I worked in this industry as a software developer. Companies like SunCulture (who used to be a customer of ours) started maintaining all their customers on spreadsheets. But with high volume low-value sales, you need to have good software to manage this. We were a player.
I once had to do a mobile money integration with a Zimbabwean bank. A dozen skype calls led to nothing. Then I visited the country, bought a local cell phone, made a few phone calls, and within several days I'd reached the developer I needed. He said: "Wait all I need to do is add this string?". "Yes.". He did so at midnight and our integration worked. Next evening we partied.
It shows how integrations are often more of a human/organizational navigation more than anything technical.
As for the article; the tone is hyped, and it is also somewhat true. Hundreds of millions will be using electricity. Still I want to point out one thing: This is all Solar powered DC electricity. No inverters! So you are looking at powering DC only appliances! Inverters are generally simply too expensive for this. Also the impact on income is very limited; you can't really do anything significantly more productive with the electricity, as several reports have shown. But I don't want to downplay the impact; The quality of life improvement is hard to overstate. Maybe somewhat comparable to say; you are forbidden to use any form of transport (bike, car, bus) to suddenly having all 3. Life becomes so much more convenient. For example: You don't have to take the bus anymore to town to charge your phone - yes people do this.
> So you are looking at powering DC only appliances!
Is there anything you actually need AC for? The big advantage of AC is that you can easily transform it for long range transmission. If you don't need that, AC is not really necessary, is it?
I guess the bigger issue is the limited power -- you probably can't use a small scale solar installation for cooking or washing, not because it's DC, but because it just wont offer 1000W power.
Battery powered induction stoves exist, although they are not cheap enough yet. They are, however, truly excellent products. The one from Impulse Labs is not a case of “wow, I can get decent performance without the monster electric hookup it used to require” — it’s “wow, this seems to be the best stove of any sort on the market by a considerable margin, and it’s nifty that it happens to run off an integral battery, too.” If you’re so inclined, you can cook an entire meal or three on it while unplugged.
If someone wants to make them work in rural areas like this, I think the necessary ingredients will be:
1. Cheaper batteries. These are likely coming.
2. More energy. A meal might require 1 kWh or more. (Or less — scrambled eggs won’t require much energy at all.) This is solvable with more panels.
3. Copper. The coil itself is a decent sized hunk of copper. I assume this is part of why cheap little portable induction cooktops still cost $50 or more.
4. Power electronics? I’m not an expert, and I have no idea how much of the cost comes from the power electronics, but integrating the battery and the induction heater seems like it should result in a dramatically simpler system than, say, producing AC from a battery and then converting that AC into a form that will power the coil. The current list price of the Impulse Labs stove includes a hilariously high power output, and a stove targeting rural Africa could be 1/5 as powerful and would still be fantastic.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could squeeze the cost of a decent battery powered stove down to $200 in a few years if they had appropriate scale.
I looked up that Impulse Labs induction hob. Holy Shit, 10kW peak on a single burner is ridiculous!
I already managed to ruin a pan with just 3.7kW (heated it while empty), and I tought that was a lot.
However, I think the cost is probably mostly the battery. Our induction hob (max power per burner 3.7kW / 7.2kW total) costs only 10% of the battery powered stove.
Also, at the low cost, induction is a non-starter. Resistive heating elements are dirt cheap, and the efficiency is not much less than induction. Induction is just way nicer :)
Battery power for an oven like this is not necessarily cost-prohibitive; if you want cost effectiveness and long lifetime, LiFePo cells can be had for ~$60/kwh, which would be under <$200 for an ImpulseLabs sized oven.
Absolutely agree on resistive heating for cost effectiveness: Some cheap cells, resistive heating and minimal power electronics would probably be the way to go for the African market.
Dang that 6k is pretty prohibitive not for the overall level, but because it's 4 hobs or nothing. Hardly a "give it a swag" kind of level.
I assume they are probably somewhat comparable to the Breville Control Freak, so at a single hob you'd be competing against $1500.
But the battery is a nice philosophy, similar to hybrid/mild electric cars. You don't need all the power forever. You just need more than a 120V circuit can provide.
For what it’s worth, cooking a large meal for three (big pot of pasta or rice, brown onions and garlic, brown mince meat, vegetables, simmer sauce) on my induction in my round the world vehicle uses smack on 40Ah of a 12v lithium battery - so about 0.5kwh.
It takes 1.16 Watt-hours to raise a litre of water by a degree. Say 85Wh for 15C room temp to 100C boiling. Assuming your large meal for three is 3 litres, that's 255Wh to get the water boiling. There's energy loss from battery through inverter, through induction. Loss in the pot losing heat to the air. This doesn't count keeping it simmering, or heating the other ingredients.
I don't have any idea if that's very good, to be only twice the theoretical minumum, or quite a room for improvement - have you ever experimented with a 'pot cosy' to insulate the pot and stop radiated heat loss so you can keep it simmering with less power input, or turning the heat off once it's boiling to let pasta or rice cook in the residual heat, or anything?
Yessss, more or less. I learned of the idea from this guy's content[1] who bikepacks ultralight and wants to save camping stove fuel, and he made his own. And from my dad who habitually wraps a thick teatowel around stew pots, on principle (he doesn't measure for a difference in power use. Electric cooktops only, not flame ones). Since it has to be snug on the pot, making one is probably the common way forward.
A few products do exist in that ultralight camping world, the Toaks D95 Pot Pocket[2], the Trangia Pot Cozy[3], Glacier Minimalist "pot with insulating sleeves". In standard size maybe the "So-Vida Sous Vide Insulation Band and Mat for Pots - Protects Your Work Surfaces and Saves You Electricity From Increased Insulation"[5] which is out of stock.
The Wonderbag[6] marketed as for communities in Africa and not available in the USA. From the Wikipedia page on Thermal Cooking[7], in a normal size kitchen people probably go with a vacuum flask cooker, popular in Asia.
AC makes power distribution easier (because you can have modulated phases). So it's correct to say it's easier to move it over a long distance.
Additionally, and i'm really simplifying, at parity of nominal voltage, you can move a lot more power, at a lower dissipation cost. This has resulted in few high power electronics to be AC native (ie.: no AC - DC - AC conversion). Think about motors in the various appliances, etc.
It doesn't need to be like that, investment in DC car motors have pushed the industry to optimizes design, and get similar power output of the motor at lower energy consumption.
That said, if you are a manufacturer of an appliance and you have an addressable user base of billions with AC, and a 'potential new user base' with DC... you might just want to swallow the cost and add a DC / AC converter for the sake to not have to produce two variants of the most complex / costly item (the motor in this case).
That wheel has turned. The king of long distance transmission is now HVDC, to be point of sometimes being used intra-grid and not just for interconnects.
That is correct. When that will be available is the hard thing to guess.
There are currently enough production of electricity that is motor based (think about gas turbine, water turbines, etc), so there is a nice benefit of having AC at source and distribution.
The infrastructure needs to change. With an average lifetime of a substation in the 50-75years, it's hard to expect we'll overhaul completely the distribution system over night.
It's also hard for me to understand the power loss between the two scenarios (AC production, ac distribution, ac/dc conversion , dc consumption) and DC production, dc stepup to HVDC, dc distribution, DC stepdown and DC consumption). Even 1% at national scale means millions, so the entire business case might be anchored there.
I'm sure there are smarter people than me here that can cast some light on this
> I guess the bigger issue is the limited power -- you probably can't use a small scale solar installation for cooking or washing, not because it's DC, but because it just wont offer 1000W power.
Your average lead-acid starter battery can easily do that - 1 kW is less than 100 amps at 12V, less than 50A if you wire two in series. 200 Ah means about four hours worth of runtime.
The problem is switching off higher DC voltages and currents. AC is easy, it traverses through 0V 100 (or 120 in the US) times a second. But DC? The arc is just going on. That's why most electrical equipment, from switches over automated breakers to fuses, has distinct ratings for AC and DC, with DC ratings sometimes being half the AC rating.
Additionally, larger DC networks tend to have issues with weird current flows and electrochemical corrosion.
No, only for about a minute or two. But there are a lot of lithium-ion batteries capable of 10C discharge rates which can survive several minutes of max load. For 100 amps I am guessing you'd need 10 amp-hours of 10C-capable lithium-ion batteries, roughly a 4S4P or 4P4S configuration of 10C 18650s. I think this is about US$128 of batteries, a similar price to the car battery but much smaller and more inflammable.
Thought provoking question! I am not an electrical engineer, but arguments I heard went along these lines: Almost all existing appliance markets are AC. Are we really going to be building a complete parallel appliance market? You wouldn't be able to sell a TV from the city in the country side and vice versa. I would be keen to hear what an electrical engineer on hackernews has to say!
Interestingly, when I visited the countryside, I saw some AC electrical appliances. One elder couple had an enormous 80ies style stereo-set gathering dust in the shed. I was told they were a wedding gift.
Laptops, TVs and other electronics already run from DC. Also, there are a lot of appliances for camper vans, boat which run on 12v or 24v DC. On Alibaba you can buy a stove for a few bucks: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Solar-DC-12V-24V-Batt...
I'm sort of an electrical engineer. Increasingly things don't run directly off 120/240V directly. Anything with a power supply could be designed to run of 48V DC nominal. My slight obsession is that really the world needs a low voltage standard. Things like lighting, low power appliances don't need 120/240V.
I'm with you, and actually bullish on this to be a viable way forward.
48V DC has been eyed already for a potential standard to emerge. Doesn't need massive cables to deliver decent power (4A ~200W). There is enough hardware around coming from use cases like EV and Boats that could make it work. Many battery solutions already 'talk' 48v without lossy stepdown of voltage, etc.
Big plus is that the regulation is A LOT less strict for <48v DC compared to AC 110/220/240.
I worked as an electrical civil engineer for few years.
>> the world needs a low voltage standard
we have high voltage standard because it means we can have low amperage to transit same VA.
Because voltage doesn't kill, amperage does.
It's for safety.
DC is far more safer then AC, but it's not that much safer.
If we convert 20A 240V AC (very bad, you can't move your hands away) to 48V DC we get a wooping 110A (instant death)
But if we convert 20A 120V AC, we'd get 55A 48V DC. It's on the same level and has the same problem with moving your hands away.
My country used 220V (as most do!) so switching to DC would mean huge safety threat, but for 120V countries I'd say – go for it!
Not an electrical engineer, but doesn’t the voltage combined with the bodies resistance dictate the amperage? So anything under 50VDC just can’t transmit enough amps through the body to be harmful?
Thermal energy storage solves the problem of cooking and washing.
I have a half-liter thermos bottle that leaks about 0.3 watts at ΔT ≈ 50° (635g of water dropped from 71.9° to 69.8° over five hours and 8 minutes), so any power supply averaging over about a watt would be sufficient to boil water in it—eventually. If you needed to do it in the 4 hours the sun was near peak on a single day, you'd need at least 15 watts. (I don't live in Africa, but I do live in a third-world country. Blown-glass thermoses are pretty widely available because, although they're fragile, they're light and never wear out, just shatter.)
Sand batteries are potentially extremely cheap and can easily deliver cooking temperatures. A super-low-tech version of this approach is "salt frying", where you preheat a few kg of table salt (melting point 800.7°) to frying temperature, then stir dry food into it. Most of the salt won't stick to the food, but the few grains that do won't cause the edibility problems that sand would.
TCES potentially offers much greater storage density and much greater controllability than these sensible-heat energy-storage technologies, since you can store the "heat" indefinitely.
Phase-change thermal energy storage is another potentially appealing possibility, potentially offering a stable cooking temperature for many hours, although I don't know of any suitable materials. The MgCl₂-KCl–NaCl eutectic, for example, doesn't melt until 401°. Maybe something like calcium stearate (m.p. 150°–180°) would work, but its heat of fusion isn't great, I'd be worried about long-term stability, and although it's easy to get anywhere in the world, it's probably a lot more expensive than salt. (Table salt is US$100/tonne, but the eutectic mentioned above would be closer to US$400/tonne.)
Ignoring the cost of the battery how much does a cordless drill that'll break your wrist cost? A non-trivial amount more than the corded one that's for sure. You're gonna see comparable cost difference in just about every "final appliance" that actually turns the jiggling electrons into results (whether those results are work or heat).
Alternating current is substantially easier to step up/down in voltage, much nicer to anything that modulated current flow and has a lot of convenient aspects for motors. Like for like the DC solution costs just a little bit more every step of the way.
Even if you're not doing long distance transmission the cost of all those things that are worse about DC are going to be bore across the entirety of your economy that uses AC. DC makes sense here because the supply chain is so dysfunctional that making the "better" solution work would actually cost more than the "12v doodads from china" style solution. Eventually as electrification continues the choice of DC will become a drag though.
I don't think this is correct. Drills use "universal" motors which don't care if they're running on AC or DC, because 60Hz AC motors are limited to 3600rpm, which isn't nearly fast enough for a drill, and also because it's not okay if the drill stops working if it hits resistance and slows down. (Most AC motors run at a fraction of that.) You can run a cheap electric drill off 120Vdc just as easily as 120Vac. Getting it to run on 48Vdc or 30Vdc involves rewinding the motor with the same amount of copper in the form of thicker wire.
Fancy drills already have a lot of electronics that do care about the polarity of the applied voltage, but they usually want it to be DC. Once you get anything more sophisticated than phase-angle control with a TRIAC, you're using MOSFETs anyway, and you can often use half as many of them if you're using DC, because MOSFETs like DC.
> Companies like SunCulture (who used to be a customer of ours) started maintaining all their customers on spreadsheets. But with high volume low-value sales, you need to have good software to manage this.
That's pretty interesting. Can you tell us more what kind of problems your software solved and how you convinced them to move from the spreadsheets?
I tried something similar (in another industry) and it's a mixed bag. Companies often straight up refuse to move past the spreadsheets even though it creates a significant backlog on their side.
Happy to oblige. Basically we digitized a company from spreadsheets or paper to ERP. We'd introduce accounting software, stock management software, help desk software. But the biggest thing you need is some kind of "Loan Account Management Software" which is the center piece.
This centerpiece tracks the outstanding loan amount that each customer has. It sutomatically sends payment reminder SMS messages a few days before payments are due. It connects to the hardware with internet-of-things to turn it off if payments aren't made. It connects to the bank to ensure payments are there, and confirms when payments are made. Really fun software to build with many different parts.
There were SaaS providers for this. In the beginning (2015) there was only 1 player, Angaza (Reed Hastings mentioned in the article is one of their sales guys). Nowadays there are a handful; PaygOps, BBoX pulse (not sure if that still exists), and a few smaller ones. They charge like $2-$7 per device managed on the platform.
Convincing customer to take this up was not hard at all. You pretty much needed it to run your operations on anything more than 100 customers, and as the above article shows, scale had big advantages. Moreover; if you could show to investors that you had the software infrastructure scale, they were significantly likely to give money. It was boom time until corona hit. Everyone was expecting 30% YoY growth like until 2019, but then everything stagnated. Many companies went bankrupt and a lot of consolidation happened in the distributor market. Companies saved money on their software first, and we called it a day.
In the manufacturing industry where I am now, I fully agree with the mixed bag. Companies are old, with many old people, they stay small and don't necessarily need to scale or "grow forever". They are conservative and happy with the way things are.
My understanding is that the main benefit of small solar like this is to get combustion out of the home, specifically kerosene or dung lamps/stoves. A lot of folks have respiratory issues because they cook indoors.
Yes and no. You are right that indoor cooking (or outdoor on wood) is indeed one of the biggest causes of death worldwide. It dwarfs deaths by malaria. And where people don't die, it causes respiratory issues. I don't know the math but it is similar to smoking X cigarettes a day.
- sidenote - You always learn that in centuries past, people didn't grow old. I never knew why but my current suspicion is that air pollution by stoves and hearths was probably the top 3 cause.
However, cooking isn't (yet) solved by solar. Making heat from electricity is hard! Clean Cooking solutions often use propane, butane, or wooden pallets. Clean Cooking companies face all of the same issues as the Off grid solar companies of this article. But you'd be surprised that it is really considered a different industry. Customers and price plans are the same, but funding often comes from different sources.
Making affordable, electric, clean cooking solutions would be one of the most impactful inventions of our generation. Even then, challenges remain: No cultural activity is as steeped in tradition as cooking, and convincing people to change this, resulting in different tasting meals, is hard. Particular if it is the man deciding on the money, and the woman doing the work.
Not really, my old microwave has 500 Watts, this should be also enough for slow resistive cooking while being insulated.You will find 12V/24V 2.8L/5L Dc Electric Pressures Cookers with 250W-300W on AliExpress. (1l needs roughly 0.1kwh of energy to go from 20 to 100°C) Additionally, you might save a lot of energy by using a hay box after it starts to boil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haybox
Totally agree on the DC limitation point too. A lot of folks outside the space assume these systems are just mini-versions of Western home solar setups, but they're not
People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them.
This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world.
It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over.
My takeaway from observing “tech in developing world” projects is that the key gap is usually maintenance. That is, continuous small investment to prevent things from breaking in the first place. To be fair, that’s not exactly a solved problem in developed countries either!
Sometimes development projects just throw solutions at rural communities then move onto their next project, leaving no legacy of training or continued supply of parts/tools/funding.
Sometimes solutions get treated as resources instead of infrastructure, like a water treatment plant that got strip-mined for metal (that example was from South America).
Tech is a whole ecosystem, mindset and lifestyle, not just magic hardware to parachute into situations that aren’t set up to manage it on a long term basis.
I knew a charity group many years ago that targeted this issue.
They noticed that aid charities would give modern motorcycles to rural medical workers that rapidly ended up in a non-working state.
So they gathered older motorbikes, more suitable and more repairable in the destination country, and spent time training the end users in maintenance and upkeep, and ongoing support.
Not an uncommon problem with charities working with foreign nations. They fail to capture the local populations because they think of these problems in a vacuum.
Person lacks reliable transportation -> give them some -> problem solved
There's another example - a charity provides treated mosquito nets for free to millions of families in Africa. Great!
People lack reliable mosquito protection -> give them treated nets -> problem solved!
But in reality it went like this:
People lack reliable mosquito protection -> give them treated nets -> many of these families are starving -> fine mesh nets are great at catching small fish -> all their food is now infected with insecticide, mosquitos continue to access the family as well
That was exactly the goal with the Buffalo Bicycle project, and I'd say it worked pretty well. Make a bike that's mechanically simple & reliable, maintainable with common tools, and train technicians to fix and upkeep them. Basically create the Toyota Landcruiser of bikes. I kind of want one, even though it's a "bad" bike by the standards of most western audiences (heavy, slow, ugly, etc)
even in the Big IT Enterprise "support" is a byword that appears in all discussions.
it's not enough to have, or to build, you gotta maintain, fix, replace, and eventually, remove.
those discussions aren't fun or sexy, and everyone hates when you tank a blue-sky "it'll fix everything" discussion with the unpleasant realities of long-term care and feeding
> it's not enough to have, or to build, you gotta maintain, fix, replace, and eventually, remove.
Indeed. I think many in the West fail to appreciate - and take for granted - the cultural dimensions (which include cultures of knowledge, skill transmission, cultivation, and development, and also worldview[0]) as well as the economic ecosystems and supply chains involved.
Dropping off a tractor in Africa or a bulldozer in rural India and calling it a day is superficial and worthless. Imagine shipping something suitably technologically advanced to some Germanic tribe during the Roman conquest of Europe if you need an analogy.
[0] The worldview bit might surprise some. As some have argued, there are reasons why enterprises like modern science arose and flourished only in the West, whereas everywhere else scientific development was historically quite limited. These reasons include a culture formed under the notion of the Logos which entails the belief in a thoroughly intelligible universe that can be fully known in principle; a rejection of pantheism with a distinction made between the transcendental and the immanent, allowing for exploration; a rejection of pantheism and so a world infested with capricious, personified natural phenomena; an omniscient and omnibenevolent God who is not capricious or voluntarist. Without these elements, the confidence and motivation needed to confidently exercise and develop intellectually, to try to understand the world - which contribute to the formation of a robust scientific culture - is stifled.
It's not just a failure to appreciate, it's an outright demonization of many of these observations as racist/imperialist. One of the prime motivators for this kind of development "aid" is the mistaken belief that the only issue is a lack of resources or external exploitation, and if you just provide the resources and/or remove the exploitation a given place will naturally turn into an enlightened Western nation-equivalent. Maybe with some fun unique cultural festivals, local cuisine, and some harmless, quirky native dances in exotic outfits!
Meanwhile even in the West it's easy to find people who win the lottery and are broke a year later, or rich celebrities/pro athletes who make tons of money and lose it all, or die with far less than you'd expect. Those people are laughed at and/or pitied, because even they are held to to a higher standard than some poor 3rd-worlder who's just a pure victim
Before the so-called scientific revolution and the later industrial revolution, that may be true - arguably for largely uninteresting reasons - but afterward, this is patently false.
Modern science arose only a couple of centuries ago in Europe. Prior to that, we see a long period of great European intellectual ferment, most notably the Scholastic period, that supplied the intellectual foundations and vocabulary that made modern science possible.
You're also reducing science to technology production, but even here, the sophistication of technology that modern science made possible far outstrips anything pre-scientific.
I don't understand this space very well, but I wonder if an iFixit-esque solution would work there: publish DIY guides on identifying and fixing common faults, and have a network of sellers for replacement parts and tools.
Absolutely a possibility. Solar systems, especially when not connected to a grid, are fairly simple beasts at the end of the day. Simple enough that I've seen more than a few youtube videos where guys build out their own custom solar system on a van.
There's only a few parts that go bad (it's probably a capacitor somewhere).
Those who are talking about market opportunities, yes it’s big!
Bottom up calculation: average $10/repair x 250 million potential repairs = $2.5B market.
Problem is labour shortages and supply chain, as stated in the report. Both hard problems to solve.
We’ve been working on getting the labour shortages fixed and I personally believe that you can also skip some of the supply chain problems by localising labour.
For example: when we train people they can 4x their _household_ income within 6 months. This is young people who didn’t have an income before and are suddenly earning 3x as much as both their parents combined.
People just don’t know how to fix these things and when someone finally learns how, they can absolutely rake it in.
It’s actually insane to me how much education can be such a massive multiplier in this context!
Yeah, I'd imagine so. Especially since Solar systems are relatively simple. People are doing more complex repairs on car electrical systems.
What sort of repairs are you training them to do? Is it just simply testing and swaps of parts? Or are you training them on how to find and replace a bad capacitor?
Brazilian person here, when I moved to Europe I was baffled I couldn't find shops that fixed electronics. Like I wanted to get my Android phone charging port replaced, I literally couldn't find a shop in my city willing to do the repair.
I eventually went back to Brazil and had it fixed there and replaced the battery. Freaking phone lasted 8 years on my very clumsly hands, still works even. The fix cost me ~30 usd plus the battery cost.
Yes, it's something extremely valuable, an expensive portable, and the new models all just keep getting worse and worse. There's no reason not to fix them.
It's also a repair that demands some amount of training. I imagine people fix a lot of things without getting them to a shop.
Hackers are down voting my comment. My question to them: If you could get paid twice the salary per hour to repair expensive machines, would you spend your time repairing mobile phones?
Everybody wants that juicy, juicy cheap labour, but nobody wants to be the cheap worker.
If nobody is offering cell phone repair services, that means repairing cell phones is not profitable enough compared to other things the person can do with their time. Otherwise people would offer these services.
Two economists were walking when they spotted a $100 bill. One asked the other "should one of us pick it up?", the other replied "no, if there was a $100 bill there, somebody would have picked it up already", so they kept walking.
Not even the joke is funny. People repeating it seriously is even less so.
Anyway, you would be right if you are trying to claim that the repairmen isn't the party maintaining the irrational situation, so they are powerless to fix it.
Then put your money where your mouth is and open as many cell phone repair shops in Europe as you please. You can mortgage your house and borrow a bunch of money if you need to get started.
But I think that there is always some reason or another why nobody is offering a service which seems to have great demand among customers.
And you can train those teenagers to do things which are much more profitable. If they have the dexterity and other skills needed to work on cell phone electronics, then they can work on other electronics.
If it was a good business, then there would be cell phone repair shops on every corner in Europe, like you have in other parts of the world where that makes sense.
lol yeah I was gonna say that they fix everything. They can't just Amazon prime new shit. It's weird how OP just assumes they're inept at repairs when that's just not true at all.
I didn’t say, nor do I assume, people are inept at repairs. I said that the communities that are being targeted with off-grid solar don’t currently have the skills or infrastructure required to maintain these systems.
It’s something I’ve seen with my own eyes and that I’ve read in academic literature as a widespread problem. Cross and Murray 2018 [1] being one the first papers to talk about it, I saw it myself for the first time around that time in Tanzania.
I stayed in a village where each house had at least 2 broken solar lanterns stored in a corner (like those old routers people love to keep).
The next closest repair shop was first 30min motorbike ride then a 2 hour bus ride away.
This was a village of 8,000 people.
Yes, the person with a diploma from the local technical college can fix a lot of things but they live in the local town with grid electric etc. They don’t live in these remote rural regions where off grid is so important/impactful.
The solution is to teach more people how to design, build and maintain solar energy systems so that the skills are embedded in off grid communities and give them the tools to carry out the work. You can do a lot with a soldering iron and good grasp of electronics!
Well, what is the alternative then? Probably the same problem when their diesel generator conks out. Small things you can do yourself, but rapidly you run into a situation where you need spare parts, or at least a competently run machine shop.
The same report says that 90% of those kits are repairable and the most common failure point is the battery and also that the vast majority of users hold on to their devices in hopes of repairing them in the future, as there exists some kind of repair service, it just isn't up to scale.
The repair service is really expensive for subtle reasons.
First of all there is the repair itself, but there isn’t any collection service so you need to travel (often a full day) to get to a repair centre. Then travel back. Not open on the weekend so you have to do it during the week, meaning you are also loosing 2 days of income. Then you have to go and get it once it’s done.
Total cost of repair for people using these devices might 10+ days worth of income if you include the opportunity cost.
That’s why we are training people to fix these systems within their communities.
Regarding parts you can get second life batteries in Kenya for $1-2 per cell from people like Acele Africa[1], so you can get total repair cost down to ~$10 (that’s ~3% of original purchase price)
> First of all there is the repair itself, but there isn’t any collection service so you need to travel (often a full day) to get to a repair centre
This is a good reminder of how much we in the developed world take our publicly funded transportation infrastructure for granted, which allows a repairman to easily reach us or vice versions.
This mirrors our public health infrastructure, which in the US at least is being degraded, the consequences of which we're all likely to experience soon.
I know you have some bias for the education solution, but I can't see why this is not a market problem. You have broken devices; you send them to get fixed; you have to travel one day to get them fixed; you have someone take them for a fee.
You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.
That’s the premium solution that some, but not most, can afford and only makes sense if the cost of repair is less than the cost a new unit. Travel just makes that tip in favour of getting a new system with a $10 deposit.
Most of the people we’re talking about here are subsistence farmers who pick up casual labour at a local farm. Income is sporadic and seasonal.
That was the initial brilliance of the PAYGO system, it allows users to pay off their device sporadically I.e. they buy units when they get paid and that goes towards paying off an asset that in theory will then provide energy at 0 marginal cost. Turns out that last bit isn’t true.
Here the VC story is important, these companies were meant to be high growth and giving significant returns. We all know how that ends.
> You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.
I have been in the past, but not anymore. No one is saying people aren’t resourceful but there is a significant barrier to entry when it comes to electronics repairs for the general population. One part of what we provide is an off-grid repair lab bundled with our new education offering so it’s very much knowledge + tools.
It depends. If the quality of the panels is similar to Temu products and not design with any repairablity in mind, then even with almost no labor costs, it still might be more cost-effective to simply replace the entire thing.
I was thinking about this too. There are tradeoffs around repairability. As an example, if you're expecting the unit to live in a wet environment it's not unreasonable to consider potting the circuit boards. This makes water ingress as a source of failure significantly less likely, but also has thermal effects (heat can't radiate very well through a block of silicone) that can hurt the overall lifetime as well as make it almost impossible to repair.
The most likely part to fail is the charge controller. That's got enough brains and parts that are ultimately likely to fail due to something like a bad capacitor. Next up is the batteries. If they are lead acid, then simply letting them under charge or dry out could have damaged them. Then the transformer/convert would be my next guess. It's got the right set of parts to go wrong. Panels is the last thing that might fail. They have no real parts to them, just cells and wires. About the only thing that could go wrong is if the wires somehow corrode (someone removes or scratches off the protective layer). Otherwise, the panels will likely just lose efficiency over time. They'll still generate power, but like 70% of their new condition.
That seems more optimistic (or solar punk) than your summary e.g.:
> In terms of waste management, 85.3% of distributors reported
that they had a waste management strategy. Mostly, this
tended to involve collecting broken products, harvesting
them for spare parts and then storing the remainder in a
central warehouse before sending them to a (usually certified)
local e-waste recycling facility. How effective these recycling
facilities are, however, was beyond the scope of this report.
They seem to suggest that lithium batteries are the hardest to repair and recycle, but people want to do so. It feels like a problem that will get easier at scale.
For sure recycling is improving. That’s different from repair though.
The current cycle is
1. sell product
2. wait three years for it to break
3. Go back to 1.
The impact of the recycling can lessen the impact of that but it definitely doesn’t eliminate it. That’s just on environmental scale, think about the financial impact of carrying this debt for years on people earning $2 a day.
Also important to note that a lot of this is contingent of legislation that implements things like Extended Producer Responsibly (EPR) where you essentially have an additional tax on producers that gets used to fund collection. Kenya implemented this for the first time 12 months ago [1], so we will see the impact over the next couple years.
Re solar punk, my personal vision is that you basically teach people how to build and maintain these systems themselves by running solar tech bootcamp and giving them off-grid tools.
They then have tools and skills to fix anything without the need for the grid. Train 100k people and have them maintain these systems using a decentralised approach.
In fact, as part of our training we now have e-cooking stove suppliers who deliver training on their stoves to our students.
The economic impact of this cannot be over stated.
1. You are giving people the ability to 4x their income as repairers
2. You are saving the people who are getting new systems, instead of repairing them, multiples of their yearly income.
Africans have more repair skills than westerners. Due to cost of things being expensive, repair culture is really big over there and in other 3rd world countries. You would be surprised at what folks can fix over there.
Are you saying the reason roads are bad in some parts of Africa is that the people there are too dumb to know how to repair the roads? That their problem is figuring out how to mix and pour asphalt, cement, or gravel on their roads?
That would be very dumb, if that's what you are saying.
No, I'm saying their/our societies are broken. Wrong values, wrong incentives w.r.t. to the skills required to build modern, well-maintained cities with roads, schools, hospitals, etc. when compared to similar peers in e.g. Asia.
Of course they are intellectually capable of laying asphalt, but they end up spending it on salaries, ridiculously enriching small elites, etc. Its not unique to Africa, but its certainly endemic here.
And not all of the citizens like it like this - hence the massive diaspora. Which is why I used the word "failed", not "dumb".
But thanks for taking my comment in the best possible interpretation - perhaps you should refresh yourself with the HN guidelines if these kinds of serious conversations distress you.
Footnote: I se you say you are from Ghana. Well Ghana and Singapore become independent at about the same time. Both got to run their country themselves. Only one decided it was important for their families and grandchildren to pour said asphalt.
The somethingpunk settings are supposed to be gritty and dominated by exploitative megacorps, though! As a rule, the thingpunk needs a Man dominating by means of the thing to rebel against. The only reason "solarpunk" has gotten such a rosy image is that its proponents tend to fancy themselves the Tessier-Ashpools were it to come to pass.
I guess even cyberpunk now has a bimodal supporter base - there are the would-be punks, and then there are the would-be (and actual) Zuckerbergs building the torment nexus/metaverse.
This is interesting. Can you please consider expanding your outreach to venues other than linkedin? I understand that you are serving local needs, but I suspect that some people in the United States would be quite interested in learning about this. I've assumed that people used solar power in Africa, but didn't consider the restraints and challenges of keeping them operational.
Yeah not much has changed, it’s simple technology that was developed in 2005. Main innovations of the PAYGO model in recent times was the ability to use the payment data you collected to offer other types of loans. One of the previous biggest companies in the space now sells mobile phones using PAYGO.
Technically battery chemistry has obviously moved on but we are talking a device capacity similar to a medium power bank. How much innovation have you noticed in power banks recently?
Panels are big problem from a e-waste perspective as they very difficult to repair.
Batteries failures are repairable. Usually battery packs will be 2+ LFP 18650s or 32700s. If one cell goes bad the the whole pack goes but the others may be fine. Just need to test and match cells and you can make new packs.
I can’t remember exact recovery rate for cells, I think it is something like 40-60%.
Dealing with these batteries at end of life is a challenge, but that’s a global problem.
Still a lot of legacy Sealed Lead Acid batteries around but these are very recyclable.
If we look at the growth curves it is clear that the actual real boom in solar will be happening between now and the next 10 (maybe 20 years) until the S-curve flattens.
The pictures in the report show panels which are so tiny in comparison to what you can buy today for 50 USD that it seems incomprehensible why anybody would repair them.
There is no sustainable future without repair and maintenance, and there are significant barriers to repair and maintenance imposed by governments in the name of "Intellectual property".
Is there some money in recycling them? The easiest way to get people interested in cleaning up trash is if you can pay them for the trash. Is there any money in a broken solar panel?
Cheap crap = lasts only as long as the warranty period.
I did a survey in partnership with a the African Leadership University in a Rwanda, where we surveyed people living in two rural villages and found 90% or units had broken within 3 years of purchase. This is the logical end point when 1/5 stop working after 6 months, which you can find in Cross and Murry 2018, linked in other comments.
10x mark up (i.e. the mark up on cost of the unit) comes from knowing that the COGS for one of these units is ~$20-30 and the premium sellers sell up to $300.
Sure it’s at the top end of the range but 10x markup on each unit is not an exaggeration, let alone a massive one.
Gross margins are indeed tight but that’s is a separate issue to markup. You can sell at a huge markup and still make a loss: for example if the default rate of loans you make turns out to be much higher than you expected.
Solar is dead simple. The cell puts out 12v. Theres some maths around parallel and serial but you don’t need to know that for repairs. The cells connect into a box that puts out ac. If the box fails you buy a new one (no user serviceable parts inside is what the sticker says). If the wires break you splice them.
If something hard breaks and you decommission a system the cells are still good and can be trivially reused. If a cell fails it’s obvious and it can be pulled out of rotation.
> A company (Sun King, SunCulture) installs a solar system in your home
> * You pay ~$100 down
> * Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months
But also:
> The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system. You’re replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene)
And earlier they say “$120 upfront might as well be a million when you’re making $2/day”. The whole article reads like it was vomited up by an LLM trained exclusively on LinkedIn posts. The math errors are consistent with that.
They say $120 might as well be a million and they immediately follow that up with “$100 down payment to get started”. But I thought it was like a million dollars??
LLM slop. Author couldn’t even be bothered to read the slop before clicking publish.
Yeah way too many tell-tale ChatGPT rhetorical devices in this article, which is a shame because the topic and premise are fascinating, but those turned me off from finishing it.
AI slop hits 700+ upvotes on Hacker News. The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom. A sign of things to come.
I think it's more of a link with a nice title getting 700+ upvotes. IMO many (and most non-tech) articles linked on HN are bad and most of their value lies in them being a conversation starter.
Yeah I think this is right. I want to read an HN conversation about solar in Africa, and all the interesting anecdotes that come out of the woodwork. Valuable even if the article itself is mediocre.
It was a hard read, but actually a fairly interesting article. It's a shame the author chose to format it how they did.
The key takeaways - that solar is super cheap, that technology has unlocked offering hire purchase to incredibly poor remote communities, and that westerners looking to buy carbon credits are basically subsidising that - are pretty interesting. There was a lot of fluff around those points though.
> The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom
always_has_been.jpg
The Internet has drowned to death in garbage back when they coined the term "content marketing". That was long before transformer models were a thing.
People have this weird impression that LLMs created a deluge of slop and reduced overall quality of most text on-line. I disagree - the quality arguably improved, since SOTA LLMs write better than most people. The only thing that dropped is content marketing salaries. You were already reading slop, LLMs just let the publisher skip the human content spouter middleman.
I am too, and the wisdom of old age has taught me: once Eternal September hits a community, it's time to walk away.
I dunno if HN is at that point yet, but it's certainly creeping closer compared to where it was 5-10 years ago. Reddit passed the point of no return within the last few years.
Back in my day, we lamented the loss of bang paths for email... and you had to pay Robert Elz to bring in a news group because munnari connected Australia to the world...
It's getting boring how every. single. article. has comments how the article is AI generated. The funny thing is the article writing styles are completely different, but every one has apparently "tell-tale" signs of "AI slop". It just gets tiring.
For what it's worth I pasted the first couple of paragraphs into several AI detectors and 4/5 said it's clean, while one said mixed (partly AI generated partly human). So either all these AI generation tools are crap, or the text is not so "obviously" AI generated. Not saying either way, but it seems to at least not be so obvious.
All of those tools are garbage. There is no reliable automated way to detect ai generated text. In 2023 OpenAI had a tool for this as well and they eventually took it down because it wasn't accurate enough. The major AI labs are probably best positioned to make such a tool work. If even they can't, then some random company with access to a fraction of a data and a fraction of the compute almost certainly also cannot.
Agree those tools are unreliable. Unless you have a massive amount of ML models trained on individuals' writing[0], the best you can do is vibe-checking[1].
You realise the irony right? You say say AI "slop" has a distinctive structure, but at the same time you (and the other poster) say that AI tools can not detect it? For what it's worth I'm an AI sceptic, but one thing that AI tools are good at is pattern matching (that's really all they do). But somehow pattern matching AI writing is so obvious to human's but it completely fails all AI tools (just tried another tool which said 100% human).
It doesn't match up. Moreover it's getting tiring, because every single article has these comments on them, and I've seen enough examples where authors showed up in discussions or texts were from before LLMs were widely available, but posters were still adamant that the text was AI generated.
