Sustainability of PV water pumping programmes: 12-years of successful experience

This paper presents the key points to assure the sustainability of a PV water pumping program that has supplied 5 million m3 of water in the last 12 years to approximately 40 000 people. Key aspects for success have been the proper consideration of user's priorities, rigorous technical quality assurance, and maintenance structure set up. The present work mainly focuses on the maintenance structure aspects: some results to characterize the maintenance carried out, such as the mean time to failure parameter (MTTF) or the failure typology, are shown. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This paper presents the key points to assure the sustainability of a PV water pumping program that has supplied five million m3 of water in the last 12 years to approximately 40,000 people: proper consideration of user's priorities, rigorous technical quality assurance, and maintenance structure set up.