taking an open unit in Spanish, Latin America was, naturally, the first place I looked; and I quickly found that I needn’t look much further! Latin American was the fastest growing region in the world for renewable energy in 2015, and this was during a year when global investment in renewables soared to record levels, adding an extra 147GW of capacity. (That’s more than double the UK demand!)

So, eager to find out more about the opportunities to work there, I discussed my interest with Dr. Paul Harper. He very kindly put me in touch with Patricia Darez, general manager of 350renewables, a renewable energy consultancy based in Santiago. As luck would have it, they were looking to expand their new business and take someone on for an upcoming research project. Given my previous experience in both an engineering consultancy and research projects I was fortunate enough to be offered a chance to join them out in Chile. Of course I jumped at the opportunity!

1 – Santiago, Chile (the smog in this photo being at an unusually low level)

Fast-forward by 8 months and I am tentatively stepping off the plane into a new country and a new life, eager to get started with my new job. Santiago was certainly a big change to Bristol, being about 10 times the size, but to wake up every day with the Andes mountains looming over the skyline was simply incredible. The greatest personal challenge by far has been learning Spanish, largely because the Chilean version of Spanish is the approximate equivalent to a thick Glaswegian accent in English. So for my (at best) GSCE level Spanish it was quite a while before I felt I could converse with any of the locals (and even now I spend almost all my time nodding and smiling politely whilst my mind tries to rapidly think of a response that would allow the conversation to continue without the other person realising I haven’t a clue what they’re saying!) But it has taught me to be patient with my progress, and little by little I can see myself improving.

Fortunately for me though, I was able to work in English, and before long I was getting to grips with the research project that I had travelled all this way for! But before I go into the details of the project, first a little background on why Chile has been such a success story for Solar.

2 – There’s a lot of empty space in the Atacama

The Atacama desert ranges from the pacific ocean to the high plains of the Andes, reaching heights of more than 6000m in places. It is the driest location on the planet (outside of the poles) where in some places there hasn’t been a single drop of rain since records began. This combined with the high altitude results in an unparalleled solar resource that often exceeds 2800 kWh/m2 (Below are two maps comparing South America to the UK, and one can see that even the places of highest solar insolation in the UK wouldn’t even appear on the scale for South America!)

3 – Two maps comparing the solar resource of Latin America to the UK. If you think about the number of solar parks in the UK that exist, and are profitable, just imagine the potential in Latin America!

The majority of the Atacama lies within Chile’s northern regions, and because of this there has been a huge rush over the past 3 years to install utility-scale Solar PV projects there. Additionally, Chile has seen an unprecedented period of economic growth and political stability since the 1990’s, in part due to the very same Atacama regions which are mineral-rich. The mines used to extract this wealth are energy-hungry, and as Chile has a lack of natural fossil fuel resources, making use of the plentiful solar resource beating down on the desert planes surrounding these remote sites made perfect economic sense. This is added to the need for energy in the rapidly-growing cities further south, in particular the capital Santiago, where almost a third of the Chilean population live. From 2010 to 2015, the total installed capacity of PV worldwide went from 40GW to 227GW, a rapid increase largely due to decreasing PV module manufacture costs. As the cost of installation dropped, investors began to search for locations with the greatest resources, and so Chile became a natural place to invest for energy developers.

However, as large scale projects began generating power, new challenges began to emerge. New plants were underperforming and thus not taking full advantage of the powerful solar resource. This underperformance could be down to a whole range of factors; faulty installation, PV panels experiencing a drop in performance due to the extremely high UV radiation (known as degradation). But the main culprits are likely to be two factors; curtailment and soiling.

Firstly, curtailment. Chile is a deceptively large country, which from top to bottom is more than 4000km long (roughly the distance from London to Baghdad). Because of this, instead on having one large national grid, it is split into four smaller ones. The central grid (in blue, which is connected to the power-hungry capital of Santiago) offered a better price of energy than the northern grid (in green) supplying the more sparsely populated Atacama regions. This lead to a large number of plants being installed as far into the Atacama desert as possible, and therefore as far north as possible, whilst still being connected to the more profitable central grid.

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– A map of the central (blue) and northern (green) grids in Northern Chile.
Major PV plants are shown with red dots

This lead to a situation where the low number of cables and connections that existed connecting these areas with the cities further south suddenly became overloaded with huge quantities of power. When these cables reach capacity, the grid operators (CDEC-SIC – http://www.cdecsic.cl/), with no-where to store this energy, simply have no other option but to limit (or curtail) the clean, emission-free energy coming out of these PV plants. This is bad news for the plant operators as it limits their income, and bad news for the environment as fossil fuels still need to be burned further south to make up for the energy lost.

