Imagine cooking for 50,000 people without using a single drop of gas or electricity. Sounds impossible? It’s happening every day in Mount Abu, Rajasthan, where a solar kitchen is breaking records and showing the world what clean energy can really do.

Tucked high in the Aravalli Hills at the Shantivan Complex of the Brahma Kumaris, this massive setup uses the power of the sun to cook thousands of hot, nutritious, vegetarian meals — no firewood, no LPG, with almost no diesel.

It all starts with the sun

The kitchen runs on solar thermal energy, not solar panels. That means instead of converting sunlight into electricity, it uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate heat, a lot of it.

The kitchen is powered by 84 Scheffler reflectors — these are giant oval-shaped mirrors, each with a surface area of 9.2 square metres. Their job? To track the sun and reflect its rays to a single focal point.

The reflectors are mounted on rotating frames that follow the sun all day. This movement helps them capture maximum solar energy,........

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