THE PROJECT: In the huts of Shaping, a village in the Chinese province of Yunnan, it never really gets light even during the day. So far there were only weak oil lamps for lighting. The villages are small, only a few huts, the nearest town is often 50 kilometers away: a one-day trip because there are no paved roads on which you could drive a car. Fast contact to the outside world, for example when a medical doctor was needed, has so far been hardly possible. Admittedly, there are functioning mobile radio networks but people had no power to recharge their mobile phone batteries, to operate their radios or their TV sets. No power for refrigerators with which to keep their food or their medical supplies cool. Now some 29,000 people in a total of 142 villages in the thinly populated Chinese provinces of Xinjiang, Qinghai and Yunnan have access to electricity for the first time. SOLARWORLD has equipped the villages with solar power plants producing a total output of 1.2 Megawatt of electricity for about 7,300 households. Off-grid, i.e. independently of the national power grid, these plants now bring people a certain measure of independence.