The solution to this is to simply build more cables, a task easier said than done in a country of this size and in an area so hostile. This takes a long time, and so until the start of 2018 when a new connection between the northern and central grids will be made, operators have little choice but to busy themselves by improving plant performance as much as possible in preparation for a time when generation is once again unlimited.

This leads me onto soiling. Soiling is a phenomenon that occurs when wind kicks up sand and dust from the surrounding environment and this lands on the PV panels. This may seem relatively harmless but in Saudi Arabia is has been found to be responsible for as much as a 30% loss in plant performance. Chile, however, is still a very new market and so the effects of soiling here are not as well understood. What we do know for sure is that it affects some sites much more than others – the image below being taken by the 350renewables team at an existing Chilean site.

5 – The extent of soiling in the Atacama. One can appreaciate the need for an occasional clean!

These panels can be cleaned, but this becomes somewhat more complicated when you consider that some of these plants have more than 200,000 panels on one site. Cleaning then becomes a balance between the cost of cleaning, the means of cleaning (water being a scarce commodity in the desert) and the added energy that will be gained by removing the effects of soiling.

This is what the research project that I am taking part in hopes to establish. Sponsored by CORFO, a government corporation that promotes economic growth in Chile, and working with the University of Santiago, 350renewables hopes to establish how soiling effects vary across the Atacama and which cleaning schedules are best suited to maximising generation. There are 10 utility scale projects currently taking part, providing generation data and cleaning schedules. My role within this project has thus far been to inspect, clean and process all the incoming data and transfer this to our in-house tools for analysis. In the future (as my spanish improves) this will move onto liaising with the individual maintenance teams at each site to ensure that cleaning schedules are adhered to.

My most notable challenge thus far was presenting some of our initial findings at the Solar Asset Management Latin America (SAM LATAM – http://www.samlatam.com/#solar-asset-management-latam) conference in September. Considering I had only been in the country for just over a month, it was a lot to learn in not very much time! My presentation discussed the underperformance of Chilean PV plants and the potential causes for this, examining some of the publicly available generation data over the past few years. It was certainly terrifying, but getting the opportunity to share a stage with a plethora of CEOs, managers and directors from the Chilean solar energy industry was a fantastic opportunity.

6 – I felt like an impostor amongst all the Directors and Managers

A few weeks prior to this we had also gone to the Intersolar South America conference (https://www.intersolar.net.br/en/home.html) in São Paulo, Brasil, where Patricia was speaking. This was another fantastic opportunity to meet other people from the industry (although somewhat limited by my non-existent Portuguese abilities) and I was lucky enough to have some time to explore the city for a few days thereafter.

7 – São Paulo, Brazil

In addition to São Paulo, I have been able to find the time to travel elsewhere in Chile during my time here, including down to Puerto Varas in the south with its peaceful lakes nestled at the feet of imposing active volcanoes (including the Calbuco volcano, which erupted in spectacular fashion in early 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faacTZ5zeP0). Being further south the countryside is much more green, and with a significant German influence from several waves of immigration in the 1800s.

8 – Me in front of the incredible Osorno Volcano near Puerto Varas

9 – Puerto Varas

By far my favourite though was the astounding Atacama desert. As beautiful as it is vast. The high altitude making for astounding blue skies contrast against the red rocks of the surrounding volcanic plains. It is also one of the best stargazing spots on the planet, and the location of the famous A.L.M.A. observatory, which hopes to provide insight on star birth during the early universe and detailed images of local star and planet formations (http://www.almaobservatory.org/).

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– Me in the Atacama. The second photo being what can only be described as a
dust tornado. To call the Atacama inhospitable would be taking it lightly

11 -Valle de la luna, an incredible formation of jagged peaks jutting out of the desert plains. Certainly a highlight.

In the new year the soiling project really gets underway, and by the end of 2017 we hope to have some findings that will provide some insights into the phenomenon that is soiling. Personally, it has been a great adventure so far, the language skills I have developed and the experience of living in another culture, as opposed to merely passing through as a tourist, has been very rewarding. I still have a long way to go, and hope to post an update to this blog in the future, but for now a Happy New Year from Chile!