KAKHIN BIMILE, Bangladesh — Kismat Ali is a 33-year-old mason living in Kakhin Bimile, a village a few hours drive from Dhaka, Bangladesh’s crowded capital. He lives in a large brick home on a dirt road with his wife, son, parents and five brothers. This semirural area is off the main electrical grid, so residents rely on kerosene lamps and electricity from wires strung across the village to a noisy privately owned diesel generator. It runs about five hours each night.
But Mr. Ali has a new source of electricity he can turn to: solar panels on his corrugated metal roof. In his home, he flicks a light switch and a bare bulb glows from the ceiling. Mr. Ali proudly switches on a fan that stirs the stultifying summer air. He says he wants to have a television one day, but is waiting for an LED TV that would consume less energy than models available now.
Solar energy is reliable, clean and cheaper in the long run than kerosene and the village’s generator. It costs about 3,000 taka ($38) a month for the diesel generator to light a three-room house. But for the solar equipment, Mr. Ali pays 1,355 taka ($17) in monthly installments after a down payment of 6,500 taka ($83) on a loan he expects to pay off within two years.
In rural Bangladesh, especially the coastal southwest, it is common to see tiny solar panels embedded even in humble thatch-roofed huts. This is mostly the work of Infrastructure Development Company Limited (Idcol), a government-backed Bangladeshi energy and infrastructure group that claims more than 90 percent of the country’s booming home solar market.
Since 2003, Idcol has installed solar panels in 3.95 million off-grid homes, reaching 18 million people. In terms of individual units served (rather than total wattage), Bangladesh has become one of the world’s largest markets for home solar systems.
By comparison, Selco, a leading solar company in neighboring India, has installed about 350,000 home systems since 1995 in a country of 1.2 billion people. In the United States, even after exponential growth in solar in recent years, there were just 784,000 home and business solar installations in 2015.
Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/opinion/in-rural-bangladesh-solar-power-dents-poverty.html?_r=0
Really good to see solar being a viable alternative in Bangladesh. The knock on effects are huge not just on the economy, but individual families on a micro level.
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