For as much as we enjoy modern conveniences, it’s easy to forget that not everyone gets to enjoy them. Even something as simple as an energy-efficient smart or manual thermostat may not be available everywhere due to a lack of infrastructure. For example, in certain remote, rural villages of China, there is a distinct lack of the kind of temperature-control infrastructure we take for granted, which means residents need to manually tend stoves to keep up the heat during the cold season. It is in these under-developed villages that solar power has proven to be an unexpected boon, providing residents with heat and power with a fraction of the required labor, leading to all kinds of positive knock-on effects.
Since 2019, the State Grid Linxi County Power Supply Company has been running a solar initiative in Fukang New Village, a tiny rural village with a little 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 in solar panels, alongside additional panels outside and a photovoltaic system for storing and recirculating energy around the neighborhood. With the steady electricity provided by all of these panels, as well as new indoor climate control systems, the residents no longer needed to keep a fire burning all night to survive the winter, which has led to a swath of improvements to both their physical and mental health.
During the cold season, the residents of Fukang New Village used to need to manually fuel and stoke a fire in their stoves all through the night. Naturally, spending an entire night with your face in front of a smoky stove is bad for your lungs, which was why the residents regularly exhibited breathing problems and respiratory conditions like asthma. With the adoption of improved solar infrastructure, the occurrence of respiratory issues began to steadily decrease.
Rather than keeping their faces in front of a stove for hours on end, sacrificing sleep in the process, the villagers can heat their homes as simply as tapping a few buttons on the thermostat. Putting aside the matter of directly tending a stove through the night, the removal of the need to have the stove running all the time, belching smoke and soot throughout the house, means that the general air quality in and around the village homes has improved. Even here in the United States, almost half of Americans breathe unclean air, so the benefits of this particular change should be self-evident.
Dialing back the need to keep the stove running all day and night isn’t just great for the villagers’ breathing; it also means that they don’t have smoke, soot, and ash constantly flying all over the place inside their homes. Having that much soot covering floors and surfaces is a major cleanliness concern, with unsanitary living environments fostering the growth of illness-inducing microbes, not to mention the transmission of potentially dangerous pathogens between residents.
No more soot-belching stoves in solar-powered homes means that after the villagers clean their homes, they stay clean. More surfaces are safe to touch, sit, and sleep on, not to mention eat on and near. Plus, without the stove making everything near it dirty, residents don’t need to worry as much about cluttering their possessions in the corners of a room away from it, which means a reduction in potential tripping hazards and fewer cramped spaces gathering irritating dust.
As is so often the case in life, when you don’t need to spend all your time worrying about just staying safe and alive, your life suddenly becomes a lot more pleasant and relaxing. Before the residents of Fukang New Village got their solar infrastructure upgrade, they needed to spend large swaths of their time tending to the fire just to stay warm, which would also eat into their sleep time, leaving them exhausted come morning. A constant state of physical exhaustion is terrible for your health, especially the older you get.
With the help of the climate control systems powered by the village’s solar panels, the villagers can set their home thermostats to a comfortable and safe temperature at night, then go to sleep secure in the assumption that it’ll stay nice and warm until morning, and well into the following day. The power infrastructure improvement has opened up the villagers’ entire days, providing ample time for not just a good night’s sleep, but leisure activities and other forms of recuperation during the day.
All of the improvements to the villagers’ overall health and environment brought about by their solar panels and related infrastructure have also brought about marked improvement in their overall state of mind. The villagers no longer have to worry about getting sick from getting smoke constantly funneled into their faces, losing sleep to tending the fire, or living in dirty environs, and as a result, a sense of comfort and overall improvement to morale have been seen among them.
Of course, all of this comfort is predicated on the assumption that the systems continue working, but a major contributing factor to the villagers’ improved comfort and mental wellness has been the reliability of the system and its tenders. Even after the State Grid Linxi County Power Supply Company installed the system, its employees have been visiting the village regularly to maintain and improve it over time, always ensuring it’s in working order, especially during the cold season. The villagers no longer need to worry about power shortages or sudden heating cuts; they can safely go about their lives without concern that they’ll suddenly be thrust back into their old sub-optimal conditions.
Living in a remote, rural village can be unexpectedly expensive, and in potentially dangerous ways. Low-income, low-infrastructure areas like Fukang New Village have limited access to vital resources like food and medical care, and whatever they can access is scarce and expensive as a result. Additionally, when the villagers relied solely on their stoves for warmth, they would need to spend most of their money on fuel, which ate further into food and medicine funds.
The introduction of the solar power system into the village has helped to break this dangerous cycle in multiple ways. Thanks to the extra power and reliable heating, the villagers save quite a bit of money on fuel costs, and the improved state of their environs mean that regular medical costs are less of a concern. This means that the villagers have more money to spend on food and necessary medical expenses. Plus, the power generated and stored by the solar system continues to save the village money year over year, which means the village can afford more infrastructure improvements. With new battery innovations emerging all the time, the village may be able to store and use even more power as time goes on.

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