https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/world/middleeast/syria-solar-power-idlib.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage

HARANABUSH, Syria — When the Syrian government attacked their village, Radwan al-Shimali’s family hastily threw clothes, blankets and mattresses into their truck and sped off to begin new lives as refugees, leaving behind their house, farmland and television.

Among the belongings they kept was one prized technology: the solar panel now propped up on rock next to the tattered tent they call home in an olive grove near the village of Haranabush in northwestern Syria.

“It is important,” Mr. al-Shimali said of the 270-watt panel, his family’s sole source of electricity. “When there is sun during the day, we can have light at night.”

An unlikely solar revolution of sorts has taken off in an embattled, rebel-controlled pocket of northwestern Syria, where large numbers of people whose lives have been upended by the country’s 10-year-old civil war have embraced the sun’s energy simply because it is the cheapest source of electricity around.

Solar panels, big and small, old and new, are seemingly everywhere in Idlib Province along Syria’s border with Turkey, rigged up in twos and threes on the roofs and balconies of apartment buildings, perched atop refugee tents and mounted near farms and factories on huge platforms that rotate to follow the sun across the sky.

Many in the West view solar panels as a sign of affluence, and wealthy countries like the United States have invested billions of dollars to promote alternative energy.

But the solar boom in northwestern Syria is unrelated to fears of climate change or a desire to reduce a carbon footprint. It is the only viable option for many in a region where the government has cut the power and where imported fuel for private generators is far beyond most people’s means.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4835321&forum_id=2#42467169)