RAICHUR – In the scorching heat that often surrounds Raichur, an ancient city in southern India, a ceiling fan that spins non-stop brings sweet relief to newborns and their mothers at the government maternity hospital.
However, such a recovery was not always guaranteed in a region prone to frequent power outages India’s congested power grid can take hours. It wasn’t until the hospital installed solar panels on the roof a year ago that it could rely on a constant power supply to keep lights on, patients and staff comfortable, and vaccines and medicines safely chilled.
Gone is the diesel generator that once served as a backup power source, belching out warming gases and noxious smoke within the reach of newborns each time it ran. So does the need to use flashlights during one of the hospital’s approximately 600 births a year, as staff sometimes had to do during a sudden power outage when the old generators weren’t working.
For Martha Jones, a senior nurse who has helped deliver countless babies, the reliability that solar power has brought was a revelation.
“We don’t even know when the power will go out or when it’ll be back,” Jones said.
In semi-urban and rural regions of India and other developing countries with unreliable power grids, distributed renewable energy – particularly solar power – is making the crucial difference in the delivery of modern healthcare. And it will become even more essential as heat and extreme weather increases due to climate change. In Raichur, for example, temperatures can soar to as high as 42 degrees Celsius (107 degrees Fahrenheit) during the warmest months.
The Government Maternity Hospital, a humble facility serving thousands who cannot afford private health care, is one of 251 medical facilities in Raichur District being operated under a solar rooftop program led by the Selco Foundation. The Bengaluru-based non-profit organization has been raising funds from Indian and international companies since 2017 and coordinating them with the local government.
A system at public health centers costs about $8,500 to install, including lead-acid batteries that store electricity for nighttime use. Smaller clinics cost about $2,000. The sites will remain connected to the electricity grid, but only as a substitute for solar energy.
Some Government Mother patients, like 25-year-old Sandhya Shivappa, said they knew little or nothing about the hospital’s use of solar energy and were simply grateful for the free services.
“We would pay 30,000 rupees ($367) if I wanted to give birth to my baby in a private hospital,” Sandhya Shivappa, a 25-year-old who had just given birth to a healthy baby girl, told a reporter visited.
According to a study by Health Care Without Harm, an international nonprofit working to reduce these emissions, switching hospitals and clinics to clean energy helps reduce emissions in a sector that accounts for about 4.4% of global CO2 emissions. And that aligns with broader targets in India, the world’s most populous country and third-largest emitter of gases that warm the planet.
While India currently relies on it heavily on coal for its electricity, The goal is to install 450 gigawatts of renewable energy, which should account for about half of its needs by the end of this decade. In order to achieve this goal, a rapid expansion of solar energy, especially the roof solar system, is required.
India currently has only about a quarter of the 40 gigawatts of rooftop solar power that policymakers had planned for last year. Supply chain issues and taxes on imported components – designed to protect domestic manufacturers – have contributed to the deficit. But India has also consistently emphasized the importance of Get money from developed countries and multilateral development banks to help achieve its climate goals.
In addition to the uninterruptible power supply, the solar system on the roof helps the medical facilities to reduce costs. In nearby Zaheerabad, a low-income neighborhood, Dr. Kavyashree Sugur says the public health center she oversees has paid at least 50% less for electricity in the two years since solar panels were installed.
That’s a huge advantage in a country that’s among the lowest in the world on health care spending – India spends just over 2% of its national budget on health care, compared to 18% in the United States – and has many hospitals and health clinics are short of cash.
Adding solar power to health centers in remote regions is particularly important for villagers who don’t have the time or money to go to hospitals in the city and who are likely to have simply skipped healthcare, said Hanumantappa Channadaser, Selco’s Raichur branch manager.
“Before solar power, people were afraid to go to these hospitals because of the lack of electricity and they didn’t have confidence in the treatment they could get,” Channadaser said.
Recently Selco, the Swedish furniture group Ikea and the Indian Ministry of Health announced that they want to supply 25,000 public health facilities in 12 Indian states with solar energy by 2026. Ikea has committed $48 million to the project. Selco is also working with the International Renewable Energy Agency and the World Health Organization in Africa to expand distributed solar power for healthcare facilities across the continent.
Shireen Fatima, who was four months pregnant and attended Zaheerabad Health Center for a check-up, said she appreciated that “blood tests, pills, everything is free here.” The hospital’s conversion to solar power is “definitely good,” she added.
“If the hospital saves costs, we benefit too,” she said.
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Follow Sibi Arasu on Twitter at @sibi123
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