5 Surprising Health Benefits of Solar-Powered Chinese Villages

As much as we appreciate modern conveniences, it’s easy to forget that not everyone enjoys them. Even something as simple as an energy-efficient smart or manual thermostat may not be available everywhere due to lack of infrastructure. For example, in some rural and remote villages in China, there is a distinct lack of temperature control infrastructure that we take for granted, meaning residents have to manually maintain stoves to maintain heat during the cold season. It is in these underdeveloped villages that solar power has proven to be an unexpected boon, providing residents with heat and electricity with a fraction of the labor required, leading to all sorts of positive ripple effects.

Since 2019, State Grid Linxi County Power Supply Company has been running a solar initiative in Fukang New Village, a small rural village of just over 200 residents, the majority of whom are aged 60 or older. With the company’s help, all of the village’s roofs were covered with solar panels, along with additional panels outside and a photovoltaic system to store and recirculate energy throughout the neighborhood. With the constant electricity provided by all of these panels, along with new indoor temperature control systems, residents no longer need to maintain a fire all night to survive the winter, leading to many improvements in their physical and mental health.

During the cold season, residents of the new village of Fukang had to manually stoke and stoke the fire in their stoves all night. Naturally, spending an entire night with your face in front of a smoky stove is bad for the lungs, which is why residents regularly experienced respiratory problems and respiratory conditions like asthma. With the adoption of improved solar infrastructure, the occurrence of respiratory problems began to steadily decline.

Rather than spending hours in front of a stove, sacrificing sleep, villagers can heat their homes by simply pressing a few buttons on the thermostat. Aside from the issue of directly maintaining a stove overnight, removing the need to run the stove all the time, spewing smoke and soot throughout the house, means that the general air quality in and around houses in the village has improved. Even here in the United States, nearly half of Americans breathe unclean air. The benefits of this particular change should therefore be obvious.

Reducing the need to run the stove all day and night is not only good for villagers’ breathing; it also means they don’t have smoke, soot, and ash constantly flying everywhere inside their homes. Having so much soot covering floors and surfaces is a major problem when it comes to cleanliness, with unsanitary living environments encouraging the growth of disease-causing microbes, not to mention the transmission of potentially dangerous pathogens between residents.

Eliminating soot stoves in solar-powered homes means that once villagers clean their homes, they stay clean. More surfaces are safe to touch, sit on and sleep on, not to mention eat on and near. Plus, without the stove dirtying everything nearby, residents don’t have to worry as much about cluttering their belongings in corners of a room away from it, meaning reduced potential tripping hazards and fewer cramped spaces collecting irritating dust.

As is so often the case in life, when you don’t need to spend all your time worrying about your safety and your life, your life suddenly becomes much more enjoyable and relaxing. Before residents of the new Fukang village upgraded their solar infrastructure, they had to spend much of their time tending the fire just to stay warm, which also encroached on their sleep time, leaving them exhausted in the morning. A constant state of physical exhaustion is terrible for your health, especially as you age.

With the help of air conditioning systems powered by the village’s solar panels, villagers can set their home’s thermostats to a comfortable and safe temperature at night, then safely go to sleep with the assumption that it will stay warm until morning and into the next day. Improved electricity infrastructure has allowed villagers to have full days, providing them with ample time not only for a good night’s sleep, but also for leisure activities and other forms of recovery during the day.

All the improvements made to the villagers’ overall health and environment through their solar panels and associated infrastructure have also led to a marked improvement in their overall state of mind. Villagers no longer have to worry about getting sick from the smoke constantly thrown into their faces, losing sleep due to fire or living in a dirty environment, and as a result, a sense of comfort and an overall improvement in morale have been seen among them.

Of course, all this comfort is based on the assumption that the systems continue to function, but a major contributing factor to the improved comfort and mental well-being of the villagers has been the reliability of the system and its offerings. Even after the State Grid Linxi County Power Supply Company installs the system, its employees regularly visit the village to maintain and improve it over time, always ensuring that it is in good working order, especially during the cold season. Villagers no longer have to worry about power cuts or sudden heating cuts; they can safely go about their business without fear of suddenly being pushed back into their former suboptimal conditions.

Living in a remote rural village can be surprisingly expensive and potentially dangerous. Low-income, low-infrastructure areas like Fukang New Village have limited access to vital resources like food and medical care, and whatever they do have access to is therefore scarce and expensive. Additionally, when villagers relied solely on their stoves for heat, they had to spend most of their money on fuel, further eating into funds for food and medicine.

The introduction of the solar energy system in the village has helped break this dangerous cycle in several ways. With extra electricity and reliable heating, villagers save a lot of money on fuel costs, and the improved condition of their surroundings means regular medical costs are less of a concern. This means villagers have more money to spend on food and necessary medical expenses. Additionally, the energy produced and stored by the solar system continues to save the village money year after year, meaning the village can afford more infrastructure improvements. With new battery innovations constantly emerging, the village may be able to store and use even more energy over time.