Off the (failing) grid in North Korea, where solar energy is a hot commodity
Panels can be seen on the balconies of nearly every apartment building in the capital, Pyongyang, and many streetlights are powered by the sun
Beset by crippling power shortages for decades, North Koreans are turning to solar power in a major way. With cheap panels readily available in neighbouring China, a grey market expanding in North Korea and a green-energy drive endorsed by supreme leader Kim Jong-un, there’s been a remarkable flowering of photovoltaic panels across the insular country.
Though North Korea has not published any figures, the panels can be seen on the balconies of nearly every apartment building in the capital, Pyongyang, and many streetlights are powered by the sun. Larger arrays, along with solar water heaters, have been affixed to industrial sites such as the Kim Jong Suk Pyongyang Silk Factory and the Jangchon collective farm on the southeastern outskirts of the capital. A large solar field was installed last fall on Pyongyang’s Ssuk Island near a new showcase complex called the Sci-Tech Centre, a sort of exploratorium-library-research hub, which also boasts of having geothermal technology.
To be sure, solar power is nowhere near being a cure-all for North Korea’s overall energy needs; hydropower and coal-fired plants are the overtaxed workhorses of the socialist state’s crumbling grid. David Von Hippel, a researcher with the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, California, who has been studying the country’s power infrastructure since the 1990s, estimates solar accounted for just 0.1 per cent of all electricity generated in the country in 2015.
Nevertheless, solar is having an outsize effect on ordinary people’s lives. “It may be a small amount of electricity, but it’s used for things that really matter a lot,” he says. “You can’t use it very well to run a factory or light a whole office building, at least with the number and size of solar panels they’re using. But if it gives you access to charging your phone or using your computer or DVD player or having some lights at night, it’s a great thing.”
Probably more North Koreans have electricity now than they have since the 1990s, because of solar panels
An analysis based on Chinese customs data and other information by Von Hippel and another researcher, Peter Hayes, estimates that 100,000 or more North Korean households in the country of 24 million had acquired solar panels through the end of 2014. Von Hippel said the country has imported about 15 megawatts of photovoltaic systems through last year – a third of that in 2015 alone.