I highly doubt that people here would reliably pick out (success rate > 60%, i.e. you get 60% of guesses correctly if text was generated by a human or LLM) LLM generated text that completely fools 90% of AI detectors.
Regarding the setup-punchline format, guess what, those were popular way before LLMs (not surprising LLMs must have learned them from somewhere).
What detection tools are you using and why do you have such confidence in them? How reliable are they and how do you know? Why do you think these particular tools are better pattern matchers than actual humans (on HN no less)?
Food for thought, fwiw I think you have some valid points.
Buried lede (in that none of the comments mention this): wireless micro-financing without transaction fees works for 10 African countries and is enabling a rural energy revolution. (though M-PESA isn't without controversy, and clearly it could benefit from competition)
Meanwhile, developed nations have millions of people who pay up to 500% interest on payday loans, 29% interest on credit cards, and can't get bank accounts. Small businesses can't grow quickly due to (among other things) high transaction fees cutting into already-meager profits. We only hear news about big business and products and services for people with money. We forget that if we want our economy to grow, and adopt things like increased personal/residential solar power, we need to unburden the poorest, grow their own wealth, and infuse that back into the economy.
Perhaps we should stop obsessing so much over AI, and obsess a little more over making it less expensive and difficult to be poor. Seems to be working in Kenya.
The grid is HUGELY expensive, an absolutely massive cost for our electricity. And it would still be expensive in a well-regulated environment where you can quickly and easily get permission to build, without, say, voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]. Here in the US we have a very very poorly regulated environment for adding to our grid, it moves slower than molasses and there are so many parties that have unilateral veto points. The advent of a new transmission route in the US these days is pretty much a miracle event.
Now imagine a world where there's tons of bribes to government officials all along the way to get a grid going (in the US you just need to bribe landowners and hold-outs). Or there's bribes to get a permit for the large centralized electriticy generator. And you have to deal with importing a whole new skill set and trades, on top of importing all the materials, fuel, etc.
Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US. The only thing stopping me is the permitting hassle or the contractor hassle.
Out in greenfield, solar plus storage is so revolutionary. This is bigger than going straight to mobile phones instead of landlines.
Africa is going to get so much power, and it's all going to be clean, renewable energy. Thanks to all the entrepreneurs and engineers over the past decades that have continuously and steadily improved this technology, it's one of the bright lights of humanity these days.
> Thanks to all the entrepreneurs and engineers over the past decades
Hat tip also to China's ideological commitment to independence from external oil supplies, as nicely coupled to reducing pollution and greenwashing their image. It's their citizens who sacrifice to make solar power cheap enough.
the vast majority of solar panels are imaculately concieved in fully automated factorys,some where in fact there are NO people and they turn the lights off, as the robots are blind to those frequencys anyway.
surviving solar PV production facilities operate on razor thin margins, and gargantuan volumes, the results of which are the electrification of most of the world, useing the absolute minimum of carbon.
first lights, and dev8ces, small appliences, then the next step will be universal access to clean water and refrigeration, and then the worlds largest continent will be something to recon with.
This is a very rosy picture, unfortunately to the point of delusion. There are huge questions about the labour used in various stages, and the production of some of the raw materials is environmentally questionable.
Sure, but most of it happens in countries beyond china.
In any case, I literally have a cousin who's lived ten years in China building a 3d printing company, and the last reason he went to China was cheaper labor, that was borderline irrelevant.
Yes there is a bunch of automation in there, and still a ton of manual work and re-work. And it is done by the lowest cost labor, with a hefty government subsidy (by china) and a purchasing program.
This is pretty much bunk. There really is _very_ little space for manual unqualified work in solar panel manufacturing.
Does the supply chain contain less-than-free labor somewhere? Likely. Most probably somewhere in the raw material production, but it's not something that is a deciding factor in anything. These materials just as well likely go into making of iPhones and Lenovo laptops.
Unloading, Frame assemblies, testing, Cleanup of any failed products (this is skilled labor)... Packaging and loading. This is at the plant that does panel assembly (joining silicon to packaging).
The problem is that "Highly automated" does not mean "free of people" ... the demand for low skill labor (and a fair amount of it to keep up with automated processes) is still required.
The cost of labor in china remains so low (on the whole) that these things are still not only feasible but cost effective.
Most of the time, I don't personally look at it as cheap labour because I am just ordering, e.g. 60,000 of something or 100,000 of something else.
It's cheap, yes. I can indeed buy 1,000 of something more locally or from other than China.
But when it comes to scale, needing vast shipments, then they are the ones who can actually ship it and do it reliably. It just also happens to be cheaper, too, which is more of a convenience or cherry on top, than the actual attractive part: vast scale.
China sent tiktok the the US, the gifted geniuses of silicon valley duplicated it and when their clones were garbage they just took it and said "we own this now"
It's not remotely cheap. A long time ago the cheap labor moved from places like China to places like Mexico, which is one of the reasons so many automotive manufacturing plants there - just a rail ride across the border.
Now that hasn't been the case for more than a decade. The cheap labor is in SE Asia and South America.
What China has is decades of process improvement, factories, infrastructure, experience, and a willingness to work. They haven't been the cheapest, by far, for a long while.
I don't now about Japanese manufacturing per se, but I definitely wouldn't say that finished Japanese products were considered dodgy in the 80s. Sony, Panasonic, Honda, Toyota, various camera brands, Yamaha.. I recall all of those being at least "pretty good".
I definitely remember the sense that Japanese cars posed a real threat to the American auto industry, and in hindsight that seems to have been well founded.
>but then lost their edge as China moved itself up the car manufacturing hierarchy
Didn't they lose their edge earlier and because the US togheter with some european nations forced their arm after a trade war to limit their exports, enforce an unfavourable currency regime, etc?
That's the entire point of the joke, yeah. Japanese manufacturing was dodgy in the 50s-60s but great by the 80s.
Korean manufacturing might've been considered dodgy in the 80s but great by 2000. Taiwan (ROC) went through this also (70s vs 90s, ish?). And now China.
The older generation made huge sacrifices with no wage growth because the CCP kept the currency low.
This allowed for China to choose industries it would dominate outside of economic forces. It chose to dominate solar and was allowed to sell panels below raw materials cost in order to kill competition.
In one hand it’s good for world solar, on the other hand this has helped cause the rise of the far right all over the west.
> It's their citizens who sacrifice to make solar power cheap enough.
No. Manufacturing labor cost in China is not cheap. In fact since 2012 or so, it is more expensive than in most of Asia. Companies who want cheap labor look elsewhere.
Labor is always a big driver of cost, because you need to plan, build, maintain and operate those factories with humans even if fully automated, and a lot of the indirect costs is going to scale with the price of labor, too (local legal representation, transport/logistics, ...)
That is objectively dirt-cheap compared to basically all of the west.
Yes, wages might be even cheaper in neighboring countries, but those lag behind in infrastructure, education, political stability, availability of capital and network effects from existing industry (and are thus not a viable alternative to China yet for lots of things).
> Manufacturing labor cost in China has surpassed parts of Eastern Europe.
This is a good point, but I think that only really the underdeveloped/underindustrialized/unstable parts really qualify, possibly Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, with similar caveats than Chinas neighbors.
Despite all this a lot of European manufacturing (e.g. cars), has shifted into the more viable low-wage countries over the last decades (despite language barriers and very high automation; talking mainly Poland, Slovenia, Hungary here).
You still need labor to build, maintain and operate factories, even if they are filled with robots; people here underestimate the benefit of cheap labor by a lot.
Because of the efficiency of the EV motor vs. the ICE motor, EVs are far cleaner than ICEVs even when fossil-fuel-powered and that's not factoring in the (slow) cleaning of the grid which will widen that gap over time, as the other comment mentioned.
Right, but you can switch an EV to a clean source of energy in the future, which you can't do with a petrol car (until carbon-capture fuel becomes viable)
I think you should find authoritative sources rather than relying on blogspam misrepresenting the source article.
Your article is a single paragraph:
> China burned more coal at power plants between January and July of 2025 than at any time since 2016, despite massive renewable capacity, according to new environmental research report.
Which was updated due to not correctly presenting the underlying report.
> Correction: The article initially referred to China burning coal at record high levels and had other inconsistencies with the original CREA report. This has been edited to reflect that the study highlighted an increase in coal power plants, rather than burned coal, after being contacted by the research institution.
Which is what I have been telling you again and again. China is building tons of coal plants but in absolute terms the coal usage is declining.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-xi... ("Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human Rights Concerns" / "The global industry is cutting some ties to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and companies are less transparent, a new report found")
However most of the "slave" talk these days comes from highly politicized sources, so it's hard to cut through to the truth. For example, it's not likely that there's enough Uyghur slave labor to be involved with "most" of the polysilicon even from Xinjiang, much less the entire world's supply.
IMHO, like the cobalt getting mined by children from artisanal-scale mines in Africa, it's a very serious issue that gets trotted out more as a political football against the entire technology, rather than expressed as an earnest concern to solve the underlying problem.
> IMHO, like the cobalt getting mined by children from artisanal-scale mines in Africa
Not really an issue for solar battery systems as they typically use the cheaper LFP chemistry that has a much higher cycle count. The gravimetric density is a bit less, but that only really matters for high-performance mobility.
The post you're replying to didn't explain it well, but: LFP batteries don't use cobalt (or nickel).
LFP production is starting to pass NMC (lithium + nickel manganese cobalt oxide). Slightly lower density but a lot of advantages in lack of easily catching on fire, longer lifetime -- and lack of cobalt. LFP (LiFePo4) is the battery chemistry of choice today for solar installations, where the longer lifetime and increased safety are a big win and the slightly lower density doesn't matter, unlike mobile applications.
I suppose I could have been clearer, but I figure it was an easy connection tom make from talking about chemistry to the question of whether cobalt is even relevant.
> Here in the US, the thirteenth amendment seems to think that a little slavery is cool.
For anyone not familiar with the US Constitution, the 13th Amendment forbids slavery and involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
Without that "except as a punishment for [a] crime" clause, being sentenced to N hours of community service would be forbidden by the Constitution, and the second-lowest penalty judges could impose (the lowest being a fine) would be prison time. So that clause was actually necessary to include in order to allow for more lenient sentences for crimes that deserve something more severe than a fine: lowest level of sentencing is a fine, after that comes being sentenced to community service (which most people agree is less severe than prison, even though it does count as involuntary servitude), and then after that come the more severe sentences like prison.
Most other countries seem to be able to have community service orders without labelling it “servitude”. Do you have a reference for why community service is defined as servitude in the US?
Are you saying that being ordered by a judge to perform work, without pay, and which you would not have done absent those orders, does not fit the definition of involuntary servitude?
Because while the precise definitions of servitude do vary from dictionary to dictionary, and some define it more harshly than others, in general it fits. One definition I found online (with no reference to which dictionary it came from) defines servitude as "A condition in which an individual is bound to work for another person or organization, typically without pay." Another one (Cambridge dictionary) says it's "the state of being under the control of someone else and of having no freedom". I couldn't check the Oxford English Dictionary as it requires a subscription to look up even one word. Merriam-Webster lists two meanings, one of which applies to land. the one that applies to people is "a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life".
Now, being sentenced to community service is only a temporary condition of servitude, which ends as soon as a given number of hours have been served. And it might not fit the strict definition if the person being sentenced is allowed to choose the form their community service will take; I lack knowledge of what kinds of community-servitude sentences are commonly handed out. But if the person being sentenced does not get to choose the form his community service will take, but instead is told "Your community service will be served in the city clerk's office. Show up at 9:00 AM on Monday ready to make photocopies and run errands," then that counts as being under the control of another and lacking freedom during the period of community service. It's not a permanent state of servitude, but even a temporary state of servitude is forbidden by the 13th amendment (other than as a sentence for a crime), because otherwise people at the time would have argued "Oh, fifty years of involuntary servitude still counts as 'temporary', so I'm allowed to carry on with imposing debt peonage on my debtors."
(I should also mention that I am not a lawyer, so perhaps US lawyers have already reached broad consensus on whether community service counts as involuntary servitude under US law; if someone knows whether that's true, I welcome being corrected on my point).
The context for the 13th amendment was that slavery was legal in the US then. It mostly wasn’t in other countries, so they never had to try to find the language to allow judicial punishments while disallowing private slavery. If you are given a community service orders without labelling in the UK for example, nobody thinks it’s slavery or servitude, they just think it’s a valid sentence under the law. The grey area is probably around profiting off such work?
> It [slavery] mostly wasn't [legal] in other countries [at the time the 13th Amendment was passed, i.e. the mid 1860's]...
The history of the 19th century and when slavery was abolished in each one is actually a fascinatingly complex subject, and there's tons of interesting history hiding behind your word "mostly", to the point where I can't actually tell whether "mostly" is a correct or incorrect description. Judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave... I would lean towards "definitely correct in Europe and the Americas, a lot murkier in Africa and Asia". Oddly enough, a lot of Spanish colonies in South America abolished slavery before the United States did, yet Spain itself didn't pass its law ending slavery until a year after the US's 13th Amendment came into effect.
If you're at all interested in the history of that era, the film Amazing Grace, though it takes a few liberties with the historical facts, is a mostly-accurate depiction of what it took to get slavery abolished in the United Kingdom. Interestingly, the part of Prime Minister William Pitt was played by a then-unknown Benedict Cumberbatch (Amazing Grace came out in 2006, and most people first discovered Cumberbatch when Sherlock came out in 2010). I recommend the film if you enjoy historical films; it's quite fun. (I love the "I would have been bored by botany" line).
fascinating reading here on HN every now again someone taking a moral high ground on some random shit while actively using products and services of some of the most evil corporations in the history of mankind
Talking about degrees of slavery is decidedly not cool. If you have documentation of iPhone supply chain using forced labor like I linked to, please do share rather than trying to be morally ambiguous.
I dont think China deserves that hat tip. Their "commitment" was done years after all the major nations had committed to emissions reduction and seems to have only been done so they could sell the solution. They've made little attempt to reduce emissions and instead scaled their industrial base to capitalize on the demand from nations working to reduce their carbon footprint.
The only thing they've done to greenwash their image is spend money buying articles that present the false image of a green china.
besides toomuchtodo's nicely made argument, I would like to point that that many "major" nations (I'm assuming that refers to mostly western countries, correct me if I'm wrong) were able to focus on committing to emissions because they gave their dirty work (ie: mass manufacturing, waste disposal, resource extraction) to other countries, especially China.
toomuchtodo's arugments are deluded and ill respond to those in a bit. But I want to be clear that no one "gave" their dirty work to china. Industry in all these countries were priced out.
The Western and Asian governments increased environmental regulations and the cost to do business rose. In China the government ignored its climate obligations and slashed environmental regulations and increased coal investment to drive energy costs down and thus the manufacturing moved there. You think Germany couldnt have cut environmental regulations slapped down a few coal plants and made solar panels?
Thats why there was climate meetings to get everyone on the same track. If everyone is aligned in their goals then the economic hurt is easier to bare. China intentionally captialised on this and I do not think they deserve any praise for it.
I agree and find it disturbing people downvote this point of view because that is actually the most reasonable one when you look at the actual facts.
It's completely stupid to pretend China is going green when their emissions have continuously increased and the rate has even accelerated the richer they got.
It was all done so they could capture the business of western countries and run a silent economic war. Now most of europe is so dependent on China it's hopeless and they are not even cheaper because all kinds of costs have been added.
> Global solar installations are breaking records again in 2025. In H1 2025, the world added 380 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity – a staggering 64% jump compared to the same period in 2024, when 232 GW came online. China was responsible for installing a massive 256 GW of that solar capacity. For context, it took until September last year to pass the 350 GW mark. This year, the milestone was achieved in June. That pace cements solar as the fastest-growing source of new electricity generation worldwide. In 2024, global solar output rose by 28% (+469 terawatt-hours) from 2023, more growth than any other energy source. Nicolas Fulghum, senior energy analyst at independent energy think tank Ember, said, “These latest numbers on solar deployment in 2025 defy gravity, with annual solar installations continuing their sharp rise. In a world of volatile energy markets, solar offers domestically produced power that can be rolled out at record speed to meet growing demand, independent of global fossil fuel supply chains.”
> Utility-scale solar power capacity in China reached more than 880 gigawatts (GW) in 2024, according to China’s National Energy Administration. China has more utility-scale solar than any other country. The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024. Planned solar capacity projects will likely lead to continued growth in China’s solar capacity. More than 720 GW of solar capacity are in development: about 250 GW under construction, nearly 300 GW in pre-construction phases, and 177 GW of announced projects, according to the Global Solar Power Tracker compiled by Global Energy Monitor.
> China’s coal-fired electricity generation took an unexpectedly sharp turn downward in the first quarter of 2025, signaling a potentially profound shift in the world’s largest coal-consuming economy. This wasn’t merely a seasonal dip or economic distress signal; rather, it represented a clear and structural turning point. Coal generation fell by approximately 4.7% year over year, significantly outpacing the overall grid electricity supply decline of just 1.3%. However, electricity demand, a better measure, went up by 1%. What gives?
> China’s Decarbonization Is So Fast Even New Coal Plants Aren’t Stopping It. In multiple sectors—transportation, renewable energy, and overall electrification—the clear trend is toward a greener energy system. In fact, in areas like renewables and electric vehicles, China is now the world’s leading player. With the United States essentially abandoning the field, it will become even more dominant.
> China’s installations of wind and solar in May are enough to generate as much electricity as Poland, as the world’s second-biggest economy breaks further records with its rapid buildup of renewable energy infrastructure. China installed 93 GW of solar capacity last month – almost 100 solar panels every second, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Wind power installations reached 26 GW, the equivalent of about 5,300 turbines.
(it is somewhat irrelevant that China has accomplished spinning up a clean tech machine of this scale out of energy security reasons, as it still accomplishes the goal of decarbonizing their economy first, and then, the rest of the world as their spun up manufacturing flywheel exports cheap clean tech to the world)
We're at the point where things are changing fast. Yes, largely driven by the ginormous solar and battery production coming from China. The rest of the world better get their ducks in order if they want to compete.
Solar bribery is interestingly the exact opposite in some of the USA, where the solar contractors have basically gotten in bed with government for regulatory capture on the market.
Most places in my state you need an electrician license, permits, bonding, insurance, a special 'solar' warranty, and inspections if you want solar.
I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid without anyone from the government ever even looking at it or taking money for it. If I wanted to add a solar system, it basically completely fucked everything and I would have had to gone through the normal permitting and inspection system for my house which would have made even building the house basically impossible for me.
> I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid without anyone from the government ever even looking at it or taking money for it.
That's... not common (perhaps more-so in rural areas).
In my area, being connected to the grid brings a lot more hassle: the utility gets a say in how much solar you can build, as well as how it's connected. Some of it makes sense (they want to make sure you're not going to backfeed during an outage and cause a hazard to linemen), but a lot of it is them protecting their bottom line.
Interesting. My utility let me do my own service entrance and everything. They didn't even give a shit what I connected it to. I ended up powering a whole house and a trailer without anyone from the power company even looking at either of them (I added them after I built a 200 amp service entrance as just a stubbed entrance with no load).
If I added a solar system they would neither care nor have any idea. Only the government cares here.
It's not about them protecting their bottom line. It's about managing the supply-demand balance to within the tight tolerances required to operate the grid stably . You can't just let an unconstrained new amount of generation come online and maintain a stable grid.
I feel very optimistic about battery storage for this reason. I would love nothing more than be able to run on battery for a week or so so I can give a middle finger to the utility and just rip out the grid connection. No more solar inverter or power limit permits needed.
You probably still want an inverter to get AC for your household. I’m also still waiting for the house size batteries to come down in price before pulling the trigger apart from a small 200W setup for fun
Wording might have been ambiguous - yes to inverter, no to requesting permission to attach it to the grid (for good reasons, backfeeding power during outages, avoiding overload and fire etc etc.)
In my jurisdiction I could avoid permits and inspections by attaching less than 5 square meters of panels to my house, by staying under 60V, and by staying right of the panel. It would be ridiculous to pay over $3k in permits and inspections for $2k of hardware.
"I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid"
Where exactly do you live? I'm not saying you're lying, but this smells like a tall tale. You can easily buy solar panels and batteries, and if no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.
Maybe what you're saying is, "my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?
>"my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?
Nah they didn't give a shit what I connected it to. I literally stubbed a 200 amp service entrance on vacant land then just went wild connecting it to whatever I like. I shot the shit with their engineer when they ran secondary off the power pole and that was it, I've never seen them again.
> no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.
I don't know for certain but having an unpermitted solar panel visible via satellite would likely trigger a visit.
Great, so it sounds like installing unpermitted solar at your house is about as illegal as jaywalking, and you probably shouldn't worry about it so much.
What law governs this? I'm familiar with a lot of restrictions on grid-tie systems, but I've never heard of it being this strict for something that could (presumably) be done without a back feed.
I mean, are you saying that someone sticking up a few panels+batteries to run an electric fence, gate, and camera system has to have permits?
For example, here is the one that to install certain PV you need permit with roof and building plan, which is impossible on my house because I have none (literally built my roof off the cuff after thumbing IRC).
People have guns in all of the US. Sure, AZ ownership might be around double that of CA, but that's just going from 1 in 4 to 1 in 2. The odds are high either way.
>voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]
This is a disastrous misrepresentation of a complex case with lots of moving pieces. At no point in the history of the construction of that specific power line was there a challenge to legality of citizen initiative until after the vote. Meanwhile, as they were behind in the polls, the company rushed to build as much of it as they could knowing that the initiative was coming, so when they failed at the ballot box, they could claim a legally recognized "vested interest".
Absent the vested interest claim they would have been legally bound by the results of the ballot initiative, and the vested interest was not established until after the ballot had been voted on.
> Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US. The only thing stopping me is the permitting hassle or the contractor hassle.
Does decentralized solar plus batteries give you same amount of reliability? How many days without sunny weather can you survive without having to change your energy use habits?
Each 9 of reliability for infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive. And grid has a lot of 9s.
But having electricity 13 days every two weeks is much better than not having it at all.
This isn't about China building out their grid with an over capacity factor of 200% so they can keep everything running even if rain, sun and wind all fail for months on end. This is a developing county getting to the point they can charge mobile phones consistently.
When I go to https://model.energy/ and ask it to solve for providing steady output in China from 100% renewable energy (wind/solar/battery/hydrogen) at minimum cost using 2030 cost assumptions and 2011 weather data, the solar curtailment is just 7.3% (and most of the energy is coming from solar, not wind). If I remove hydrogen and solve again, solar curtailment increases to 16.7%. "200% overcapacity" is completely bogus.
Try that again with 99% renewable and it becomes much more reasonable with regards to over overcapacity. 1% non-renewable would be a very good outcome.
One can enable "dispatchable 1" which is simple cycle gas turbines, and limit the total CO2 emission so that's at most 1% of the generation. Doing that, and with no hydrogen, solar curtailment is reduced by more than half, to 8.1%.
And what was the storage requirement? I just ran those parameters myself with China's 2.9 TW of constant electricity demand, and the storage requirement was over 70,000 GWh of battery storage.
By comparison, global battery production is around 1,000 GWh per year.
Battery production capacity grows by 10x every five years. In 2021 there was ~100 GWh of batteries produced a year. In 2031, it's going to be 20-30TWh per year. Current batteries have 10+ year warranties, and last 20-25 years. We're likely to see 30 years+ for the newer sodium ion batteries.
For something like 20 years, people have been looking at the exponential growth in the annual solar deployments and saying "well that's it, starting next year we're only going to deploy exactly as much as last year, plus 5%-30%". And every year these predictions are proven wrong. And every year they do the same dumb thing again:
It was around 14 hours of battery storage. Seems reasonable.
Realize that replacing all ICE road vehicles in the US with 70 kWh BEVs would require storage equal to ~40 hours of our average grid usage. The future is going to need large numbers of batteries, which is why China has been all in on this.
14 hours of battery (~40 TWh for China) with the hydrogen storage or without? Because the calculator was reporting ~78,000 GWh battery storage with China's weather selected, and 2030 technology assumptions. I changed the spatial capacity factor from 1 to 2 and the battery storage requirement dropped down to 68 TWh, but still well above 40 TWH.
Regardless, 14 hours of China's electricity demand is a whopping 40,600 GWh. By comparison, 2024's lithium ion battery production figure was 1.5 TWh [1]. Even assuming 100% of this went to EV's we're still talking about roughly 25 years worth of global battery production to fulfill only China's demand for storage in this model. As you point out, we still have loads of battery demand for EV adoption, so nowhere near 100% of production will be able to be diverted to grid storage.
The scale of storage required to make intermittent sources viable without being backed by a dispatchable energy source really is tremendous, and this often gets overlooked in pushes for a fully renewable grid.
Battery production capacity grows by 10x every five years. It was four years ago when I first heard that, and we are exactly on track still. In 2031 we will be at 20-30 TWh/year production capacity.
There are few things that grow this fast when it comes to manufactured things, atoms are far harder to arrange and scale than bits. But it's happening at a tremendous scale. Natural gas turbine production capacity is tapped out with long order queues, and so is battery production well into 2026, but only battery production capacity is expanding at breakneck speed.
Understand that only ~6 TWh of lithium batteries have been produced to date. As in, every single year of production combined adds up to less than 6 Twh. Moore's law largely stemmed from the fact that making a processer faster also meant making transistors smaller. Reducing the width of a transistor to a half, a quarter, etc. increased compute per cm^2 by double, quadruple, etc. Chemistry doesn't obtain that kind of exponential growth - we have hard limits on the number of joules we can store per gram of anode and cathode, so scaling up production means digging up more anode and cathode material out of the ground. The nature of resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are exhausted first, and continued production is contingent on accessing the progressively more and more inconvenient reserves.
Maybe in 2030 annual global production will be 30 TWh - we'll know in 4 years. But there's a lot of people who probably don't want to make trillion-dollar investments gambling on that possibility panning out.
Regardless of your confidence in battery production's continued growth, I think you'd agree that if someone is making a calculation about the required amount of overproduction required to maintain a stable grid, they should at least mention that their calculation is contingent on provisioning tens of terawatt hours worth of grid storage.
Getting to 10x production capacity doesn't require improving battery tech, it just requires building more factories. The equivalent here isn't Moore's Law, it's fab capacity. If battery tech stalled out today at the same pricing (it won't), we could still 10x the battery production capacity every 5 years just on this pace.
The learning rate for batteries has not been as steep as Moore's Law for ICs. But the value of being able to store mass quantities of electricity at low cost is so incredibly valuable that it's going to blow up into a huuuuge number of factories.
You look at the 6TWh of all time and see that as a limitation. I haven't seen that stat before but I trust you, because with the growth rate of battery production it has to be a tiny number, because it's exponential growth. In 2024, 1.2 TWh of batteries were produced, 20% of all storage capacity ever. That was a single year! What if, in 2024, we produced 20% of all CPU capacity every produced? That's obviously a hugely growing market.
> The nature of resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are exhausted first, and continued production is contingent on accessing the progressively more and more inconvenient reserves. Maybe in 2030 annual global production will be 30 TWh - we'll know in 4 years. But there's a lot of people who probably don't want to make trillion-dollar investments gambling on that possibility panning out.
If you spend a small amount of time diving into the industry, you'll see that there's a massive number of very smart people solving all these resource constraint problems, securing supply chains years in advance, and building like fucking mad. Sure, there's a lot of people that don't want to get involved, but they will be left in the dust.
We are witnessing a massive energy interchange. This is like when the PC came along, but much bigger in terms of quantity and speed. Sure, there are those who are still skeptical of energy storage, 5-10 years after it became blazingly obvious that batteries are cheap and getting cheaper and will take over the enery world. But they are the same people who saw the iPhone and said "it will never catch up to my BlackBerry."
Electricity storage in batteries is a swiss-army knife for the grid that never existed until recently. We couldn't do time arbitrage, always had to match supply and demand instantaneously, across grids spanning hundreds and thousands of miles. No more, that's all gone. We can do tiny microgrids, we can do single houses, we can do 10 TWh installs across grids, because batteries scale small, scale big, are cheap, getting cheaper, and are being produced on a growing scale that most people do not understand.
That was about the amount in both cases. Slightly more in the no-hydrogen case than otherwise. Hydrogen contributed only marginally.
Yes, it's a lot of batteries. So what? It's not like the current battery production is some firm limit. If anything, the very large future demand ensures batteries will be driven down their experience curve, so the cost will be even lower than assumed.
The world spends something like $10T per year on energy. Any replacement energy system is going to be a big thing.
You need to make an argument that is more than you expressing fear of large numbers.
Unfortunately, all such calculations are egocentric. People assume that everyone can use solar panels for 13 days 2 weeks, and when needed, we’ll just get electricity from the grid. But what they don’t take into account is that when there’s load today but none tomorrow, the grid becomes unstable.
2) This also increases costs. You might save electricity consumption in 14 times, but your expenses for grid electricity can increase in 14 times, because the grid still needs to be maintained — staff must be kept at power plants to ensure you can be supplied with 100% of your energy at any moment.
The tricky thing in cold climates is the part of the year when solar power is lowest but electricity use, for heating, is highest. Sometimes they have hydro or something.
Sounds good until you try to run a business. Having businesses randomly out of commission is not a way to bring country from developing to developed status.
Even if you have an under-provisioned solar+storage solution and don't want to splurge for a generator, even on cloudy days you still get power, just less.
Generally businesses are really great at balancing costs, and for highly-cost-constrained businesses if you give them 95% uptime at half the cost, the equation becomes clear. And in Africa, if the option is 95% uptime or 0% uptime, the choice is even clearer.
Where I live, I only get two 9s from the utility. And I'm within commuting distance of Seattle. With my generator, I still got three nines the one year where the battery tender failed and the generator didn't start when needed, but only because that outage was less than 8 hours and I replaced the battery tender before further outages (I could have jump started the generator, but the outage started overnight and waiting it out was easier). Most years, the number of brief outages adds up, and I probably only get five 9s.
Solar + battery + generator for really bad weeks (but make sure you exercise it!) could pretty easily add up to the two nines I'd get from the utility here.
For developing countries, solar + battery alone is likely be better than many grids which often are intermittent rather than 24/7 and many places don't have any access to utility power.
I actually counted the number of outages after I got my battery unit in June -- it was six in five weeks, for anything from a couple of seconds to 30 minutes, which I noticed because the unit clicked over to running from the battery, and the clock on the oven (which is still only mains powered) flashes until I go over and hit a button.
In April I had a 40 hour outage after a storm. That's what caused me to order the brand new Pecron E3600LFP, first New Zealand model shipment in "early" June (I received mine June 19).
In February 2023 I had a 4 day outage during/after a storm.
There are even, every 2 or 3 months, scheduled and notified 9 AM - 3 PM outages for equipment maintenance, tree trimming etc. Just those alone lower the grid reliability to around 99.5%.
Six days outage in three years -- let's call it four -- drops grid reliability by another 0.4%.
So, yeah, two 9s is about right.
With the Pecron base unit (US$999 at the moment still on Halloween special, $1259 before that) I simply don't notice any outage under 4 hours, and that's even with a full winter heating load. In fact I deliberately turn the mains to it off from 7-9 AM and 5-9 PM every day.
A 4 hour outage was a little close sometimes, so in August I added a 3kWh expansion battery ($699 on pecron.com right now).
With 6kWh I can run my fridge, computers, Starlink, some LED lighting for 36 hours. Or 30 hours with typical kitchen appliance usage added (espresso machine, toaster, kettle, microwave, air fryer).
Or virtually forever now I added 6x 440W solar panels (cost me US$400 total) to it, which still generates around 200W between them in even the worse overcast and rain.
I'm running this stuff as a mini off-grid system, not connected to the house wiring at all -- except plugged into a standard socket to charge the battery if needed. I also have a $450 2kW petrol generator which I can use to charge the battery if needed, but needing that should be very rare.
Total cost: under US$3k. More like $2.3k at the current Halloween special prices.
The grid has a lot of 9s, but in a lot of places losing power for a day or two after a storm is not unusual at all. The grid per se being fine but your actual neighborhood being dark for a couple days is a pretty common experience in some places.
Last time my building lost power was about 19 years ago, when I was living in a Welsh valley halfway between the two nearest villages.
Since then, none of the extended Portsmouth conurbation, Sheffield, Cambridge, rural Cambridgeshire or Berlin have had any problems big enough to even notice while I've lived in them.
I have seen at least two circuit breakers trip in that time though.
In the UK, I think I can remember 3 power outages my entire life. One when there was significant flooding in my hometown as a child, which lasted around a day, once at university for a few hours (local substation failed) and recently 30 minutes overnight while they were upgrading something (with a lot of notice). I may be undercounting/misremembering but I don't think its far off.
I think the main difference is the UK in all but mostly rural areas has all the power lines underground. This is very different in eg North America where you can go a few blocks out of downtown areas and it is all overhead delivery.
I don’t know where you live, but I experienced outage in Budapest once in at least 10 years while I lived there. And only one phase was out, not all. We even lamented with my friends that we didn’t even remember when was the last time when something like that happened. I never had to reconfigure the clock on my microwave, just for daylight saving time. I know that even 30 kms from there my granddad still experiences outages monthly, but there are places where that happens very-very rarely nowadays.
And, for a refrigerator and a lot of loads, being down for 2 days straight is way worse than a few hours a year. losing 48 hours of supply a year if broken into 2 hour chunks is not nearly as bad as losing 48 consecutive hours.
I get your point, but I personally would be grumpy if I lost power for two hours twice a month. I realize that is rich considering this article is about people who are lucky to get any amount of power reliably
When I lived in a city proper, the grid was doing well to maintain 98% uptime. Multiple day long outages were the rule, not uncommon to lose power 3-5 days in a row.
Now I live in a rural area and it's uncommon to avoid outages more than a month. We have an automatic transfer switch and fuel generator from previous owners and it saves hundreds of dollars in frozen food.
This is in the US by the way. If you're investing in a transfer switch and generator now, the cost is going to quickly approach a modest solar + battery set up with a whole house inverter, and of course, you save money all year that way, not just in outages.
The grid where I live has a target of 89 minutes of unplanned power outages per year for urban customers and somewhere in the high 200s for long rural feeder lines. This is in Australia, where serving outlying customers comes with some geographical challenges. I think it's currently sitting at 99.998% reliability. I can't remember the last unplanned outage longer than a couple of minutes, although they did some planned work last year and took out our power for half an hour.
I'm surprised that someone would think days of power outages are normal everywhere. My family used to get hit with 8+ hour outages every few years back in the 90s because we were at the end of a single long rural feeder line, and we thought that was an unacceptable frequency.
I lost power for 10h in my city recently and it was a big fucking deal. The last 5 years that's the first time that happened. I would say I have less than a hour of downtime per year in the other years
Can confirm. I live in a US city and the only 9 involved is maybe the very first number. I've lived here just over a year and we've had 1 full day without power and probably 8 to 10 short outages between a few seconds and several 10s of minutes. I'm adding batteries and solar permitting be damned.
Wild! I’ve lived in Chicago and San Francisco and have never lost power for more than an hour. And can’t remember the last time it went out at all, maybe 2 years ago?
I'm (not GP) in the Chicago burbs and expect to lose power 1-3 times a year. Usually it's for less than twelve hours but last year it was out for three days straight. Most recent outage was ~10 minutes long a couple weeks ago - I still haven't set the oven clock.
The cause around here is usually storm + trees + above ground power lines, plus a low enough population density that you're not top priority for the utility company.
My concern is that it deflates any impetus to actually solve the problems of regulatory capture, profiteering, and other corruption.
Not everybody can afford the up front costs of installing solar + battery storage, plus replacement when the PV cells and batteries inevitably reach EoL. These people will be left behind on a decaying grid nobody with political capital wants to fix or at the mercy of landlords.
I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.
> I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.
Because people are too busy playing Team Politics instead of solving issues that everyone can get behind.
Fixing the power grid is one of those things that everyone could get behind, and yeah I agree, it disproportionately affects the economically disadvantaged.
It is funny to me how fractally perverse systems gets when a centralised authority refuses to directly solve a problem but rather decide have it solved by third party uncooperative players by creating an endless stream of byzantine rules to force the solution to be a twisted copy of what the centralised authority could have done by itself.
Of course there are failure modes in any approach but "oh no! Herding cats is hard. Who could have imagined!" is funny to me
According to PVWatts, a 10kW solar system would get me very close to my average usage in December. I'd be way over in the summer, could probably get away with a 4kW system and dial back use during an outage. I can lease two Powerwall 3 batteries from my utility company for $55/mo.
We used to lose power 3-4 days a winter in our old house. It would have been really nice to have heat. A generator or smaller system could handle that.
keep in mind the limitations of these forecasting calculations. On an AVERAGE day, assuming AVERAGE weather, assuming AVERAGE load, you should be fine.
The trouble with relying on the weather for your electricity is that it is entirely possible that you will go five days straight with cloud cover, limited to no solar generation and then be freezing. This is the problem that the electricity grid solves with varied sources of generation.
I read a decent essay about the difference between solar and wind reliability and fossil fuel reliability.
Solar and wind tend to be regularly and predictably intermittent but not unreliable. That's something you can design around. Especially when you have cheap storage to handle critical loads.
It's instructive to look at California's ISO website's supply graphs over the year. Renewables follow a reliable daily cycle.
Distributed can do redundancy. It’s relatively cheap.
Consider a family with two cars instead of one. How often do they have zero working cars? The correlated failure rate squares while the cost doubles.
My home now has a grid connection, house battery and solar, a caravan with mounted solar/battery/fridge/inverter beside it, and I also have a portable “powerstation” and portable solar panel which is basically a UPS. My fridge contents and phone charging needs have a several extra 9’s now for costs that have scaled very well.
These systems are tech that is improving rapidly. In some years these African farmers with their increased yields will likely add a bigger, second solar & battery system. In a village you can run a cable next door. Etc.
I mean, it very much depends on where you are. Three 9s would be no more than about 8 hours downtime per year. A lot of rural locations would do worse than that, realistically.
Poor countries have different problems that don’t let decentralization to work.
Local gangs go around and demand protection money and if you don’t pay up your solar panels will unfortunately suffer some “accidental” catastrophic damage.
