Black, shiny solar panels shine in competition with the sun’s rays. In the thousands, they decorate several of the roofs of schools located in remote areas of India’s northeastern West Bengal. Here, West Bengal’s Sunshine Schools project is in full swing. The plan is to equip 25,000 schools with solar panels and add a total of 250 megawatts of clean energy to the power grid by 2030. The project aims to install solar cells at 1,000 schools a year. Not only does it provide green electricity for many children, but the goal is also for each school’s CO2 emissions to be reduced by 10 tonnes a year. “One of our basic goals is to connect schools located in remote areas with powerful and easily accessible electricity, so that even children in rural areas can benefit from the latest educational facilities,” Ratan Mondal said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. He is a board member of the West Bengal Renewable Energy Development Agency that runs the project. Electricity provides the opportunity for better education The school in the remote town of Kakdwip is one of the 1800 schools in the West Bengal area which so far has had the shiny black panels on the roofs. Before, the school struggled with fluctuating and low power supply, but now there are no problems getting power to the computers or cooking in the school kitchens, thanks to the solar energy system that supplies the school with all the energy it needs. In fact, schools often have energy left over. The extra power from sunny days is sent into the national power grid. When the sun is not shining, schools can get power from the grid. This is something that has significantly reduced schools’ electricity bills. The school Bankisole Akshoy Kumar Institution has saved so much on the electricity bill in the last two years that they have been able to spend the money on planting trees, hiring more teachers and maintaining the school’s sanitary conditions. It is especially schools in the districts that get solar panels and new educational facilities. This is also where there is an extra need for them. Because there is a big difference in the level of education depending on whether you are from the country or a city in India. In 2018, 73.5 percent of people over the age of seven in rural areas could read, while the figure was almost 88 percent in urban areas.
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Full force on thousands of green solar schools in India
