Solar Story: How One Community Lives Alongside the World’s Biggest Solar Plant

Rural Ghassate, Morocco—“in the top left-hand corner of the map of Africa” between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert—has a mighty neighbor: the Noor power plant, the largest “concentrated solar power plant in the world.” In kinetic, loose-lined illustrations washed with sunbaked hues, a group of classmates explores and explains topics including solar power, sustainability, and community development. The class visit to the plant frames statistics useful to young readers—it is “the size of 3,500 soccer fields, and contains 660,000 mirrors”—while lengthy sidebars dive into deeper discussions of Morocco, the plant, and its multidimensional impacts on sustainability. Drummond’s author’s note relates that he visited a school in Ghassate, which sparked the idea for this framing and, despite his initial “cultural shortsightedness” about the plant’s placement (“not... in a highly developed country like the United States”), taught him that “solutions... can be found everywhere and require a global perspective.” Ages 4–8. [em](Mar.) [/em]