"Once the solar power system is up and running, we won't need to burn coal for heating this winter," a local villager told power grid workers conducting facility inspections in a mountain village in Shangcheng County, Central China's Henan Province, on September 21.

Nestled in the Dabie Mountains, Shangcheng County sees early winters and prolonged cold spells. Coal-fired heating was long the primary way for local villagers to keep warm through the cold season. Every late autumn, households would stockpile coal ahead of time — hauling heavy sacks, tending stoves and clearing ash were all strenuous tasks, and particularly burdensome for elderly left-behind residents.

To cut scattered coal use in rural areas and improve winter living environments in mountain communities, the local government has been steadily advancing the solar-for-coal heating program. During the preparatory phase, the State Grid Shangcheng County Power Supply Company, in line with requirements under the three-year campaign to address workplace safety risks at their source, aligned its work with local governance plans. It conducted village-by-village grid condition assessments, inspected the load capacity and safety performance of distribution transformer zones, and eliminated hidden risks in aging power facilities, laying a solid safety foundation for the project's orderly rollout.

So far, the county has completed screening all distribution transformer zones eligible for solar grid connection, and introduced differentiated zone-based management tied to grid carrying capacity. Project quotas are allocated to towns and townships according to the province's unified grid access capacity indicators, with priority given to villages with mature grid infrastructure. For areas that temporarily lack sufficient connection capacity, the implementation schedule is dynamically adjusted. Every residential solar connection goes through standardized acceptance checks to ensure reliable installation, grid access and stable operation for each household.

For local villagers, the solar-for-coal shift brings more than an energy upgrade — it also improves overall quality of life. Less coal burning has also brought cleaner winter air and more pleasant living conditions across the mountain villages.

Going forward, local authorities will continue to improve services throughout the solar grid connection based on actual rural grid conditions, extending clean heating coverage to more remote mountain villages and bringing clean heating to more rural households through the winter months.