Insights from Farmer-Managed Decentralized Solar Irrigation Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores how farmers use informal digital tools like WhatsApp to maintain and monitor decentralized solar irrigation systems, highlighting community-driven practices that complement formal monitoring.

Contribution

It reveals the role of messaging platforms as informal infrastructures for collective sensemaking and maintenance in decentralized solar energy systems.

Findings

Farmers share generation data via WhatsApp for peer comparison.

Messaging platforms enable informal collective maintenance practices.

Informal digital infrastructures support community-driven energy system management.

Abstract

Solar irrigation systems are increasingly deployed in rural regions, yet their distributed and remote deployment makes maintenance challenging for farmers. While formal monitoring processes and applications exist, they often fall short in practice. We present insights from grid-connected solar irrigation schemes that incentivize farmers to feed energy to the grid, focusing on how farmers maintain their systems. We found that farmers face multiple challenges but are also devising strategies, including the appropriation of WhatsApp to share daily generation data with peers and compare performance across installations to identify potential system anomalies. Our findings highlight how messaging platforms function as informal digital infrastructures enabling collective sensemaking around distributed energy systems. We discuss implications for designing agricultural energy technologies that support peer comparison, contextual interpretation, and community-driven maintenance, framing these as a socio-technical platform. Finally, we outline directions for future work integrating such practices with formal monitoring tools and explore their potential to support citizen science initiatives in environmental sensing.