More power

to the folk of Borabora

For the past year, the many tourists flocking to Borabora in the hope of finding a perfect South Sea paradise have been puzzled by a strange, humming sound which is in strong contrast to the melodious beating of the waves on the reef, and the soft rustling of the palm trees. This unexpected noise emanates from two big metal cylinders pointing to the sky like moon rockets ready for their momentous take-off. In the ensuing guessing game, no visitor ever comes up with the correct explanation, i.e., that the ‘rockets’ are actually the combustion chambers of a recently built, experimental model of an electric power plant, using coconut husks for fuel.

Of course, gas engines are nothing new. They were particularly common in Europe during World War II (even for use in motor cars) when petrol and coal were in short supply.

And already long before that more precisely between 1928 and 194$ the power plant that produced the modest amount of electricity needed to light the town of Papeete was run entirely on coconut husks. Maintenance was, however, always a problem, for the gas was full of tar which continually clogged up the machinery. For this reason, this easily available fuel was eventually abandoned in favour of imported oil of which there seemed to be, in the 1950 s and 19605, an endless supply at very reasonable cost.

When the Arabs began changing all that in 1974, the French Government claimed with some smugness that it had long since foreseen the oil crisis and therefore opted for nuclear energy as the only possible alternative. Many French ministers and other official spokesmen tried to make us believe that it was thanks to the bomb tests at Moruroa that France possessed such an advanced nuclear technology. It was therefore most appropri ate, it was said, to compensate the people of French Polynesia for past hardships by having installed on the most populous island, Tahiti, as a gift from the mother country, a nuclear power plant, using as its basic component a generator of the type especially designed for the French atomic submarines. This seemingly very generous offer was, however, angrily rejected by all local political and civic leaders when they learned that the plant they were offered was an experimental prototype of untested and unproven safety. In consequence, they told the eager donors to try out this strange nuclear contraption in their own backyard in France.

Instead, the local leaders began clamouring for other types of generators, using such natural energy sources as the sun, wind, rivers and ocean. The French response was rather lame: up to date only a handful of VAT technicians (the French counterpart to the American Peace Corps) have arrived and most of them spend their time pottering about with old-fashioned wind-mills.

Meanwhile being a private company, the Electricite de Tahiti (owned by the powerful Martin family, also in the profitable brewing business) could and did act in a much more efficient manner. At first glance the decision of the EDT board to build an experimental power plant in Borabora, fuelled with coconut husks in the same way as the old Papeete plant does not

make much sense. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals a difference of vital importance: the new Borabora plant is equipped with an additional small burner (running on diesel fuel) capable of destroying the obnoxious tar content of the gas produced. As the EDT manager tells the story, this burner was invented by a French engineer named Delacotte, who continued to work on gas engines all his life, in spite of the general indifference that existed up to the 1974 oil crisis! As a crowning triumph, he was brought to Borabora shortly before his death to help in setting up this pilot plant which will open up a new era in the field of economic power production all this according to the EDT manager The main reason why Borabora had been chosen was that its population, 2700, was of the right size for testing a 190 kW plant

of this type. The mayor, Toro Teriirere, had also, so to speak, seen the light, and warmly welcomed the experimenters.

Actually, the only thing wrong was the timing, for the plant had barely been completed early in 1978, when Borabora was hit by an unforeseen disaster of hurricane force, i.e., the sudden invasion by Italian film mogul Dino de Laurentiis’ motley crowd of 200 technicians and stuntmen, bent on transforming the whole island into a Hollywood location for the shooting of a super-colossal disaster movie, vaguely inspired by the fine novel The Hurricane by NordhofT and Hall. Consequently, for the next year all the Boraborans were happily reaping the benefits of this enormous windfall which did not leave them any time for such tedious tasks as cutting copra and gathering coconut husk. Then it took them, of course, a few more months to spend all the surplus money they had accumulated by playing ‘real natives’. But by March 1980 they had emptied their last liquor bottle and smashed their last motor vehicle and were thus, at long last, ready to spend their considerable energy in a more productive manner.

Today the generator has been operating for more than 1000 hours on husk (plus the small amount of diesel oil needed to burn the tar), and the smiling manager has just announced that all expectations have been fulfilled.

In the first place and this is the most important conclusion the tar is regularly and thoroughly eliminated by the additional Delacotte burner. The consumption of husk is 1.5 m 3. or 150 kg, per hour. This represents the husks from about 500 nuts. It is estimated that it takes 1.3 kg of husk and 50 grams (or 0.06 of a litre) of diesel oil to produce one kWh. This means that the average consumption of electricity for each household on Borabora can be paid for by collecting six husks, since the price is 20.75 francs per kWh. The only real inconvenience is that the furnace must be fed every hour with 1.5 m 3, or 150 kg of husk. If for some reason the supply of diesel oil dries up, the Delacotte burner can also be operated on coconut oil.

The Electricite de Tahiti confidently expects other Pacific countries to be interested in their research and experiments, and is ready to mass-produce the equipment. So far only the Cook Islands have dispatched an engineer to examine the plant. But perhaps in the near future Borabora will attract a steady stream of a new brand of tourists, more interested in what these technical discoveries can do for the future economic develop ment of the Pacific than in the natural beauty and legendary

past of the island.

Marie-Therese and Bengt Danielsson.