Poor countries have these problems, yes, but they don’t stop whatever, they just add some expense to it. In certain areas of Mexico, businesses have to pay taxes to the local cartel, but if you do, they’ll leave you alone-and they know that if they demand too much, that’s actually undermining their own self-interest. Effectively, the cartel is just another level of local government, taxing you like all the others do. An armed gang or warlord somewhere in Africa or Syria or Afghanistan very often functions similarly.
Here in Austria, grid costs are now on par with the actual electricity cost. Each are ca €0.1 per kWh now, plus again that in taxes.
Once the EU finally gets rid of the ridiculous pricing model where spot prices are dictated by the most expensive energy source (usually, gas), we might have a situation where grid costs exceed the cost of energy itself.
Oh and what do they do with that money? Hoard it for upcoming grid updates, which they supposedly have to make to accommodate solar peaks and EV charging. And buy solar parks in Spain, apparently.
>Once EU finally gets rid of the ridiculous pricing model where spot prices are dictated by the most expensive energy source (usually, gas), we might have a situation where grid costs exceed the cost of energy itself.
Why is it ridiculous? From a pure mathematical economics point of view it's genius I think. It means energy producers can just set their price at production price, knowing they will get the best deal that way and thus don't need to speculate on the electricity prices. It makes electricity as cheap as possible when it's abundant and expensive when it's not, also incentifying users of electricity to shift their consumption.
> Soon there is so much solar that you don't need the expensive gas most of the time.
In the EU (winters with weak solar radiation) this only works if you can store power over multiple months. Getting rid of gas means purchasing and maintaining a giant amount of batteries. Slow storage won’t save you from outages during peaks. We do have very cheap power from solar, during the hot months. In winter, its wind and offshore turbines that are prevalent, but they are as unpredictable.
So, solar and wind power is trivial. Storage is the issue. And consumers will pay that storage, in both grid cost, and spot prices.
I don’t understand why peak producers should dictate prices for all levels of service. Make an exception for them that’s adequate, like a second peak market, and done? Why should a solar producer (who doesn’t buffer!) get 3x the price only because Russia turns up gas prices and the big producers start panic buying expensive gas futures, poisoning their whole lineup in the process? Solar producers just pump whatever’s coming out of their panels into the market, with no regard for grid stability.
Right now providing grid stability is maximally rewarded because you get paid a lot when it's needed and little when there's a lot of electricity available. Storage providers can use this spread to make money and create grid stability.
I'm not sure what you mean by second peak market?
Let me turn around the question, why should a gas plant get more for its electricity when it's indistinguishable from solar electricity?
> why should a gas plant get more for its electricity when it's indistinguishable from solar electricity?
I already wrote it: levels of service. A gas plant powers up in minutes. A coal plant in hours. A nuclear reactor in years. Solar and wind isn’t controllable at all.
The cheaper suppliers actually bid with their prices, and why wouldn’t those prices be fair then? The EU then goes and gives them more than they offered. Make it make sense. Google „merit order“.
It‘s still a gamble for suppliers btw. The prices change every 15 minutes, and every cheap supplier is at the whim of more expensive suppliers.
Err, no, it's an actual system we built here to service an actual town to soak excess energy from midday solar and buffer an actual real town from blackouts.
The battery banks in Adelaide an elsewhere are real - you can kick them.
You can price these against gas peaker turbine plants, and then compare the robustness of mini distributed storage nodes against larger single point of failure fossil fuel gas plants.
I understand the Western Power link provided looks like media hype, it was put together years back at the start of the project with minal updates in the interim.
It's well out of date now that the Walpole project has been completed and is up and running for a few months now.
The point you appear to miss is that it works and can be easily distributed across a nation cheaply and robustly.
Single massive peaker plants Vs. many smaller battery parks and pumped hydro nodes.
It depends upon the population distributions, topologies, power grid, etc.
Adelaide is a state capital with massive battery banks and large amounts of renewable energy, they have long periods of self suffiency and export excess power to neighbouring states.
This is dull power infrastructure engineering reality, not woo woo imaginary hype.
Great profit to be had from solar because of expensive gas.
Let’s put aside that this isn’t good for the end user, as it openly admits the whole point of solar is great profit, rather than savings for the end user.
> Let’s put aside that this isn’t good for the end user, as it openly admits the whole point of solar is great profit, rather than savings for the end user.
The whole point of capitalism is that in a well-regulated, open, competitive market, an ecosystem of companies pursuing maximum profit drive down each other's profit margins as they compete for a limited pool of consumers. In other words, it is precisely the profit motive that creates savings for the end user.
Exactly. The same principles that apply for solar energy are already in place for natural gas and for every other form of energy and the fundamental logic of markets is that there's a price point consumers will pay that's also profitable for the company.
That didn't newly become an issue for the first time once solar entered the picture. There should be a word for this type of argument where people relitigate settled principles because they're discovering them for the first time.
> the fundamental logic of markets is that there's a price point consumers will pay that's also profitable for the company
Electricity demand is price inelastic, meaning the consumer has no direct influence on prices, and will pay practically any price (well, up to a point). In the EU, the day-ahead spot prices are published every day at 2PM CEST, and it's a bidding market driven only by suppliers. If gas price goes up by x3, total electricity price average will go up by some linear factor, because gas turbines are absolutely required for surges/peaks - at least until we have enough batteries.
I'm sorry, but somehow this manages to be the most incorrect comment in the entire thread so far, a textbook case of missing the forest for the trees.
For starters, numbers I've seen suggest something day ahead prices are something like 10% to 30% of the overall energy supply because most of it's sold outside of that context via things like regulated utility pricing, forward and futures markets which sell weeks to years ahead, and long-term bilateral contracts such as power purchase agreements. So most energy is not purchased this way over the short term.
Moreover, for goodness sake, inelasticity at the margin doesn't make something not a market, that's simply not what inelasticity means, and none of these considerations have anything to do with whether solar power in particular can be profitably offered to customers. (Again, why would it be just applying uniquely and exclusively to solar power but not other forms of energy?)
Investments of various kind occur over horizons of days, months, and years where these market dynamics unfold. Every energy source on offer whether it be solar panel, gas turbine and storage facility is financed built and dispatched based on the expectations of cost and profit. Demand is quite elastic over the horizon of months and years, and demand inelasticity is sometimes a feature of markets not something that identifies any specific phenomena that prevents solar power in particular from entering markets.
Solar power rises and falls throughout the day in a manner that conveniently aligns with actual energy consumption patterns, and its net effect on the grid is de-stressing peaking infrastructure.
So it's certainly true that there are day ahead markets but if you think the upshot of that is that it somehow means solar can't be provided at a price point affordable to consumers that simultaneously profitable to the companies providing it, well, the phrase "missing the forest for the trees" was practically invented for moments like this.
Even more generally, this applies to commodity markets. Price of potatoes is x EUR/kg, set by supply and demand. If some farmer can produce potatoes for 0.1x EUR/kg, they get to make a good profit.
Now electricity wholesale markets are an artificial construct, but it has been designed to mimic other commodity markets in that the producer on the margin sets the price.
It’s not like I’m discovering the concept for the first time.
I just think when people say things like “solar is cheaper than gas” they should say for who.
Solar is cheaper than gas for the capitalist.
And there’s no guarantee the capitalists savings will ever be passed on to the consumer.
In my market, Australia, the energy retailers are regulated to increase prices once a year. Increase prices. Never a saving for the retail customer. They’ve worked out that can skip all that messy market bullshit and just regulate annual increases.
> In my market, Australia, the energy retailers are regulated to increase prices once a year. Increase prices. Never a saving for the retail customer. They’ve worked out that can skip all that messy market bullshit and just regulate annual increases.
Have you actually read the regulation?
The AEMC said the new rules were in response to requests from Australia's energy minsters. They will:
* prevent retailers from increasing prices more than once a year
* ban excessive charges like late-payment fees for all retail contracts
* ensure all consumers are entitled to a fee-free payment method
* prohibit retail fees for vulnerable consumers
* ensure vulnerable Australians are receiving their retailer’s best offer
* prevent retailers from charging more than the standing offer price if the customer's initial offer changes or expires. This will protect customers from paying higher prices for their loyalty.
The rules to improve consumer confidence in retail energy plans will come into effect on 1 July 2026. Those that assist hardship customers take effect from 30 December 2026.
There is a difference between
A) regulation that forces a price rise once a year.
and
B) regulation that stops more than one price rise (if any) in any year.
It sounds like what you are talking about is the "Default Market Offer", aka the Australian equivalent to the "standard offer" in the United States. I cannot possibly stress this enough: nothing about the existence of the standard offer has anything to do with the relative economics of solar to other energies, so it's bizarre that you're showing up in a middle of a thread about solar power specifically, and treating a phenomenon that applies to the energy market as a whole like it's only a problem for solar.
And remember what this thread is about - Solarpunk in Africa, off the grid, which is a case that has nothing to do with regulated utility grids, so it couldn't possibly have less to do with the article that this thread is about.
You're insisting you're not discovering the concept for the first time, yet even in this comment you're still doing the same thing, treating systemic regulations that apply to energy markets writ large like they somehow only apply to solar. You wouldn't be doing that if you understood beforehand that these systemic problems had nothing to do with solar in particular, you would be doing it if you were just starting to look into solar and discovered those issues for the first time, which I what I think is happening.
If solar is cheaper to produce (which it often is), there's room for undercutting natural gas and room for profit, a mutual benefit to customers and the solar industry where only natural gas loses.
comments like this really show that many people with strong opinions do not understand how the electricity grid, electricity markets or electricity economics work.
Electricity is priced at the edge entirely because demand must match supply at all times. You either meet all electric demand or someone will go without power. This is why marginal pricing exists and this is why the most expensive generator is always the last to be accepted. This is why electricity at night is cheaper that during the day.
Please, if you do not understand what you are talking about, it's ok to just say that you don't know. Don't spread misinformation like this.
> Electricity is priced at the edge entirely because demand must match supply at all times. You either meet all electric demand or someone will go without power.
There's also more to it than just that. Supply-demand imbalance affects the frequency on the grid. Too high or too low frequency damages the turbines in the base load power plants, and they will shut down to avoid damage if the frequency goes too far out of range. Hence, too little or too much power actually causes grid collapse.
Solar actually has to be managed a lot more carefully than people realise.
In the Japanese market in summer during the day the spot price nose dives to almost nothing because of an oversupply of solar. Yet most installed solar is operating under the FIT system where all generation is guaranteed to be bought by the regional generation company for a fixed price, regardless of what the spot price is. This worked to incentivise bringing lots of solar online, but its paid for by adding a levy as a line item to everyone's electricity bill. To lower the financial burden the government is ending the FIT system and transitioning to FIP where from memory solar operators still make similar money as they did under FIT but it's sold on the spot market and then the government pays a premium on top.
The TSOs have to manage the supply-demand balance and there's things like the balancing market to help with this. However the government is also changing the regulations to put more of the burden of managing the supply-demand onto the solar operators themselves and not lump it all on the TSOs. Lots of people invested in solar under the FIT system because operation and expected revenue was straightforward. Now with shifting to FIP it's less straightforward. Additionally when the burden finally falls to the solar operators to proactively manage the supply-demand balance, there aren't good systems they can readily leverage to do so, and the average Joe with solar panels on their roof isn't necessarily going to want to be submitting 30 minute generation plans to their regional TSO, hence they'll eventually have to wind up going through aggregators and such becoming part of a virtual power plant where you may have things occur like negawatt transactions to incentivising reducing demand to help manage the supply-demand balance etc.
PPAs are also an increasingly popular option for purchasing/selling solar power. They're usually fixed price contracts, but depending on how it's setup money either changes hands directly between the generator and consumer (via a retailer) or sometimes the generator sells it all on the spot market and then settlement of the difference between the contract price occurs afterwards between the parties. Even with fixed price contacts the revenue isn't completely guaranteed because the TSO might need to issue curtailment orders to the generator in order to manage supply-demand balance when there is oversupply or grid congestion.
It's not all sold on the spot market.
Anyway, my comment was less about how it's priced more about hidden operational complexity of renewables non-industry folks aren't aware of. In particular turbines have inertia and so if you stop generating power they will still run for a while, and this helps keep the frequency on the grid stable, but solar doesn't have inertia since it isn't turbine based, so large swings in generation can have an instantaneous impact on grid frequency, which can be destabilizing, unless you do stuff with batteries and inverters to produce pseudo-inertia. TSOs need to manage fluctuations with frequency containment reserve, frequency restoration reserve, and replacement reserve. These costs all wind up as part of the wheeling charges which affect the bills in the end.
There's also things like capacity payments/capacity market which impacts solar operators, but I don't know specifics on how that stuff works.
all true, but in the vast majority of electricity markets, inertia is not priced.
what does drive the price of electricity is fuel cost, not grid stability.
Solar inverters do not have physical inertia but they can have fast frequency response via capacitors. Many wind turbines have this feature and at scale, it is a decent replacement for electromagnetic inertia.
There are a few US Solar wholesaler companies that will draft and sign engineering drawings for a roof-top permit application in most states. Some folks claim https://www.pegasussolar.com/ was inexpensive, and might be worth a call.
The problem with Home Solar is the same as with Heat exchanger installs... some installers price gouge, and simply don't care about the quality of the work.
Best of luck, if you plan to stay someplace 8+ years a 10kW Solar+battery install and heat exchanger are fine investments. We've also donated a few of those cheap FlexSolar 40W Foldable Solar panels + power-bank kits to people in remote areas, and they reported phone/VHF-Handy charging was reliable. =3
Rural electrification in the US hugely proves your point. Yes, grid costs are fantastically expensive!!
At the time: we had no choice! Universal electricity access was (& is) vastly better than the alternative: not having universal access. But what's happening in this article isn't an alternative, not so far: it's leaving the masses behind, dropping the pretense that electricity is a utility that ought be available to society broadly.
Perhaps the private rental systems here provide pretty good access. In general though, I think society really ought to accept pretty big inefficiencies/costs (if that's what it takes) if thats what it takes to provide these base demands widely. It feels horrific to consider only the costs here, to see the inefficiency, without regarding what electrification, transport, and other base utilities enable your people to do, how much it changes lives.
Narrow, mercenary cost analysis is an awful way to run your society. For sure, I deeply hope solar maybe can reduce some of the grid maintenance costs, by decentralizing energy. Over time. But this article &b this comment broadly accept a cost-based analysis, that largely revolve around the failure of a public works, one that needs to be efficient but that also has to be more willing to lose some money, to operate no matter what in unprofitable places. States have to make utilities available, period, whatever combination of political & economic will/unprofitability is required.
I'm excited for solar! The decentralized nature is amazing! But beyond the glory of possibility, it scares the heck out of me that society might just give up on a tie that binds us, might abandon the basic sense of utility that most states have been able to keep going for around a hundred years now.
The success & market capture of the companies spotlighted here is both a success, but also an liability. Solar is plentiful but the middlemen here have enormous price control, that maybe they are not flexing on now, but over time is a capability I would far prefer states tap & use for public benefit, rather than comingling with private interest.
This is not about rich society abandoning its people. (That's the US healthcare mess.)
This is about advances in the technology allowing the people to take care of themselves in cases when the overall society is so poor that it can't provide the central electricity grid.
> in the US you just need to bribe landowners and hold-outs
If you really believe that then you need to read up on how the political system is financed. Members of congress spend a majority of their day calling "donors". That's not mom and dad, it's some corps (or rich individuals) who want to get sth done in return. And magically it gets done if the donations keep flowing. The only thing missing for "bribe" is to actually use the word.
It increases costs of a solar system to about 1.5-2.2x (so an extra 50-120%), not several hundred fold. The hybrid inverter is slightly more expensive than a normal inverter, then you add the 4-16 kWh battery which is pretty cheap nowadays.
Where I live in California permitting is such a pain in the ass that a lot of work goes unpermitted. Contractors have a CYA clause in all of their contracts (along the lines of "the owner is responsible for all permits"). Permits significantly increase the time for a job, with inspectors needing to show up to inspect things before something else can go on top, and things that seem reasonable causing complete reworks[1]. The fact that so few people pull permits means many workers aren't used to inspections, causing even further delays.
1: e.g. I saw an inspector not allow two 90deg. bend in RMC because, while the existing RMC went through a wall, and came out in a straight line on the other side, without knocking out the wall, we couldn't prove that there weren't already 3 90deg. bends. Maybe that's the right call (the electrician certainly thought it was asinine), maybe not, but things like that can significantly increase the time for project completion, since there are downstream effects to the scheduling.
The reason more than 180 degrees of bends is not allowed is because it becomes too hard to pull the wires through. If the inspector was there looking at finished work, the wires are already pulled.
Sorry, it's not. The only proof I need to show is 100 year old wooden power poles that are literally everywhere. I have no idea why this is so highly upvoted. I guess it takes some shit in the tech tree to get you there, but maintenance of the lines and infra is not expensive. You ate the bait.
> voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]
The idea that a private company should get to unilaterally change our environment for profit is gross.
I think it's funny you use this example when CMP has been utterly refusing to connect tens of solar power and community solar projects to our grid, which suffers from a lack of generation contributing to our staggeringly high electricity costs.
Meanwhile, CMP insists that they have to double our rates (again), and don't really provide justification. This despite our generation and distribution costs being entirely separated, CMP having monopoly power over most of the state for distribution buildout, CMP having one of the least reliable grids in the nation despite supposedly spending enormously within the last few years to upgrade parts of the grid, and the whole time, CMP is extracting tidy profits to an entirely different country, from my fellow Mainers who are primarily old and on fixed incomes.
Maybe, just maybe, you don't have an accurate understanding of this issue?
We have several fully built solar farms, desperately needed new generation, just sitting idle as CMP refuses to connect them, because connecting more distributed infrastructure like that would eat into their profit margins, which continue to stay high as they continue to yearly increase our rates while sending out multiple leaflets telling people that they are totally not at fault for increasing their distribution rates because oh my generation costs also went up.
You should look up how much CMP spent on playing ads about how they would totally respect our nature and it would be vaguely great for us to build a transmission line to another state, as they continue to refuse to hook up generation that could reduce our power prices, and not even their chunk of that price!
Isn't it a shame that 90% of the comments here are complaining that AI was involved in producing this article, and none of the comments are from a tech nerd kid in Africa who has electricity because of the solar schemes mentioned in the article?
I worked in this industry, visited several rural areas. Spoke to many people. Sunculture used to be a customer of our software company. The article doesn't quite do justice to the introduction of electricity; it claims that people replace kerosine or diesel with electricity.
From what i've seen this is rarely true. Most people just sit in the dark. This means you go from total darkness at night to electricity. Even the smallest 100lumen light is transformative. You can talk to your family at night. You can make love while seeing your spouse. You can see the spiders and the snakes. You are less afraid of bandits in the night. The biggest impact isn't made by the pumps or the larger systems, but by the significantly more affordable $5-$10 solar lanterns. The poorest of the poorest will get this and pay $0.20 per day or week for this.
I appreciate your response! It’s nice to see the impact of technology from people actually there on the ground.
Too easy to forget that there are ~10 billion people in the world. I live in the US, and it always gives me awe when I realize we represent <5% of humanity.
You’ll likely need to wait a couple decades for this. Kids need to not spend all their free time helping on the farm first and their currency has to appreciate such that they can afford a computing device that isn’t a toy. With yields seeing such big increases it looks feasible, but we’re still early.
I agree in principal, but this whole post is lazy if it's AI-produced. There's certainly no original thought and as the comments mention here, most of the math is outright incorrect
I also saw this on my recent visit to Pakistan, the country has flipped to solar instead of grid for most middle-class homes. Farmers and small industries also have started using solar a lot! Truly transformational (and cheap) thanks to China.
I could handle this style when it wasn't everywhere. But now I've developed a hypersensitivity and can't bear it. It's like suddenly most of the internet is in a language I can't read.
I always wonder now if an article was written by GPT, or by someone who spent so much time chatting with GPT that they've started sounding like an LLM.
I have genuinely wondered if I've picked up an elevated tendency to say "it's not just X, it's Y". No smoking gun that it's affected me just yet, but it's at least a live enough issue that it raises the question.
I hand wrote something recently that I re-read the next day and I'm worried I sound like an LLM now, I'm pretty sure I always sounded like one because I like it to make exhaustive lists in my sentences, but it makes me wonder if the bot is rubbing off on me.
It's part of our ecosystem now, we unconsciously mirror the patterns that we notice around us. This will include the language of LLMs because it has been invited in.
We always affect the environment, and it always affects us.
I hope that the consequence will be that we reduce the fluff, we stop writing to sound important or to justify a position, but instead use language to operate on the level of insight and shift our future into one that benefits us all.
Let's be very charitable and figure out a scenario where this could be true.
Suppose, a farmer has a farm which produces 1 unit of crop. Farmer uses 0.8 of the crop for subsistence and sells 0.2 of the crop. They get $600/acre.
Now, crop yields go up 5x, so now the farm produces 5 units of crop. Subsistence needs are the same, so the farmer is now able to sell 4.2 units of crop. This is 4.2/0.2 = 21 times more revenue or $12,600/acre.
Hmm yeah I didn't consider that they might use part of their yields in ways that don't generate revenue. However that would mean they use $2,400/acre/month of their crops for subsistence which doesn't seem very plausible, so I agree that's a very charitable interpretation. Would only make sense if their field is only a few square meters, in which case the framing of "revenue per acre" is extremely misleading.
Edit: looks like those numbers might be per year (it doesn't seem to specify explicitly), so it actually might be vaguely plausible (though misleading) if we make several charitable assumptions.
They stop growing a full amount of low value subsistence crops needed to survive and start growing cash crops on some portion or on all of the land. Those cash crops have a higher value.
An example - say you have 4 acres of land and have a family of 4.
In the old world, say you needed one acre per person to grow enough food to the next crop harvest. This would be something like corn or potatoes that can keep. So all your land goes to growing food to survive and you cant make any money.
In the new world, with irrigation, you can do much more - say for the sake of argument, 4 times the crop, in the same space. Now, you only need 1/4 of an acre per person or an acre for everyone. So you grow vegetables that sell for 10 times as much on the 3/4s of land you have that you no longer need to use to survive.
Or even better, you grow high veg on the entire piece of land for income and use the cash to buy your corn and potatoes or whatever as you need them.
Just as all other commercial farmers do across the world.
In other words, solar allows them to become small business owners.
You've added the per month part. The article itself doesn't provide a time period but the two reasonable ones are month and year. For a year, that could actually be a reasonable amount of crops kept by a family for their own consumption and storage for later consumption.
maybe over the lifetime of the installation ? But then they say the battery must be replaced after 5 years... So 5*12 - 30 months = 30 months without paying. So one pays about half 2.17 per day over the 5 years. But that's still about 5 times more than 0.21$/day... I'd love to believe the article, but you're right, the maths seem wrong.
That's in a "bear case" section and honestly is far too bearish, warranties are typically 10+ years for. Unless you buy something super cheap that goes bad and the manufacturer is no longer around.
>It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.
>Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.
Isn't this the same thing they did with the internet? They skipped the wired revolution and just implemented it when mobile phone networks made if more feasible. If you look at it only in the present, it seems revolutionary, their mobile usage is through the roof - how modern of them. But if you dig in, they also had decades with essentially no data services when the rest of the world was surfing the web full tilt and they still have a lower access to actual computers which may be lost jobs/skills/etc. In this case, they've had decades of power instability and all that comes with it. So there are tradeoffs being had. It's not a bad strategy for some of the poorer parts of the world to let the rest of the world do the innovating until things are affordable, it's quite smart and should be expected actually.
Kinda, but not really. IRL, feature phones and cheap smartphones subsidized to carry Whatsapp and Facebook apps starting 20 years ago pushed "people using the internet" and at this point Whatsapp is 90% of what people use internet for in Africa because data is cheaper than talk and text.
There's also the perception of usability. I have personally had relatively well-paid Africans tell me that $4 a month for 10 GB of (4G mobile) data was "the most expensive on Earth." Which is not true, I checked, but people say it to try and rumor mill the price down. However, it's sort of almost true in the sense of trying to pay for streaming services and being online like anyone from London or LA on one's hone and not home fiber connections, which only the wealthy have. But that's not how people use their phones anyway. So there's no market for high bandwidth use, and only the wealthy are willing to use bandwidth and pay for it because prices drop per GB once you're doing unlimited fiber connections at home on post-paid accounts. The middle ground is the barrier.
But people like the author who barely know where Africa is on a map love to throw around stats like "85% of Africa is online!" Not like how most Westerners think. Kids in wealthy areas will push being on IG and Tik Tok. In malls in larger cities there's a shop that sells gaming consoles.
This phenomenon is vastly underestimated.
Electricity can also amplify the influence of TikTok and Temu — a world no longer constrained by energy shortages, with social media less dominated by the West, and a marketplace for cheap and affordable industrial goods. Together, these forces will essentially curb uncontrolled population growth in any country and gradually raise living standards. (Also pakistan and many other countries)
Even North Korea is undergoing some changes. The country has long suffered from energy shortages, and the gradual spread of solar power can help address some of these issues. However, I doubt that North Korea’s geographic conditions will allow for much improvement.
And considering geography, if I understand correctly, the Middle East has once again gained a significant advantage?
i think no one can stop that from happening.. you have electricity, you have apps. people will have more thinking on the child thing. and more time on the internet and less time on the home.
I was staying at a Maasai owned ecolodge in Kenya on the day they switched over from generator to solar. It was so much quieter, and with their new electric Range Rover they don’t ever have to go into town except for parts.
All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard. One of the more interesting political/economic questions is can a non-authoritarian country that values environmental protection do rare earth refining, or is the ecological harm in isolation too abhorrent to the members of the community where it is done to counterbalance the ecological good it does elsewhere? In an authoritarian country, you can just tell the people who live around the processing plant to relocate or suffer because it helps the environment elsewhere. In a non-authoritarian country, the local people will all reject it because it will degrade the quality of life and their land. This has been happening in the backlash against mining in Madagascar for example.
> All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard.
You don't actually need rare-earths to produce solar panels, control systems and batteries - at least not in the amounts that require the scale China is operating at.
I wonder this as well - it seems the most strategic path forward for any nation or community is to localize the supply chain as much as possible, but like oil before there's some things that are just impossible or super difficult to get locally. And unfortunately to find new ways to turn sun into electricity costs money to do and won't happen because the cost of the current method is too low to justify trying to turn sand into solar panels or whatever other thing you might try.
I dream of a solar punk future where basically any community can generate power without any horrifying pollution anywhere in the supply chain. Mirror powered smelters, sand batteries.
Rare earth refining isn't a specific industrial process. The cheapest possible method is a specific industrial process, and is very dirty. In a "survivalist solarpunk world" it would probably be done less cheaply.
I have been saying this for a few years now that people are underestimating the change solar, batteries and electric transport/machinery will bring about im many of parts of the world. People are not going to just get access to cheap electricity but also a lot of machinery that they can run with that electricity that was not possible before.
Yep, a memory that changed my perspective on this was in a tiny island in Italy where a grandma was riding her electrical bike uphill with no effort in the middle of the Summer.
When I mean uphill I mean not Tour de France level but damn steep still. And yet, here she was with her grocery in her bag, no problem.
That was absolutely wonderful because, despite my envy, she was autonomous!
She didn't need no stinking petrol station, she could charge at home. She didn't need a humongous garage where streets were ridiculous narrow. She could park somewhere, charge the battery home.
This moment was genuinely wonderful... and my point is that I do believe even though it felt relatively new, I can easily imagine it to deploy at scale for the benefit of most.
> M-PESA, a mobile money platform that let people transfer cash via SMS.
This a thing that needs to be more widely known. If you saying, as people here sometimes do, "oh but my new tech could help people move money in poor parts of the world" (not mentioning any specific tech right now) and you're not familiar with M-PESA, then you're just out of your depth and talking foolishly. The real world has already moved past you.
Yeah, MPESA was and is still an incredible product. A real lightning-in-a-bottle moment. Even if they've struggled to replicate that success in other geos, the original vision and execution back in the 200x's is a textbook case that bears study.
I didn't say that you had to praise it extravagantly, just to be aware of it. To know what the current state of play is. What demonstrably has succeeded, and what untapped niches remain.
Equator, poorest countries with 12 hours of sun 365 days a year. If batteries really fall in price it may rapidly have the cheapest, cleanest energy on the planet. The future of energy intensive industries may be Africa, which would be nice, they could use a break. Not to mention the cheapest place to launch your rockets into orbit.
I heard a fascinating interview with Sandeep Vaheesan[1]
He said in the early days of American electrification, private power companies wouldn't build lines to rural customers because it wasn't expected to be profitable. So rural customers joined together and formed public power companies and got the job done. Not only that, they innovated many cost saving technique which the private power companies eventually adopted.
Public power cooperatives still exist, but have themselves become ossified and commercialized over the years.
After COVID, grid electricity became hugely expensive, but the pushback was massive and unexpected, as people transitioned from a fixed supply to a hybrid online or offline (battery-powered) system.
Several African countries have also been fascinating for the growth of cellular telephone.
Grids require an amount of cohesion that isn't always on-hand in that part of the world (a fancy way of saying "When they built the grid in Europe, they could mostly put copper on telephone poles and assume nobody would just show up and steal it later"). But a cellular node can be built to be self-contained and protected by a single property owner with a shotgun.
It became a much faster and cheaper rollout solution and the demand created a market to justify the cost of improving and perfecting the technology.
I understand why this is happening in Africa first — lack of infrastructure makes the solution much more competitive. But as prices fall, it seems that this might be cost competitive in other areas as well. Selfishly, I’d love to see this in the US! Any big issues that would prevent adoption in the US?
It's mostly politics stopping this in the US. But even with current political roadblocks to solar, it's an absolutely massive part of new builds for grid scale electricity generation:
Already in Germany people are putting solar on their roofs and batteries in their basements which makes them no longer need the grid 80+% of the time. With Sodium-Ion batteries this will go to 90+% at the same cost. It's happening pretty much everywhere.
>Any big issues that would prevent adoption in the US?
Lol is this sarcasm? America is back on the fossil fuel train baby! If you're a patriot, jump on board as we sink this ship! Solar panels are for soyboys and we eat beef out hur.
Joking aside, solar is so cheap that even without subsidies the US is installing more solar than anything else. Fossil fuels are dirty and expensive in comparison.
I think the point of this article is to get people to say this. Considering half the numbers in this article are fabricated, it makes me wonder if this comment is also a part of the scam.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I'm not a native speaker but neither do I use any of those tools to write my comments here.
The community I have the privilege to be involved with in Kenya is facing many challenges when it comes to propagating access to solar energy, and one relatively small thing that can be done would be to service the lead-acid batteries most commonly used there: the environment is quite hostile to them as I understand it, and lead-acid is "the affordable chemistry" of choice. The problem is that there is a lack of knowledge and toxic waste (sulphuric acid, lead) handling capability. Otherwise topping up old batteries as a service is absolutely an achievable goal, much needed, and there is money to be made.
If you're talking about fairly modest sums ($10k to 100k) and Kenya in particular is on your radar, I think we should discuss this further. I'm not Kenyan myself (European), but I frequent the area and have a solid network and resources already in place to make things happen. How may I reach out?
The global average price for solar panels is $0.09/W in 2025. I think India, which also has tariffs to stimulate local factories, is around $0.18/W.
Though at these prices you're likely going to be paying nearly as much for mounting materials as you are for the panels.
Edit: Also, used solar panels are becoming a pretty thriving market. Definitely worth checking those out, especially for isolated projects like a solar car port or something.
Yep I'm looking at used solar since I have a ton of roof space and land area, and the shipping is 50% of the price of a pallet of panels. Even if they're derated 25% and 20% fail, the racking and balance of system outweigh them to a silly degree. It's going to be 80% balance of system 20% panels.
"The global North's carbon problem subsidizes the global South's energy access."
This is problematic. The subsidized economy will grow inefficiently, the wealth transfer will inevitably result in a corrupt class of bureaucrats who seek to maintain the status quo even when it doesn't make sense. Time will pass and it will get worse until there is political will for change, and that change will result in the suffering of those whom the initial intent was to help.
I had this idea to rent roofs to install solar panels, building a kind of decentralized power plants. I live in the sunny southern France where summer are starting to become unbearably hot, but at least this comes with a lot of sunpower. There are plenty roofs but sadly we install solar plants in spaces that compete with forest/fertile soil. I am not an energy engineer so that's not a realistic project for me, but are there similar projects around?
This model has actually taken off in rural China. Salespeople will tell you, "You only need to lend us your roof for 20 to 30 years,and in return, you'll receive a sum of money." Many people in rural China readily agree to this deal. I'm not entirely sure what these solar panel companies get out of the arrangement. Perhaps they sell the generated electricity for a profit, or supply it to factories with high energy demands.
There is a similar idea called "community solar" in the US. It allows electric customers to subscribe to the output of solar panels on someone else's roof. This allows a developer to build a solar array on a large commercial building's roof that they rent.
It's hard to overstate the degree to which the United States is giving away the future to any country that can produce clean energy technology at scale.
Lithium is abundant in the United States. Nothing in the component chain of solar and battery systems is so complex it couldn't be made here. We could establish trade with African countries like China has, instead of doing these pointless tariffs. But for idiotic cultural reasons, we are not doing any of those things.
The world will permanently shift away from the fossil fuel economy sooner than most people think, and it will disrupt the entire system of dollar-denominated oil that underpins the U.S. empire. It's glaringly obvious where this is headed. And yet!
I think those authors have been trying to figure out what I've long suspected- infrastructure can't be build locally as easily as one that can be exported with extreme modularity. Building a nuclear power plant, even a small modern one, still requires a ton of permitting and environmental review. Setting up a portable solar power plant, with imported panels and inverters, in theory allows for much more adaptability and affordability.
I've heard/read common criticisms about NGO's having more power and private funding than weak and poor governments, but then again, if there isn't a centralized effort to develop infrastructure, citizens are more likely to prefer outside funding/investment https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/internation...
This is the most optimistic thing I've read about this year. When they got to "and also they replaced diesel farming with solar panels and are making bank," I had a big smile, and when I got to "and they're selling it as carbon credits on the side," I just started giggling. Wonderful!
TLDR: dirty fuel is being displaced by clean electricity for 500M+ Africans beyond the grid via combination of cheap solar panels + batteries, microfinancing, electronic payments, and a carbon-credit kicker. Two main players captured most consumers and farmers via hard-to-reproduce integration. TAM should increase 3X with China's continued oversupply and govt-backed financing. Case studies available for key points.
Inspiring. My only critique would be that the excited tone (and exclusivity) ends up detracting from the achievement and opportunity.
Tariffs (government tax) on Chinese panels, corruption (companies bribing(lobbying) to get monopolies on installs) and more corruption ( power companies bribing to get guaranteed profits)
Based on comments here my 7.8kw rooftop solar in Canada was 3-5x cheaper than people pay in the US. It was $8k CAD ($5,660 usd)
My Dad in Australia got a 10kw system fully installed for $5k AUD ($3,250 usd)
When you buy corn or gas or tires for your car do you really care if it’s subsidized and say something like “oh yeah it was $x, but heavily subsidized”?
Of course not, you only care about how much it costs you.
Solar panels represent approximately 12% of the total average cost for solar projects in the United States. The remaining costs are primarily composed of soft costs, which include permitting, financing, installation labor, customer acquisition, and other non-hardware expenses.
probably CCP subsidizing manufacturing and sales (like they do with EV) because it's a command economy and getting the world to run on their stuff is good for their "national security". and US taxing it for that reason
You'll see these little solar panels outside people's homes in any country that doesn't have all of its population (reliably) connected to the grid. They're everywhere in rural Afghanistan as well for instance.
Everyone will be hit hard by climate change.
I do t see why it should be less in eg the Americas - where you already have pretty volatile climate events
The problem is that there is no true manufacturing nor repairability capacity for high density electronics in africa. Hell, our customer in SA asks us to buy spare components for them because getting parts there from our favourite distributors is a nightmare.
My parents are involved in an organization that helps developing parts of Togo. They helped build wells, structures (schools, bathrooms, .. ) and give material for agriculture and light manufacture, fund for tutoring, such things. All the electric and mechanical machinery they donated, including vehichles, are older models and the reason is simple: they must be serviced with the available technology, and they must be simple to service.
They made a conference in our town to showcase the project and i addressed the obvious elephant in the room: what about electricity? They are dependend on china for cheap panels and inverters, and they do not want to use alternative sources that require way less tech to operate: biofuel for example. They say it's not as efficient, and i concour, but i feel there is also a geopolitic issue, they do know they are making themselves dependent on china and there might be a small print condition for the cheap solar.. and they were elusive on the answers.
Also, not programs to train electronics technicians in the next future. If i ever get involved i'd like to help with setting up repair shops and train technicians. We'll see in the next few years what happens.
Are we really able to service solar panels and batteries in Europe either, for example? Or most of the time is just a game of moving refurbished devices to replace the broken ones, that are then shipped back to... China? to be refurbished once again?
I know that for more costly EV batteries there is some refurbishment capacity in Europe but what about the rest?
"This worked great if you were electrifying America in the 1930s, when labor was cheap, materials were subsidized, and the government could strong-arm right-of-way access."
It was good in the moment. The issue is maintaining it without the same cheap labor and materials. PG&E in California is a perfect example. There is no way for them to maintain the grid which is aging and causing fires. We are going to have to switch to a slightly similar regional power generation/storage model.
As long as grid upgrades & maintenance continue to work reasonably well across western Europe, bad examples from the US are not particularly worrying.
Economics of scale still very much apply; there is a point in maintaining expensive grid infrastructure. Especially so when using it to improve other expensive infrastructure, such as electric high-speed passenger rail.
> Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, you stop waiting and figure it out yourself.
To what historic people did electricity come all by itself, without them having to figure out and build anything themselves?
For all those who have electricity, who was their "cable guy"?
This article is a good example of how, sometimes, starting from scratch is a blessing, since you can adopt the best tech right away instead of fighting market inertia and monopolies trying to keep a status quo - as a counter example, see Japan being stuck w/ fax past the internet advent.
Overall, democratization of utility and finance is great, but this article is so inconsistent with the pricing and statements it really reads like a sycophantic llm wrote the entire thing.
