FortLewis.edu-FLC News — Durango Herald — The Colorado Sun
FLC College Solar Initiative faculty, students, and alumni are bringing off-grid, hands-on solar installations to rural Diné households. backed by AES and Marathon Petroleum investments
...Students, alumni, faculty [and volunteers] – under the leadership of Professor Laurie Williams and first-generation FLC graduate and Diné engineer Camille Keith – have completed 15 solar installations across Navajo Nation land since 2023…
...According to Williams, almost a third of the homes on the Navajo Nation – nearly 11,000 – don’t have access to electricity. [For those families], power in the home is a luxury – not a given….
For these households, their lighting, heating, and food supply all involve frequent hauling fuel, water and groceries long distances over poor road conditions, at tremendous costs of time, effort, gasoline and automotive maintenance, then storing food in coolers for lack of refrigeration, and cooking on stoves heated by wood, coal, propane, or even kerosene, with only kerosene or daytime sunshine for indoor light.
h/t Marie Fitzgerald, DK staff
FLC’s Village Aid Project Solar Initiative is changing that, with a component-based process for installing off-grid residential photovoltaic solar systems one home at a time.
FLC students and volunteers create in-house designs on campus, including fabricating components, then take those parts to the rural areas being served, where the systems are assembled, and homeowners are educated on how to self-service the new systems.
Williams called the installations “life-changing” for Navajo Nation community members who previously did not have power in their homes.
“There are elders out there that have medical needs, where they may have medicines that need to be refrigerated. Or they’re on oxygen, but because they don’t have electricity, they’re not able to [live] at home,” Williams said ....
For those who’ve been forced to reside instead in or near towns with the medical and power capabilities they’ve needed simply to survive, the costs increase depth of impoverished conditions. And separation from their homes, communities and environments add psychological and physical burdens of the stress of unaccustomed urban impacts, and the losses that personal and cultural isolation create.
h/t Marie Fitzgerald, DK staff
About 14,000 of 55,000 Navajo homes were without electricity in 2010, according to the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority. About 18,000 homes were without water service. Connecting these houses to infrastructure can be a challenge. They are located all around the 27,400-square-mile reservation, which is nearly the size of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont combined….
More at the links.
