Solar LED’s Light Up Rural India
January 5, 2006 by admin
Filed under Green Living
An estimated 100,000 villages throughout rural India do not yet have electricity. Most in these villages use kerosene lamps as their lighting source, despite how dangerous and dirty it is.
Grameen Surya Bijli Foundation (GSBF), a Bombay-based NGO, is one of a number of groups working to change this by installing solar-powered LED lighting systems in these communities. By utilizing LED technology, they can light an entire village with less energy than that used by a one single conventional 100 watt light bulb.
A humbling fact is that this represents just a drop in the bucket. As many as 1.5 billion people worldwide – only 80 million of whom are in India – still rely on fuels like kerosene for their lighting. I love how organizations like GSBF and the Canadian-based Light Up The World Foundation can take modern yet inexpensive technologies like this to allow third world communities to leapfrog into the future.
A more thorough look at what GSBF is up to can be found in this Christian Science Monitor article.
[via Treehugger]