Here is the actual numbers from Sun King on their entry level system (Home Plus):
Basic (dc-only) panel for lighting and cellular/usb use:
Lighting: 1 x 240-lumen LED tube light, 2 x 120-lumen LED hanging lights. Up to 43 hours of light on a single charge on low-power mode
Battery: 3.2 V, 19.2 Wh lithium ferro-phosphate (LFP) battery. 10-year battery lifespan with typical daily use (over 2,500 cycles)
Solar: 7 Wp, 9 V solar panel with 8-metre rodent-resistant cable
Output ports: 2 x 12 V DC output ports for lighting (550 mA max. total), 1 x USB-A phone charging port (5 V, 1 A)
>₦2,000 per week ($1.39 USD/week) x 60 weekly payments, ₦3,500 down payment ($2.43 USD)
= $85.83
=~ 20kWh over that 60 week period (Just over 1 year), over 10 years = ~200 kWh... ~$0.429/kWh (reasonable given the lighting hardware is included, and the only thing that should need changing during that time is the lfp battery which the price is dropping very quickly on).
Larger dc system:
Home 500X + Pedestal Fan
Lighting: 4 x LED tube lights with individual wall switches, 200 lumen per tube light on max setting, 20 times brighter than a kerosene lamp, One motion-sensing 100 lumen security lamp
Battery: 141 Wh lithium-ion NMC battery, Up to 19 hours of runtime on low power mode. 5-year battery lifespan with typical daily use
Solar: 50 W, polycrystalline solar panel with aluminium frame and a 6 m cable
Charging Ports: 2 x 5 V/1.8 A USB ports for charging mobile devices, 4 x 12 V(+/-3 V) ports. One port is specially designed to power Sun King DC appliances
>₦5,600 per week ($3.82 USD/week) x 60 weekly payments, ₦15,500 down payment ($10.78 USD)
= $239.98
=~ 147kWh over that 60 week period (Just over 1 year), over 10 years = ~1300 kWh... ~$0.184/kWh (again very reasonable given the lighting hardware is included, and again the nmc battery at 5 years which the price and quality of is improving very quickly on).
So yes, this does seem pretty viable in terms of Upfront, TCO and payment options.
The larger systems (solar + AC Inverter + home-scale battery):
PowerHub Core (2 kW AC inverter 230VAC, 2.5kWh lfp battery storage, 1800-2700W solar panels - ₦48,000 per week, 80 weekly payments, ₦240,000 down payment ₦4,080,000 ($2,836.94 USD) financed or ₦2,400,000 ($1668.79 USD) buy outright
PowerHub Plus (3.3kW AC inverter 230VAC, 5.0 kWh lfp battery storage, 1800-3600W solar panels - ₦64,000 per week, 80 weekly payments, ₦320,000 down payment ₦5,440,000 ($3782.58 USD) financed or ₦3,200,000 ($2225.05 USD) buy outright
= yields ~47,600kWh over 10 years, =$0.0350-0.0795/kWh (2.5kWh/1800W system bought outright vs 5kWh/1800W system on finance), very competitive, with storage included.
These are the "starting from" costs - so likely the with 1800w of panels on both systems.
Pretty crazy cost of financing, but still pretty reasonably priced for an installed, warrantied system. For reference, that's cheaper than most of these ecoflow-style "solar generators" with ~3.3kWh batteries, 3000W output and 4x400W solar panels cost here (typically $4500-5000 USD).
I can't help but be reminded of the bitter lesson when I read about the continual spread of solar energy. The simple, scalable system wins over everything else. I wonder how many aspects of our lives could be transformed in this way.
Charging phones and "studying at night" are cliches in this context. It completely misses the point. Yes, it's important. And obviously happening.
The article zooms in on cliche 2-3 use cases that while important show a lack of imagination and awareness of what's actually happening. Here are two more not mentioned in the article, at all. And they are transformational.
1) EVs. By that I don't mean the luxury four wheel road yachts common in the rich part of the world but its much more common two wheel variant: the e-bike. These are being produced by the hundreds of millions. The four wheel versions are are a rounding error. They show up all over Asia and Africa. We in the west have no concept of how important these things are to the local economies there.
You can charge those for next to nothing with solar. Most of these things only have a few hundred wh of battery on board. A single solar panel can top them up in an hour or so. What's the impact of that on in a place where subsistence farming is common and people have to walk hours to find a generator powered point to charge their phone or get some water? Well the obvious thing happens: lots of people now have affordable transport that doesn't require an arm and a leg to power.
2) AI. I know, we're all tired of the daily dose of AI utopia on HN. But like world + dog in the west has access to ChatGPT for free, so does all of Africa. "Hey chatgpt, what's a water pump and where can I find water here?". That's already a thing. AI usage is widely spread across Africa; and not just among the elite. Every subsistence farmer with a smart phone (most of them at this point) can now ask questions like that. That's massive. Knowledge is power. This is hugely empowering. People are naturally curious and now they can ask AIs for information instead of having to ask the local witch, village elder, or the nearest white person that actually had an education. That's very liberating.
Solar panels are going to be like smartphones were 15 years ago, everybody will have access to cheap power. And yes you can power one with the other. But it's really about what else you can power? IMHO this will transform some of the poorest/undeveloped regions in this world in a few mere years/decades.
I’ve heard that if you have a solar system and a battery system connected to the grid, if the grid goes out for whatever reason, your battery gets cut off as well. Meaning that it’s essentially useless as power backup.
Is this true? Can you really go fully off-grid in Australia?
I’ve heard this from rural people in Victoria, where they do experience blackouts and where an actual backup would be useful.
Many systems, especially older ones, are set up this way by default.
But you can get, for extra $$, a switch to disconnect you from the grid entirely when it's down and run from your own solar power / battery. People who live in cities with underground wires normally don't bother, but it's essential in the countryside (IMHO).
Note however that many people have only maybe 5kW or 8kW or something like that being added to grid power by their solar setup, so if there is no mains power then it doesn't take many 2kW appliances (microwave, kettle, clothes washer (when heating water), dish washer (ditto), hairdryer, vacuum cleaner) to overload it. Not to mention 3kW hot water heater or 3kW+ stove oven.
I have a 3600W off-grid system (Pecron E3600LFP) and I run pretty much all that stuff from it. I added up and I could try to turn on 14kW of stuff at the same time. But I don't, obviously.
It depends on the inverter. Older "grid-following" inverters would isolate themselves from the grid to avoid putting any current on the line when presumably in an outage it should be de-energised, as well as relying on the grid for reference frequency.
Modern hybrid & multi-mode inverters are capable of isolating themselves from the grid, generating their own reference frequency and managing connection and disconnection from the grid. However you might not get one of these types of inverters unless you specifically ask for "backup power" or similar.
I've had solar for ten years and just added a battery to it which _should_ keep the house running through a power failure for as long as the battery holds out.
This is yet to be tested, but it's very specifically setup to me able to.
There are some specific electronics required to continue operation when the grid is down, and with the explosion of popularity of home batteries, I think these options are also more common.
you heard wrong. What most electricity grids forbid is exporting power from your home to the grid when the grid is down. The claimed danger is that energised power lines will kill people working on the lines.
The reality is that the vast majority of home inverters (in an EV, battery or solar PV) is nowhere near powerful enough to energise even a single distribution transformer.
This is yet another example of electricity codes being unrealistically restrictive.
Generally, there's nothing stopping you from disconnecting your home from the grid during a power outage and running your own devices off a battery. Going fully off-grid depends on your local laws.
The figures quoted are way out of date. Solar is already USD 0.11 per Watt and has been for over a year.
Solar is scalable. The cheapest system 10W with a powerbank and phone charger and 3 x 3W LED lights as about USD 20. Next level is more lights and a fan and the high end is a TV and fan powered by solar.
The idea that Africa is skipping the grid in the same way it skipped landlines is compelling, but this goes even deeper: it’s infrastructure as a product, not a government service. And it’s being financed by the end user and the global North’s carbon tab. Wild.
Would be interesting if renewable exporters are going to ge emission credit vs penalty vs fossil exporters. I mean it won't change anything, dead dinosaur sauce must flow, but it's a useful way to attribute actual emission producers at source.
This has got to be ChatGPT, right? There's just a lot of... nonsensical phrasing and sentences? I love the story of it, but I can't take the writing.
> This worked great if you were electrifying America in the 1930s, when labor was cheap, materials were subsidized, and the government could strong-arm right-of-way access. It works less great when you’re trying to reach a farmer four hours from the nearest paved road who earns $600 per year.
It's structured like a contrasting pair of sentences, but it just doesn't make any sense. The things it's calling out in 1930s America aren't - or don't have to be - dissimilar from modern Africa. The farmer making $600/yr is kind of a non-sequitur.
> But there was still a massive, seemingly insurmountable barrier: $120 upfront might as well be $1 million when you earn $2/day.
No, it's 60 days of earnings. It's just a weird sentence. Taking a median US wage of $60k/yr or $165/day, 60 days of earnings is $9,900. "Might as well be $1 million" is a wild take, and a sloppy way to say it.
Hey there, author (Skander from Climate Drift) here.
So for the record: This isn't a chatgpt article, it's something I wrote over the weekend while I was down with a flu (although the idea has been running through my head for a while).
@America's 1930s: Most of US rural electrification happened at this point (90% of urban homes hat electricity, only around 10% of farms). Rural Electrification Act from 1936 changed that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
Hey in the part 3 that introduces PAYG it jumps from $100 down $40-65 a month to $0.21 a day / $1.50 a week.
It seems your mixing up examples since they're off by an order of magnitude. Once I read that my trust in everything else started breaking down and I couldn't be bothered to read the rest with the same level of engagement.
Thanks! Maybe I'm a little too sensitive to AI signals. I actually really love the story and content, but if it was AI generated I didn't know how much to actually believe it. I still don't know who you are, but it's probably less likely to be totally fabricated if a human is responsible for it. So, thanks, I'll give it another read.
Rather than too sensitive, I think you’re making up AI signals. Poor writing (or, in this case, slightly less than perfect writing) is not a phenomenon to which humans are immune.
If you like the idea of human-written content on the Internet, I recommend against joining the chorus of voices baselessly accusing humans of being AI bots - an unfortunate trend lately which only serves to disincentivize future contributions.
just fyi when I ran this through an AI detection tool it came up with likely ChatGPT. 60% written by non-human. So either you've started really writing like an AI or you used AI for this.
It fails the sniff test and the tool test.
You also didnt correct the math mistakes the AI made.
> It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.
Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.
Why are you lying about this, its clearly written by an LLM
My grandpa (long dead) remembers his dad paying $600 in the 1920s (1930s?) to get electric to the farm. That is the actual cost, not inflation adjusted. Most of the neighbors didn't because that was too much money in those days.
> $600 in the 1920s (1930s?), not inflation adjusted
I consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator:
$600 in 1925 would be $11,264 today
$600 in 1935 would be $14,329 today
A lot of money, but I've heard that it can easily cost $10-20K today to erect a couple of poles to bring power a hundred feet to your property in a rural area these days. Do you know what distance was being covered to bring power to your grandfather?
I also got ChatGPT vibes... all this repetition of "why it matters" and all the lists, and going back and forth between contradictions...
It's even sadder to me that the author says this is not GPT. I believe them. Which means we have reached a point where the style of how ChatGPT writes has made its way into our sub-conscious...
> The farmer making $600/yr is kind of a non-sequitur.
It's less than a non-sequitur. It makes the contrasting even weaker because it means in modern Africa labor is still cheap, just like in 1930s America.
> I love the story of it, but I can't take the writing
My personally heuristic is that if the style is AI, the substance is likely AI too.
Huh? Even if the farmer could save 100% of that daily $2 earning it's still 60 days worth of wages, which while not exactly $1,000,000, is still a lot for the the farmer.
The structure of each section gives away that it's mostly AI even without having to read the actual words. I'm sure it was AI + writer, but there's something about ending each section with 3-4 short, question-like sentences that is strongly AI. This is the same format as the successful LinkedIn slop so maybe it's not AI and just algo-induced writing.
Yup. It's the colons after every paragraph's first sentence:
> It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.
> Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs.
> The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system.
> It gets even better: there are people who will pay for credits beforehand.
It's just again and again and again. It's sounds 100% ChatGPT.
Maybe this is 100% written by hand by someone who reads too many ChatGPT-generated articles. Possibly the author just spends a ton of time chatting with ChatGPT and have picked up its style. Or it's just more AI-written than OP wants to admit.
We are so cooked.
We spend more time trying to suss out if something was written by AI than actually reading the article.
So many legitimate ways of writing are now “ai” style.
I used to use emdash a lot, but now I deliberately avoid it because it’s an AI smell - using the less “correct” version instead. E
> It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.
> Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.
The ROI of using a diesel-powered pump isn't so high so few farmers have one. It means, they work well and those who don't have one, still get some water for their fields, too.
A solar pump is many times cheaper to run. It means ROI of using it is huge and many more people will get them. But it doesn't mean there will now be magically more groundwater to pump!
Which mean, those who don't have a pump, will soon find themselves completely without water - it will be all sucked out by people with pumps. So they will also HAVE to install those pumps.
As a result, no one will be better off because same amount of water will be redistributed among same number of farmers. Even an "arms race" of more and more powerful pumps is likely when people will realise theirs are not working as good anymore now than everyone has one.
All until the point where ROI of having a solar pump will become negligible.
Farmers will not be better off - they will be worse off. Chinese will make money - money funded by Western funds for "reducing" carbon emissions which do not really reduce anything as they are "replacing" diesel pumps 90+% of which did not exist.
And yes, people will also have a little bit of electricity at home - about 100x less than in grid-connected Western homes - a 200-watt panel per household at about 15% average output or maybe 20 KWh per month. It's not enough to run a blowdryer, or kettle, not even a fridge. But enough to charge a tablet to watch online TV - and become far right.
Bingo, enshittification comes to Africa, in it's purest form.
Only good thing about it is that money will go to Chinese vs Arabs for diesel fuel. Chinese are a problem that will gradually solve itself due to demography, while Arabs will not.
I meant to say: this is a new sleek tool to make people compete more intensely against each other in the race to exhaust a limited resource. Just like freelance sites made life of everyone miserable while extracting cash out of them, simply because they did not increase the amount of work available - just forced everyone to compete stronger and pay to play. Until the work was ruined and people simply churned out.
I was wondering about that. Is there some sort of removal process when the lease is up? If there were, folks would just do it early. Maybe there's enough enforcement/followup to discourage that while there's still outstanding debt, but perhaps it's a thing later.
It's a good point. This purchase model with IoT-enabled PAYG devices means there's a built-in vulnerability in the entire infrastructure. And unlike with a centralized utility where hypothetically some action-movie hero could rip out the one central device that shut things down, here there's millions of them everywhere.
> Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, you stop waiting and figure it out yourself.
To what historic people did electricity come all by itself, without them haivng to figure out and build anything themselves?
As I keep saying ad infinitum, Africa is not a single unitary region.
Different countries in Africa have better grids than others, and different countries in Africa have stronger penetration of digital banking and DBT than others.
A country seeing a boom in domestic solar because of government subsidies and policies like Nigeria [0] is different from a country seeing a domestic solar boom because of a collapsing electric grid and regulatory failure like South Africa [1] or Pakistan [2] (not Africa but the same point holds).
At best this is an AI generated article, at worst this is someone who is truly misinformed and thinks about Africa this reductively.
I'm curious how you stay on top of African affairs. South Asia doesn't seem that hard to me but I don't know where to follow the regulatory landscape of African countries.
people saying this is AI-generated: why? It seems voicey, pacey, individualistic ... and contains new-to-the-world info. And it's good. None of these being qualities I associate with AI writing.
The giveaway is almost always an over-dependence on "Not 'x' but 'y'" structure. Even when the author changes the wording so that the phrase doesn't read exactly like that, they tend to leave the structure intact, and the bots really like to lead with the inverse of what the author wants to say to create contrast.
A human author might have used this technique once to really emphasize a strong point, but today's LLMs use it so often that it loses its emphasis, and instead becomes a distinct stylistic fingerprint.
As a human who's written like that for decades, this witch-hunt makes it really hard to participate online anymore. This was a standard expository device taught in school, some of us latched onto it, and now it's impossible to argue that we're human because someone's conviction that we're AI is just an opinion and there is no evidence that will convince them, nor do they deserve the effort it would take even if it were possible.
Keep using that structure. The bots use it so much, and in ways that human authors wouldn't, that it becomes self-parodying. As long as you're not using the same device over and over again in the same piece you'll be fine.
yeah it's a crazy trend. suspicion that everything is AI is a poison to forums. have no idea how this moves forward. secretly hoping it destroys the entire internet, and rapidly. so we can go back to conspiring in smoke-filled rooms.
Reading things like this makes me feel like there must be fundamentally something wrong with my brain, because it all seems like just a complicated song and dance that is maintained as a global share delusion for reasons I can't figure out.
Some solar panel companies in China are trying to extract the idea of value from farmers whose hands change actual currency a couple of times a year to whoever brings it to market, all other times "money" is sent around in SMS. That bit of extracted wealth pays out in volume, eventually, but they also get a huge boost from selling "we did an environmentalism" dollars to corporate social responsibility brokers who are trying to help ai and oil and gas companies convince legislators that actually their businesses don't harm the environment because they bought the magic dollarydoos from the Chinese solar panel vendors who are making money selling solar panels but also selling magic dollarydoos.
It seems madness. This system is efficient and the best one we can do?
People should learn to never trust a #1 ranked hacker news article. There are almost always hidden motives. The author (GPT???), or a company mentioned in the article likely is connected to a VC, or YC or both!
Don't engage with slop that seems lazily written, if not completely generated by Claude(sorry author if I'm wrong, I know you are claiming you wrote it but idk). This stuff kinda comes off like an article written on behalf of SunCulture or SunKing so they can go, hey guys look we were featured on a front page of HN article.
>IOT-backed hardware linked to a novel asset whose issuance serves to make the world a little bit better
I swear: this was meant to be the pitch for like 99% of blockchain companies, only in this case they managed to do it. This is super interesting on so many levels.
The zero-cost payments with a low-barrier to entry. Again, this is what digital currencies were meant to do. Only, it turns out that at scale a combination of tech problems and legislative red tape made everything break. Just solving this one problem here is industry-defining in its own right. And shows the kind of products that open up when banking is enabled to everyone.
What about the hardware though? Well, I've worked at startups that were exactly dedicated to this kind of IoT stuff. They even were linking it with payments. But can you guess what happened? Well, of course: it had to be linked to blockchain shit, you know, just because... Then on the product side of things: nothing ever left the lab... Not that customers would have been able to use a blockchain-based payment rail anyway...
Getting reliable IoT hardware is hard enough but you still have to build customer relationships. They did it all through a simple technology the users were already familiar with. You don't need a frigging comp sci PhD to use SMS mobile payments. I think that's genius and blockchain tech bros could truly learn a lot from this. Pay-as-you-go here is also genius because as the author states: the chances of the owners having tons of disposal cash around to outright buy equipment are slim. Yet offering equipment to strangers under a pay-to-buy scheme by itself is risky for the lender and would typically lead to the kind of bureaucratic red tape that would slow down financing. With the IoT stuff, they can shut off the equipment on non-payment. But also: the economics are already there because the only other game in town is expensive disposal fuels like kerosene and petrol.
It's not solarpunk, unless "lots of solar installations" qualifies. They just used the term to convey an aesthetic, or as bait. Being "punk" or socialist is not the point.
It's not capitalism, it's technology. That can often go together with capitalism, but Russia from 1917-60 and China from 1960-2025, say, are big counter-examples. As are the many poor countries with capitalist economies. Growth in electrification, transport infrastructure, manufacturing and mechanized agriculture will grow any economy, capitalist or socialist
Strongly disagree, you're example is nonsensical as it's normally used to prove the exact opposite. Nearly every quality of life improvement and economic boom in China and Russia during those periods are directly tied to adopting some parts of capitalistic systems.
Those that happened in the USSR and China, no? After the start of electrification and active mechanization of agriculture, more peasants died of hunger there than in the previous 100 years (in Russia more than in the previous 200 years).
That is simply how socialism works. Land as a mean of production is no different from a factory, so naturally, the products created on the land belong not to the peasants (Petite Bourgeoisie), but to society as a whole.
And guess what this bourgeoisie did when they found out that the grain they produced would now become common property (they sharply reduced the amount they producing).
> but Russia from 1917-60 and China from 1960-2025, say, are big counter-examples.
Russia and China are good examples of that.
We have Khrushchev's memoirs about how, before the communist revolution, he, as a simple worker, lived better than workers live 40 years after the revolution. That is, the period from 1917 to 1960 in the USSR was one of complete stagnation, despite all the technological progress.
And in the example of China in the second half of the 20th century, we see yet another confirmation: their standard of living was literally directly proportional to the level of implementation of capitalist mechanisms.
> As are the many poor countries with capitalist economies.
As far as I understand, there is not a single poor capitalist country. Name a single poor country where private property is reliably protected and people enjoy economic freedom. There is no such country. As soon as even the poorest country begins to protect private property and guarantee economic freedom, it becomes rich within 10 years or something.
You make some reasonable points. But you're wrong to discount technology. Consider what Russia and China would have looked like if they hadn't electrified and mechanized.
Agree - I am an ardent capitalist, but a conscious capitalist. I believe the purpose of capitalism redirected can be used as a vehicle for massively changing economies and lives - such as in this case.
Afaik markets predate joint-stock companies. The concept of "raising capital" is much newer than the concept of a market economy. Did capitalism exist under feudalism? How do modern capital markets differ from historical markets under various other economic systems?
I would say it's more of a matter of the level of interference of the fief on trade. When 100% of the economy is controlled by the monopoly on violence I would say that is complete communism, and when 0% of the economy is controlled by the monopoly on violence that is complete capitalism. This is a kind of asymmetric definition of communism/capitalism because "complete capitalism" is a pretty unstable configuration.
Joint-stock companies are not a prerequisite in my opinion; You can have an capitalist economy of merchants that run everything as sole proprietorships. Socialists will try to define capitalism around ownership of the means of production but I am not sure this is a useful definition.
Modern industry is more capital-intensive than labor intensive historical industries. So the sort of pro-labor communist movements that design systems that ignore the value of capital have pretty much gone extinct in the current era.
The "communist" party of china has adopted a number of capitalistic practices since deng xiaoping. At the same time, the "capitalist" american economy looks awfully communist under my definition as a significant chunk of the economy flows through the government, the military-industrial complex and such.
Are you confused by the idea that socialism and market are incompatible ideas, or is this a critique that they're merely selling and not manufacturing (therefore not fully owning the means of production)?
Capitalism is really centralized monopolistic oligarchical control in modern media parlance.
Distributed empowering democratic grassroots level capitalistic allocation of resources that don't provide centralized control and administration is "socialism".
I think this is really insightful definition, username aside, I think forcing the conversation to include "oligarchical control" (the part people usually have issue with) prevents the lazy "but muh free market!" arguments when discussing our modern economic system
If the value is staying with local workers (social ownership) instead of being captured by some multinational, that's closer to a textbook definition of socialism than capitalism. How's that double-speak?
The solar panels are produced by outside of the country with companies applying massive economies of scale. I don't know what about this is socialist.
I guess it is vaguely leftist in the sense that poor 3rd worlders are benefiting. But whether a system is capitalist or not does not hinge on this sort of grievance-based thinking.
You're attempting to be sarcastic but that's actually accurate:
> Capitalism is really centralized monopolistic oligarchical control in modern media parlance.
Of course, because the Capitalists try to control the industry they've invested in.
> Distributed empowering democratic grassroots level <word> allocation of resources that don't provide centralized control and administration is "socialism".
Yes, it is. When the people who actually do the work own it.
>Of course, because the Capitalists try to control the industry they've invested in.
But does the system eventually result in a small number of capitalists taking power or is it distributed over many capitalists? Not all monopolies are natural.
What is the "work" being done here? Manufacturing or installation? It's not like all of the solar companies are co-ops and contractors.
Solar is inherently distributed in non-centralized.
Because it's based on sunlight which is distributed and noncentralized and free.
With battery storage, the intermittency is solved largely. Maybe you have your own gasoline peaker.
With enough solar, and an electric vehicle, you have transportation independence.
And I'm no expert on the historical and political nature of agriculture and centralized control, but I could argue agriculture is also fundamentally decentralized, certainly within the modern standards of deep technological stack control.
So if you can get your food, energy, transportation, water by yourself or within a local network... Then while I wouldn't call that socialist, I would call that highly democratilized, is that a word?
Now traditionally you also needed centralized power for defense.
And I'm wondering if drones will provide a fundamental advantage to guerilla defense.
why are you happy? many African nations attempted socialism in the 20th century, and all of those states have since collapsed. trying the same failed strategy over and over doesn't bode well.
anyway, I hope they get electricity. the article said a lot about markets for something related to an ideology that rejects them.
> many African nations attempted socialism in the 20th century, and all of those states have since collapsed
This is false. Senegal attempted small-s socialism under its first postcolonial regime (under Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1960–1980) and has had democratic political succession to the present day.
> So no, not fake, not AI, just written under the flu over the weekend.
Well, my apologies then. On the bright side you definitely have a super power when under the flu: the ability to perfectly emulate a chatbot in your writing :D
Huh? These people own their own equipment after 30 months and are then not reliant on usually corrupt and/or incompetent government. They're not exactly rent seeking.
Ah, capitalism. It's only rainbows, children laughing and happiness. Well, if you're a potentially profitable customer, of course, otherwise you're left on the side of the road. And if you're not part of that low 10% that can't repay the costs and presumably gets violently thrown back to the last century.
Are massive infrastructure projects a failure ? Most definitely. But is corporate driven development the panacea this articles makes it out to be ? I don't think so. Especially telling is the last bit explaining how 3 households of a village sign a contract, then 30, but never does the whole village get solar. Public projects have that universality that is sorely needed. Should that one person that can't pay be left in the dark ? Too poor, too sick, too old, too unique, not profitable!
I worked in this industry as a software developer. Companies like SunCulture (who used to be a customer of ours) started maintaining all their customers on spreadsheets. But with high volume low-value sales, you need to have good software to manage this. We were a player.
I once had to do a mobile money integration with a Zimbabwean bank. A dozen skype calls led to nothing. Then I visited the country, bought a local cell phone, made a few phone calls, and within several days I'd reached the developer I needed. He said: "Wait all I need to do is add this string?". "Yes.". He did so at midnight and our integration worked. Next evening we partied.
It shows how integrations are often more of a human/organizational navigation more than anything technical.
As for the article; the tone is hyped, and it is also somewhat true. Hundreds of millions will be using electricity. Still I want to point out one thing: This is all Solar powered DC electricity. No inverters! So you are looking at powering DC only appliances! Inverters are generally simply too expensive for this. Also the impact on income is very limited; you can't really do anything significantly more productive with the electricity, as several reports have shown. But I don't want to downplay the impact; The quality of life improvement is hard to overstate. Maybe somewhat comparable to say; you are forbidden to use any form of transport (bike, car, bus) to suddenly having all 3. Life becomes so much more convenient. For example: You don't have to take the bus anymore to town to charge your phone - yes people do this.
> So you are looking at powering DC only appliances!
Is there anything you actually need AC for? The big advantage of AC is that you can easily transform it for long range transmission. If you don't need that, AC is not really necessary, is it?
I guess the bigger issue is the limited power -- you probably can't use a small scale solar installation for cooking or washing, not because it's DC, but because it just wont offer 1000W power.
Battery powered induction stoves exist, although they are not cheap enough yet. They are, however, truly excellent products. The one from Impulse Labs is not a case of “wow, I can get decent performance without the monster electric hookup it used to require” — it’s “wow, this seems to be the best stove of any sort on the market by a considerable margin, and it’s nifty that it happens to run off an integral battery, too.” If you’re so inclined, you can cook an entire meal or three on it while unplugged.
If someone wants to make them work in rural areas like this, I think the necessary ingredients will be:
1. Cheaper batteries. These are likely coming.
2. More energy. A meal might require 1 kWh or more. (Or less — scrambled eggs won’t require much energy at all.) This is solvable with more panels.
3. Copper. The coil itself is a decent sized hunk of copper. I assume this is part of why cheap little portable induction cooktops still cost $50 or more.
4. Power electronics? I’m not an expert, and I have no idea how much of the cost comes from the power electronics, but integrating the battery and the induction heater seems like it should result in a dramatically simpler system than, say, producing AC from a battery and then converting that AC into a form that will power the coil. The current list price of the Impulse Labs stove includes a hilariously high power output, and a stove targeting rural Africa could be 1/5 as powerful and would still be fantastic.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could squeeze the cost of a decent battery powered stove down to $200 in a few years if they had appropriate scale.
I looked up that Impulse Labs induction hob. Holy Shit, 10kW peak on a single burner is ridiculous!
I already managed to ruin a pan with just 3.7kW (heated it while empty), and I tought that was a lot.
However, I think the cost is probably mostly the battery. Our induction hob (max power per burner 3.7kW / 7.2kW total) costs only 10% of the battery powered stove.
Also, at the low cost, induction is a non-starter. Resistive heating elements are dirt cheap, and the efficiency is not much less than induction. Induction is just way nicer :)
Battery power for an oven like this is not necessarily cost-prohibitive; if you want cost effectiveness and long lifetime, LiFePo cells can be had for ~$60/kwh, which would be under <$200 for an ImpulseLabs sized oven.
Absolutely agree on resistive heating for cost effectiveness: Some cheap cells, resistive heating and minimal power electronics would probably be the way to go for the African market.
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45703666
Dang that 6k is pretty prohibitive not for the overall level, but because it's 4 hobs or nothing. Hardly a "give it a swag" kind of level. I assume they are probably somewhat comparable to the Breville Control Freak, so at a single hob you'd be competing against $1500.
But the battery is a nice philosophy, similar to hybrid/mild electric cars. You don't need all the power forever. You just need more than a 120V circuit can provide.
The marginal cost of a hob is likely not the price driver.
For what it’s worth, cooking a large meal for three (big pot of pasta or rice, brown onions and garlic, brown mince meat, vegetables, simmer sauce) on my induction in my round the world vehicle uses smack on 40Ah of a 12v lithium battery - so about 0.5kwh.
It’s connected with a 3000W inverter.
600W of solar helps a lot.
> so about 0.5kwh
It takes 1.16 Watt-hours to raise a litre of water by a degree. Say 85Wh for 15C room temp to 100C boiling. Assuming your large meal for three is 3 litres, that's 255Wh to get the water boiling. There's energy loss from battery through inverter, through induction. Loss in the pot losing heat to the air. This doesn't count keeping it simmering, or heating the other ingredients.
I don't have any idea if that's very good, to be only twice the theoretical minumum, or quite a room for improvement - have you ever experimented with a 'pot cosy' to insulate the pot and stop radiated heat loss so you can keep it simmering with less power input, or turning the heat off once it's boiling to let pasta or rice cook in the residual heat, or anything?
> 'pot cosy' to insulate the pot and stop radiated heat loss
Is this a product that exists?
The closest I could find was ceramic fiber insulation [0], which could presumably be cut to shape and fastened (high temp fastener?) into pot shape.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ceramic+fiber+insulation
Yessss, more or less. I learned of the idea from this guy's content[1] who bikepacks ultralight and wants to save camping stove fuel, and he made his own. And from my dad who habitually wraps a thick teatowel around stew pots, on principle (he doesn't measure for a difference in power use. Electric cooktops only, not flame ones). Since it has to be snug on the pot, making one is probably the common way forward.
A few products do exist in that ultralight camping world, the Toaks D95 Pot Pocket[2], the Trangia Pot Cozy[3], Glacier Minimalist "pot with insulating sleeves". In standard size maybe the "So-Vida Sous Vide Insulation Band and Mat for Pots - Protects Your Work Surfaces and Saves You Electricity From Increased Insulation"[5] which is out of stock.
The Wonderbag[6] marketed as for communities in Africa and not available in the USA. From the Wikipedia page on Thermal Cooking[7], in a normal size kitchen people probably go with a vacuum flask cooker, popular in Asia.
[1] https://www.tristanridley.com/post/2019/01/21/diy-pot-cosy-t...
[2] https://www.toaksoutdoor.com/products/coz-m
[3] https://trangia.se/en/shop/pot-cozy/
[4] https://gsioutdoors.com/products/glacier-minimalist
[5] https://www.amazon.com/stores/SO-VIDA/page/BB00BAE8-07C8-4B4...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderbag
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_cooking
No, I never tried.
I have a 200Ah lithium battery, 600W of solar and a dc-dc charger.
To be honest, using up 20% of my battery to cook a large dinner is not a big deal or something I need to improve.
AC makes power distribution easier (because you can have modulated phases). So it's correct to say it's easier to move it over a long distance. Additionally, and i'm really simplifying, at parity of nominal voltage, you can move a lot more power, at a lower dissipation cost. This has resulted in few high power electronics to be AC native (ie.: no AC - DC - AC conversion). Think about motors in the various appliances, etc. It doesn't need to be like that, investment in DC car motors have pushed the industry to optimizes design, and get similar power output of the motor at lower energy consumption.
That said, if you are a manufacturer of an appliance and you have an addressable user base of billions with AC, and a 'potential new user base' with DC... you might just want to swallow the cost and add a DC / AC converter for the sake to not have to produce two variants of the most complex / costly item (the motor in this case).
That wheel has turned. The king of long distance transmission is now HVDC, to be point of sometimes being used intra-grid and not just for interconnects.
That is correct. When that will be available is the hard thing to guess.
There are currently enough production of electricity that is motor based (think about gas turbine, water turbines, etc), so there is a nice benefit of having AC at source and distribution.
The infrastructure needs to change. With an average lifetime of a substation in the 50-75years, it's hard to expect we'll overhaul completely the distribution system over night.
It's also hard for me to understand the power loss between the two scenarios (AC production, ac distribution, ac/dc conversion , dc consumption) and DC production, dc stepup to HVDC, dc distribution, DC stepdown and DC consumption). Even 1% at national scale means millions, so the entire business case might be anchored there. I'm sure there are smarter people than me here that can cast some light on this
DC is hard to step down. You dont want 10,000 volts going into every house.
AC sill be used for distribution that isnt very long distance
Long distance yes. But medium distance AC is stíl cheaper.
You also need to step down that voltage to 240/220 for residential use, much easier to do with AC
> I guess the bigger issue is the limited power -- you probably can't use a small scale solar installation for cooking or washing, not because it's DC, but because it just wont offer 1000W power.
Your average lead-acid starter battery can easily do that - 1 kW is less than 100 amps at 12V, less than 50A if you wire two in series. 200 Ah means about four hours worth of runtime.
The problem is switching off higher DC voltages and currents. AC is easy, it traverses through 0V 100 (or 120 in the US) times a second. But DC? The arc is just going on. That's why most electrical equipment, from switches over automated breakers to fuses, has distinct ratings for AC and DC, with DC ratings sometimes being half the AC rating.
Additionally, larger DC networks tend to have issues with weird current flows and electrochemical corrosion.
Could it easily do that for several minutes at full chap? Under the load of a full washing machine?
No, only for about a minute or two. But there are a lot of lithium-ion batteries capable of 10C discharge rates which can survive several minutes of max load. For 100 amps I am guessing you'd need 10 amp-hours of 10C-capable lithium-ion batteries, roughly a 4S4P or 4P4S configuration of 10C 18650s. I think this is about US$128 of batteries, a similar price to the car battery but much smaller and more inflammable.
Lowtech magazine recently had an article about cooking with solar power:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2025/10/how-to-build-a-sol...
They also did one on using DC directly instead of AC and the benefits of doing it: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/04/slow-electricity-t...
Thought provoking question! I am not an electrical engineer, but arguments I heard went along these lines: Almost all existing appliance markets are AC. Are we really going to be building a complete parallel appliance market? You wouldn't be able to sell a TV from the city in the country side and vice versa. I would be keen to hear what an electrical engineer on hackernews has to say!
Interestingly, when I visited the countryside, I saw some AC electrical appliances. One elder couple had an enormous 80ies style stereo-set gathering dust in the shed. I was told they were a wedding gift.
Laptops, TVs and other electronics already run from DC. Also, there are a lot of appliances for camper vans, boat which run on 12v or 24v DC. On Alibaba you can buy a stove for a few bucks: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Solar-DC-12V-24V-Batt...
I'm sort of an electrical engineer. Increasingly things don't run directly off 120/240V directly. Anything with a power supply could be designed to run of 48V DC nominal. My slight obsession is that really the world needs a low voltage standard. Things like lighting, low power appliances don't need 120/240V.
I'm with you, and actually bullish on this to be a viable way forward.
48V DC has been eyed already for a potential standard to emerge. Doesn't need massive cables to deliver decent power (4A ~200W). There is enough hardware around coming from use cases like EV and Boats that could make it work. Many battery solutions already 'talk' 48v without lossy stepdown of voltage, etc.
Big plus is that the regulation is A LOT less strict for <48v DC compared to AC 110/220/240.
I worked as an electrical civil engineer for few years.
>> the world needs a low voltage standard we have high voltage standard because it means we can have low amperage to transit same VA.
Because voltage doesn't kill, amperage does. It's for safety.
DC is far more safer then AC, but it's not that much safer. If we convert 20A 240V AC (very bad, you can't move your hands away) to 48V DC we get a wooping 110A (instant death)
But if we convert 20A 120V AC, we'd get 55A 48V DC. It's on the same level and has the same problem with moving your hands away.
My country used 220V (as most do!) so switching to DC would mean huge safety threat, but for 120V countries I'd say – go for it!
Not an electrical engineer, but doesn’t the voltage combined with the bodies resistance dictate the amperage? So anything under 50VDC just can’t transmit enough amps through the body to be harmful?
This is correct.
I'm slightly afraid of a world where USB-C PD is going to be that standard.
Perish the thought.
You plugged your class EVTF television into a class ETVF receptacle and your TV caught fire? Shame shame on you.
Thermal energy storage solves the problem of cooking and washing.
