I have been in India and Bhutan for the last three weeks, trekking along the border between India and Nepal and, more recently, here in Bhutan. We have seen distributed solar in the most remote places imaginable. In villages two days' walk from any road, where everything has to be carried in by horseback or humanback, houses often have a solar panel, or sometimes two. Remote  yakherders' houses sometimes had PV panels.   We visited a primary school with six students, some of whom walk an hour a day each way to school, which had a 12-volt system powered by a single PV panel. I haven't seen a single incandescent bulb; CFLs are the rule. Those yakherders' panels probably make it possible for students to do their homework at night.

 

In my time as a Communications Intern at Solar Oregon, I was thrust into an environment that I now think of as a solar-powered pool -- ripe for cultivating new ideas, with the warmth for embracing tried and true skills.