We have purchased and decorated a brand new Sunlabob truck. A 6-wheel Isuzu Elf capable of carrying up to 5,000 kg of weight, this truck will enhance Sunlabob's abilities to reach even the remotest areas in the Lao PDR. Furthermore, the truck has steel panels with large water-resistant pictures displaying our products and activities, as well as stickers on every side presenting our name and contact info in both English and Lao. This will provide excellent advertising as the truck travels all over the country carrying our equipment and technicians.

The Sunlabob team is steadily growing and there are now 40 staff members working on our projects. Nevertheless, Sunlabob is still seeking to hire qualified professionals. Please check our job offers for current vacancies.

50 farmers from various locations around Laos attended a demonstration of solar-powered water pumps used with drip-pipe irrigation to create cash crops. The demonstration was co-hosted by Sunlabob’s partner, Xao Ban, who is providing the pipes and is using the system to grow passion fruit, mulberries, lettuce, basil, long beans, and other fruits and vegetables. The attendees visited Xao Ban’s farms in Ban Paksarb. There they learned how the system works and also received information on ideal agricultural usage. The demonstration was held by Sunlabob’s master trainer and Xao Ban’s agricultural trainer. This demonstration is part of the Private Public Partnership program with German DEG (Deutsche Entwicklungsgesellschaft).

On 05. September, Sunlabob signed a memorandum of understanding with Helvetas Laos, the Swiss Association for International Cooperation, and the provincial government of Xieng Khuang to provide access to electricity to develop small businesses in Phaxay district. Sunlabob will provide village electricity grids to five village districts, supplying 24 hour renewable energy to over 80 households per village. Project staff will advise local residents on how to use the new power supply to increase handicraft production for sale in local markets. The pilot phase will last for two years and the project is expected to be extended into further phases. The project will provide the villages with technical expertise, capacity building and financial assistance for building dams, channels, power grids and generator houses, as well as backing small business development and product marketing. The project will also be implemented in Huaphan province.
This pilot project is the newest innovative model of Private-Public Partnerships in rural electrification in off grid areas. With the success of this project Sunlabob would like to attract more public groups as well as private investors, as the only way to be successful is through mutual leverage of funding.

Sunlabob has been awarded the prestigious "Ashden Award for sustainable energy" sponsored by Climate Care. The Ashden Award is a UK-based foundation that awards outstanding solutions for sustainable energy. Sunlabob has been invited to London and has been personally congratulated by Al Gore and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.

Sunlabob had submitted the Solar Lamps with central charging station. Our test-runs and calculations show that the fees the households pay for recharging the exchangeable solar lamps are comparable or even cheaper than what they spend for kerosene in the lamps they presently use. We are very proud to be able to achieve this without any direct subsidies, and we are proud that this solution has been developed in the field in Laos and is now internationally recognized as a breakthrough for photovoltaics in remote rural areas anywhere on the planet.
We will use the prize money to purchase further charging stations and solar lamps for villages in Laos. The demand is very high for them.
See the prospectus for the solar lamps solution.

After more than a year of planning, testing and installations, we could launch the first village hybrid grid to be operated in Asia.
The system combines a hydro-turbine, solar panels and a diesel generator to feed a village grid with 24/7-hour AC power. Operationally this is also innovative in that international private investors provide the funding for the movable assets of the scheme (ie. the generating equipment), whereas development agencies provide for the fixed assets that become property of the village (ie. the grid, civil works etc.).
This allows to mutually leverage public and private funding.

The opening ceremony showed the strong interest of various agencies to upscale this pilot effort, with representatives of local government, international banks, development agencies and private operators all sharing in this success of electrification in a remote village, launching a system that can be sustained on a commercial basis.
We hope with this breakthrough to be able to contribute to the efforts of the government to achieve electrification throughout the country by the year 2020.

Demand for our rental services has always been very high in the villages but we lacked the funds to make the required investments. But now with new investments reaching Sunlabob we are in a position to meet this demand. We therefore are preparing ourselves to grow our operations. One of the first steps is to train the franchisees required for more extensive operations throughout the country. A training for Franchisees took place. They are the people based in rural areas who are capable of installing and servicing our equipment.

Triodos and FMO will invest in the operations of Sunlabob over the next 3-4 years. This will allow us to install and rent out several thousand Solar Home Systems and invest in up to 15 hybrid village grids. The approval by the Bank of Laos has just reached us. We are delighted by this recognition of our work by a major international foreign investor who understands the potential of Sunlabob for rural electrification off the grid on a sustainable commercial basis.

In January Sunlabob Rural Energy Systems became the first Lao company to provide development assistance overseas.
The four man team from Sunlabob traveled to Nias Island in Indonesia to provide solar energy to 250 new houses built by UID (United In Diversity) to house victims displaced by the Tsunami of 2004 and the earthquake of 2005. During their two week stay the team successfully trained four local technicians and a village committee to run the project in the future. In addition, the team found time to install the first 50 systems in the houses of those people in most pressing need as well as a community centre. The remaining systems are expected to have been installed by the newly trained local Sunlabob technicians by the end of this month.
The whole report can be downloaded here (pdf).

A delegation of the Ministry of energy and mineral Development of Uganda visited Sunlabob to learn from our experience in the rural electrification with renewable energies. The delegation expressed their wish to remain in contact and explore these issues further. We are of course available to coach similar efforts in other countries.

Sunlabob has participated in the LIRE workshop in November 2006 on building a Jatropha program for Laos. This has been a major effort pulling together experts from various fields to get an overview of all the aspects of the complex challenge. Various Research & Development projects have been defined and drafted. Sunlabob has decided to participate in the R&D projects for propagation, village level decentralized production, decentralized (mobile?) processing of the oil, and use of oil for fuel in rural areas (tractors, trucks, pumps, generators). We have committed ourselves to provide logistics to these efforts of LIRE and to help in finding the funding for these projects.
Download the Jatropha program from the LIRE website.

The Belgium Technical Cooperation (BTC) and Save the Children Australia have become the first customers to sign over their carbon emission reduction points, earned by their purchase of solar equipment from Sunlabob.
Most solar systems sold by Sunlabob are too small to justify the verification of their carbon emission reduction and the creation of the necessary certificates to be able to produce carbon credits. Carbon credits are measured in units of emission reductions, each unit being equivalent to the reduction of 1 ton of carbon dioxide.
For this reason, Sunlabob customers are asked to assign all of the emission reduction rights for their purchased solar systems to Sunlabob. Sunlabob will buy these emission reduction rights in order to register the collective reduction as carbon credits. The collective carbon credits will be sold and the proceeds will be reinvested in Sunlabob's award-wining solar system.

This technology is a solar powered water purifying system that will yield drinking water from open sources of water. The systems are tested in really rough field conditions for a period of 4-5 months. This is a joint undertaking in partnership with the Solarfabrik Freiburg in cooperation with Fraunhofer ISE Institut Freiburg. The work in Laos is a project in close cooperation with the Lao Institute for Renewable Energy, LIRE. We will monitor and evaluate many different parameters in the next few months. If successful, Sunlabob intends to use these units as another possibility to launch sustainable small enterprises in villages that can sell large bottles of drinking water on dispenser stands, very similar to those presently available in the cities.