Solar street lights for villages in the offing: Goyal

In a bid to push clean energy, government is mulling providing solar street lights to every village and Andaman and Nicobar Islands will soon be converted into green islands for meeting energy needs.
"We try and work on a scheme by which we can take these solar street lights up to every village. A preliminary scheme has been prepared. We shall be brainstorming and discussing it and then present it to the Cabinet," Power Minister Piyush Goyal said while interacting with school children across the country through video link at the National Energy Conservation Day function.
He further said, "I do hope that very soon we would be able to come out with a programme under Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY) (under which) we can set up solar street lights at least in the main areas (crossings) of villages."

The minister noted that "The reality is that today we don't have street lights in rural India. Even though electricity is reached in these villages, the infrastructure is required to ensure lighting through the street lights in villages will take some time to build up."
While announcing that Andaman and Nicobar Islands will soon be converted into green islands, Goyal pointed out that there is lobby of people who sell diesel there and against it.
The Minister also proposed to create a mobile application for auditing energy efficiency and said that with the help of mobile app every student can become energy auditor (for his home as well as others).

The suggestion to this effect came from a student from Bal Shiksha Niketan School, Shimla, during the video conferencing.

The Minister accepted the feedback of a student from Thiruvananthapuram who suggested switching off the lights in the shopping malls at night for conserving power.
Goyal also directed the officials to take up with Municipal Corporations to devise the ways to stop unnecessary wastage of energy at the shopping malls which are located in urban areas.
Winding up the interactive video session with the students Goyal urged them to become torch bearers of government drive for Energy Conservation and Efficiency.
The Minister on this occasion also launched 'Star Rating' mobile app which provides the user a platform to compare personalised energy saving devices across the same class and get a real-time feedback from consumers and other stakeholders so they can make an informed purchase decision.

Apart from being a one-stop solution for customers, it's also a valuable tool for policymakers to access the accumulated data and analyse the feedback of the market at any given point in time.