I have a half-liter thermos bottle that leaks about 0.3 watts at ΔT ≈ 50° (635g of water dropped from 71.9° to 69.8° over five hours and 8 minutes), so any power supply averaging over about a watt would be sufficient to boil water in it—eventually. If you needed to do it in the 4 hours the sun was near peak on a single day, you'd need at least 15 watts. (I don't live in Africa, but I do live in a third-world country. Blown-glass thermoses are pretty widely available because, although they're fragile, they're light and never wear out, just shatter.)
Sand batteries are potentially extremely cheap and can easily deliver cooking temperatures. A super-low-tech version of this approach is "salt frying", where you preheat a few kg of table salt (melting point 800.7°) to frying temperature, then stir dry food into it. Most of the salt won't stick to the food, but the few grains that do won't cause the edibility problems that sand would.
TCES potentially offers much greater storage density and much greater controllability than these sensible-heat energy-storage technologies, since you can store the "heat" indefinitely.
Phase-change thermal energy storage is another potentially appealing possibility, potentially offering a stable cooking temperature for many hours, although I don't know of any suitable materials. The MgCl₂-KCl–NaCl eutectic, for example, doesn't melt until 401°. Maybe something like calcium stearate (m.p. 150°–180°) would work, but its heat of fusion isn't great, I'd be worried about long-term stability, and although it's easy to get anywhere in the world, it's probably a lot more expensive than salt. (Table salt is US$100/tonne, but the eutectic mentioned above would be closer to US$400/tonne.)
Ignoring the cost of the battery how much does a cordless drill that'll break your wrist cost? A non-trivial amount more than the corded one that's for sure. You're gonna see comparable cost difference in just about every "final appliance" that actually turns the jiggling electrons into results (whether those results are work or heat).
Alternating current is substantially easier to step up/down in voltage, much nicer to anything that modulated current flow and has a lot of convenient aspects for motors. Like for like the DC solution costs just a little bit more every step of the way.
Even if you're not doing long distance transmission the cost of all those things that are worse about DC are going to be bore across the entirety of your economy that uses AC. DC makes sense here because the supply chain is so dysfunctional that making the "better" solution work would actually cost more than the "12v doodads from china" style solution. Eventually as electrification continues the choice of DC will become a drag though.
I don't think this is correct. Drills use "universal" motors which don't care if they're running on AC or DC, because 60Hz AC motors are limited to 3600rpm, which isn't nearly fast enough for a drill, and also because it's not okay if the drill stops working if it hits resistance and slows down. (Most AC motors run at a fraction of that.) You can run a cheap electric drill off 120Vdc just as easily as 120Vac. Getting it to run on 48Vdc or 30Vdc involves rewinding the motor with the same amount of copper in the form of thicker wire.
Fancy drills already have a lot of electronics that do care about the polarity of the applied voltage, but they usually want it to be DC. Once you get anything more sophisticated than phase-angle control with a TRIAC, you're using MOSFETs anyway, and you can often use half as many of them if you're using DC, because MOSFETs like DC.
> Companies like SunCulture (who used to be a customer of ours) started maintaining all their customers on spreadsheets. But with high volume low-value sales, you need to have good software to manage this.
That's pretty interesting. Can you tell us more what kind of problems your software solved and how you convinced them to move from the spreadsheets?
I tried something similar (in another industry) and it's a mixed bag. Companies often straight up refuse to move past the spreadsheets even though it creates a significant backlog on their side.
Happy to oblige. Basically we digitized a company from spreadsheets or paper to ERP. We'd introduce accounting software, stock management software, help desk software. But the biggest thing you need is some kind of "Loan Account Management Software" which is the center piece.
This centerpiece tracks the outstanding loan amount that each customer has. It sutomatically sends payment reminder SMS messages a few days before payments are due. It connects to the hardware with internet-of-things to turn it off if payments aren't made. It connects to the bank to ensure payments are there, and confirms when payments are made. Really fun software to build with many different parts.
There were SaaS providers for this. In the beginning (2015) there was only 1 player, Angaza (Reed Hastings mentioned in the article is one of their sales guys). Nowadays there are a handful; PaygOps, BBoX pulse (not sure if that still exists), and a few smaller ones. They charge like $2-$7 per device managed on the platform.
Convincing customer to take this up was not hard at all. You pretty much needed it to run your operations on anything more than 100 customers, and as the above article shows, scale had big advantages. Moreover; if you could show to investors that you had the software infrastructure scale, they were significantly likely to give money. It was boom time until corona hit. Everyone was expecting 30% YoY growth like until 2019, but then everything stagnated. Many companies went bankrupt and a lot of consolidation happened in the distributor market. Companies saved money on their software first, and we called it a day.
In the manufacturing industry where I am now, I fully agree with the mixed bag. Companies are old, with many old people, they stay small and don't necessarily need to scale or "grow forever". They are conservative and happy with the way things are.
My understanding is that the main benefit of small solar like this is to get combustion out of the home, specifically kerosene or dung lamps/stoves. A lot of folks have respiratory issues because they cook indoors.
Yes and no. You are right that indoor cooking (or outdoor on wood) is indeed one of the biggest causes of death worldwide. It dwarfs deaths by malaria. And where people don't die, it causes respiratory issues. I don't know the math but it is similar to smoking X cigarettes a day.
- sidenote - You always learn that in centuries past, people didn't grow old. I never knew why but my current suspicion is that air pollution by stoves and hearths was probably the top 3 cause.
However, cooking isn't (yet) solved by solar. Making heat from electricity is hard! Clean Cooking solutions often use propane, butane, or wooden pallets. Clean Cooking companies face all of the same issues as the Off grid solar companies of this article. But you'd be surprised that it is really considered a different industry. Customers and price plans are the same, but funding often comes from different sources.
Making affordable, electric, clean cooking solutions would be one of the most impactful inventions of our generation. Even then, challenges remain: No cultural activity is as steeped in tradition as cooking, and convincing people to change this, resulting in different tasting meals, is hard. Particular if it is the man deciding on the money, and the woman doing the work.
> Making heat from electricity is hard!
Why? All you need is resistive wires, and minimal, dirt cheap electronics for regulation and shutdown/safety.
You can find this in literally any $20 kettle or toaster, no need to supply Africans with induction cooktops for thousands of dollars...
You also need a buttload of electric power, which is the bottleneck.
Not really, my old microwave has 500 Watts, this should be also enough for slow resistive cooking while being insulated.You will find 12V/24V 2.8L/5L Dc Electric Pressures Cookers with 250W-300W on AliExpress. (1l needs roughly 0.1kwh of energy to go from 20 to 100°C) Additionally, you might save a lot of energy by using a hay box after it starts to boil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haybox
IMO 500 watts of sustained electrical power is a fair bit, especially compared to every other electric device these households are likely to have.
500wh battery can deliver that for 1 hour.
slow cooking: see above on changing the taste of food that's deeply rooted in tradition
So? Everyone used to cook over woodfire. If the benefits are good enough, like massiv time saving, it will change.
>I don't know the math but it is similar to smoking X cigarettes a day.
The article says two packs a day.
I oversaw that thank you :)
alibaba.com/product-detail/Solar-DC-12V-24V-Battery-Powered_60758353185.html
Totally agree on the DC limitation point too. A lot of folks outside the space assume these systems are just mini-versions of Western home solar setups, but they're not
This revolution also has a dark side:
People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them.
This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world.
It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over.
More details for the interested here: https://solar-aid.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/State-of-Re...
My takeaway from observing “tech in developing world” projects is that the key gap is usually maintenance. That is, continuous small investment to prevent things from breaking in the first place. To be fair, that’s not exactly a solved problem in developed countries either!
Sometimes development projects just throw solutions at rural communities then move onto their next project, leaving no legacy of training or continued supply of parts/tools/funding.
Sometimes solutions get treated as resources instead of infrastructure, like a water treatment plant that got strip-mined for metal (that example was from South America).
Tech is a whole ecosystem, mindset and lifestyle, not just magic hardware to parachute into situations that aren’t set up to manage it on a long term basis.
I knew a charity group many years ago that targeted this issue.
They noticed that aid charities would give modern motorcycles to rural medical workers that rapidly ended up in a non-working state.
So they gathered older motorbikes, more suitable and more repairable in the destination country, and spent time training the end users in maintenance and upkeep, and ongoing support.
Not an uncommon problem with charities working with foreign nations. They fail to capture the local populations because they think of these problems in a vacuum.
Person lacks reliable transportation -> give them some -> problem solved
There's another example - a charity provides treated mosquito nets for free to millions of families in Africa. Great!
People lack reliable mosquito protection -> give them treated nets -> problem solved!
But in reality it went like this:
People lack reliable mosquito protection -> give them treated nets -> many of these families are starving -> fine mesh nets are great at catching small fish -> all their food is now infected with insecticide, mosquitos continue to access the family as well
Givewell did an analysis and concluded that while this is a problem, it's not nearly enough to offset the benefit which comes from using the nets for their intended purpose: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/in...
Certainly improving public health in developing countries is a hard problem! But it's not impossible and existing efforts have had an effect.
That was exactly the goal with the Buffalo Bicycle project, and I'd say it worked pretty well. Make a bike that's mechanically simple & reliable, maintainable with common tools, and train technicians to fix and upkeep them. Basically create the Toyota Landcruiser of bikes. I kind of want one, even though it's a "bad" bike by the standards of most western audiences (heavy, slow, ugly, etc)
https://buffaloride.org/buffalobicycle https://worldbicyclerelief.org/product-development/
ain't just tech in the developing world.
even in the Big IT Enterprise "support" is a byword that appears in all discussions.
it's not enough to have, or to build, you gotta maintain, fix, replace, and eventually, remove.
those discussions aren't fun or sexy, and everyone hates when you tank a blue-sky "it'll fix everything" discussion with the unpleasant realities of long-term care and feeding
> it's not enough to have, or to build, you gotta maintain, fix, replace, and eventually, remove.
Indeed. I think many in the West fail to appreciate - and take for granted - the cultural dimensions (which include cultures of knowledge, skill transmission, cultivation, and development, and also worldview[0]) as well as the economic ecosystems and supply chains involved.
Dropping off a tractor in Africa or a bulldozer in rural India and calling it a day is superficial and worthless. Imagine shipping something suitably technologically advanced to some Germanic tribe during the Roman conquest of Europe if you need an analogy.
[0] The worldview bit might surprise some. As some have argued, there are reasons why enterprises like modern science arose and flourished only in the West, whereas everywhere else scientific development was historically quite limited. These reasons include a culture formed under the notion of the Logos which entails the belief in a thoroughly intelligible universe that can be fully known in principle; a rejection of pantheism with a distinction made between the transcendental and the immanent, allowing for exploration; a rejection of pantheism and so a world infested with capricious, personified natural phenomena; an omniscient and omnibenevolent God who is not capricious or voluntarist. Without these elements, the confidence and motivation needed to confidently exercise and develop intellectually, to try to understand the world - which contribute to the formation of a robust scientific culture - is stifled.
It's not just a failure to appreciate, it's an outright demonization of many of these observations as racist/imperialist. One of the prime motivators for this kind of development "aid" is the mistaken belief that the only issue is a lack of resources or external exploitation, and if you just provide the resources and/or remove the exploitation a given place will naturally turn into an enlightened Western nation-equivalent. Maybe with some fun unique cultural festivals, local cuisine, and some harmless, quirky native dances in exotic outfits!
Meanwhile even in the West it's easy to find people who win the lottery and are broke a year later, or rich celebrities/pro athletes who make tons of money and lose it all, or die with far less than you'd expect. Those people are laughed at and/or pitied, because even they are held to to a higher standard than some poor 3rd-worlder who's just a pure victim
> As some have argued, there are reasons why enterprises like modern science arose and flourished only in the West
Majority of inventions came from Asia... as they're currently doing.
Before the so-called scientific revolution and the later industrial revolution, that may be true - arguably for largely uninteresting reasons - but afterward, this is patently false.
Modern science arose only a couple of centuries ago in Europe. Prior to that, we see a long period of great European intellectual ferment, most notably the Scholastic period, that supplied the intellectual foundations and vocabulary that made modern science possible.
You're also reducing science to technology production, but even here, the sophistication of technology that modern science made possible far outstrips anything pre-scientific.
The claim being that it's a gap there, a thing that gets overlooked in these projects. Whereas here it's a standard line item in whoever's budget.
I don't understand this space very well, but I wonder if an iFixit-esque solution would work there: publish DIY guides on identifying and fixing common faults, and have a network of sellers for replacement parts and tools.
I’m confused by everything tbh.
I maintain a 20 year old Corolla, which is incredibly common throughout Africa (exported 2nd/3rd/4th hand).
But users from there rarely pop up in the forums or anywhere else I’ve found.
I dunno how they diagnose obscure condition XYZ without the like 9 retired mechanics on the forum.
Do they all use closed WhatsApp groups? Do they just consume tech info but not produce?
I appreciate they don’t all speak English, nor a language that Google Translate is good at.
They’ve gotta be dealing with the same problems we do fixing these, if not more.
Solar Aid who wrote this report have an app called SunnyMoney which has repair guides.
Don’t know about uptake:
https://solar-aid.org/news/repair-app/
Absolutely a possibility. Solar systems, especially when not connected to a grid, are fairly simple beasts at the end of the day. Simple enough that I've seen more than a few youtube videos where guys build out their own custom solar system on a van.
There's only a few parts that go bad (it's probably a capacitor somewhere).
On some level economies of scale and improving technology don’t warrant maintenance
Those who are talking about market opportunities, yes it’s big!
Bottom up calculation: average $10/repair x 250 million potential repairs = $2.5B market.
Problem is labour shortages and supply chain, as stated in the report. Both hard problems to solve.
We’ve been working on getting the labour shortages fixed and I personally believe that you can also skip some of the supply chain problems by localising labour.
For example: when we train people they can 4x their _household_ income within 6 months. This is young people who didn’t have an income before and are suddenly earning 3x as much as both their parents combined.
People just don’t know how to fix these things and when someone finally learns how, they can absolutely rake it in.
It’s actually insane to me how much education can be such a massive multiplier in this context!
Link to our recent work: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energy-makers-academy_strathm...
Yeah, I'd imagine so. Especially since Solar systems are relatively simple. People are doing more complex repairs on car electrical systems.
What sort of repairs are you training them to do? Is it just simply testing and swaps of parts? Or are you training them on how to find and replace a bad capacitor?
As someone who's spent the last 3 years in Africa, if there's one thing I learnt here is that if it can be fixed, they'll find a way to fix it.
Brazilian person here, when I moved to Europe I was baffled I couldn't find shops that fixed electronics. Like I wanted to get my Android phone charging port replaced, I literally couldn't find a shop in my city willing to do the repair.
I eventually went back to Brazil and had it fixed there and replaced the battery. Freaking phone lasted 8 years on my very clumsly hands, still works even. The fix cost me ~30 usd plus the battery cost.
Somebody who has the skills to fix electronics will be working with fixing devices which are much more expensive and critical than cell phones.
Industrial dishwasher breaks down? You need to get an electrician there ASAP.
Cell phone breaks down? Throw it away and buy a new one.
Brazil has very low salaries for skilled workers, so it makes sense that it's cheap to find somebody to fix your phone.
Note that mobile phone repair is the no. 1 service provided by repair shops in rural areas of many countries in Africa.
Like 50%+ of all repairs are mobile phone repairs
Yes, it's something extremely valuable, an expensive portable, and the new models all just keep getting worse and worse. There's no reason not to fix them.
It's also a repair that demands some amount of training. I imagine people fix a lot of things without getting them to a shop.
Hackers are down voting my comment. My question to them: If you could get paid twice the salary per hour to repair expensive machines, would you spend your time repairing mobile phones?
Everybody wants that juicy, juicy cheap labour, but nobody wants to be the cheap worker.
Do you think US people capable of fixing phones make more than the ~$600/hour they can add in value by fixing phones there?
No. Fixing modern phones requires a lot of specialized equipment.
You need to be able to fix microscopic flaws in soldering.
There are locked-down components that you cannot replace.
Here is a referenece: https://www.ipadrehab.com/index.cfm?Page=About
If nobody is offering cell phone repair services, that means repairing cell phones is not profitable enough compared to other things the person can do with their time. Otherwise people would offer these services.
Two economists were walking when they spotted a $100 bill. One asked the other "should one of us pick it up?", the other replied "no, if there was a $100 bill there, somebody would have picked it up already", so they kept walking.
Not even the joke is funny. People repeating it seriously is even less so.
Anyway, you would be right if you are trying to claim that the repairmen isn't the party maintaining the irrational situation, so they are powerless to fix it.
Then put your money where your mouth is and open as many cell phone repair shops in Europe as you please. You can mortgage your house and borrow a bunch of money if you need to get started.
But I think that there is always some reason or another why nobody is offering a service which seems to have great demand among customers.
No, it's extremely easy and routine to fix cell phones. You could train teenagers to do it.
And you can train those teenagers to do things which are much more profitable. If they have the dexterity and other skills needed to work on cell phone electronics, then they can work on other electronics.
If it was a good business, then there would be cell phone repair shops on every corner in Europe, like you have in other parts of the world where that makes sense.
lol yeah I was gonna say that they fix everything. They can't just Amazon prime new shit. It's weird how OP just assumes they're inept at repairs when that's just not true at all.
I didn’t say, nor do I assume, people are inept at repairs. I said that the communities that are being targeted with off-grid solar don’t currently have the skills or infrastructure required to maintain these systems.
It’s something I’ve seen with my own eyes and that I’ve read in academic literature as a widespread problem. Cross and Murray 2018 [1] being one the first papers to talk about it, I saw it myself for the first time around that time in Tanzania.
I stayed in a village where each house had at least 2 broken solar lanterns stored in a corner (like those old routers people love to keep).
The next closest repair shop was first 30min motorbike ride then a 2 hour bus ride away.
This was a village of 8,000 people.
Yes, the person with a diploma from the local technical college can fix a lot of things but they live in the local town with grid electric etc. They don’t live in these remote rural regions where off grid is so important/impactful.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961...
Edit:
The solution is to teach more people how to design, build and maintain solar energy systems so that the skills are embedded in off grid communities and give them the tools to carry out the work. You can do a lot with a soldering iron and good grasp of electronics!
Well, what is the alternative then? Probably the same problem when their diesel generator conks out. Small things you can do yourself, but rapidly you run into a situation where you need spare parts, or at least a competently run machine shop.
How long did it take for mobile repair shops to proliferate? Surely solar repair shops will also appear.
It's not even Amazon prime. It's all the random industrial doodads you need to keep a modern economy running.
The "modern world supply chain" just doesn't go into africa much or at least not in a way that general commerce has easy access to.
The same report says that 90% of those kits are repairable and the most common failure point is the battery and also that the vast majority of users hold on to their devices in hopes of repairing them in the future, as there exists some kind of repair service, it just isn't up to scale.
The repair service is really expensive for subtle reasons.
First of all there is the repair itself, but there isn’t any collection service so you need to travel (often a full day) to get to a repair centre. Then travel back. Not open on the weekend so you have to do it during the week, meaning you are also loosing 2 days of income. Then you have to go and get it once it’s done.
Total cost of repair for people using these devices might 10+ days worth of income if you include the opportunity cost.
That’s why we are training people to fix these systems within their communities.
Regarding parts you can get second life batteries in Kenya for $1-2 per cell from people like Acele Africa[1], so you can get total repair cost down to ~$10 (that’s ~3% of original purchase price)
[1] https://www.aceleafrica.com/
> First of all there is the repair itself, but there isn’t any collection service so you need to travel (often a full day) to get to a repair centre
This is a good reminder of how much we in the developed world take our publicly funded transportation infrastructure for granted, which allows a repairman to easily reach us or vice versions.
This mirrors our public health infrastructure, which in the US at least is being degraded, the consequences of which we're all likely to experience soon.
How often is bartering used as payment for repairs?
I know you have some bias for the education solution, but I can't see why this is not a market problem. You have broken devices; you send them to get fixed; you have to travel one day to get them fixed; you have someone take them for a fee.
You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.
That’s the premium solution that some, but not most, can afford and only makes sense if the cost of repair is less than the cost a new unit. Travel just makes that tip in favour of getting a new system with a $10 deposit.
Most of the people we’re talking about here are subsistence farmers who pick up casual labour at a local farm. Income is sporadic and seasonal.
That was the initial brilliance of the PAYGO system, it allows users to pay off their device sporadically I.e. they buy units when they get paid and that goes towards paying off an asset that in theory will then provide energy at 0 marginal cost. Turns out that last bit isn’t true.
Here the VC story is important, these companies were meant to be high growth and giving significant returns. We all know how that ends.
> You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.
I have been in the past, but not anymore. No one is saying people aren’t resourceful but there is a significant barrier to entry when it comes to electronics repairs for the general population. One part of what we provide is an off-grid repair lab bundled with our new education offering so it’s very much knowledge + tools.
It depends. If the quality of the panels is similar to Temu products and not design with any repairablity in mind, then even with almost no labor costs, it still might be more cost-effective to simply replace the entire thing.
I was thinking about this too. There are tradeoffs around repairability. As an example, if you're expecting the unit to live in a wet environment it's not unreasonable to consider potting the circuit boards. This makes water ingress as a source of failure significantly less likely, but also has thermal effects (heat can't radiate very well through a block of silicone) that can hurt the overall lifetime as well as make it almost impossible to repair.
It's almost certainly not the panels that failed.
The most likely part to fail is the charge controller. That's got enough brains and parts that are ultimately likely to fail due to something like a bad capacitor. Next up is the batteries. If they are lead acid, then simply letting them under charge or dry out could have damaged them. Then the transformer/convert would be my next guess. It's got the right set of parts to go wrong. Panels is the last thing that might fail. They have no real parts to them, just cells and wires. About the only thing that could go wrong is if the wires somehow corrode (someone removes or scratches off the protective layer). Otherwise, the panels will likely just lose efficiency over time. They'll still generate power, but like 70% of their new condition.
This is a far more negative comment than the linked article for those who wish to read it.
That seems more optimistic (or solar punk) than your summary e.g.:
> In terms of waste management, 85.3% of distributors reported that they had a waste management strategy. Mostly, this tended to involve collecting broken products, harvesting them for spare parts and then storing the remainder in a central warehouse before sending them to a (usually certified) local e-waste recycling facility. How effective these recycling facilities are, however, was beyond the scope of this report.
They seem to suggest that lithium batteries are the hardest to repair and recycle, but people want to do so. It feels like a problem that will get easier at scale.
For sure recycling is improving. That’s different from repair though.
The current cycle is 1. sell product 2. wait three years for it to break 3. Go back to 1.
The impact of the recycling can lessen the impact of that but it definitely doesn’t eliminate it. That’s just on environmental scale, think about the financial impact of carrying this debt for years on people earning $2 a day.
Also important to note that a lot of this is contingent of legislation that implements things like Extended Producer Responsibly (EPR) where you essentially have an additional tax on producers that gets used to fund collection. Kenya implemented this for the first time 12 months ago [1], so we will see the impact over the next couple years.
Re solar punk, my personal vision is that you basically teach people how to build and maintain these systems themselves by running solar tech bootcamp and giving them off-grid tools.
They then have tools and skills to fix anything without the need for the grid. Train 100k people and have them maintain these systems using a decentralised approach.
In fact, as part of our training we now have e-cooking stove suppliers who deliver training on their stoves to our students.
The economic impact of this cannot be over stated.
1. You are giving people the ability to 4x their income as repairers
2. You are saving the people who are getting new systems, instead of repairing them, multiples of their yearly income.
[1] https://cleanupkenya.org/30-things-to-know-about-kenyas-epr-...
"Five billion phones to be thrown away in 2022"
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63245150
Africans have more repair skills than westerners. Due to cost of things being expensive, repair culture is really big over there and in other 3rd world countries. You would be surprised at what folks can fix over there.
"Africans have more repair skills than westerners."
… which is why our roads are so much better than those in Switzerland.
There's a difference between being able to do something and being motivated to do it.
So any country could go to the moon, build 2nm chips? In your opinion its just motivation.
In the real world: there are - sadly - such things as failed states and failed societies.
I'm not sure your argument is making any sense.
Are you saying the reason roads are bad in some parts of Africa is that the people there are too dumb to know how to repair the roads? That their problem is figuring out how to mix and pour asphalt, cement, or gravel on their roads?
That would be very dumb, if that's what you are saying.
No, I'm saying their/our societies are broken. Wrong values, wrong incentives w.r.t. to the skills required to build modern, well-maintained cities with roads, schools, hospitals, etc. when compared to similar peers in e.g. Asia.
Of course they are intellectually capable of laying asphalt, but they end up spending it on salaries, ridiculously enriching small elites, etc. Its not unique to Africa, but its certainly endemic here.
And not all of the citizens like it like this - hence the massive diaspora. Which is why I used the word "failed", not "dumb".
But thanks for taking my comment in the best possible interpretation - perhaps you should refresh yourself with the HN guidelines if these kinds of serious conversations distress you.
Footnote: I se you say you are from Ghana. Well Ghana and Singapore become independent at about the same time. Both got to run their country themselves. Only one decided it was important for their families and grandchildren to pour said asphalt.
> Wrong values, wrong incentives
> Of course they are intellectually capable of laying asphalt, but they end up spending it on salaries.
> Only one decided it was important for their families and grandchildren to pour said asphalt.
Are these statements not supporting what I originally said: that there is a difference between ability and motivation?
The somethingpunk settings are supposed to be gritty and dominated by exploitative megacorps, though! As a rule, the thingpunk needs a Man dominating by means of the thing to rebel against. The only reason "solarpunk" has gotten such a rosy image is that its proponents tend to fancy themselves the Tessier-Ashpools were it to come to pass.
I guess even cyberpunk now has a bimodal supporter base - there are the would-be punks, and then there are the would-be (and actual) Zuckerbergs building the torment nexus/metaverse.
Sounds like an opportunity to do a buyback and sell to a refurb provider.
But also to fix their junk. 250 million?!
We are teaching people how to fix them so that the income stays within those communities.
You can see a bit our latest work here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energy-makers-academy_strathm...
This is interesting. Can you please consider expanding your outreach to venues other than linkedin? I understand that you are serving local needs, but I suspect that some people in the United States would be quite interested in learning about this. I've assumed that people used solar power in Africa, but didn't consider the restraints and challenges of keeping them operational.
This looks more like an opportunity, especially compared to the worse downsides of these communities continuing with diesel.
As you develop the distribution network, you also establish the recovery network.
Make it more advantageous for someone to continue to pay maintenance, on the basis of modular upgrades over time, versus owning outright.
Essentially the "grid" becomes the physical distribution/repair/upgrade network.
The article you link bundles together 5/10/15/20/25 years technology in one huge basket.
What about the most recent (last 5/10 years)?
Also, aren't almost all failures battery, rather than panel, related?
Yeah not much has changed, it’s simple technology that was developed in 2005. Main innovations of the PAYGO model in recent times was the ability to use the payment data you collected to offer other types of loans. One of the previous biggest companies in the space now sells mobile phones using PAYGO.
Technically battery chemistry has obviously moved on but we are talking a device capacity similar to a medium power bank. How much innovation have you noticed in power banks recently?
Panels are big problem from a e-waste perspective as they very difficult to repair.
Batteries failures are repairable. Usually battery packs will be 2+ LFP 18650s or 32700s. If one cell goes bad the the whole pack goes but the others may be fine. Just need to test and match cells and you can make new packs.
I can’t remember exact recovery rate for cells, I think it is something like 40-60%.
Dealing with these batteries at end of life is a challenge, but that’s a global problem.
Still a lot of legacy Sealed Lead Acid batteries around but these are very recyclable.
If we look at the growth curves it is clear that the actual real boom in solar will be happening between now and the next 10 (maybe 20 years) until the S-curve flattens.
The pictures in the report show panels which are so tiny in comparison to what you can buy today for 50 USD that it seems incomprehensible why anybody would repair them.
Yet it still might be marginally better off.
The article talks a lot about replacing generators: they need complex maintenance.
There will be a new waste stream... But the question is whether the waste stream is smaller than the current status quo.
There is no sustainable future without repair and maintenance, and there are significant barriers to repair and maintenance imposed by governments in the name of "Intellectual property".
Is there some money in recycling them? The easiest way to get people interested in cleaning up trash is if you can pay them for the trash. Is there any money in a broken solar panel?
> sell people cheap crap at a 10x mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over.
Two massive exaggerations inside one sentence to drive home a rhetorical point.
Provision of retail solar is a highly competitive market in developing countries and the profit margins are small.
Cheap crap = lasts only as long as the warranty period.
I did a survey in partnership with a the African Leadership University in a Rwanda, where we surveyed people living in two rural villages and found 90% or units had broken within 3 years of purchase. This is the logical end point when 1/5 stop working after 6 months, which you can find in Cross and Murry 2018, linked in other comments.
10x mark up (i.e. the mark up on cost of the unit) comes from knowing that the COGS for one of these units is ~$20-30 and the premium sellers sell up to $300.
Sure it’s at the top end of the range but 10x markup on each unit is not an exaggeration, let alone a massive one.
Gross margins are indeed tight but that’s is a separate issue to markup. You can sell at a huge markup and still make a loss: for example if the default rate of loans you make turns out to be much higher than you expected.
Perhaps the race to the bottom to create the cheapest possible solar panel wasn't the right way to approach this.
It highlights the gap between access and resilience
What? No. I call bullshit on your whole premise.
Solar is dead simple. The cell puts out 12v. Theres some maths around parallel and serial but you don’t need to know that for repairs. The cells connect into a box that puts out ac. If the box fails you buy a new one (no user serviceable parts inside is what the sticker says). If the wires break you splice them.
If something hard breaks and you decommission a system the cells are still good and can be trivially reused. If a cell fails it’s obvious and it can be pulled out of rotation.
In conclusion, bullshit.
I don't see the problem. The market to fix these will eventually emerge.
I think this is really cool, but math seems off:
> A company (Sun King, SunCulture) installs a solar system in your home > * You pay ~$100 down > * Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months
But also:
> The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system. You’re replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene)
$1.5 week is $6 a month, not $60.
And earlier they say “$120 upfront might as well be a million when you’re making $2/day”. The whole article reads like it was vomited up by an LLM trained exclusively on LinkedIn posts. The math errors are consistent with that.
They say $120 might as well be a million and they immediately follow that up with “$100 down payment to get started”. But I thought it was like a million dollars??
LLM slop. Author couldn’t even be bothered to read the slop before clicking publish.
another comment clarified the $100 downpayment is for the agriculture solar (SunCulture) not the residential solar (Solar King)
Yeah way too many tell-tale ChatGPT rhetorical devices in this article, which is a shame because the topic and premise are fascinating, but those turned me off from finishing it.
AI slop hits 700+ upvotes on Hacker News. The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom. A sign of things to come.
I think it's more of a link with a nice title getting 700+ upvotes. IMO many (and most non-tech) articles linked on HN are bad and most of their value lies in them being a conversation starter.
Yeah I think this is right. I want to read an HN conversation about solar in Africa, and all the interesting anecdotes that come out of the woodwork. Valuable even if the article itself is mediocre.
It was a hard read, but actually a fairly interesting article. It's a shame the author chose to format it how they did.
The key takeaways - that solar is super cheap, that technology has unlocked offering hire purchase to incredibly poor remote communities, and that westerners looking to buy carbon credits are basically subsidising that - are pretty interesting. There was a lot of fluff around those points though.
> The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom
always_has_been.jpg
The Internet has drowned to death in garbage back when they coined the term "content marketing". That was long before transformer models were a thing.
People have this weird impression that LLMs created a deluge of slop and reduced overall quality of most text on-line. I disagree - the quality arguably improved, since SOTA LLMs write better than most people. The only thing that dropped is content marketing salaries. You were already reading slop, LLMs just let the publisher skip the human content spouter middleman.
I’m old enough to remember people complaining about the exact same thing except they called it eternal September.
I am too, and the wisdom of old age has taught me: once Eternal September hits a community, it's time to walk away.
I dunno if HN is at that point yet, but it's certainly creeping closer compared to where it was 5-10 years ago. Reddit passed the point of no return within the last few years.
Eternal September is a different, unrelated problem. Slop isn't next generation of clueless kids - it's marketing communication.
Back in my day, we lamented the loss of bang paths for email... and you had to pay Robert Elz to bring in a news group because munnari connected Australia to the world...
Yeah, I'm old.
It's getting boring how every. single. article. has comments how the article is AI generated. The funny thing is the article writing styles are completely different, but every one has apparently "tell-tale" signs of "AI slop". It just gets tiring.
For what it's worth I pasted the first couple of paragraphs into several AI detectors and 4/5 said it's clean, while one said mixed (partly AI generated partly human). So either all these AI generation tools are crap, or the text is not so "obviously" AI generated. Not saying either way, but it seems to at least not be so obvious.
All of those tools are garbage. There is no reliable automated way to detect ai generated text. In 2023 OpenAI had a tool for this as well and they eventually took it down because it wasn't accurate enough. The major AI labs are probably best positioned to make such a tool work. If even they can't, then some random company with access to a fraction of a data and a fraction of the compute almost certainly also cannot.
Agree those tools are unreliable. Unless you have a massive amount of ML models trained on individuals' writing[0], the best you can do is vibe-checking[1].
[0] https://mattsayar.com/can-ai-tell-if-im-writing-ai-slop-a-ma...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
The detectors are wrong. Here’s the thing: AI slop has a distinctive structure that many of us spot from a mile away.
The kicker? This setup-punchline format sets off a red alert for astute readers’ AI detectors.
This isn’t just AI slop, it’s an industrial AI sludge factory.
(note: this was ironically written by a human)
You realise the irony right? You say say AI "slop" has a distinctive structure, but at the same time you (and the other poster) say that AI tools can not detect it? For what it's worth I'm an AI sceptic, but one thing that AI tools are good at is pattern matching (that's really all they do). But somehow pattern matching AI writing is so obvious to human's but it completely fails all AI tools (just tried another tool which said 100% human).
It doesn't match up. Moreover it's getting tiring, because every single article has these comments on them, and I've seen enough examples where authors showed up in discussions or texts were from before LLMs were widely available, but posters were still adamant that the text was AI generated.
I highly doubt that people here would reliably pick out (success rate > 60%, i.e. you get 60% of guesses correctly if text was generated by a human or LLM) LLM generated text that completely fools 90% of AI detectors.
Regarding the setup-punchline format, guess what, those were popular way before LLMs (not surprising LLMs must have learned them from somewhere).
What detection tools are you using and why do you have such confidence in them? How reliable are they and how do you know? Why do you think these particular tools are better pattern matchers than actual humans (on HN no less)?
Food for thought, fwiw I think you have some valid points.
They mixed up the numbers for residential solar (Solar King) and agriculture solar (SunCulture).
The $100 down + $65/mo is for agriculture.
(not that the numbers are correct or make sense)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ib-atDnj5jE
video from sunking from 7 years ago where the cost of a basic system was 25¢ per day. Probably cheaper now.
the article wording/numbers seem mixed up but the overall argument holds up when you look at the actual products they're talking about here
It's obviously AI generated. Was a bummer because I was interested in the premise.
Isn't $6 a month the cost of the subscription, but the $40-56 a month the cost of the installation?
Would've been clearer if the author had separated those models explicitly, but yeah, you're right, those two numbers don't map to the same product
this, they also say 45-60/month which is NOT 0.21/day
These 0.21/day are MPESA transaction fees. I stumbled upon that, too.
Buried lede (in that none of the comments mention this): wireless micro-financing without transaction fees works for 10 African countries and is enabling a rural energy revolution. (though M-PESA isn't without controversy, and clearly it could benefit from competition)
Meanwhile, developed nations have millions of people who pay up to 500% interest on payday loans, 29% interest on credit cards, and can't get bank accounts. Small businesses can't grow quickly due to (among other things) high transaction fees cutting into already-meager profits. We only hear news about big business and products and services for people with money. We forget that if we want our economy to grow, and adopt things like increased personal/residential solar power, we need to unburden the poorest, grow their own wealth, and infuse that back into the economy.
Perhaps we should stop obsessing so much over AI, and obsess a little more over making it less expensive and difficult to be poor. Seems to be working in Kenya.
The grid is HUGELY expensive, an absolutely massive cost for our electricity. And it would still be expensive in a well-regulated environment where you can quickly and easily get permission to build, without, say, voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]. Here in the US we have a very very poorly regulated environment for adding to our grid, it moves slower than molasses and there are so many parties that have unilateral veto points. The advent of a new transmission route in the US these days is pretty much a miracle event.
Now imagine a world where there's tons of bribes to government officials all along the way to get a grid going (in the US you just need to bribe landowners and hold-outs). Or there's bribes to get a permit for the large centralized electriticy generator. And you have to deal with importing a whole new skill set and trades, on top of importing all the materials, fuel, etc.
Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US. The only thing stopping me is the permitting hassle or the contractor hassle.
Out in greenfield, solar plus storage is so revolutionary. This is bigger than going straight to mobile phones instead of landlines.
Africa is going to get so much power, and it's all going to be clean, renewable energy. Thanks to all the entrepreneurs and engineers over the past decades that have continuously and steadily improved this technology, it's one of the bright lights of humanity these days.
[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/maine-jury-clears-avangrids...
> Thanks to all the entrepreneurs and engineers over the past decades
Hat tip also to China's ideological commitment to independence from external oil supplies, as nicely coupled to reducing pollution and greenwashing their image. It's their citizens who sacrifice to make solar power cheap enough.
the vast majority of solar panels are imaculately concieved in fully automated factorys,some where in fact there are NO people and they turn the lights off, as the robots are blind to those frequencys anyway. surviving solar PV production facilities operate on razor thin margins, and gargantuan volumes, the results of which are the electrification of most of the world, useing the absolute minimum of carbon. first lights, and dev8ces, small appliences, then the next step will be universal access to clean water and refrigeration, and then the worlds largest continent will be something to recon with.
This is a very rosy picture, unfortunately to the point of delusion. There are huge questions about the labour used in various stages, and the production of some of the raw materials is environmentally questionable.
Sure, but most of it happens in countries beyond china.
In any case, I literally have a cousin who's lived ten years in China building a 3d printing company, and the last reason he went to China was cheaper labor, that was borderline irrelevant.
