Years after they first appeared in North Korea, increasingly cheap and available solar panels are giving a boost to consumer consumption and industry as Pyongyang tries to limit the impact of tough international sanctions.
Electricity shortages have been a perennial concern for North Korea, and leader Kim Jong Un has called for greater use of renewable energy as part of his drive for self-sufficiency as sanctions have ratcheted higher in response to the country’s nuclear and missile programmes.
Now ever more households, factories and businesses are equipped with solar panels, leading to a greater variety of home electronics products available in increasingly common private markets known as jangmadang, defectors and recent visitors say.
Among the hottest selling items are water purifiers, hair straighteners and electric bicycles, mostly from China but some made in North Korea or even smuggled in from South Korea.
“A few years ago, such things as water purifiers, mixers and rice cookers were only seen at some restaurants and rich households, but they are becoming commonplace, especially in cities,” said Kang Mi-jin, an economic expert who regularly speaks with North Koreans for Daily NK, a website run by defectors.
“Some would look just like an ordinary middle-class South Korean home, with a wall-hanging LED TV, multiple laptops and electric mini cars for babies.”
Consumer Culture
North Koreans started using solar panels several years ago, mostly to charge mobile phones and light their homes as a backup to the unstable, mostly hydro and coal-fired national grid.
As well as markets brimming with electronics products, there are more teahouses, computer games rooms, karaoke bars and billiard halls open longer after switching to solar from diesel generators, according to recent visitors and defectors.
Such entertainment venues are becoming more widespread, not only in cities, but also the countryside, where grid power is even less reliable.
“At night, often it is only those places that have solar panels and batteries that have lights on,” a source with knowledge of the issue told Reuters on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of North Korea affairs.
Use of the panels spread after they were used at a now-closed inter-Korean factory park in the North’s border city of Kaesong that opened in 2004.
“Now many apartment balconies have them out in the sun during the day collecting energy so they are readily visible, the source said.
Private use of solar panels has gone from being officially banned, to tolerated, to encouraged by the ruling Workers’ Party, which keeps a tight rein on the economy and the populace.
Early this month, the official Rodong Sinmun ran an article about a team of labourers at a cooperative farm who earned solar panels and LED TVs as a reward from the Party for surpassing a production goal.
State television has also aired a series of reports on the growing use of solar energy over the past year, including a 17-minute documentary from October introducing locally made devices, such as high-voltage inverters and even a portable charger for electric bicycles.
Kim Yun-soung, a research fellow at the Green Energy Strategy Institute in Seoul, said the North’s push for domestic production of solar equipment was spurred by sanctions banning imports of metal products.