This week I spoke with an inspiring creative engineer working in the renewables space in Australia. He’s got an interesting side project that sounded incredible, working to save lives in rural Africa.

Andrew Dickson is a renewable energy project developer with 15 years of experience developing large scale wind and solar projects across Australia. He’s currently Project Manager for the Asian Renewable Energy Hub project, a very large scale wind and solar project in the Pilbara, Western Australia. The project is set to export energy to Indonesia and Singapore, to power mines and mineral processing in the Pilbara and to produce green hydrogen for local and export markets.

Outside of his day job however, Andrew has a ‘side project’ which has led him to be part of an initiative several years in the making. Hot on the heels of a successful global project called TeamTrev, a zero-emission race around the world in 2010/2011, Andrew formed a new team upon receiving a call for help from Zimbabwe. The challenge: Could they develop an electric vehicle to transport pregnant women from remote villages to hospitals in northern Zimbabwe, to help reduce maternal mortality? The team took it on. Called the African Solar Taxi, it has evolved into a low mass, rugged electric vehicle to help address transport poverty and maternal mortality in northern Zimbabwe.

When women choose to give birth in their villages, without proper medical care or sanitary hygienic conditions, medical complications during delivery can be disastrous. Many serious conditions can all result in the death of women or their babies. Just as importantly, unassisted births in villages are twice as likely to result in the transmission of HIV from an HIV-positive mother to her child. A key contributing factor to maternal mortality and morbidity in Zimbabwe is the lack of adequate, reliable and affordable transport services. So in comes the idea of the Solar Taxi.

The African Solar Project

“It really is developing a new form of transport that solves transport poverty that is not solved in other ways currently. “

Andrew and his team are in the process of finalising the prototype and the pilot to test the vehicle is on for early next year. Another brilliant start up collaboration one would hope will ultimately receive the required government and private backing it needs, seeing it addresses an urgent and real problem and will inevitably save lives.

African Solar Taxi prototype 2018 and at the rear the famous TeamTrev electric vehicle

The Asian Renewable Energy Hub (Pilbara) project

” It’s weaving the indigenous people much closer into the economic fabric of the Pilbara, which has been somewhat achieved with mining projects but there’s a really big difference with mining project and renewable energy projects. Simplistically renewable projects don’t take away the resource from the land, the resource is completely reversible at the end of the project, it doesn’t pollute. So it’s completely different. “

Both the Pilbara and African Solar projects blew me away in their own way. The positive impact the Pilbara project could have on the local indigenous community, for future job opportunities and also the export potential created is massive. It’s currently an 11,000 MW project, which would generate approximately 55 terra watt hours per year. Victoria alone consumes 40 terawatt hours of electricity per year, so it gives you an idea of the capacity of the project.

Andrew’s Solar Taxi story is so uplifting. Using technology and teams working together to save lives where its nee...