> the vast majority of solar panels are imaculately concieved in fully automated factorys
What?
https://insights.issgovernance.com/posts/forced-labor-in-the...
Yes there is a bunch of automation in there, and still a ton of manual work and re-work. And it is done by the lowest cost labor, with a hefty government subsidy (by china) and a purchasing program.
This is pretty much bunk. There really is _very_ little space for manual unqualified work in solar panel manufacturing.
Does the supply chain contain less-than-free labor somewhere? Likely. Most probably somewhere in the raw material production, but it's not something that is a deciding factor in anything. These materials just as well likely go into making of iPhones and Lenovo laptops.
Unloading, Frame assemblies, testing, Cleanup of any failed products (this is skilled labor)... Packaging and loading. This is at the plant that does panel assembly (joining silicon to packaging).
The problem is that "Highly automated" does not mean "free of people" ... the demand for low skill labor (and a fair amount of it to keep up with automated processes) is still required.
The cost of labor in china remains so low (on the whole) that these things are still not only feasible but cost effective.
Yeh USA could doninate this if only the price of a guy to load panels onto a truck wasnt so high
/obvious sarcasm
Like anything else that the world procures cheaply from China btw.
At this point this is a cliche.
There's tons of countries with much cheaper labor.
The reasons we build in china are not related to cheap labor, this hasn't been the case from quite some time.
Cheap labor is still a major factor, but infrastructure is definitely another.
Most of the time, I don't personally look at it as cheap labour because I am just ordering, e.g. 60,000 of something or 100,000 of something else.
It's cheap, yes. I can indeed buy 1,000 of something more locally or from other than China.
But when it comes to scale, needing vast shipments, then they are the ones who can actually ship it and do it reliably. It just also happens to be cheaper, too, which is more of a convenience or cherry on top, than the actual attractive part: vast scale.
And trust, probably the most valuable commodity.
Three or four decades of proven ability to deliver, trusted relationships.
Even despite all the political noise.
The industry basically treats any designs sent to China as a loss since they know it will be duplicated
I don't think trust has much to do with it
If you know it will happen, it is a part of price.
I believe Parent is talking about trust in the ability to deliver on promises, not in handling of IP.
Oh I agree. But I'd say trust is the wrong word
They're reliable, but would you really trust them?
I think there's a bit of nuance there to differentiate the 2 though.
Maybe I'm jaded from working with overseas factories though in ways others wouldn't be.
Are you saying you don’t reverse engineer your competitors, and friends, products?
I'm not contracted out to build a product for these companies or people like a factory would be
So not really a good comparison
When you have the design it takes away alot of the need to even reverse engineer in the first place
China sent tiktok the the US, the gifted geniuses of silicon valley duplicated it and when their clones were garbage they just took it and said "we own this now"
It's not remotely cheap. A long time ago the cheap labor moved from places like China to places like Mexico, which is one of the reasons so many automotive manufacturing plants there - just a rail ride across the border.
Now that hasn't been the case for more than a decade. The cheap labor is in SE Asia and South America.
What China has is decades of process improvement, factories, infrastructure, experience, and a willingness to work. They haven't been the cheapest, by far, for a long while.
This
I recal, the 1980s when Japanese manufacturing was dogy as. By 2000 it was the best
The same thing is happening in China
They are very good at everything they do, and getting better. Good.
I don't now about Japanese manufacturing per se, but I definitely wouldn't say that finished Japanese products were considered dodgy in the 80s. Sony, Panasonic, Honda, Toyota, various camera brands, Yamaha.. I recall all of those being at least "pretty good".
I definitely remember the sense that Japanese cars posed a real threat to the American auto industry, and in hindsight that seems to have been well founded.
Nintendo! That was definitely not their reputation in the 80s it was top notch
You are right except off by couple of decades. So 60s to 80s.
Japan was making tin toys in the 60s, by the 80s, they were one of the largest car manufacturing nations and were buying out US factories.
They boomed through the 80s/90s, but then lost their edge as China moved itself up the car manufacturing hierarchy, particularly in EVs.
Same with competing with South Korea, but Japan are coasting a bit.
China is at the start of that curve.
They'll end up diversifying into the rest of the world, but the 21st century will belong to China.
>but then lost their edge as China moved itself up the car manufacturing hierarchy
Didn't they lose their edge earlier and because the US togheter with some european nations forced their arm after a trade war to limit their exports, enforce an unfavourable currency regime, etc?
In the 1980s the cars were not good.
They were not built to last so became unreliable after ~5 years.
That was because in the Japanese market five years as a long time to run a car. Not so in the west
Japanese manufacturing was dodgy in the 80’s? I don’t think so.
“What do you mean doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan”
“Unbelievable”
That's the entire point of the joke, yeah. Japanese manufacturing was dodgy in the 50s-60s but great by the 80s.
Korean manufacturing might've been considered dodgy in the 80s but great by 2000. Taiwan (ROC) went through this also (70s vs 90s, ish?). And now China.
The older generation made huge sacrifices with no wage growth because the CCP kept the currency low.
This allowed for China to choose industries it would dominate outside of economic forces. It chose to dominate solar and was allowed to sell panels below raw materials cost in order to kill competition.
In one hand it’s good for world solar, on the other hand this has helped cause the rise of the far right all over the west.
> The older generation made huge sacrifices with no wage growth
...and poured their savings into the sole investment available, real estate, creating the largest bubble the world has ever seen...
AI: hold my beer
Real estate was at one point 25-30% of Chinese GDP. AI is not anywhere close, at least not yet.
Just Nvidia has a larger market cap than all German public companies combined.
Just Nvidia.
But much less revenue I suspect? Looks like a bubble, smells like a bubble, it's a bubble
> It's their citizens who sacrifice to make solar power cheap enough.
No. Manufacturing labor cost in China is not cheap. In fact since 2012 or so, it is more expensive than in most of Asia. Companies who want cheap labor look elsewhere.
https://www.economist.com/business/2023/02/20/global-firms-a... (Archive link: https://archive.fo/tdhXJ )
China is also the only major economy where wages have increased at the same rate as GDP in the last 40 or so years.
Solar panel construction is very easy to automate, I don’t think labor is a big driver of cost.
Labor is always a big driver of cost, because you need to plan, build, maintain and operate those factories with humans even if fully automated, and a lot of the indirect costs is going to scale with the price of labor, too (local legal representation, transport/logistics, ...)
Median wage in urban China is about $20k/year.
That is objectively dirt-cheap compared to basically all of the west.
Yes, wages might be even cheaper in neighboring countries, but those lag behind in infrastructure, education, political stability, availability of capital and network effects from existing industry (and are thus not a viable alternative to China yet for lots of things).
Manufacturing labor cost in China has surpassed parts of Eastern Europe.
I agree that infrastructure, supply chains, political stability, and education are the primary drivers for attracting manufacturing to China.
> Manufacturing labor cost in China has surpassed parts of Eastern Europe.
This is a good point, but I think that only really the underdeveloped/underindustrialized/unstable parts really qualify, possibly Romania, Serbia, Ukraine, with similar caveats than Chinas neighbors.
Despite all this a lot of European manufacturing (e.g. cars), has shifted into the more viable low-wage countries over the last decades (despite language barriers and very high automation; talking mainly Poland, Slovenia, Hungary here).
You still need labor to build, maintain and operate factories, even if they are filled with robots; people here underestimate the benefit of cheap labor by a lot.
[flagged]
This is a myth: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths
Because of the efficiency of the EV motor vs. the ICE motor, EVs are far cleaner than ICEVs even when fossil-fuel-powered and that's not factoring in the (slow) cleaning of the grid which will widen that gap over time, as the other comment mentioned.
Right, but you can switch an EV to a clean source of energy in the future, which you can't do with a petrol car (until carbon-capture fuel becomes viable)
No one is arguing that’s not obviously the case. Just reminding that coal is still king in China.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
Since the beginning of 2025 coal usage has started to decline in absolute numbers in China.
China builds enough renewables and storage to both absorb grid growth and displace existing coal plants.
Rate is at a ten year high.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
That is construction of new plants.
In terms of actual coal burned in those and already existing plants it is declining.
China burned more coal at power plants between January and July of 2025 than at any time since 2016.
https://www.realclearenergy.org/2025/08/29/china_burning_coa...
I think you should find authoritative sources rather than relying on blogspam misrepresenting the source article.
Your article is a single paragraph:
> China burned more coal at power plants between January and July of 2025 than at any time since 2016, despite massive renewable capacity, according to new environmental research report.
Then they link the source DW article:
https://www.dw.com/en/china-boosting-coal-capacity-at-record...
Which was updated due to not correctly presenting the underlying report.
> Correction: The article initially referred to China burning coal at record high levels and had other inconsistencies with the original CREA report. This has been edited to reflect that the study highlighted an increase in coal power plants, rather than burned coal, after being contacted by the research institution.
Which is what I have been telling you again and again. China is building tons of coal plants but in absolute terms the coal usage is declining.
Why is it so hard to accept that?
Some of the sacrifice is not voluntary - most panels contain parts and/or materials made by slaves in work camps.
I.e.,
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-xi... ("Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human Rights Concerns" / "The global industry is cutting some ties to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and companies are less transparent, a new report found")
Just like iPhones.
I think it's a bit different, I never heard a story of iPhones being manufactured like this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57124636
However most of the "slave" talk these days comes from highly politicized sources, so it's hard to cut through to the truth. For example, it's not likely that there's enough Uyghur slave labor to be involved with "most" of the polysilicon even from Xinjiang, much less the entire world's supply.
IMHO, like the cobalt getting mined by children from artisanal-scale mines in Africa, it's a very serious issue that gets trotted out more as a political football against the entire technology, rather than expressed as an earnest concern to solve the underlying problem.
> IMHO, like the cobalt getting mined by children from artisanal-scale mines in Africa
Not really an issue for solar battery systems as they typically use the cheaper LFP chemistry that has a much higher cycle count. The gravimetric density is a bit less, but that only really matters for high-performance mobility.
You responded to a comment about cobalt with vague references to cell chemistry, cycle count, and energy density.
What does any of that have to do with cobalt?
The post you're replying to didn't explain it well, but: LFP batteries don't use cobalt (or nickel).
LFP production is starting to pass NMC (lithium + nickel manganese cobalt oxide). Slightly lower density but a lot of advantages in lack of easily catching on fire, longer lifetime -- and lack of cobalt. LFP (LiFePo4) is the battery chemistry of choice today for solar installations, where the longer lifetime and increased safety are a big win and the slightly lower density doesn't matter, unlike mobile applications.
I suppose I could have been clearer, but I figure it was an easy connection tom make from talking about chemistry to the question of whether cobalt is even relevant.
> I think it's a bit different
nice to discuss the degrees of slavery, little slavery is cool, little more perhaps not as much…
Here in the US, the thirteenth amendment seems to think that a little slavery is cool.
As I understand it, much of the rest of the world has similar views, but I'm sure this varies a bit from country to country.
It's just that in the 21st century, we prefer to use some less-upsetting euphemism to refer to the practice domestically.
> Here in the US, the thirteenth amendment seems to think that a little slavery is cool.
For anyone not familiar with the US Constitution, the 13th Amendment forbids slavery and involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
Without that "except as a punishment for [a] crime" clause, being sentenced to N hours of community service would be forbidden by the Constitution, and the second-lowest penalty judges could impose (the lowest being a fine) would be prison time. So that clause was actually necessary to include in order to allow for more lenient sentences for crimes that deserve something more severe than a fine: lowest level of sentencing is a fine, after that comes being sentenced to community service (which most people agree is less severe than prison, even though it does count as involuntary servitude), and then after that come the more severe sentences like prison.
Most other countries seem to be able to have community service orders without labelling it “servitude”. Do you have a reference for why community service is defined as servitude in the US?
Are you saying that being ordered by a judge to perform work, without pay, and which you would not have done absent those orders, does not fit the definition of involuntary servitude?
Because while the precise definitions of servitude do vary from dictionary to dictionary, and some define it more harshly than others, in general it fits. One definition I found online (with no reference to which dictionary it came from) defines servitude as "A condition in which an individual is bound to work for another person or organization, typically without pay." Another one (Cambridge dictionary) says it's "the state of being under the control of someone else and of having no freedom". I couldn't check the Oxford English Dictionary as it requires a subscription to look up even one word. Merriam-Webster lists two meanings, one of which applies to land. the one that applies to people is "a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life".
Now, being sentenced to community service is only a temporary condition of servitude, which ends as soon as a given number of hours have been served. And it might not fit the strict definition if the person being sentenced is allowed to choose the form their community service will take; I lack knowledge of what kinds of community-servitude sentences are commonly handed out. But if the person being sentenced does not get to choose the form his community service will take, but instead is told "Your community service will be served in the city clerk's office. Show up at 9:00 AM on Monday ready to make photocopies and run errands," then that counts as being under the control of another and lacking freedom during the period of community service. It's not a permanent state of servitude, but even a temporary state of servitude is forbidden by the 13th amendment (other than as a sentence for a crime), because otherwise people at the time would have argued "Oh, fifty years of involuntary servitude still counts as 'temporary', so I'm allowed to carry on with imposing debt peonage on my debtors."
(I should also mention that I am not a lawyer, so perhaps US lawyers have already reached broad consensus on whether community service counts as involuntary servitude under US law; if someone knows whether that's true, I welcome being corrected on my point).
The context for the 13th amendment was that slavery was legal in the US then. It mostly wasn’t in other countries, so they never had to try to find the language to allow judicial punishments while disallowing private slavery. If you are given a community service orders without labelling in the UK for example, nobody thinks it’s slavery or servitude, they just think it’s a valid sentence under the law. The grey area is probably around profiting off such work?
> It [slavery] mostly wasn't [legal] in other countries [at the time the 13th Amendment was passed, i.e. the mid 1860's]...
The history of the 19th century and when slavery was abolished in each one is actually a fascinatingly complex subject, and there's tons of interesting history hiding behind your word "mostly", to the point where I can't actually tell whether "mostly" is a correct or incorrect description. Judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave... I would lean towards "definitely correct in Europe and the Americas, a lot murkier in Africa and Asia". Oddly enough, a lot of Spanish colonies in South America abolished slavery before the United States did, yet Spain itself didn't pass its law ending slavery until a year after the US's 13th Amendment came into effect.
If you're at all interested in the history of that era, the film Amazing Grace, though it takes a few liberties with the historical facts, is a mostly-accurate depiction of what it took to get slavery abolished in the United Kingdom. Interestingly, the part of Prime Minister William Pitt was played by a then-unknown Benedict Cumberbatch (Amazing Grace came out in 2006, and most people first discovered Cumberbatch when Sherlock came out in 2010). I recommend the film if you enjoy historical films; it's quite fun. (I love the "I would have been bored by botany" line).
The conditions in the 'Angola' prison in Louisiana are a lot closer to slavery than community service.
fascinating reading here on HN every now again someone taking a moral high ground on some random shit while actively using products and services of some of the most evil corporations in the history of mankind
Talking about degrees of slavery is decidedly not cool. If you have documentation of iPhone supply chain using forced labor like I linked to, please do share rather than trying to be morally ambiguous.
You linked to a four and a half year old news article from a highly politicised source.
I wouldn’t call that “documentation”.
buuuut his source is bold enough to fake trump speeches - that takes balls
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/03/bbc-report-revea...
The BBC is not the source, they are reporting on another study, directly linked near the very top of the article.
It actually links to rot.
Try it yourself.
Link rot.
I wonder how much solar energy produced from these slave-built panels makes its way into iPhones.
I dont think China deserves that hat tip. Their "commitment" was done years after all the major nations had committed to emissions reduction and seems to have only been done so they could sell the solution. They've made little attempt to reduce emissions and instead scaled their industrial base to capitalize on the demand from nations working to reduce their carbon footprint.
The only thing they've done to greenwash their image is spend money buying articles that present the false image of a green china.
besides toomuchtodo's nicely made argument, I would like to point that that many "major" nations (I'm assuming that refers to mostly western countries, correct me if I'm wrong) were able to focus on committing to emissions because they gave their dirty work (ie: mass manufacturing, waste disposal, resource extraction) to other countries, especially China.
toomuchtodo's arugments are deluded and ill respond to those in a bit. But I want to be clear that no one "gave" their dirty work to china. Industry in all these countries were priced out.
The Western and Asian governments increased environmental regulations and the cost to do business rose. In China the government ignored its climate obligations and slashed environmental regulations and increased coal investment to drive energy costs down and thus the manufacturing moved there. You think Germany couldnt have cut environmental regulations slapped down a few coal plants and made solar panels?
Thats why there was climate meetings to get everyone on the same track. If everyone is aligned in their goals then the economic hurt is easier to bare. China intentionally captialised on this and I do not think they deserve any praise for it.
I agree and find it disturbing people downvote this point of view because that is actually the most reasonable one when you look at the actual facts.
It's completely stupid to pretend China is going green when their emissions have continuously increased and the rate has even accelerated the richer they got.
It was all done so they could capture the business of western countries and run a silent economic war. Now most of europe is so dependent on China it's hopeless and they are not even cheaper because all kinds of costs have been added.
> They've made little attempt to reduce emissions
They are a growing economy of a billion + people.
You need to realize this is a population that was virtually 90% poor just 3 decades ago.
This isn't factually accurate at all, and I would encourage some research so your statements can be more accurate.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener...
https://electrek.co/2025/09/02/h1-2025-china-installs-more-s...
> Global solar installations are breaking records again in 2025. In H1 2025, the world added 380 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity – a staggering 64% jump compared to the same period in 2024, when 232 GW came online. China was responsible for installing a massive 256 GW of that solar capacity. For context, it took until September last year to pass the 350 GW mark. This year, the milestone was achieved in June. That pace cements solar as the fastest-growing source of new electricity generation worldwide. In 2024, global solar output rose by 28% (+469 terawatt-hours) from 2023, more growth than any other energy source. Nicolas Fulghum, senior energy analyst at independent energy think tank Ember, said, “These latest numbers on solar deployment in 2025 defy gravity, with annual solar installations continuing their sharp rise. In a world of volatile energy markets, solar offers domestically produced power that can be rolled out at record speed to meet growing demand, independent of global fossil fuel supply chains.”
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064
> Utility-scale solar power capacity in China reached more than 880 gigawatts (GW) in 2024, according to China’s National Energy Administration. China has more utility-scale solar than any other country. The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024. Planned solar capacity projects will likely lead to continued growth in China’s solar capacity. More than 720 GW of solar capacity are in development: about 250 GW under construction, nearly 300 GW in pre-construction phases, and 177 GW of announced projects, according to the Global Solar Power Tracker compiled by Global Energy Monitor.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/20/chinas-coal-generation-...
> China’s coal-fired electricity generation took an unexpectedly sharp turn downward in the first quarter of 2025, signaling a potentially profound shift in the world’s largest coal-consuming economy. This wasn’t merely a seasonal dip or economic distress signal; rather, it represented a clear and structural turning point. Coal generation fell by approximately 4.7% year over year, significantly outpacing the overall grid electricity supply decline of just 1.3%. However, electricity demand, a better measure, went up by 1%. What gives?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/08/21/china-clean-renewable-e...
> China’s Decarbonization Is So Fast Even New Coal Plants Aren’t Stopping It. In multiple sectors—transportation, renewable energy, and overall electrification—the clear trend is toward a greener energy system. In fact, in areas like renewables and electric vehicles, China is now the world’s leading player. With the United States essentially abandoning the field, it will become even more dominant.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...
> China’s installations of wind and solar in May are enough to generate as much electricity as Poland, as the world’s second-biggest economy breaks further records with its rapid buildup of renewable energy infrastructure. China installed 93 GW of solar capacity last month – almost 100 solar panels every second, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Wind power installations reached 26 GW, the equivalent of about 5,300 turbines.
(it is somewhat irrelevant that China has accomplished spinning up a clean tech machine of this scale out of energy security reasons, as it still accomplishes the goal of decarbonizing their economy first, and then, the rest of the world as their spun up manufacturing flywheel exports cheap clean tech to the world)
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
Ember recently released a report (well, slide deck?) about the coming 'electrotech' age: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electrotech-rev...
We're at the point where things are changing fast. Yes, largely driven by the ginormous solar and battery production coming from China. The rest of the world better get their ducks in order if they want to compete.
Solar bribery is interestingly the exact opposite in some of the USA, where the solar contractors have basically gotten in bed with government for regulatory capture on the market.
Most places in my state you need an electrician license, permits, bonding, insurance, a special 'solar' warranty, and inspections if you want solar.
I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid without anyone from the government ever even looking at it or taking money for it. If I wanted to add a solar system, it basically completely fucked everything and I would have had to gone through the normal permitting and inspection system for my house which would have made even building the house basically impossible for me.
> I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid without anyone from the government ever even looking at it or taking money for it.
That's... not common (perhaps more-so in rural areas).
In my area, being connected to the grid brings a lot more hassle: the utility gets a say in how much solar you can build, as well as how it's connected. Some of it makes sense (they want to make sure you're not going to backfeed during an outage and cause a hazard to linemen), but a lot of it is them protecting their bottom line.
Interesting. My utility let me do my own service entrance and everything. They didn't even give a shit what I connected it to. I ended up powering a whole house and a trailer without anyone from the power company even looking at either of them (I added them after I built a 200 amp service entrance as just a stubbed entrance with no load).
If I added a solar system they would neither care nor have any idea. Only the government cares here.
It's not about them protecting their bottom line. It's about managing the supply-demand balance to within the tight tolerances required to operate the grid stably . You can't just let an unconstrained new amount of generation come online and maintain a stable grid.
Where did you build a house without a permit and get away with it?
I have a permit. And the permit basically says I don't have to get it inspected, show building plans, or do anything but tip my hat to the government.
Unless I add solar.
I feel very optimistic about battery storage for this reason. I would love nothing more than be able to run on battery for a week or so so I can give a middle finger to the utility and just rip out the grid connection. No more solar inverter or power limit permits needed.
You probably still want an inverter to get AC for your household. I’m also still waiting for the house size batteries to come down in price before pulling the trigger apart from a small 200W setup for fun
Wording might have been ambiguous - yes to inverter, no to requesting permission to attach it to the grid (for good reasons, backfeeding power during outages, avoiding overload and fire etc etc.)
In my jurisdiction I could avoid permits and inspections by attaching less than 5 square meters of panels to my house, by staying under 60V, and by staying right of the panel. It would be ridiculous to pay over $3k in permits and inspections for $2k of hardware.
"I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid"
Where exactly do you live? I'm not saying you're lying, but this smells like a tall tale. You can easily buy solar panels and batteries, and if no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.
Maybe what you're saying is, "my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?
Rural AZ
>"my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?
Nah they didn't give a shit what I connected it to. I literally stubbed a 200 amp service entrance on vacant land then just went wild connecting it to whatever I like. I shot the shit with their engineer when they ran secondary off the power pole and that was it, I've never seen them again.
> no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.
I don't know for certain but having an unpermitted solar panel visible via satellite would likely trigger a visit.
Great, so it sounds like installing unpermitted solar at your house is about as illegal as jaywalking, and you probably shouldn't worry about it so much.
just never upset the wrong person that knows they have leverage over you keeping your home.
As long as it's not visible by satellite, yes.
What law governs this? I'm familiar with a lot of restrictions on grid-tie systems, but I've never heard of it being this strict for something that could (presumably) be done without a back feed.
I mean, are you saying that someone sticking up a few panels+batteries to run an electric fence, gate, and camera system has to have permits?
This all seems strange.
For example, here is the one that to install certain PV you need permit with roof and building plan, which is impossible on my house because I have none (literally built my roof off the cuff after thumbing IRC).
https://www.azleg.gov/ars/11/00323.htm
Just dropping by to say that I appreciate your approach to life lol
Don't people have guns in AZ, especially rural?
I wouldn't want to go to someone's home to hassle them about their DIY solar installation.
People have guns in all of the US. Sure, AZ ownership might be around double that of CA, but that's just going from 1 in 4 to 1 in 2. The odds are high either way.
> Most places in my state you need an electrician license, permits, bonding, insurance, a special 'solar' warranty, and inspections if you want solar.
Because its dangerous to own solar. If its guns, then its perfectly fine and safe.
>voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]
This is a disastrous misrepresentation of a complex case with lots of moving pieces. At no point in the history of the construction of that specific power line was there a challenge to legality of citizen initiative until after the vote. Meanwhile, as they were behind in the polls, the company rushed to build as much of it as they could knowing that the initiative was coming, so when they failed at the ballot box, they could claim a legally recognized "vested interest".
Absent the vested interest claim they would have been legally bound by the results of the ballot initiative, and the vested interest was not established until after the ballot had been voted on.
> Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US. The only thing stopping me is the permitting hassle or the contractor hassle.
Does decentralized solar plus batteries give you same amount of reliability? How many days without sunny weather can you survive without having to change your energy use habits?
Each 9 of reliability for infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive. And grid has a lot of 9s.
It absolutely does not.
But having electricity 13 days every two weeks is much better than not having it at all.
This isn't about China building out their grid with an over capacity factor of 200% so they can keep everything running even if rain, sun and wind all fail for months on end. This is a developing county getting to the point they can charge mobile phones consistently.
When I go to https://model.energy/ and ask it to solve for providing steady output in China from 100% renewable energy (wind/solar/battery/hydrogen) at minimum cost using 2030 cost assumptions and 2011 weather data, the solar curtailment is just 7.3% (and most of the energy is coming from solar, not wind). If I remove hydrogen and solve again, solar curtailment increases to 16.7%. "200% overcapacity" is completely bogus.
Try that again with 99% renewable and it becomes much more reasonable with regards to over overcapacity. 1% non-renewable would be a very good outcome.
One can enable "dispatchable 1" which is simple cycle gas turbines, and limit the total CO2 emission so that's at most 1% of the generation. Doing that, and with no hydrogen, solar curtailment is reduced by more than half, to 8.1%.
And what was the storage requirement? I just ran those parameters myself with China's 2.9 TW of constant electricity demand, and the storage requirement was over 70,000 GWh of battery storage.
By comparison, global battery production is around 1,000 GWh per year.
Battery production capacity grows by 10x every five years. In 2021 there was ~100 GWh of batteries produced a year. In 2031, it's going to be 20-30TWh per year. Current batteries have 10+ year warranties, and last 20-25 years. We're likely to see 30 years+ for the newer sodium ion batteries.
For something like 20 years, people have been looking at the exponential growth in the annual solar deployments and saying "well that's it, starting next year we're only going to deploy exactly as much as last year, plus 5%-30%". And every year these predictions are proven wrong. And every year they do the same dumb thing again:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/07/12/has-the-international...
Let's not repeat the same projection mistake with batteries that's been going on with solar for so long.
It was around 14 hours of battery storage. Seems reasonable.
Realize that replacing all ICE road vehicles in the US with 70 kWh BEVs would require storage equal to ~40 hours of our average grid usage. The future is going to need large numbers of batteries, which is why China has been all in on this.
14 hours of battery (~40 TWh for China) with the hydrogen storage or without? Because the calculator was reporting ~78,000 GWh battery storage with China's weather selected, and 2030 technology assumptions. I changed the spatial capacity factor from 1 to 2 and the battery storage requirement dropped down to 68 TWh, but still well above 40 TWH.
Regardless, 14 hours of China's electricity demand is a whopping 40,600 GWh. By comparison, 2024's lithium ion battery production figure was 1.5 TWh [1]. Even assuming 100% of this went to EV's we're still talking about roughly 25 years worth of global battery production to fulfill only China's demand for storage in this model. As you point out, we still have loads of battery demand for EV adoption, so nowhere near 100% of production will be able to be diverted to grid storage.
The scale of storage required to make intermittent sources viable without being backed by a dispatchable energy source really is tremendous, and this often gets overlooked in pushes for a fully renewable grid.
1. https://www.argusmedia.com/ja/news-and-insights/latest-marke...
Battery production capacity grows by 10x every five years. It was four years ago when I first heard that, and we are exactly on track still. In 2031 we will be at 20-30 TWh/year production capacity.
There are few things that grow this fast when it comes to manufactured things, atoms are far harder to arrange and scale than bits. But it's happening at a tremendous scale. Natural gas turbine production capacity is tapped out with long order queues, and so is battery production well into 2026, but only battery production capacity is expanding at breakneck speed.
Understand that only ~6 TWh of lithium batteries have been produced to date. As in, every single year of production combined adds up to less than 6 Twh. Moore's law largely stemmed from the fact that making a processer faster also meant making transistors smaller. Reducing the width of a transistor to a half, a quarter, etc. increased compute per cm^2 by double, quadruple, etc. Chemistry doesn't obtain that kind of exponential growth - we have hard limits on the number of joules we can store per gram of anode and cathode, so scaling up production means digging up more anode and cathode material out of the ground. The nature of resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are exhausted first, and continued production is contingent on accessing the progressively more and more inconvenient reserves. Maybe in 2030 annual global production will be 30 TWh - we'll know in 4 years. But there's a lot of people who probably don't want to make trillion-dollar investments gambling on that possibility panning out.
Regardless of your confidence in battery production's continued growth, I think you'd agree that if someone is making a calculation about the required amount of overproduction required to maintain a stable grid, they should at least mention that their calculation is contingent on provisioning tens of terawatt hours worth of grid storage.
Getting to 10x production capacity doesn't require improving battery tech, it just requires building more factories. The equivalent here isn't Moore's Law, it's fab capacity. If battery tech stalled out today at the same pricing (it won't), we could still 10x the battery production capacity every 5 years just on this pace.
The learning rate for batteries has not been as steep as Moore's Law for ICs. But the value of being able to store mass quantities of electricity at low cost is so incredibly valuable that it's going to blow up into a huuuuge number of factories.
You look at the 6TWh of all time and see that as a limitation. I haven't seen that stat before but I trust you, because with the growth rate of battery production it has to be a tiny number, because it's exponential growth. In 2024, 1.2 TWh of batteries were produced, 20% of all storage capacity ever. That was a single year! What if, in 2024, we produced 20% of all CPU capacity every produced? That's obviously a hugely growing market.
> The nature of resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are exhausted first, and continued production is contingent on accessing the progressively more and more inconvenient reserves. Maybe in 2030 annual global production will be 30 TWh - we'll know in 4 years. But there's a lot of people who probably don't want to make trillion-dollar investments gambling on that possibility panning out.
If you spend a small amount of time diving into the industry, you'll see that there's a massive number of very smart people solving all these resource constraint problems, securing supply chains years in advance, and building like fucking mad. Sure, there's a lot of people that don't want to get involved, but they will be left in the dust.
We are witnessing a massive energy interchange. This is like when the PC came along, but much bigger in terms of quantity and speed. Sure, there are those who are still skeptical of energy storage, 5-10 years after it became blazingly obvious that batteries are cheap and getting cheaper and will take over the enery world. But they are the same people who saw the iPhone and said "it will never catch up to my BlackBerry."
Electricity storage in batteries is a swiss-army knife for the grid that never existed until recently. We couldn't do time arbitrage, always had to match supply and demand instantaneously, across grids spanning hundreds and thousands of miles. No more, that's all gone. We can do tiny microgrids, we can do single houses, we can do 10 TWh installs across grids, because batteries scale small, scale big, are cheap, getting cheaper, and are being produced on a growing scale that most people do not understand.
That was about the amount in both cases. Slightly more in the no-hydrogen case than otherwise. Hydrogen contributed only marginally.
Yes, it's a lot of batteries. So what? It's not like the current battery production is some firm limit. If anything, the very large future demand ensures batteries will be driven down their experience curve, so the cost will be even lower than assumed.
The world spends something like $10T per year on energy. Any replacement energy system is going to be a big thing.
You need to make an argument that is more than you expressing fear of large numbers.
I wonder what proportion of energy use goes towards either heating or cooling and could use a thermal energy store rather than an electrical one.
It's their 2060 plan. Take it up with the CPP.
Press 'X' to doubt.
Assuming someone actually told you that, I think you need to reevaluate the credibility of that source.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266649842...
Nowhere in that document do I see a statement about 200% overcapacity. Could you point it out?
Unfortunately, all such calculations are egocentric. People assume that everyone can use solar panels for 13 days 2 weeks, and when needed, we’ll just get electricity from the grid. But what they don’t take into account is that when there’s load today but none tomorrow, the grid becomes unstable. 2) This also increases costs. You might save electricity consumption in 14 times, but your expenses for grid electricity can increase in 14 times, because the grid still needs to be maintained — staff must be kept at power plants to ensure you can be supplied with 100% of your energy at any moment.
These people don't have access to the grid. That's the issue to begin with.
The tricky thing in cold climates is the part of the year when solar power is lowest but electricity use, for heating, is highest. Sometimes they have hydro or something.
Sounds good until you try to run a business. Having businesses randomly out of commission is not a way to bring country from developing to developed status.
Even if you have an under-provisioned solar+storage solution and don't want to splurge for a generator, even on cloudy days you still get power, just less.
Generally businesses are really great at balancing costs, and for highly-cost-constrained businesses if you give them 95% uptime at half the cost, the equation becomes clear. And in Africa, if the option is 95% uptime or 0% uptime, the choice is even clearer.
If that’s your first thought, then you’ll hate this influential perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Better make sure they don't depend on AWS, then.
> And grid has a lot of 9s.
Where I live, I only get two 9s from the utility. And I'm within commuting distance of Seattle. With my generator, I still got three nines the one year where the battery tender failed and the generator didn't start when needed, but only because that outage was less than 8 hours and I replaced the battery tender before further outages (I could have jump started the generator, but the outage started overnight and waiting it out was easier). Most years, the number of brief outages adds up, and I probably only get five 9s.
Solar + battery + generator for really bad weeks (but make sure you exercise it!) could pretty easily add up to the two nines I'd get from the utility here.
For developing countries, solar + battery alone is likely be better than many grids which often are intermittent rather than 24/7 and many places don't have any access to utility power.
Same here in rural far north New Zealand.
I actually counted the number of outages after I got my battery unit in June -- it was six in five weeks, for anything from a couple of seconds to 30 minutes, which I noticed because the unit clicked over to running from the battery, and the clock on the oven (which is still only mains powered) flashes until I go over and hit a button.
In April I had a 40 hour outage after a storm. That's what caused me to order the brand new Pecron E3600LFP, first New Zealand model shipment in "early" June (I received mine June 19).
In February 2023 I had a 4 day outage during/after a storm.
There are even, every 2 or 3 months, scheduled and notified 9 AM - 3 PM outages for equipment maintenance, tree trimming etc. Just those alone lower the grid reliability to around 99.5%.
Six days outage in three years -- let's call it four -- drops grid reliability by another 0.4%.
So, yeah, two 9s is about right.
With the Pecron base unit (US$999 at the moment still on Halloween special, $1259 before that) I simply don't notice any outage under 4 hours, and that's even with a full winter heating load. In fact I deliberately turn the mains to it off from 7-9 AM and 5-9 PM every day.
A 4 hour outage was a little close sometimes, so in August I added a 3kWh expansion battery ($699 on pecron.com right now).
With 6kWh I can run my fridge, computers, Starlink, some LED lighting for 36 hours. Or 30 hours with typical kitchen appliance usage added (espresso machine, toaster, kettle, microwave, air fryer).
Or virtually forever now I added 6x 440W solar panels (cost me US$400 total) to it, which still generates around 200W between them in even the worse overcast and rain.
I'm running this stuff as a mini off-grid system, not connected to the house wiring at all -- except plugged into a standard socket to charge the battery if needed. I also have a $450 2kW petrol generator which I can use to charge the battery if needed, but needing that should be very rare.
Total cost: under US$3k. More like $2.3k at the current Halloween special prices.
https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/1984782313386099022
The grid has a lot of 9s, but in a lot of places losing power for a day or two after a storm is not unusual at all. The grid per se being fine but your actual neighborhood being dark for a couple days is a pretty common experience in some places.
If you have ever lost power for just 12 hours in an entire year, you're already down to only two 9's: 99.863%
I've never lived anywhere where the power didn't go down for at least a few (cumulative) days a year.
Last time my building lost power was about 19 years ago, when I was living in a Welsh valley halfway between the two nearest villages.
Since then, none of the extended Portsmouth conurbation, Sheffield, Cambridge, rural Cambridgeshire or Berlin have had any problems big enough to even notice while I've lived in them.
I have seen at least two circuit breakers trip in that time though.
It's very location dependent fwiw.
In the UK, I think I can remember 3 power outages my entire life. One when there was significant flooding in my hometown as a child, which lasted around a day, once at university for a few hours (local substation failed) and recently 30 minutes overnight while they were upgrading something (with a lot of notice). I may be undercounting/misremembering but I don't think its far off.
I think the main difference is the UK in all but mostly rural areas has all the power lines underground. This is very different in eg North America where you can go a few blocks out of downtown areas and it is all overhead delivery.
I don’t know where you live, but I experienced outage in Budapest once in at least 10 years while I lived there. And only one phase was out, not all. We even lamented with my friends that we didn’t even remember when was the last time when something like that happened. I never had to reconfigure the clock on my microwave, just for daylight saving time. I know that even 30 kms from there my granddad still experiences outages monthly, but there are places where that happens very-very rarely nowadays.
And, for a refrigerator and a lot of loads, being down for 2 days straight is way worse than a few hours a year. losing 48 hours of supply a year if broken into 2 hour chunks is not nearly as bad as losing 48 consecutive hours.
I get your point, but I personally would be grumpy if I lost power for two hours twice a month. I realize that is rich considering this article is about people who are lucky to get any amount of power reliably
When I lived in a city proper, the grid was doing well to maintain 98% uptime. Multiple day long outages were the rule, not uncommon to lose power 3-5 days in a row.
Now I live in a rural area and it's uncommon to avoid outages more than a month. We have an automatic transfer switch and fuel generator from previous owners and it saves hundreds of dollars in frozen food.
This is in the US by the way. If you're investing in a transfer switch and generator now, the cost is going to quickly approach a modest solar + battery set up with a whole house inverter, and of course, you save money all year that way, not just in outages.
