Via NK News, a report that North Korea wants to remove household solar panels and build community energy farms instead:

North Korean authorities want to remove solar panels from individual homes in favor of building community solar farms, according to state media, calling the proposed system “more efficient” and “better-looking” as the country deals with chronic energy shortages.

But one expert expressed concern that North Koreans who increasingly rely on such solar panels could lose their access to electricity if authorities push through the new scheme.

Korean Central Television (KCTV) on Monday presented personal solar panels as problematic and inefficient, and suggested “signing up” for access to local solar farms is a patriotic act that can “contribute” to national energy production.

A Pyongyang citizen named Ri Hye Song said in the segment that she signed up to get energy from a new solar farm and that people can “use as much energy as [they] want through the national power system connected to the farm, even without solar panels installed at home.”

Workers from Kim Il Sung University Solar Battery Manufactory install a new solar farm | Image: KCTV (June 8, 2023)
She said she previously “installed a solar panel at my home, but because it was in a shady spot it didn’t produce much energy.”

KCTV played an animation over her interview showing solar panels being removed from apartment windows and the construction of a solar farm connected to the national power grid.

“If many households participate in the energy production of solar farms, this contributes to the national energy production and I think this is a great system,” she added.

Jon Kyong Il, head of the Kim Il Sung University Solar Battery Manufactory, told KCTV that “distributed solar energy farms” such as the one at the Mangyongdae Funfair are a “more efficient and scientific” alternative.

“People who participate in this system can become producers instead of consumers like in the past, making them more invested in this kind of power station and thus more careful about energy savings and helping the country in the process,” Jon said in a separate KCTV program on saving energy that first aired on May 10.

That program also played an animation depicting flowers replacing solar panels on apartment balconies, saying this will help “establish a better-looking city.”

The claims highlighted in both KCTV segments suggest that those “signing up” for community farms are expected to invest in their construction or possibly donate their own panels for use in new projects.

Martyn Williams, a fellow with the Stimson Center, told NK News he is “suspicious” of the state’s motives in promoting community solar projects and questioned whether participants will “get access or will the state siphon some away and ration it to households.”

Williams and his colleagues at 38 North have explored North Korea’s solar energy system in a recent series, finding an increase in the number of makeshift arrays on the sides and facades of apartment buildings, as well as professionally installed arrays on the rooftops of office buildings.

Defectors told 38 North that energy supplies still remained limited to only a few hours per year in a rural village in 2019 and a few hours per day in a northern city the previous year.

“Individual households set these up because the state cannot provide them with enough or any power. While in theory connecting them all together helps ensure no energy is wasted, it only benefits the households if they get guaranteed access to the power,” Williams said.

He added that North Korea “has been pushing the idea of linking panel arrays on organizations and offices to the grid to feed unneeded power to others” for a number of years now, but that extending this initiative to civilian homes appears new.

It is unclear if the proposed system will remain optional, but the state’s history of exercising jurisdiction over building facades suggests authorities could institute actual policies on removing solar panels from apartments.

NK News previously reported on apparent state-led efforts in 2019 to get rid of Pyongyang’s iconic multicolor pastel look and repaint apartment towers across the city with more muted colors.

Authorities that same year also forcibly covered up windows and balconies of dozens of high-rise households across the city with line-of-sight views of leader Kim Jong Un’s central Pyongyang office building.