Solar panels for our refugee food bank

Historically, most of the electricity used in Moldova was produced by free gas from Russia. That completely changed when the conflict in Ukraine intensified in 2022. Since then, Moldova has been making a quick transition towards energy independence, and local, renewable sources are a big part of that puzzle.

In early spring, we finally installed 40 kW of solar panels on the roof of our refugee food bank. After months of planning and wiring, they’re up there now — rows of clean, silent potential. Enough to power fridges, ovens, forklifts, events… maybe even our indoor greenhouse (on a good day). But it’s not just about keeping the fridge cold and the bread warm.

To help build capacity we teamed up with WECF organized a series of workshops, about designing and installing systems based on solar panels, both residential and commercial, turning the installation of rooftop panels into a real-world lab, especially for women looking to get more confident with tools, tech, and the fast-changing green job market.

The panels we’ve installed so far are able to cover most of our core operations. We’d love to go further: expand into food drying and processing, space cooling and heating, power our entire facility, and even feed excess energy back into the grid — to make our small but real contribution to Moldova’s energy mix. So we’re planning to add more panels not only to the roof, but even mount some on solar trackers — devices that follow the sun across the sky to squeeze out every watt the day has to offer.

That all sounds good, right?

Well… here comes the hammer.

The panels are up there right now, soaking up sun and quietly producing electricity. The problem? We can’t use it yet. Not a single watt.

Because unless you can run that power through the grid — or store it in an expensive off-grid battery system — it just sits there, unused.

For the past six months, we’ve been battling bureaucracy — trying to get authorization to feed our energy into the national grid. But the country’s only energy provider keeps telling us there’s “no capacity to receive renewables in your district.”

That’s partly due to outdated, weak infrastructure — the local distribution nodes just aren’t strong enough. But it’s also a matter of reserved feed-in permits: most of the available capacity on paper has already been claimed by large investment groups. Some of those projects exist only in theory, but still block the path for everyone else.

So here we are — with a fully installed, working solar system… and no reasonable way to use the energy it generates.

We’ve reached out to the Ministry of Energy. We’ve written to the national energy authority. We’ve pinged inboxes, waited, followed up, waited again. Still no green light.

We’re currently weighing whether to shift toward an off-grid system with batteries, but that comes with real downsides: high cost, questionable environmental impact, and a quiet heartbreak at watching clean energy go unused while the grid needs it most.

So for now, we’re waiting — along with others on the feed-in list. But not forever.
If things don’t move soon, we may need to take a stand.

Because whether we’re baking bread, charging forklifts, or running workshops under the solar roof — we believe power should flow.

Thank you, to everyone who’s helped get us this far.

With care,