The grid where I live has a target of 89 minutes of unplanned power outages per year for urban customers and somewhere in the high 200s for long rural feeder lines. This is in Australia, where serving outlying customers comes with some geographical challenges. I think it's currently sitting at 99.998% reliability. I can't remember the last unplanned outage longer than a couple of minutes, although they did some planned work last year and took out our power for half an hour.
I'm surprised that someone would think days of power outages are normal everywhere. My family used to get hit with 8+ hour outages every few years back in the 90s because we were at the end of a single long rural feeder line, and we thought that was an unacceptable frequency.
I lost power for 10h in my city recently and it was a big fucking deal. The last 5 years that's the first time that happened. I would say I have less than a hour of downtime per year in the other years
PS I don't live in the US.
I live in central Europe and can't remember the last power outage not caused by a clumsy electrician. It must have been many years.
Can confirm. I live in a US city and the only 9 involved is maybe the very first number. I've lived here just over a year and we've had 1 full day without power and probably 8 to 10 short outages between a few seconds and several 10s of minutes. I'm adding batteries and solar permitting be damned.
Wild! I’ve lived in Chicago and San Francisco and have never lost power for more than an hour. And can’t remember the last time it went out at all, maybe 2 years ago?
What city do you live in?
I'm (not GP) in the Chicago burbs and expect to lose power 1-3 times a year. Usually it's for less than twelve hours but last year it was out for three days straight. Most recent outage was ~10 minutes long a couple weeks ago - I still haven't set the oven clock.
The cause around here is usually storm + trees + above ground power lines, plus a low enough population density that you're not top priority for the utility company.
Checks out - you aren’t in a city.
I was surprised that the original comment said they were in a city
> Each 9 of reliability for infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive. And grid has a lot of 9s.
Correction: should have a lot of 9s.
But in a lot of places in the U.S., even rich states, it doesn't because a combination of regulatory capture, profiteering and straight corruption.
I can see why solar and batteries are so attractive because at least its your prerogative when the power goes out.
My concern is that it deflates any impetus to actually solve the problems of regulatory capture, profiteering, and other corruption.
Not everybody can afford the up front costs of installing solar + battery storage, plus replacement when the PV cells and batteries inevitably reach EoL. These people will be left behind on a decaying grid nobody with political capital wants to fix or at the mercy of landlords.
I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.
> I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.
Because people are too busy playing Team Politics instead of solving issues that everyone can get behind.
Fixing the power grid is one of those things that everyone could get behind, and yeah I agree, it disproportionately affects the economically disadvantaged.
Have you heard how companies makes money on the US grid?
Oh boy.
They are incentivized to BULID but not to maintain or upgrade because that grants them guarantee rate of return.
It was enlightening to see what caused the big blackout during a big snowfall in texas a few years ago
It is funny to me how fractally perverse systems gets when a centralised authority refuses to directly solve a problem but rather decide have it solved by third party uncooperative players by creating an endless stream of byzantine rules to force the solution to be a twisted copy of what the centralised authority could have done by itself.
Of course there are failure modes in any approach but "oh no! Herding cats is hard. Who could have imagined!" is funny to me
PVWatts will help you figure this out: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov
According to PVWatts, a 10kW solar system would get me very close to my average usage in December. I'd be way over in the summer, could probably get away with a 4kW system and dial back use during an outage. I can lease two Powerwall 3 batteries from my utility company for $55/mo.
Or look at: https://www.franklinwh.com/products/apower2-home-battery-bac...
Edit: this also looks like a good option: https://www.santansolar.com/product/the-homesteady-kit/
We used to lose power 3-4 days a winter in our old house. It would have been really nice to have heat. A generator or smaller system could handle that.
keep in mind the limitations of these forecasting calculations. On an AVERAGE day, assuming AVERAGE weather, assuming AVERAGE load, you should be fine.
The trouble with relying on the weather for your electricity is that it is entirely possible that you will go five days straight with cloud cover, limited to no solar generation and then be freezing. This is the problem that the electricity grid solves with varied sources of generation.
I read a decent essay about the difference between solar and wind reliability and fossil fuel reliability.
Solar and wind tend to be regularly and predictably intermittent but not unreliable. That's something you can design around. Especially when you have cheap storage to handle critical loads.
It's instructive to look at California's ISO website's supply graphs over the year. Renewables follow a reliable daily cycle.
https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
Distributed can do redundancy. It’s relatively cheap.
Consider a family with two cars instead of one. How often do they have zero working cars? The correlated failure rate squares while the cost doubles.
My home now has a grid connection, house battery and solar, a caravan with mounted solar/battery/fridge/inverter beside it, and I also have a portable “powerstation” and portable solar panel which is basically a UPS. My fridge contents and phone charging needs have a several extra 9’s now for costs that have scaled very well.
These systems are tech that is improving rapidly. In some years these African farmers with their increased yields will likely add a bigger, second solar & battery system. In a village you can run a cable next door. Etc.
> And grid has a lot of 9s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Not as many as you might think.
> And grid has a lot of 9s.
I mean, it very much depends on where you are. Three 9s would be no more than about 8 hours downtime per year. A lot of rural locations would do worse than that, realistically.
A grid in a remote place in Africa would have less 9's than self reliance on solar.
Poor countries have different problems that don’t let decentralization to work.
Local gangs go around and demand protection money and if you don’t pay up your solar panels will unfortunately suffer some “accidental” catastrophic damage.
Apparently solar panels that have fake cracks are moderately popular in some parts of the world to deter theft and similar behavior.
Counterfeit panels are also a huge problem
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/507496-knock-off-solar...
Poor countries have these problems, yes, but they don’t stop whatever, they just add some expense to it. In certain areas of Mexico, businesses have to pay taxes to the local cartel, but if you do, they’ll leave you alone-and they know that if they demand too much, that’s actually undermining their own self-interest. Effectively, the cartel is just another level of local government, taxing you like all the others do. An armed gang or warlord somewhere in Africa or Syria or Afghanistan very often functions similarly.
Sounds like taxes and government to me and that hasn't (so far) stopped people from building.
In fact many people here praise those gangs, and wish they were bigger and demand more money.
Here in Austria, grid costs are now on par with the actual electricity cost. Each are ca €0.1 per kWh now, plus again that in taxes.
Once the EU finally gets rid of the ridiculous pricing model where spot prices are dictated by the most expensive energy source (usually, gas), we might have a situation where grid costs exceed the cost of energy itself.
Oh and what do they do with that money? Hoard it for upcoming grid updates, which they supposedly have to make to accommodate solar peaks and EV charging. And buy solar parks in Spain, apparently.
>Once EU finally gets rid of the ridiculous pricing model where spot prices are dictated by the most expensive energy source (usually, gas), we might have a situation where grid costs exceed the cost of energy itself.
Why is it ridiculous? From a pure mathematical economics point of view it's genius I think. It means energy producers can just set their price at production price, knowing they will get the best deal that way and thus don't need to speculate on the electricity prices. It makes electricity as cheap as possible when it's abundant and expensive when it's not, also incentifying users of electricity to shift their consumption.
What's a better way of doing it?
Any way that is more fair for the end user.
Why should a solar generator, who has virtually zero inputs, demand the same rate as a gas or coal generator who’s costs are dominated by inputs?
Where’s the promised savings to the end user? That’s right, there aren’t any.
And people bang on about solar being cheaper.
No it isn’t.
Solar electricity is the same price as gas peaker-plant electricity. Everywhere I’ve looked, same story.
And there’s no solar power without gas.
If you can make a great profit from solar, you are incentivised to build more of it for an even greater profit.
Soon there is so much solar that you don't need the expensive gas most of the time.
> Soon there is so much solar that you don't need the expensive gas most of the time.
In the EU (winters with weak solar radiation) this only works if you can store power over multiple months. Getting rid of gas means purchasing and maintaining a giant amount of batteries. Slow storage won’t save you from outages during peaks. We do have very cheap power from solar, during the hot months. In winter, its wind and offshore turbines that are prevalent, but they are as unpredictable.
So, solar and wind power is trivial. Storage is the issue. And consumers will pay that storage, in both grid cost, and spot prices.
I don’t understand why peak producers should dictate prices for all levels of service. Make an exception for them that’s adequate, like a second peak market, and done? Why should a solar producer (who doesn’t buffer!) get 3x the price only because Russia turns up gas prices and the big producers start panic buying expensive gas futures, poisoning their whole lineup in the process? Solar producers just pump whatever’s coming out of their panels into the market, with no regard for grid stability.
Right now providing grid stability is maximally rewarded because you get paid a lot when it's needed and little when there's a lot of electricity available. Storage providers can use this spread to make money and create grid stability.
I'm not sure what you mean by second peak market?
Let me turn around the question, why should a gas plant get more for its electricity when it's indistinguishable from solar electricity?
> why should a gas plant get more for its electricity when it's indistinguishable from solar electricity?
I already wrote it: levels of service. A gas plant powers up in minutes. A coal plant in hours. A nuclear reactor in years. Solar and wind isn’t controllable at all.
But why would anyone else being able to deliver at the same time get anything less?
I agree there's actually an issue here, ideally the price should be set by the next seller which just didn't get to sell.
The cheaper suppliers actually bid with their prices, and why wouldn’t those prices be fair then? The EU then goes and gives them more than they offered. Make it make sense. Google „merit order“.
It‘s still a gamble for suppliers btw. The prices change every 15 minutes, and every cheap supplier is at the whim of more expensive suppliers.
In the case of gas peaked plants: because they’re providing grid stability.
Whereas solar generators are ruining grid stability.
Mini pumped storage dams and battery banks fix that issue cheaper than gas peaker plants.
Eg: In your market, Australia, this was completed this year for $8 million AU
https://www.westernpower.com.au/resources-education/network-...
That’s just media hype. You need orders of magnitude more of these plants to prevent blackouts entirely.
Err, no, it's an actual system we built here to service an actual town to soak excess energy from midday solar and buffer an actual real town from blackouts.
The battery banks in Adelaide an elsewhere are real - you can kick them.
You can price these against gas peaker turbine plants, and then compare the robustness of mini distributed storage nodes against larger single point of failure fossil fuel gas plants.
I understand the Western Power link provided looks like media hype, it was put together years back at the start of the project with minal updates in the interim.
It's well out of date now that the Walpole project has been completed and is up and running for a few months now.
Yes, for one town that’s a solution, but not one for the whole of a nation.
The point you appear to miss is that it works and can be easily distributed across a nation cheaply and robustly.
Single massive peaker plants Vs. many smaller battery parks and pumped hydro nodes.
It depends upon the population distributions, topologies, power grid, etc.
Adelaide is a state capital with massive battery banks and large amounts of renewable energy, they have long periods of self suffiency and export excess power to neighbouring states.
This is dull power infrastructure engineering reality, not woo woo imaginary hype.
Isn’t that a self defeating loop.
Great profit to be had from solar because of expensive gas.
Let’s put aside that this isn’t good for the end user, as it openly admits the whole point of solar is great profit, rather than savings for the end user.
Soon there’s no need for the expensive gas.
Where’s your profit margin not?
> Let’s put aside that this isn’t good for the end user, as it openly admits the whole point of solar is great profit, rather than savings for the end user.
The whole point of capitalism is that in a well-regulated, open, competitive market, an ecosystem of companies pursuing maximum profit drive down each other's profit margins as they compete for a limited pool of consumers. In other words, it is precisely the profit motive that creates savings for the end user.
Exactly. The same principles that apply for solar energy are already in place for natural gas and for every other form of energy and the fundamental logic of markets is that there's a price point consumers will pay that's also profitable for the company.
That didn't newly become an issue for the first time once solar entered the picture. There should be a word for this type of argument where people relitigate settled principles because they're discovering them for the first time.
> the fundamental logic of markets is that there's a price point consumers will pay that's also profitable for the company
Electricity demand is price inelastic, meaning the consumer has no direct influence on prices, and will pay practically any price (well, up to a point). In the EU, the day-ahead spot prices are published every day at 2PM CEST, and it's a bidding market driven only by suppliers. If gas price goes up by x3, total electricity price average will go up by some linear factor, because gas turbines are absolutely required for surges/peaks - at least until we have enough batteries.
Calling this a market is stretching it IMO.
I'm sorry, but somehow this manages to be the most incorrect comment in the entire thread so far, a textbook case of missing the forest for the trees.
For starters, numbers I've seen suggest something day ahead prices are something like 10% to 30% of the overall energy supply because most of it's sold outside of that context via things like regulated utility pricing, forward and futures markets which sell weeks to years ahead, and long-term bilateral contracts such as power purchase agreements. So most energy is not purchased this way over the short term.
Moreover, for goodness sake, inelasticity at the margin doesn't make something not a market, that's simply not what inelasticity means, and none of these considerations have anything to do with whether solar power in particular can be profitably offered to customers. (Again, why would it be just applying uniquely and exclusively to solar power but not other forms of energy?)
Investments of various kind occur over horizons of days, months, and years where these market dynamics unfold. Every energy source on offer whether it be solar panel, gas turbine and storage facility is financed built and dispatched based on the expectations of cost and profit. Demand is quite elastic over the horizon of months and years, and demand inelasticity is sometimes a feature of markets not something that identifies any specific phenomena that prevents solar power in particular from entering markets.
Solar power rises and falls throughout the day in a manner that conveniently aligns with actual energy consumption patterns, and its net effect on the grid is de-stressing peaking infrastructure.
So it's certainly true that there are day ahead markets but if you think the upshot of that is that it somehow means solar can't be provided at a price point affordable to consumers that simultaneously profitable to the companies providing it, well, the phrase "missing the forest for the trees" was practically invented for moments like this.
Even more generally, this applies to commodity markets. Price of potatoes is x EUR/kg, set by supply and demand. If some farmer can produce potatoes for 0.1x EUR/kg, they get to make a good profit.
Now electricity wholesale markets are an artificial construct, but it has been designed to mimic other commodity markets in that the producer on the margin sets the price.
It’s not like I’m discovering the concept for the first time.
I just think when people say things like “solar is cheaper than gas” they should say for who.
Solar is cheaper than gas for the capitalist.
And there’s no guarantee the capitalists savings will ever be passed on to the consumer.
In my market, Australia, the energy retailers are regulated to increase prices once a year. Increase prices. Never a saving for the retail customer. They’ve worked out that can skip all that messy market bullshit and just regulate annual increases.
Good work if you can get it.
> In my market, Australia, the energy retailers are regulated to increase prices once a year. Increase prices. Never a saving for the retail customer. They’ve worked out that can skip all that messy market bullshit and just regulate annual increases.
Have you actually read the regulation?
There is a difference betweenA) regulation that forces a price rise once a year.
and
B) regulation that stops more than one price rise (if any) in any year.
It sounds like what you are talking about is the "Default Market Offer", aka the Australian equivalent to the "standard offer" in the United States. I cannot possibly stress this enough: nothing about the existence of the standard offer has anything to do with the relative economics of solar to other energies, so it's bizarre that you're showing up in a middle of a thread about solar power specifically, and treating a phenomenon that applies to the energy market as a whole like it's only a problem for solar.
And remember what this thread is about - Solarpunk in Africa, off the grid, which is a case that has nothing to do with regulated utility grids, so it couldn't possibly have less to do with the article that this thread is about.
You're insisting you're not discovering the concept for the first time, yet even in this comment you're still doing the same thing, treating systemic regulations that apply to energy markets writ large like they somehow only apply to solar. You wouldn't be doing that if you understood beforehand that these systemic problems had nothing to do with solar in particular, you would be doing it if you were just starting to look into solar and discovered those issues for the first time, which I what I think is happening.
If solar is cheaper to produce (which it often is), there's room for undercutting natural gas and room for profit, a mutual benefit to customers and the solar industry where only natural gas loses.
> Soon there is so much solar that you don't need the expensive gas most of the time.
Unless it's night. Or, possibly, unless you have enough battery capacity to store the entire nighttime supply during the day.
comments like this really show that many people with strong opinions do not understand how the electricity grid, electricity markets or electricity economics work.
Electricity is priced at the edge entirely because demand must match supply at all times. You either meet all electric demand or someone will go without power. This is why marginal pricing exists and this is why the most expensive generator is always the last to be accepted. This is why electricity at night is cheaper that during the day.
Please, if you do not understand what you are talking about, it's ok to just say that you don't know. Don't spread misinformation like this.
> Electricity is priced at the edge entirely because demand must match supply at all times. You either meet all electric demand or someone will go without power.
There's also more to it than just that. Supply-demand imbalance affects the frequency on the grid. Too high or too low frequency damages the turbines in the base load power plants, and they will shut down to avoid damage if the frequency goes too far out of range. Hence, too little or too much power actually causes grid collapse.
Solar actually has to be managed a lot more carefully than people realise.
This has almost nothing to do with how electricity is priced.
Electricity isn't priced only one way.
In the Japanese market in summer during the day the spot price nose dives to almost nothing because of an oversupply of solar. Yet most installed solar is operating under the FIT system where all generation is guaranteed to be bought by the regional generation company for a fixed price, regardless of what the spot price is. This worked to incentivise bringing lots of solar online, but its paid for by adding a levy as a line item to everyone's electricity bill. To lower the financial burden the government is ending the FIT system and transitioning to FIP where from memory solar operators still make similar money as they did under FIT but it's sold on the spot market and then the government pays a premium on top.
The TSOs have to manage the supply-demand balance and there's things like the balancing market to help with this. However the government is also changing the regulations to put more of the burden of managing the supply-demand onto the solar operators themselves and not lump it all on the TSOs. Lots of people invested in solar under the FIT system because operation and expected revenue was straightforward. Now with shifting to FIP it's less straightforward. Additionally when the burden finally falls to the solar operators to proactively manage the supply-demand balance, there aren't good systems they can readily leverage to do so, and the average Joe with solar panels on their roof isn't necessarily going to want to be submitting 30 minute generation plans to their regional TSO, hence they'll eventually have to wind up going through aggregators and such becoming part of a virtual power plant where you may have things occur like negawatt transactions to incentivising reducing demand to help manage the supply-demand balance etc.
PPAs are also an increasingly popular option for purchasing/selling solar power. They're usually fixed price contracts, but depending on how it's setup money either changes hands directly between the generator and consumer (via a retailer) or sometimes the generator sells it all on the spot market and then settlement of the difference between the contract price occurs afterwards between the parties. Even with fixed price contacts the revenue isn't completely guaranteed because the TSO might need to issue curtailment orders to the generator in order to manage supply-demand balance when there is oversupply or grid congestion.
It's not all sold on the spot market.
Anyway, my comment was less about how it's priced more about hidden operational complexity of renewables non-industry folks aren't aware of. In particular turbines have inertia and so if you stop generating power they will still run for a while, and this helps keep the frequency on the grid stable, but solar doesn't have inertia since it isn't turbine based, so large swings in generation can have an instantaneous impact on grid frequency, which can be destabilizing, unless you do stuff with batteries and inverters to produce pseudo-inertia. TSOs need to manage fluctuations with frequency containment reserve, frequency restoration reserve, and replacement reserve. These costs all wind up as part of the wheeling charges which affect the bills in the end.
There's also things like capacity payments/capacity market which impacts solar operators, but I don't know specifics on how that stuff works.
all true, but in the vast majority of electricity markets, inertia is not priced.
what does drive the price of electricity is fuel cost, not grid stability.
Solar inverters do not have physical inertia but they can have fast frequency response via capacitors. Many wind turbines have this feature and at scale, it is a decent replacement for electromagnetic inertia.
From a profit-driven energy company it surely makes sense. From the customer perspective not so much:
- https://www.businesselectricityprices.org.uk/media/n35dlcza/...
- https://www.endfuelpoverty.org.uk/energy-giants-see-457-bill...
There are a few US Solar wholesaler companies that will draft and sign engineering drawings for a roof-top permit application in most states. Some folks claim https://www.pegasussolar.com/ was inexpensive, and might be worth a call.
The problem with Home Solar is the same as with Heat exchanger installs... some installers price gouge, and simply don't care about the quality of the work.
Best of luck, if you plan to stay someplace 8+ years a 10kW Solar+battery install and heat exchanger are fine investments. We've also donated a few of those cheap FlexSolar 40W Foldable Solar panels + power-bank kits to people in remote areas, and they reported phone/VHF-Handy charging was reliable. =3
Rural electrification in the US hugely proves your point. Yes, grid costs are fantastically expensive!!
At the time: we had no choice! Universal electricity access was (& is) vastly better than the alternative: not having universal access. But what's happening in this article isn't an alternative, not so far: it's leaving the masses behind, dropping the pretense that electricity is a utility that ought be available to society broadly.
Perhaps the private rental systems here provide pretty good access. In general though, I think society really ought to accept pretty big inefficiencies/costs (if that's what it takes) if thats what it takes to provide these base demands widely. It feels horrific to consider only the costs here, to see the inefficiency, without regarding what electrification, transport, and other base utilities enable your people to do, how much it changes lives.
Narrow, mercenary cost analysis is an awful way to run your society. For sure, I deeply hope solar maybe can reduce some of the grid maintenance costs, by decentralizing energy. Over time. But this article &b this comment broadly accept a cost-based analysis, that largely revolve around the failure of a public works, one that needs to be efficient but that also has to be more willing to lose some money, to operate no matter what in unprofitable places. States have to make utilities available, period, whatever combination of political & economic will/unprofitability is required.
I'm excited for solar! The decentralized nature is amazing! But beyond the glory of possibility, it scares the heck out of me that society might just give up on a tie that binds us, might abandon the basic sense of utility that most states have been able to keep going for around a hundred years now.
The success & market capture of the companies spotlighted here is both a success, but also an liability. Solar is plentiful but the middlemen here have enormous price control, that maybe they are not flexing on now, but over time is a capability I would far prefer states tap & use for public benefit, rather than comingling with private interest.
This is not about rich society abandoning its people. (That's the US healthcare mess.)
This is about advances in the technology allowing the people to take care of themselves in cases when the overall society is so poor that it can't provide the central electricity grid.
> in the US you just need to bribe landowners and hold-outs
If you really believe that then you need to read up on how the political system is financed. Members of congress spend a majority of their day calling "donors". That's not mom and dad, it's some corps (or rich individuals) who want to get sth done in return. And magically it gets done if the donations keep flowing. The only thing missing for "bribe" is to actually use the word.
In many places more of your electric bill pays for the grid than for the power.
> Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US.
How do they deal with the cost of storage for anything non trivial completely eclipsing any savings?
Well it doesn't eclipse savings, you can still get about 12% annual ROI in developing countries with a battery.
And many will make do without a battery, just relying on power during the day.
> Well it doesn't eclipse savings
I mean it's several hundred fold more expensive I'd call that "eclipse" but maybe you have a higher threshold for that word?
> And many will make do without a battery, just relying on power during the day.
I mean I guess that's an option if you don't want these places to advance in quality of life or produce much of anything.
It increases costs of a solar system to about 1.5-2.2x (so an extra 50-120%), not several hundred fold. The hybrid inverter is slightly more expensive than a normal inverter, then you add the 4-16 kWh battery which is pretty cheap nowadays.
Where I live in California permitting is such a pain in the ass that a lot of work goes unpermitted. Contractors have a CYA clause in all of their contracts (along the lines of "the owner is responsible for all permits"). Permits significantly increase the time for a job, with inspectors needing to show up to inspect things before something else can go on top, and things that seem reasonable causing complete reworks[1]. The fact that so few people pull permits means many workers aren't used to inspections, causing even further delays.
1: e.g. I saw an inspector not allow two 90deg. bend in RMC because, while the existing RMC went through a wall, and came out in a straight line on the other side, without knocking out the wall, we couldn't prove that there weren't already 3 90deg. bends. Maybe that's the right call (the electrician certainly thought it was asinine), maybe not, but things like that can significantly increase the time for project completion, since there are downstream effects to the scheduling.
It certainly is asinine.
The reason more than 180 degrees of bends is not allowed is because it becomes too hard to pull the wires through. If the inspector was there looking at finished work, the wires are already pulled.
Since once all the land is accounted for, there is no such thing as construction without destruction, I am glad that destruction is difficult.
At least in some African countries, the centralized grid was never built out to begin with
Sorry, it's not. The only proof I need to show is 100 year old wooden power poles that are literally everywhere. I have no idea why this is so highly upvoted. I guess it takes some shit in the tech tree to get you there, but maintenance of the lines and infra is not expensive. You ate the bait.
> voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]
The idea that a private company should get to unilaterally change our environment for profit is gross.
I think it's funny you use this example when CMP has been utterly refusing to connect tens of solar power and community solar projects to our grid, which suffers from a lack of generation contributing to our staggeringly high electricity costs.
Meanwhile, CMP insists that they have to double our rates (again), and don't really provide justification. This despite our generation and distribution costs being entirely separated, CMP having monopoly power over most of the state for distribution buildout, CMP having one of the least reliable grids in the nation despite supposedly spending enormously within the last few years to upgrade parts of the grid, and the whole time, CMP is extracting tidy profits to an entirely different country, from my fellow Mainers who are primarily old and on fixed incomes.
Maybe, just maybe, you don't have an accurate understanding of this issue?
We have several fully built solar farms, desperately needed new generation, just sitting idle as CMP refuses to connect them, because connecting more distributed infrastructure like that would eat into their profit margins, which continue to stay high as they continue to yearly increase our rates while sending out multiple leaflets telling people that they are totally not at fault for increasing their distribution rates because oh my generation costs also went up.
You should look up how much CMP spent on playing ads about how they would totally respect our nature and it would be vaguely great for us to build a transmission line to another state, as they continue to refuse to hook up generation that could reduce our power prices, and not even their chunk of that price!
>The advent of a new transmission route in the US these days is pretty much a miracle event.
Having had three major transmission lines for energy (two electric one gas) come through the area I live in the last 8 years, this is just false.
In the US it's not hard to get it done as long as you have mountains of cash and a state willing to imminent domain people.
Permitting hassle? What do you need permits for?
To build meaningful solar on your house/property would require permits most municipalities.
But why? Does building roofs also require permits?
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Isn't it a shame that 90% of the comments here are complaining that AI was involved in producing this article, and none of the comments are from a tech nerd kid in Africa who has electricity because of the solar schemes mentioned in the article?
I want to hear from the people affected.
I worked in this industry, visited several rural areas. Spoke to many people. Sunculture used to be a customer of our software company. The article doesn't quite do justice to the introduction of electricity; it claims that people replace kerosine or diesel with electricity.
From what i've seen this is rarely true. Most people just sit in the dark. This means you go from total darkness at night to electricity. Even the smallest 100lumen light is transformative. You can talk to your family at night. You can make love while seeing your spouse. You can see the spiders and the snakes. You are less afraid of bandits in the night. The biggest impact isn't made by the pumps or the larger systems, but by the significantly more affordable $5-$10 solar lanterns. The poorest of the poorest will get this and pay $0.20 per day or week for this.
I appreciate your response! It’s nice to see the impact of technology from people actually there on the ground.
Too easy to forget that there are ~10 billion people in the world. I live in the US, and it always gives me awe when I realize we represent <5% of humanity.
You’ll likely need to wait a couple decades for this. Kids need to not spend all their free time helping on the farm first and their currency has to appreciate such that they can afford a computing device that isn’t a toy. With yields seeing such big increases it looks feasible, but we’re still early.
I agree in principal, but this whole post is lazy if it's AI-produced. There's certainly no original thought and as the comments mention here, most of the math is outright incorrect
I also saw this on my recent visit to Pakistan, the country has flipped to solar instead of grid for most middle-class homes. Farmers and small industries also have started using solar a lot! Truly transformational (and cheap) thanks to China.
This article has ChatGPT written all over it
I could handle this style when it wasn't everywhere. But now I've developed a hypersensitivity and can't bear it. It's like suddenly most of the internet is in a language I can't read.
I always wonder now if an article was written by GPT, or by someone who spent so much time chatting with GPT that they've started sounding like an LLM.
I have genuinely wondered if I've picked up an elevated tendency to say "it's not just X, it's Y". No smoking gun that it's affected me just yet, but it's at least a live enough issue that it raises the question.
I hand wrote something recently that I re-read the next day and I'm worried I sound like an LLM now, I'm pretty sure I always sounded like one because I like it to make exhaustive lists in my sentences, but it makes me wonder if the bot is rubbing off on me.
It's part of our ecosystem now, we unconsciously mirror the patterns that we notice around us. This will include the language of LLMs because it has been invited in. We always affect the environment, and it always affects us. I hope that the consequence will be that we reduce the fluff, we stop writing to sound important or to justify a position, but instead use language to operate on the level of insight and shift our future into one that benefits us all.
I don't get how it makes this jump
> Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months
> replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene)" in the next paragraph.
If it's $40-65/month that's $1.33 to $2.17 per day, not $0.21/day (assuming month with 30 days)
Similarly
> Crop yields increase 3-5×
> Farmers go from $600/acre to $14,000/acre revenue
Wouldn't that revenue jump require a 23x increase in crop yield?
Let's be very charitable and figure out a scenario where this could be true.
Suppose, a farmer has a farm which produces 1 unit of crop. Farmer uses 0.8 of the crop for subsistence and sells 0.2 of the crop. They get $600/acre.
Now, crop yields go up 5x, so now the farm produces 5 units of crop. Subsistence needs are the same, so the farmer is now able to sell 4.2 units of crop. This is 4.2/0.2 = 21 times more revenue or $12,600/acre.
Hmm yeah I didn't consider that they might use part of their yields in ways that don't generate revenue. However that would mean they use $2,400/acre/month of their crops for subsistence which doesn't seem very plausible, so I agree that's a very charitable interpretation. Would only make sense if their field is only a few square meters, in which case the framing of "revenue per acre" is extremely misleading.
Edit: looks like those numbers might be per year (it doesn't seem to specify explicitly), so it actually might be vaguely plausible (though misleading) if we make several charitable assumptions.
They stop growing a full amount of low value subsistence crops needed to survive and start growing cash crops on some portion or on all of the land. Those cash crops have a higher value.
An example - say you have 4 acres of land and have a family of 4.
In the old world, say you needed one acre per person to grow enough food to the next crop harvest. This would be something like corn or potatoes that can keep. So all your land goes to growing food to survive and you cant make any money.
In the new world, with irrigation, you can do much more - say for the sake of argument, 4 times the crop, in the same space. Now, you only need 1/4 of an acre per person or an acre for everyone. So you grow vegetables that sell for 10 times as much on the 3/4s of land you have that you no longer need to use to survive.
Or even better, you grow high veg on the entire piece of land for income and use the cash to buy your corn and potatoes or whatever as you need them.
Just as all other commercial farmers do across the world.
In other words, solar allows them to become small business owners.
> $2,400/acre/month
You've added the per month part. The article itself doesn't provide a time period but the two reasonable ones are month and year. For a year, that could actually be a reasonable amount of crops kept by a family for their own consumption and storage for later consumption.
If it's monthly, that is pretty high.
It's an AI generated article full of errors. Simple arithmetic errors. Probably copied from a video or another article.
maybe over the lifetime of the installation ? But then they say the battery must be replaced after 5 years... So 5*12 - 30 months = 30 months without paying. So one pays about half 2.17 per day over the 5 years. But that's still about 5 times more than 0.21$/day... I'd love to believe the article, but you're right, the maths seem wrong.
That's in a "bear case" section and honestly is far too bearish, warranties are typically 10+ years for. Unless you buy something super cheap that goes bad and the manufacturer is no longer around.
ChatGPT math.
Even if it's not written by ChatGPT, it's the /exact style/ used by the linkedin AI evangelists
Yeah it’s all the punchy mini paragraphs.
Just one sentence here.
Then I realized.
That another sentence came after that.
It has a voice don't it...
"Modular. Distributed. Digital. Financed by the people using it, subsidized by the carbon it avoids."
Every second paragraph thinks it's Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone.
>It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.
>Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.
Yeah pure shit for us to eat.
I always wonder what the point is.
Isn't this the same thing they did with the internet? They skipped the wired revolution and just implemented it when mobile phone networks made if more feasible. If you look at it only in the present, it seems revolutionary, their mobile usage is through the roof - how modern of them. But if you dig in, they also had decades with essentially no data services when the rest of the world was surfing the web full tilt and they still have a lower access to actual computers which may be lost jobs/skills/etc. In this case, they've had decades of power instability and all that comes with it. So there are tradeoffs being had. It's not a bad strategy for some of the poorer parts of the world to let the rest of the world do the innovating until things are affordable, it's quite smart and should be expected actually.
Kinda, but not really. IRL, feature phones and cheap smartphones subsidized to carry Whatsapp and Facebook apps starting 20 years ago pushed "people using the internet" and at this point Whatsapp is 90% of what people use internet for in Africa because data is cheaper than talk and text.
There's also the perception of usability. I have personally had relatively well-paid Africans tell me that $4 a month for 10 GB of (4G mobile) data was "the most expensive on Earth." Which is not true, I checked, but people say it to try and rumor mill the price down. However, it's sort of almost true in the sense of trying to pay for streaming services and being online like anyone from London or LA on one's hone and not home fiber connections, which only the wealthy have. But that's not how people use their phones anyway. So there's no market for high bandwidth use, and only the wealthy are willing to use bandwidth and pay for it because prices drop per GB once you're doing unlimited fiber connections at home on post-paid accounts. The middle ground is the barrier.
But people like the author who barely know where Africa is on a map love to throw around stats like "85% of Africa is online!" Not like how most Westerners think. Kids in wealthy areas will push being on IG and Tik Tok. In malls in larger cities there's a shop that sells gaming consoles.
This phenomenon is vastly underestimated. Electricity can also amplify the influence of TikTok and Temu — a world no longer constrained by energy shortages, with social media less dominated by the West, and a marketplace for cheap and affordable industrial goods. Together, these forces will essentially curb uncontrolled population growth in any country and gradually raise living standards. (Also pakistan and many other countries)
Even North Korea is undergoing some changes. The country has long suffered from energy shortages, and the gradual spread of solar power can help address some of these issues. However, I doubt that North Korea’s geographic conditions will allow for much improvement.
And considering geography, if I understand correctly, the Middle East has once again gained a significant advantage?
Trading uncrontrolled population growth for TikTok sounds like a deal with the devil.
i think no one can stop that from happening.. you have electricity, you have apps. people will have more thinking on the child thing. and more time on the internet and less time on the home.
One thing i think a lot of people forget is the effect of Porn on fertility rates.
lmao what?
Is this some /r/nofap stuff leaking?
It does not take too much brainpower to see the relationship between fast sexual relief through porn and lower fertility rate.
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I was staying at a Maasai owned ecolodge in Kenya on the day they switched over from generator to solar. It was so much quieter, and with their new electric Range Rover they don’t ever have to go into town except for parts.
This reads like a timeline in a game of Civ. Love it.
All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard. One of the more interesting political/economic questions is can a non-authoritarian country that values environmental protection do rare earth refining, or is the ecological harm in isolation too abhorrent to the members of the community where it is done to counterbalance the ecological good it does elsewhere? In an authoritarian country, you can just tell the people who live around the processing plant to relocate or suffer because it helps the environment elsewhere. In a non-authoritarian country, the local people will all reject it because it will degrade the quality of life and their land. This has been happening in the backlash against mining in Madagascar for example.
> All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard.
You don't actually need rare-earths to produce solar panels, control systems and batteries - at least not in the amounts that require the scale China is operating at.
I wonder this as well - it seems the most strategic path forward for any nation or community is to localize the supply chain as much as possible, but like oil before there's some things that are just impossible or super difficult to get locally. And unfortunately to find new ways to turn sun into electricity costs money to do and won't happen because the cost of the current method is too low to justify trying to turn sand into solar panels or whatever other thing you might try.
I dream of a solar punk future where basically any community can generate power without any horrifying pollution anywhere in the supply chain. Mirror powered smelters, sand batteries.
Rare earth refining isn't a specific industrial process. The cheapest possible method is a specific industrial process, and is very dirty. In a "survivalist solarpunk world" it would probably be done less cheaply.
Conspiratorially, if all places were non-authoritarian and did not tolerate cheap refining, a regime change would have to be ordered
I have been saying this for a few years now that people are underestimating the change solar, batteries and electric transport/machinery will bring about im many of parts of the world. People are not going to just get access to cheap electricity but also a lot of machinery that they can run with that electricity that was not possible before.
Yep, a memory that changed my perspective on this was in a tiny island in Italy where a grandma was riding her electrical bike uphill with no effort in the middle of the Summer.
When I mean uphill I mean not Tour de France level but damn steep still. And yet, here she was with her grocery in her bag, no problem.
That was absolutely wonderful because, despite my envy, she was autonomous!
She didn't need no stinking petrol station, she could charge at home. She didn't need a humongous garage where streets were ridiculous narrow. She could park somewhere, charge the battery home.
This moment was genuinely wonderful... and my point is that I do believe even though it felt relatively new, I can easily imagine it to deploy at scale for the benefit of most.
EV powertrains also have way fewer parts. Arguably, repairs are easier.
> M-PESA, a mobile money platform that let people transfer cash via SMS.
This a thing that needs to be more widely known. If you saying, as people here sometimes do, "oh but my new tech could help people move money in poor parts of the world" (not mentioning any specific tech right now) and you're not familiar with M-PESA, then you're just out of your depth and talking foolishly. The real world has already moved past you.
Yeah, MPESA was and is still an incredible product. A real lightning-in-a-bottle moment. Even if they've struggled to replicate that success in other geos, the original vision and execution back in the 200x's is a textbook case that bears study.
The M-PESA transaction fees are high.
<sarc>M-PESA helps fight poverty through the ingenious application of a thousand paper cuts. </sarc>
According to this page: https://www.safaricom.co.ke/main-mpesa/m-pesa-for-you/tariff...
Fees are high (22-38%) for low amounts, and then they drop into the 1-2% range that is typical of Western credit card networks.
I didn't say that you had to praise it extravagantly, just to be aware of it. To know what the current state of play is. What demonstrably has succeeded, and what untapped niches remain.
"But here’s the thing: this massively understates the opportunity.
The solar system is the Trojan horse. The real business is the financial relationship with 40 million customers."
Soooo... they have a good thing going, there is an opportunity to fsk them over? Like more centralized fees?
