Our Vision
Access to reliable, clean electrical energy will become an everyday reality for most Church institutions in remote rural areas and their communities by 2030. This will improve the education and healthcare situation, open up new economic opportunities and change the daily life for people living in remote rural areas.
SolSol’s project owner, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea (ELCPNG) -on behalf of the government- operates approx 600 schools, some 20 adult training seminars, and more than 60 health centers and hospitals in remote rural areas of PNG. These institutions suffer greatly from the severe lack of reliable electrical power supply and struggle daily to fulfill their main objectives.
The SolSol project shall provide reliable, clean energy to 20+ institutions in remote rural areas to bring light and hope to these communities. To present, these communities have been left in the dark, relying on costly and unreliable energy sources. With SolSol, reliable access to electrical energy shall become an everyday reality for many Church institutions in remote rural areas.
Mission Statement
As a tropical country, PNG has abundant sunshine hours and therefore great potential to produce clean electrical power locally in the rural communities by using small self-contained solar power stations. This increases the resilience of remote communities and reduces the risk of power cuts and outages due to long transmission distances, weather effects and impacts of landslides and earthquakes.
The locally installed solar stations shall be equipped with sufficient battery storage capacity to ensure supply of energy for the community’s daytime and night-time usage. This allows the community members to establish and maintain a lifestyle of basic commodity by enabling use of electrical lighting, electrical household appliances, refrigerators and cooling systems to preserve fruits and food in healthy and edible conditions for extended periods of time. Reliable access to electrical energy provides increased levels of security for girls and women by operating night-lights in public spaces, enables students to do studies after sunset and allows community members to engage in new business activities involving electrical appliances.
The Concept
Young people in the communities – boys and girls equally – are trained to maintain and operate the installed solar power stations, securing the independent power supply to their communities. The solar power station provides elementary levels of comfort to the community, such as lighting for family houses and public spaces, energy for water pumps and security lights at night-time.
The Concept applied by the SolSol project has three main components:
- A technical component: the solar system
This includes the solar power-house with solar panels, inverters and battery storage systems. A distribution network carries the energy out towards the different sections of the campus. Power distribution boxes near the user’s houses include chipcard-operated prepaid energy meters for metering the used energy.
- A social component: the solar power station as a community asset
The community commits to treat the installed solar power station as a common asset for the entire community and to maintain it in good health conditions over its lifetime of estimated 15-20 years. The solar power station shall be operated, maintained and repaired by trained local staff provided by the community, supported remotely by a skilled and trained engineering team in ELCPNG’s headquarters, where needed.
- An educational component: Engineering School
Young women and men of the community equally will be trained on the essential skills of operating, maintaining and repairing the solar system to keep it in stable operational condition to provide expected levels of energy to the community. The training courses will include topics on installation and electrical cabling, maintenance and troubleshooting routines, quality checks and controls and a simple system of internal energy management, whereby the main objective is to quantify the usage and trends, allocate new energy quota for users and to appreciate the value of the consumed energy.