The Sri Aurobindo Ashram Dining Hall, located on the Ananda Ranga Pillai Street, is one of the many heritage buildings of Puducherry. It has been serving food to the inmates of the Ashram as well as its guests since 1934.

During recent times, the number of visitors to the Ashram has increased significantly. To feed this ever increasing number, the Dining Hall has had to scale up its production which also increased its consumption of electricity. To control this upward trend in consumption of electricity, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram installed a 32.4kW on-grid solar energy plant in 2015.

Sunlit Future, Auroville, designed, constructed and performs maintenance of this site. With more than 1.5MW of on-grid solar energy plants installed or under contract in India, Sunlit Future has the experience and capacities for design, procurement, integration, management, installation and maintenance of solar energy applications and services.

With help of the Wattmon energy monitoring and control system, it is possible to track the solar system’s total energy generation, money saved as well as the amount of CO2 emissions saved! In its first year of operation, the solar power plant provided 52% of the building’s energy requirement. Looking at the benefits reaped from this solar grid-connected system, a second phase of rooftop on-grid solar system is being worked out.