In rural India, cooking is still a cumbersome job. Due to lack of access to clean and reliable sources of energy, roughly 85% of rural Indian households are forced to use cow dung cakes, dry wood and other polluting fuels for cooking. About a million people, which include women and children die every year due to household indoor air pollution.

This problem can be tackled by utilising a simple technology which can be availed locally and uses the sun as a source. Schefflers reflectors are a technological option which not only solve the problem of household pollution but also provide jobs to people in rural areas. The basic idea that lead to the development of the Scheffler- Reflectors was to make solar cooking as comfortable as possible. The cooking place should not have to be moved. It should be inside the house and the concentrating reflector outside in the sun.

The best solution was a flexible parabolic reflector which can be made from locally available material and that rotates around an axis parallel to the earth’s axis, synchronous with the sun. Additionally, the reflector is adjusted to the seasons by flexing it in a simple way. Wolfgang Sheffler has designed these reflectors and installed solar reflectors to provide cooking heat in many community kitchens in India since 1986.

The reflected ray from these reflectors can either be used directly to heat up a cooking vessel or can be used to generate steam which in turn can help in cooking. Usually steam is used to run larger community kitchens. In India, these reflectors are providing employment opportunities, especially to women. They are being used by NGOs such as Barefoot College Tilonia and Barli Institute for Rural Women for the decimation of this technology.

The conventional way to transform solar energy to electricity is by using Photovoltaics (PV) as the technology. These PV modules are largely made of Silicon. The manufacturing process of these modules requires temperature as high as 700°C, which makes the process energy intensive. These factors increase the cost of production and makes these modules expensive. Another disadvantage of these modules is that they either come in shades of blue or black, so it does not really fit aesthetically in our building materials.
The new way forward is a greener technology by the name of Organic Photovoltaics (OPV). This technology uses carbon as the major component which is found prominently in nature. The cost of manufacturing is very low as the process does not require high temperature. These cells are flexible in nature as deposition (the process for making solar cells) can be done on flexible surfaces as well. The cells made from this technology vary in colour and can also be manufactured as semi-transparent cells which give them an upper hand over silicon based PV.

The OPV finds its application in small electronic devices as well as large solar panels. The efficiency of these cells have increased over time and has reached 11% which is still lower than conventional PV technology. However research in the field of OPV assures a brighter future for these cells in terms of applicability. q