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KOLKATA, India (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Since he was a child, Santipada Gon Chaudhuri had sought ways to help India’s rural poor, so when the electrical engineer was invited to visit a co-worker’s home in the Himalayan village of Herma in the early 1980s, he saw his chance.
“I was appalled to see how local communities were living in darkness after sunset,” remembered Chaudhuri, 71, who then worked for the government in the northeastern state of Tripura.
“Some used kerosene lamps, but even kerosene was not always easy to get. Since I had both the skill and position to try and provide power to them, it made me act,” he said.
Published April 16, 2021 Permission granted by First Solar
The following is a contributed article by Nina Robertson and Katherine Ramsey, clean energy attorneys at Earthjustice and the Sierra Club, and Shana Lazerow, legal director at Communities for a Better Environment (representing the California Environmental Justice Alliance).
The past eight months have given us some of the most extreme weather we’ve seen yet in the United States, sending us soaring heat in California and arctic ice storms in Texas. This weather whiplash is yet another sign of a climate changing in frightening ways. Here in California, rolling blackouts left millions without power last summer, prompting some soul-searching in the state about our energy future as the lights went out.
CHINA / DIPLOMACY
By GT staff reporters Published: Apr 16, 2021 08:28 PM
A worker installs a solar power unit at the construction site of a 300-MW photovoltaic electricity project of the China Datang Corporation Ltd. (Xinhua/Zhang Hongxiang)
First it was cotton; now it s Xinjiang s solar panels that are being targeted. Both are pillar industries of Xinjiang in Northwest China, and they have become the target of what appears to be a malicious campaign launched by Western anti-China forces to destroy Xinjiang s rapidly ascending economy and ultimately obstruct the development of China.
These forces behind the campaign position themselves as saviors and claim to counter a genocide in Xinjiang, but what they are doing is essentially attempting to wipe out the industries and the bread and butter of over 25 million people in Xinjiang, locals, businesses and experts said.
Solar power and sheep, rather than soldiers
BayWa r.e. recently installed a 30 MW solar array on a former military base in France. The project is designed so that farmers can also use the land to breed sheep.Project planners are always looking for suitable locations on which to build solar projects, but Germany s BayWa r.e. has struck gold with two disused military sites in France. The Munich-based company began decontaminating and converting the Fontenet military site in southwestern France about a decade ago. In the meantime, it has used around half of the former military base to generate renewable electricity. The first 12 MW solar .