Perhaps because of this political alliance, the community never regained the electrical supply it lost in 1981. The rich set up rooftop solar panels that supplied a single light bulb or ceiling fan. In 2010, the villagers pooled 45,000 rupees ($680) and asked the local electricity board for a connection, but they never got it.Ī chance encounter last year between the village chief and a Greenpeace activist on a train brought the group to Dharnai. Greenpeace wanted to set up a solar village to show the government that it is possible to power rural communities with renewable energy.
The project was important to Greenpeace’s ambition. The group wants India to stop all new coal mining and coal-fired power plants because the resulting carbon emissions would contribute to climate change. The hitch is that about 400 million Indians, mostly in rural Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, remain without power. This is mainly because power lines have not reached every village and home. Greenpeace, like many environmental groups, argues that these people could be supplied through decentralized solar and other renewable energies. They envision a future where 1.3 billion people globally could skip fossil-fuel-fired power plants and enter a prosperous, low-emissions world. The fallacy in this position, others argue, is that solar microgrids do not address climate change. The microgrids do not displace coal use because the target villages were never hooked to the central grid in the first place. In fact, in parts of India, microgrids have become a stopgap solution for the energy-poor while they wait for the central grid.
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