Walt Ratterman, in the Galapagos Islands

Walt Ratterman is program director for Green Empowerment, a nonprofit that promotes community-based renewable-energy projects internationally to generate social and environmental progress.

We arrived at the boat dock at 5:45 a.m. and boarded the boat for Santa Cruz. The weather was good, so we made good time, arriving in Santa Cruz at about 8:15.

With the whole day to spend catching up on email and tasks related to indigenous Amazonian villages of Naumpatkaim and Kunkup -- where we are planning community-based renewable-energy systems -- we lucked out and talked the hotel into letting us use their registration office. We had access to the Internet from the office, and some space to spread out. We also borrowed their white board and used it for much of our work later on in the room.

In the afternoon, we visited a high school in town with a solar-power installation that is not working properly. We spent some time with the people in the high school responsible for the system, to learn more about what the problems are. We found out that they have had a few people there to look at the system, who did not tell them anything about why it was not working properly. We checked the various voltages at the batteries and panels and other points in the system, and narrowed it down to an inoperative inverter. It is strange because the inverter works partially but not completely. They said they had experienced a short circuit in the system just before the problems started to occur. We explained that they needed to get the donor of the equipment to make arrangements for its repair. The installer of the equipment is a company called Drama, which is doing the $700,000 PV installation on an island with 80 inhabitants here in the Galapagos. We explained that people from Drama need to be the ones to make the repairs.

They said that they had called several times for this to happen, but with no response. We told them we would have someone try to make some contacts with the Drama people in Quito to make sure they understand that the system is no longer operative.