One night in 2022, a power outage plunged a residential neighborhood in Shanghai into darkness. For 12 hours, as repair crews worked tirelessly to restore electricity, all the homes were pitch black — except for that of the Zhao family.

In 2006, Zhao Chunjiang installed his first rooftop solar panels, making him China’s earliest adopter of what has now become a common sight around the globe. He continued to tinker. Today, nearly two decades later, his house has enough solar panels, batteries, and other equipment to operate entirely off the grid.

Such so-called distributed energy resources (DER) were once a faraway vision. But advances in green technology have made them possible today. These include mini-grids — setups like Zhao’s but on the scale of a village rather than a single home — now being deployed across regions around the world where hundreds of millions of people remain off the power grid.

Such systems have more benefits than just providing power. They are greener than power grids connected to fossil fuel power plants, they can provide electricity that is cheaper than grid power, and — as with the Zhao family — they improve energy security.

Given that climate change is making extreme weather more common globally, the energy security that DERs provide is becoming essential. When Typhoon Yagi knocked out the power grid across southern China’s island province of Hainan in 2024, people with electric cars could use them as giant power banks — a similar kind of backup solution.

Many countries and regions promote the use of DERs. In Tokyo, new regulations that took effect in April require all newly constructed homes to install solar panels. There are also subsidies to add home batteries, allowing solar power to be stored and used after the sun goes down.

In China, solar panels have become increasingly common atop rural homes. In the country’s far more power-hungry cities, however, they are still rare.

Since rural areas consist of single-family units, the installation of solar panels is relatively straightforward. Once installed, they either provide a household with free power, or, if the family has chosen to lease out their roof to a green energy company, rental income.

However, Chinese cities predominantly consist of apartment buildings, posing challenges to the installation process. Zhao faced pushback from his neighbors over his use of communal rooftop space, eventually leading him to move to a single-family house on the outskirts of Shanghai to continue his work.

Moreover, there is little financial incentive, as residential grid power customers enjoy subsidized low rates. Companies pay higher prices, and as such can cut their costs considerably when switching to solar. In an earlier short documentary my team and I produced, “The Cost of a Glass of Lager,” a brewery paid 1.2 yuan ($0.16) per kilowatt-hour for grid electricity, while solar energy cost them only 0.3 yuan, offering a significant incentive.

Nonetheless, groups continue to promote DERs in urban China’s residential communities, believing their climate and energy security benefits still make them a wise investment. In our new short documentary, “When Solar Lights upon the Community,” our camera followed Shanghai residents experimenting with solar energy, with Zhao Chunjiang serving as their technical advisor.

Residential community groups trying to organize solar power projects often fail at the starting line, giving up in the face of high costs, neighborhood disagreements, and a lack of supportive policies.

But a group calling itself the Green Housewives offers a hopeful example. Founded in 2012, the group has taken an active role in local sustainability initiatives since its inception. Through waste sorting, reuse, and other projects, they helped several residential areas become the first to be given Shanghai’s “low-carbon community” classification.

With funding from government agencies and foundations, and relying on years of community engagement and accumulated trust, they implemented several DERs in their own residential community. We filmed them as they managed to install a 20-kilowatt parking lot solar canopy, an electric vehicle charging station, solar-powered streetlamps, wind turbines, and an energy storage and distribution system.

Even so, their journey was a bumpy one. A recurring concern regarding their project was that of fair distribution. In the project’s early stages, they elected to direct the electricity to the nearest apartment building to light its common corridors. However, this decision elicited complaints from other residents, pushing the organization to direct the electricity to illuminate the neighborhood committee office instead — a more equitable solution.

When the project first began, the majority of residents had almost no understanding of distributed energy. As project leader Li Lan recalled, questions and fears abounded: “What does any of this have to do with me? Will the project’s electricity earn money, and who will get that money? Will it explode?” Shortly after installation, many residents even raised concerns about solar panels emitting harmful radiation, which they had read about from questionable online sources.

However, for Li, these misconceptions created opportunities for public education: “Our work must begin and end with the residents’ needs. We must use our knowledge to meet those needs.”

Looking ahead, the journey to expanding DERs in Chinese urban communities continues to face technical and financial challenges. DER technology requires complex installation and integration methods that are tailored to the needs of each residential neighborhood and have to take affordability into account. Beyond technology, questions of how to coordinate with different stakeholders and residents — even achieving a shared understanding of what distributed energy is — may pose the greatest challenge.

Still, our documentary brought to light inspiring signs of progress. Building on the work of the Green Housewives, an artist led local children to transform discarded materials into creative art installations illuminated by solar-powered lights. The project provided an important creative and emotional outlet for children amid heavy academic pressures.

In another corner of the neighborhood, a high school student designed a solar-powered automatic irrigation system to water a once-abandoned lot that had been turned into a community garden.

These acts of creativity breathe new life into the promise of distributed energy. In urban settings, the challenge lies not with technical issues but with community governance. Installed at the top of high-rise buildings, rooftop solar panels are seldom visible to residents, but curbside art installations and the community gardens’ solar-powered watering system are daily reminders that distributed energy resources are close at hand — quietly making urban life more comfortable, more secure, and more sustainable.

Translator: Cynthia Lin.

(Header image: Solar panels on the roof of a residential building in Zhengzhou, Henan province, Oct. 10, 2023. VCG)