Equator, poorest countries with 12 hours of sun 365 days a year. If batteries really fall in price it may rapidly have the cheapest, cleanest energy on the planet. The future of energy intensive industries may be Africa, which would be nice, they could use a break. Not to mention the cheapest place to launch your rockets into orbit.
> How Africa is building the future by skipping the past
They did the same thing with internet. Went straight to cell/fiber. If you've never heard of M-Pesa, I highly recommend learning about it.
I heard a fascinating interview with Sandeep Vaheesan[1]
He said in the early days of American electrification, private power companies wouldn't build lines to rural customers because it wasn't expected to be profitable. So rural customers joined together and formed public power companies and got the job done. Not only that, they innovated many cost saving technique which the private power companies eventually adopted.
Public power cooperatives still exist, but have themselves become ossified and commercialized over the years.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miyfj98lR38 (starts at 21:18)
Same in Pakistan: https://www.dawn.com/news/1924573
After COVID, grid electricity became hugely expensive, but the pushback was massive and unexpected, as people transitioned from a fixed supply to a hybrid online or offline (battery-powered) system.
Several African countries have also been fascinating for the growth of cellular telephone.
Grids require an amount of cohesion that isn't always on-hand in that part of the world (a fancy way of saying "When they built the grid in Europe, they could mostly put copper on telephone poles and assume nobody would just show up and steal it later"). But a cellular node can be built to be self-contained and protected by a single property owner with a shotgun.
It became a much faster and cheaper rollout solution and the demand created a market to justify the cost of improving and perfecting the technology.
I understand why this is happening in Africa first — lack of infrastructure makes the solution much more competitive. But as prices fall, it seems that this might be cost competitive in other areas as well. Selfishly, I’d love to see this in the US! Any big issues that would prevent adoption in the US?
It's mostly politics stopping this in the US. But even with current political roadblocks to solar, it's an absolutely massive part of new builds for grid scale electricity generation:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964
Already in Germany people are putting solar on their roofs and batteries in their basements which makes them no longer need the grid 80+% of the time. With Sodium-Ion batteries this will go to 90+% at the same cost. It's happening pretty much everywhere.
>Any big issues that would prevent adoption in the US?
Lol is this sarcasm? America is back on the fossil fuel train baby! If you're a patriot, jump on board as we sink this ship! Solar panels are for soyboys and we eat beef out hur.
Joking aside, solar is so cheap that even without subsidies the US is installing more solar than anything else. Fossil fuels are dirty and expensive in comparison.
I'm sure you can think of one at the moment.
I wish I could invest in that. I heard about a solar power cooperative here in Canada recently and I’m curious how to get involved in that.
I think the point of this article is to get people to say this. Considering half the numbers in this article are fabricated, it makes me wonder if this comment is also a part of the scam.
v7n's comment smells like a bot or they used AI to translate.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I'm not a native speaker but neither do I use any of those tools to write my comments here.
The community I have the privilege to be involved with in Kenya is facing many challenges when it comes to propagating access to solar energy, and one relatively small thing that can be done would be to service the lead-acid batteries most commonly used there: the environment is quite hostile to them as I understand it, and lead-acid is "the affordable chemistry" of choice. The problem is that there is a lack of knowledge and toxic waste (sulphuric acid, lead) handling capability. Otherwise topping up old batteries as a service is absolutely an achievable goal, much needed, and there is money to be made.
If you're talking about fairly modest sums ($10k to 100k) and Kenya in particular is on your radar, I think we should discuss this further. I'm not Kenyan myself (European), but I frequent the area and have a solid network and resources already in place to make things happen. How may I reach out?
Every time I see $/watt charts like this I just want a single link to buy something at that price. 20c/watt? Yes please, _where_.
These prices are outside of the US, because the US has massive tariffs. But prices like $0.28/W are quite achievable, here's a random link:
https://signaturesolar.com/waaree-405w-pallet-mono-31-panels...
The global average price for solar panels is $0.09/W in 2025. I think India, which also has tariffs to stimulate local factories, is around $0.18/W.
Though at these prices you're likely going to be paying nearly as much for mounting materials as you are for the panels.
Edit: Also, used solar panels are becoming a pretty thriving market. Definitely worth checking those out, especially for isolated projects like a solar car port or something.
Here in Colombia we noticed that a lot of bars and such have awnings built out of solar panels. Cheap, durable, and makes power.
Yep I'm looking at used solar since I have a ton of roof space and land area, and the shipping is 50% of the price of a pallet of panels. Even if they're derated 25% and 20% fail, the racking and balance of system outweigh them to a silly degree. It's going to be 80% balance of system 20% panels.
If you plan on mounting to your roof beware of expired fire ratings. I ran into this problem recently
Here in Germany you can now buy 450W-500W solar panels at 50-60€ (§) That's already much lower than 20c/watt.
(§) for example: https://www.mydealz.de/deals/sunpro-500-wp-solarmodul-210-r-...
"The global North's carbon problem subsidizes the global South's energy access." This is problematic. The subsidized economy will grow inefficiently, the wealth transfer will inevitably result in a corrupt class of bureaucrats who seek to maintain the status quo even when it doesn't make sense. Time will pass and it will get worse until there is political will for change, and that change will result in the suffering of those whom the initial intent was to help.
I had this idea to rent roofs to install solar panels, building a kind of decentralized power plants. I live in the sunny southern France where summer are starting to become unbearably hot, but at least this comes with a lot of sunpower. There are plenty roofs but sadly we install solar plants in spaces that compete with forest/fertile soil. I am not an energy engineer so that's not a realistic project for me, but are there similar projects around?
This model has actually taken off in rural China. Salespeople will tell you, "You only need to lend us your roof for 20 to 30 years,and in return, you'll receive a sum of money." Many people in rural China readily agree to this deal. I'm not entirely sure what these solar panel companies get out of the arrangement. Perhaps they sell the generated electricity for a profit, or supply it to factories with high energy demands.
There is a similar idea called "community solar" in the US. It allows electric customers to subscribe to the output of solar panels on someone else's roof. This allows a developer to build a solar array on a large commercial building's roof that they rent.
It's hard to overstate the degree to which the United States is giving away the future to any country that can produce clean energy technology at scale.
Lithium is abundant in the United States. Nothing in the component chain of solar and battery systems is so complex it couldn't be made here. We could establish trade with African countries like China has, instead of doing these pointless tariffs. But for idiotic cultural reasons, we are not doing any of those things.
The world will permanently shift away from the fossil fuel economy sooner than most people think, and it will disrupt the entire system of dollar-denominated oil that underpins the U.S. empire. It's glaringly obvious where this is headed. And yet!
I think those authors have been trying to figure out what I've long suspected- infrastructure can't be build locally as easily as one that can be exported with extreme modularity. Building a nuclear power plant, even a small modern one, still requires a ton of permitting and environmental review. Setting up a portable solar power plant, with imported panels and inverters, in theory allows for much more adaptability and affordability.
I've heard/read common criticisms about NGO's having more power and private funding than weak and poor governments, but then again, if there isn't a centralized effort to develop infrastructure, citizens are more likely to prefer outside funding/investment https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/internation...
This is the most optimistic thing I've read about this year. When they got to "and also they replaced diesel farming with solar panels and are making bank," I had a big smile, and when I got to "and they're selling it as carbon credits on the side," I just started giggling. Wonderful!
TLDR: dirty fuel is being displaced by clean electricity for 500M+ Africans beyond the grid via combination of cheap solar panels + batteries, microfinancing, electronic payments, and a carbon-credit kicker. Two main players captured most consumers and farmers via hard-to-reproduce integration. TAM should increase 3X with China's continued oversupply and govt-backed financing. Case studies available for key points.
Inspiring. My only critique would be that the excited tone (and exclusivity) ends up detracting from the achievement and opportunity.
>Solar Home System Evolution:
>2008: $5,000 (affordable only for wealthy urban Kenyans)
>2015: $800 (middle-class farmers)
>2025: $120-$1,200 (true smallholders)
How does US solar cost so much?
Tariffs (government tax) on Chinese panels, corruption (companies bribing(lobbying) to get monopolies on installs) and more corruption ( power companies bribing to get guaranteed profits)
Based on comments here my 7.8kw rooftop solar in Canada was 3-5x cheaper than people pay in the US. It was $8k CAD ($5,660 usd) My Dad in Australia got a 10kw system fully installed for $5k AUD ($3,250 usd)
To be fair, prices in Aus have been heavily subsidised until recently.
Of course, which is a great thing!
When you buy corn or gas or tires for your car do you really care if it’s subsidized and say something like “oh yeah it was $x, but heavily subsidized”?
Of course not, you only care about how much it costs you.
On the contrary, I care because I don't buy these things at all, yet my taxes are being used to subsidise the people that do.
You don’t buy any foods with corn in them?
Or use fossil fuels?
Solar panels represent approximately 12% of the total average cost for solar projects in the United States. The remaining costs are primarily composed of soft costs, which include permitting, financing, installation labor, customer acquisition, and other non-hardware expenses.
https://www.ny-engineers.com/blog/breaking-down-the-price-of...
probably CCP subsidizing manufacturing and sales (like they do with EV) because it's a command economy and getting the world to run on their stuff is good for their "national security". and US taxing it for that reason
You'll see these little solar panels outside people's homes in any country that doesn't have all of its population (reliably) connected to the grid. They're everywhere in rural Afghanistan as well for instance.
North Africa has a lot of sun, a lot of land, and not much solar seasonality. They will be hit hard with climate change though.
Everyone will be hit hard by climate change. I do t see why it should be less in eg the Americas - where you already have pretty volatile climate events
The equator is particularly vulnerable because it's already very hot
Scandinavia is likely to benefit from climate change.
The problem is that there is no true manufacturing nor repairability capacity for high density electronics in africa. Hell, our customer in SA asks us to buy spare components for them because getting parts there from our favourite distributors is a nightmare.
My parents are involved in an organization that helps developing parts of Togo. They helped build wells, structures (schools, bathrooms, .. ) and give material for agriculture and light manufacture, fund for tutoring, such things. All the electric and mechanical machinery they donated, including vehichles, are older models and the reason is simple: they must be serviced with the available technology, and they must be simple to service.
They made a conference in our town to showcase the project and i addressed the obvious elephant in the room: what about electricity? They are dependend on china for cheap panels and inverters, and they do not want to use alternative sources that require way less tech to operate: biofuel for example. They say it's not as efficient, and i concour, but i feel there is also a geopolitic issue, they do know they are making themselves dependent on china and there might be a small print condition for the cheap solar.. and they were elusive on the answers.
Also, not programs to train electronics technicians in the next future. If i ever get involved i'd like to help with setting up repair shops and train technicians. We'll see in the next few years what happens.
Are we really able to service solar panels and batteries in Europe either, for example? Or most of the time is just a game of moving refurbished devices to replace the broken ones, that are then shipped back to... China? to be refurbished once again? I know that for more costly EV batteries there is some refurbishment capacity in Europe but what about the rest?
"This worked great if you were electrifying America in the 1930s, when labor was cheap, materials were subsidized, and the government could strong-arm right-of-way access."
It was good in the moment. The issue is maintaining it without the same cheap labor and materials. PG&E in California is a perfect example. There is no way for them to maintain the grid which is aging and causing fires. We are going to have to switch to a slightly similar regional power generation/storage model.
As long as grid upgrades & maintenance continue to work reasonably well across western Europe, bad examples from the US are not particularly worrying. Economics of scale still very much apply; there is a point in maintaining expensive grid infrastructure. Especially so when using it to improve other expensive infrastructure, such as electric high-speed passenger rail.
Oh wow this is a very good point and not something I'd ever really considered. Good comment. Makes a lot of sense.
> Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, you stop waiting and figure it out yourself.
To what historic people did electricity come all by itself, without them having to figure out and build anything themselves?
For all those who have electricity, who was their "cable guy"?
With famously weak energy grid[1], South Africa would certainly benefit from the same approach. Sadly, it seems, it isn't considered en masse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis
Kenya is an equatorial country so they basically have steady ~12 hours of sunlight every day year round. Pretty cool!
And, much of the rural population is in the Great Rift Valley, a particularly high elevation region which as a result enjoys higher solar flux.
Pretty sure this article is at least partially AI-written. Interesting content. Annoying style.
There's also nothing stopping African communities from building peer-to-peer microgrids if they want to.
The same thing that's, you know, stopping them from having real power grids.
A microgrid lets you power your neighbors, or receive power from them.
This paper cites several examples of peer-to-peer electricity trading: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...
Extending the grid to power a remote village is not the same thing as the villagers running their own microgrid.
This article is a good example of how, sometimes, starting from scratch is a blessing, since you can adopt the best tech right away instead of fighting market inertia and monopolies trying to keep a status quo - as a counter example, see Japan being stuck w/ fax past the internet advent.
Overall, democratization of utility and finance is great, but this article is so inconsistent with the pricing and statements it really reads like a sycophantic llm wrote the entire thing.
Here is the actual numbers from Sun King on their entry level system (Home Plus):
Basic (dc-only) panel for lighting and cellular/usb use:
>₦2,000 per week ($1.39 USD/week) x 60 weekly payments, ₦3,500 down payment ($2.43 USD) = $85.83 =~ 20kWh over that 60 week period (Just over 1 year), over 10 years = ~200 kWh... ~$0.429/kWh (reasonable given the lighting hardware is included, and the only thing that should need changing during that time is the lfp battery which the price is dropping very quickly on).Larger dc system:
Home 500X + Pedestal Fan
>₦5,600 per week ($3.82 USD/week) x 60 weekly payments, ₦15,500 down payment ($10.78 USD) = $239.98 =~ 147kWh over that 60 week period (Just over 1 year), over 10 years = ~1300 kWh... ~$0.184/kWh (again very reasonable given the lighting hardware is included, and again the nmc battery at 5 years which the price and quality of is improving very quickly on).So yes, this does seem pretty viable in terms of Upfront, TCO and payment options.
The larger systems (solar + AC Inverter + home-scale battery):
PowerHub Core (2 kW AC inverter 230VAC, 2.5kWh lfp battery storage, 1800-2700W solar panels - ₦48,000 per week, 80 weekly payments, ₦240,000 down payment ₦4,080,000 ($2,836.94 USD) financed or ₦2,400,000 ($1668.79 USD) buy outright
PowerHub Plus (3.3kW AC inverter 230VAC, 5.0 kWh lfp battery storage, 1800-3600W solar panels - ₦64,000 per week, 80 weekly payments, ₦320,000 down payment ₦5,440,000 ($3782.58 USD) financed or ₦3,200,000 ($2225.05 USD) buy outright
= yields ~47,600kWh over 10 years, =$0.0350-0.0795/kWh (2.5kWh/1800W system bought outright vs 5kWh/1800W system on finance), very competitive, with storage included.
These are the "starting from" costs - so likely the with 1800w of panels on both systems.
Pretty crazy cost of financing, but still pretty reasonably priced for an installed, warrantied system. For reference, that's cheaper than most of these ecoflow-style "solar generators" with ~3.3kWh batteries, 3000W output and 4x400W solar panels cost here (typically $4500-5000 USD).
I can't help but be reminded of the bitter lesson when I read about the continual spread of solar energy. The simple, scalable system wins over everything else. I wonder how many aspects of our lives could be transformed in this way.
Charging phones and "studying at night" are cliches in this context. It completely misses the point. Yes, it's important. And obviously happening.
The article zooms in on cliche 2-3 use cases that while important show a lack of imagination and awareness of what's actually happening. Here are two more not mentioned in the article, at all. And they are transformational.
1) EVs. By that I don't mean the luxury four wheel road yachts common in the rich part of the world but its much more common two wheel variant: the e-bike. These are being produced by the hundreds of millions. The four wheel versions are are a rounding error. They show up all over Asia and Africa. We in the west have no concept of how important these things are to the local economies there.
You can charge those for next to nothing with solar. Most of these things only have a few hundred wh of battery on board. A single solar panel can top them up in an hour or so. What's the impact of that on in a place where subsistence farming is common and people have to walk hours to find a generator powered point to charge their phone or get some water? Well the obvious thing happens: lots of people now have affordable transport that doesn't require an arm and a leg to power.
2) AI. I know, we're all tired of the daily dose of AI utopia on HN. But like world + dog in the west has access to ChatGPT for free, so does all of Africa. "Hey chatgpt, what's a water pump and where can I find water here?". That's already a thing. AI usage is widely spread across Africa; and not just among the elite. Every subsistence farmer with a smart phone (most of them at this point) can now ask questions like that. That's massive. Knowledge is power. This is hugely empowering. People are naturally curious and now they can ask AIs for information instead of having to ask the local witch, village elder, or the nearest white person that actually had an education. That's very liberating.
Solar panels are going to be like smartphones were 15 years ago, everybody will have access to cheap power. And yes you can power one with the other. But it's really about what else you can power? IMHO this will transform some of the poorest/undeveloped regions in this world in a few mere years/decades.
Wondering if any Aussies here know this.
I’ve heard that if you have a solar system and a battery system connected to the grid, if the grid goes out for whatever reason, your battery gets cut off as well. Meaning that it’s essentially useless as power backup.
Is this true? Can you really go fully off-grid in Australia?
I’ve heard this from rural people in Victoria, where they do experience blackouts and where an actual backup would be useful.
Many systems, especially older ones, are set up this way by default.
But you can get, for extra $$, a switch to disconnect you from the grid entirely when it's down and run from your own solar power / battery. People who live in cities with underground wires normally don't bother, but it's essential in the countryside (IMHO).
Note however that many people have only maybe 5kW or 8kW or something like that being added to grid power by their solar setup, so if there is no mains power then it doesn't take many 2kW appliances (microwave, kettle, clothes washer (when heating water), dish washer (ditto), hairdryer, vacuum cleaner) to overload it. Not to mention 3kW hot water heater or 3kW+ stove oven.
I have a 3600W off-grid system (Pecron E3600LFP) and I run pretty much all that stuff from it. I added up and I could try to turn on 14kW of stuff at the same time. But I don't, obviously.
It depends on the inverter. Older "grid-following" inverters would isolate themselves from the grid to avoid putting any current on the line when presumably in an outage it should be de-energised, as well as relying on the grid for reference frequency.
Modern hybrid & multi-mode inverters are capable of isolating themselves from the grid, generating their own reference frequency and managing connection and disconnection from the grid. However you might not get one of these types of inverters unless you specifically ask for "backup power" or similar.
I've had solar for ten years and just added a battery to it which _should_ keep the house running through a power failure for as long as the battery holds out.
This is yet to be tested, but it's very specifically setup to me able to.
There are some specific electronics required to continue operation when the grid is down, and with the explosion of popularity of home batteries, I think these options are also more common.
you heard wrong. What most electricity grids forbid is exporting power from your home to the grid when the grid is down. The claimed danger is that energised power lines will kill people working on the lines.
The reality is that the vast majority of home inverters (in an EV, battery or solar PV) is nowhere near powerful enough to energise even a single distribution transformer.
This is yet another example of electricity codes being unrealistically restrictive.
Generally, there's nothing stopping you from disconnecting your home from the grid during a power outage and running your own devices off a battery. Going fully off-grid depends on your local laws.
The figures quoted are way out of date. Solar is already USD 0.11 per Watt and has been for over a year.
Solar is scalable. The cheapest system 10W with a powerbank and phone charger and 3 x 3W LED lights as about USD 20. Next level is more lights and a fan and the high end is a TV and fan powered by solar.
The idea that Africa is skipping the grid in the same way it skipped landlines is compelling, but this goes even deeper: it’s infrastructure as a product, not a government service. And it’s being financed by the end user and the global North’s carbon tab. Wild.
Would be interesting if renewable exporters are going to ge emission credit vs penalty vs fossil exporters. I mean it won't change anything, dead dinosaur sauce must flow, but it's a useful way to attribute actual emission producers at source.
This has got to be ChatGPT, right? There's just a lot of... nonsensical phrasing and sentences? I love the story of it, but I can't take the writing.
> This worked great if you were electrifying America in the 1930s, when labor was cheap, materials were subsidized, and the government could strong-arm right-of-way access. It works less great when you’re trying to reach a farmer four hours from the nearest paved road who earns $600 per year.
It's structured like a contrasting pair of sentences, but it just doesn't make any sense. The things it's calling out in 1930s America aren't - or don't have to be - dissimilar from modern Africa. The farmer making $600/yr is kind of a non-sequitur.
> But there was still a massive, seemingly insurmountable barrier: $120 upfront might as well be $1 million when you earn $2/day.
No, it's 60 days of earnings. It's just a weird sentence. Taking a median US wage of $60k/yr or $165/day, 60 days of earnings is $9,900. "Might as well be $1 million" is a wild take, and a sloppy way to say it.
Hey there, author (Skander from Climate Drift) here.
So for the record: This isn't a chatgpt article, it's something I wrote over the weekend while I was down with a flu (although the idea has been running through my head for a while).
@America's 1930s: Most of US rural electrification happened at this point (90% of urban homes hat electricity, only around 10% of farms). Rural Electrification Act from 1936 changed that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
Hey in the part 3 that introduces PAYG it jumps from $100 down $40-65 a month to $0.21 a day / $1.50 a week.
It seems your mixing up examples since they're off by an order of magnitude. Once I read that my trust in everything else started breaking down and I couldn't be bothered to read the rest with the same level of engagement.
I noticed the same, the number don’t make any sense.
Thanks! Maybe I'm a little too sensitive to AI signals. I actually really love the story and content, but if it was AI generated I didn't know how much to actually believe it. I still don't know who you are, but it's probably less likely to be totally fabricated if a human is responsible for it. So, thanks, I'll give it another read.
Rather than too sensitive, I think you’re making up AI signals. Poor writing (or, in this case, slightly less than perfect writing) is not a phenomenon to which humans are immune.
If you like the idea of human-written content on the Internet, I recommend against joining the chorus of voices baselessly accusing humans of being AI bots - an unfortunate trend lately which only serves to disincentivize future contributions.
"Why this works: Blah blah" It is more likely that the poster just lied.
just fyi when I ran this through an AI detection tool it came up with likely ChatGPT. 60% written by non-human. So either you've started really writing like an AI or you used AI for this.
It fails the sniff test and the tool test.
You also didnt correct the math mistakes the AI made.
> It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.
Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.
Why are you lying about this, its clearly written by an LLM
Agreed it clearly is.
My grandpa (long dead) remembers his dad paying $600 in the 1920s (1930s?) to get electric to the farm. That is the actual cost, not inflation adjusted. Most of the neighbors didn't because that was too much money in those days.
> $600 in the 1920s (1930s?), not inflation adjusted
I consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator:
$600 in 1925 would be $11,264 today
$600 in 1935 would be $14,329 today
A lot of money, but I've heard that it can easily cost $10-20K today to erect a couple of poles to bring power a hundred feet to your property in a rural area these days. Do you know what distance was being covered to bring power to your grandfather?
i didn't learn this until I was given a copy of his autobiography (about 5 pages) after he did so I have no way to ask.
don't know if the article is chatgpt or not, but "might as well be a million dollars" is a super common way of saying "completely out of reach"
And from that $2 you probably still have to spend something on food / shelter / clothing, so it's not like you could just save it all.
I also got ChatGPT vibes... all this repetition of "why it matters" and all the lists, and going back and forth between contradictions...
It's even sadder to me that the author says this is not GPT. I believe them. Which means we have reached a point where the style of how ChatGPT writes has made its way into our sub-conscious...
> The farmer making $600/yr is kind of a non-sequitur.
It's less than a non-sequitur. It makes the contrasting even weaker because it means in modern Africa labor is still cheap, just like in 1930s America.
> I love the story of it, but I can't take the writing
My personally heuristic is that if the style is AI, the substance is likely AI too.
Huh? Even if the farmer could save 100% of that daily $2 earning it's still 60 days worth of wages, which while not exactly $1,000,000, is still a lot for the the farmer.
The structure of each section gives away that it's mostly AI even without having to read the actual words. I'm sure it was AI + writer, but there's something about ending each section with 3-4 short, question-like sentences that is strongly AI. This is the same format as the successful LinkedIn slop so maybe it's not AI and just algo-induced writing.
Yup. It's the colons after every paragraph's first sentence:
> It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.
> Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs.
> The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system.
> It gets even better: there are people who will pay for credits beforehand.
It's just again and again and again. It's sounds 100% ChatGPT.
Maybe this is 100% written by hand by someone who reads too many ChatGPT-generated articles. Possibly the author just spends a ton of time chatting with ChatGPT and have picked up its style. Or it's just more AI-written than OP wants to admit.
We are so cooked. We spend more time trying to suss out if something was written by AI than actually reading the article. So many legitimate ways of writing are now “ai” style. I used to use emdash a lot, but now I deliberately avoid it because it’s an AI smell - using the less “correct” version instead. E
Lets see a small paragraph from the article:
> It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.
> Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.
Ah yes, not AI slop at all! /s
This was one of the most interesting things I read today- good job Skander!
This is such a bunch of nonsense!
The ROI of using a diesel-powered pump isn't so high so few farmers have one. It means, they work well and those who don't have one, still get some water for their fields, too.
A solar pump is many times cheaper to run. It means ROI of using it is huge and many more people will get them. But it doesn't mean there will now be magically more groundwater to pump!
Which mean, those who don't have a pump, will soon find themselves completely without water - it will be all sucked out by people with pumps. So they will also HAVE to install those pumps.
As a result, no one will be better off because same amount of water will be redistributed among same number of farmers. Even an "arms race" of more and more powerful pumps is likely when people will realise theirs are not working as good anymore now than everyone has one.
All until the point where ROI of having a solar pump will become negligible.
Farmers will not be better off - they will be worse off. Chinese will make money - money funded by Western funds for "reducing" carbon emissions which do not really reduce anything as they are "replacing" diesel pumps 90+% of which did not exist.
And yes, people will also have a little bit of electricity at home - about 100x less than in grid-connected Western homes - a 200-watt panel per household at about 15% average output or maybe 20 KWh per month. It's not enough to run a blowdryer, or kettle, not even a fridge. But enough to charge a tablet to watch online TV - and become far right.
Bingo, enshittification comes to Africa, in it's purest form.
Only good thing about it is that money will go to Chinese vs Arabs for diesel fuel. Chinese are a problem that will gradually solve itself due to demography, while Arabs will not.
I meant to say: this is a new sleek tool to make people compete more intensely against each other in the race to exhaust a limited resource. Just like freelance sites made life of everyone miserable while extracting cash out of them, simply because they did not increase the amount of work available - just forced everyone to compete stronger and pay to play. Until the work was ruined and people simply churned out.
So, if the electricity gets cheaper the way information got cheaper, does it make our muscles and mind weaker due to lack of work and thought?
> After 30 months = you own it, free power forever
Except that chip that can remotely shut it off is still in it, waiting for a ransom attacker.
I was wondering about that. Is there some sort of removal process when the lease is up? If there were, folks would just do it early. Maybe there's enough enforcement/followup to discourage that while there's still outstanding debt, but perhaps it's a thing later.
It's a good point. This purchase model with IoT-enabled PAYG devices means there's a built-in vulnerability in the entire infrastructure. And unlike with a centralized utility where hypothetically some action-movie hero could rip out the one central device that shut things down, here there's millions of them everywhere.
An interesting response from an LLM. I’d love to hear more from the person who prompted it.
What do they do during the night? Do they use batteries to store the energy?
> Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, you stop waiting and figure it out yourself.
To what historic people did electricity come all by itself, without them haivng to figure out and build anything themselves?
As I keep saying ad infinitum, Africa is not a single unitary region.
Different countries in Africa have better grids than others, and different countries in Africa have stronger penetration of digital banking and DBT than others.
A country seeing a boom in domestic solar because of government subsidies and policies like Nigeria [0] is different from a country seeing a domestic solar boom because of a collapsing electric grid and regulatory failure like South Africa [1] or Pakistan [2] (not Africa but the same point holds).
At best this is an AI generated article, at worst this is someone who is truly misinformed and thinks about Africa this reductively.
[0] - https://nep.rea.gov.ng/solar-hybrid-mini-grid-for-economic-d...
[1] - https://globalpi.org/research/south-africas-solar-boom/
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/pakistans-solar-revo...
> Africa is not a single unitary region.
Well, duh!
Who is saying different? Nobody here
A short little article that does not cover every aspect is not bad. It is good
I'm curious how you stay on top of African affairs. South Asia doesn't seem that hard to me but I don't know where to follow the regulatory landscape of African countries.
people saying this is AI-generated: why? It seems voicey, pacey, individualistic ... and contains new-to-the-world info. And it's good. None of these being qualities I associate with AI writing.
The giveaway is almost always an over-dependence on "Not 'x' but 'y'" structure. Even when the author changes the wording so that the phrase doesn't read exactly like that, they tend to leave the structure intact, and the bots really like to lead with the inverse of what the author wants to say to create contrast.
A human author might have used this technique once to really emphasize a strong point, but today's LLMs use it so often that it loses its emphasis, and instead becomes a distinct stylistic fingerprint.
As a human who's written like that for decades, this witch-hunt makes it really hard to participate online anymore. This was a standard expository device taught in school, some of us latched onto it, and now it's impossible to argue that we're human because someone's conviction that we're AI is just an opinion and there is no evidence that will convince them, nor do they deserve the effort it would take even if it were possible.
What's the path forward?
Keep using that structure. The bots use it so much, and in ways that human authors wouldn't, that it becomes self-parodying. As long as you're not using the same device over and over again in the same piece you'll be fine.
yeah it's a crazy trend. suspicion that everything is AI is a poison to forums. have no idea how this moves forward. secretly hoping it destroys the entire internet, and rapidly. so we can go back to conspiring in smoke-filled rooms.
It's not good. If it were good, it wouldn't juxtapose random uncited numbers together that don't compute:
> Crop yields increase 3-5×
> Farmers go from $600/acre to $14,000/acre revenue
5×$600 is $3000. Where did the extra 4.7x come from? The new-to-the-world info looks more like "making stuff up on the fly".
> people saying this is AI-generated: why?
Because they themselves have nothing interesting to say
Lack of sources. Questionable numbers and math. Tone. Emoji. In short: everything.
Reading things like this makes me feel like there must be fundamentally something wrong with my brain, because it all seems like just a complicated song and dance that is maintained as a global share delusion for reasons I can't figure out.
Some solar panel companies in China are trying to extract the idea of value from farmers whose hands change actual currency a couple of times a year to whoever brings it to market, all other times "money" is sent around in SMS. That bit of extracted wealth pays out in volume, eventually, but they also get a huge boost from selling "we did an environmentalism" dollars to corporate social responsibility brokers who are trying to help ai and oil and gas companies convince legislators that actually their businesses don't harm the environment because they bought the magic dollarydoos from the Chinese solar panel vendors who are making money selling solar panels but also selling magic dollarydoos.
It seems madness. This system is efficient and the best one we can do?
Africans doing it for themselves
Who else could?
AI slop writing, but interesting information nonetheless
The story is great, but is it just me who's tired of this style with ultra short sentences? It's getting to the point where it's distracting.
Good story but jesus fucking christ the ChatGPT. I cannot bear it.
"lets dive in"
People should learn to never trust a #1 ranked hacker news article. There are almost always hidden motives. The author (GPT???), or a company mentioned in the article likely is connected to a VC, or YC or both!
Don't engage with slop that seems lazily written, if not completely generated by Claude(sorry author if I'm wrong, I know you are claiming you wrote it but idk). This stuff kinda comes off like an article written on behalf of SunCulture or SunKing so they can go, hey guys look we were featured on a front page of HN article.
It's even a tad worse; They are just one of those "career accelerator" companies. In fact most if not all of their articles seem to be AI generated
>IOT-backed hardware linked to a novel asset whose issuance serves to make the world a little bit better
I swear: this was meant to be the pitch for like 99% of blockchain companies, only in this case they managed to do it. This is super interesting on so many levels.
The zero-cost payments with a low-barrier to entry. Again, this is what digital currencies were meant to do. Only, it turns out that at scale a combination of tech problems and legislative red tape made everything break. Just solving this one problem here is industry-defining in its own right. And shows the kind of products that open up when banking is enabled to everyone.
What about the hardware though? Well, I've worked at startups that were exactly dedicated to this kind of IoT stuff. They even were linking it with payments. But can you guess what happened? Well, of course: it had to be linked to blockchain shit, you know, just because... Then on the product side of things: nothing ever left the lab... Not that customers would have been able to use a blockchain-based payment rail anyway...
Getting reliable IoT hardware is hard enough but you still have to build customer relationships. They did it all through a simple technology the users were already familiar with. You don't need a frigging comp sci PhD to use SMS mobile payments. I think that's genius and blockchain tech bros could truly learn a lot from this. Pay-as-you-go here is also genius because as the author states: the chances of the owners having tons of disposal cash around to outright buy equipment are slim. Yet offering equipment to strangers under a pay-to-buy scheme by itself is risky for the lender and would typically lead to the kind of bureaucratic red tape that would slow down financing. With the IoT stuff, they can shut off the equipment on non-payment. But also: the economics are already there because the only other game in town is expensive disposal fuels like kerosene and petrol.
it will get more exciting once those solar panel can charge electronic cars
They can do so today. Works great for my parents.
This is embarrassing, getting frontpaged for a ChatGPT article with bullshit maths.
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Solarpunk with capitalism is kinda missing the point IMO.
It's not solarpunk, unless "lots of solar installations" qualifies. They just used the term to convey an aesthetic, or as bait. Being "punk" or socialist is not the point.
Sick and tired of these AI articles. The cheery friendly tone at the beginning is classic example of ChatGPT.
Flagged.
AI slop on the frontpage. "Hey there! "
" Let’s dive in"
" Want to fight climate change?"
Seven hundred bullet points in the article, etc.
Someone really wants to pump solar here lol. I get it, the retail solar bags must be heavy for many
solarpunk is just socialism with afrofuturist aesthetics. happy for them!
Funny. I read the article and couldn’t shake the feeling that this is exactly how capitalism lifts whole countries out of poverty.
It's not capitalism, it's technology. That can often go together with capitalism, but Russia from 1917-60 and China from 1960-2025, say, are big counter-examples. As are the many poor countries with capitalist economies. Growth in electrification, transport infrastructure, manufacturing and mechanized agriculture will grow any economy, capitalist or socialist
Strongly disagree, you're example is nonsensical as it's normally used to prove the exact opposite. Nearly every quality of life improvement and economic boom in China and Russia during those periods are directly tied to adopting some parts of capitalistic systems.
What quality of life improvements are you thinking of that weren't based on mass electrification and mechanization of agriculture?
Those that happened in the USSR and China, no? After the start of electrification and active mechanization of agriculture, more peasants died of hunger there than in the previous 100 years (in Russia more than in the previous 200 years).
At least some of them died because they weren't allowed to consume what they produced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
That is simply how socialism works. Land as a mean of production is no different from a factory, so naturally, the products created on the land belong not to the peasants (Petite Bourgeoisie), but to society as a whole.
And guess what this bourgeoisie did when they found out that the grain they produced would now become common property (they sharply reduced the amount they producing).
> It's not capitalism, it's technology.
Seems like it's completely capitalism
> but Russia from 1917-60 and China from 1960-2025, say, are big counter-examples.
Russia and China are good examples of that.
We have Khrushchev's memoirs about how, before the communist revolution, he, as a simple worker, lived better than workers live 40 years after the revolution. That is, the period from 1917 to 1960 in the USSR was one of complete stagnation, despite all the technological progress.
And in the example of China in the second half of the 20th century, we see yet another confirmation: their standard of living was literally directly proportional to the level of implementation of capitalist mechanisms.
> As are the many poor countries with capitalist economies.
As far as I understand, there is not a single poor capitalist country. Name a single poor country where private property is reliably protected and people enjoy economic freedom. There is no such country. As soon as even the poorest country begins to protect private property and guarantee economic freedom, it becomes rich within 10 years or something.
You make some reasonable points. But you're wrong to discount technology. Consider what Russia and China would have looked like if they hadn't electrified and mechanized.
Agree - I am an ardent capitalist, but a conscious capitalist. I believe the purpose of capitalism redirected can be used as a vehicle for massively changing economies and lives - such as in this case.
What's capitalism to you?
People buying and selling things with minimal interference from protection rackets
Afaik markets predate joint-stock companies. The concept of "raising capital" is much newer than the concept of a market economy. Did capitalism exist under feudalism? How do modern capital markets differ from historical markets under various other economic systems?
> Did capitalism exist under feudalism?
I would say it's more of a matter of the level of interference of the fief on trade. When 100% of the economy is controlled by the monopoly on violence I would say that is complete communism, and when 0% of the economy is controlled by the monopoly on violence that is complete capitalism. This is a kind of asymmetric definition of communism/capitalism because "complete capitalism" is a pretty unstable configuration.
Joint-stock companies are not a prerequisite in my opinion; You can have an capitalist economy of merchants that run everything as sole proprietorships. Socialists will try to define capitalism around ownership of the means of production but I am not sure this is a useful definition.
Modern industry is more capital-intensive than labor intensive historical industries. So the sort of pro-labor communist movements that design systems that ignore the value of capital have pretty much gone extinct in the current era.
The "communist" party of china has adopted a number of capitalistic practices since deng xiaoping. At the same time, the "capitalist" american economy looks awfully communist under my definition as a significant chunk of the economy flows through the government, the military-industrial complex and such.
You're describing planned and unplanned economies, which aligns somewhat with capitalism and state communism but is not the defining feature of them.
The main difference is ownership of the means of production/companies by the workers or by a separate group that might not work at the company at all.
an economic system which rewards winners and tears itself apart in a winner-takes-all tragic finale without an impartial regulator/judge.
A system based on ownership
Sure, capitalism has been working great for Africa since the 1700! The poverty was caused by not enough capitalism.
I find that arguments against capitalism like this are unconvincing.
It is like saying that a sword is useless technology. It's directional: the pointy end goes in the other guy.
How is small businesses selling solar panels to people socialism?
It's Power to the People.
Are you confused by the idea that socialism and market are incompatible ideas, or is this a critique that they're merely selling and not manufacturing (therefore not fully owning the means of production)?
It's part of modern double speak
Capitalism is really centralized monopolistic oligarchical control in modern media parlance.
Distributed empowering democratic grassroots level capitalistic allocation of resources that don't provide centralized control and administration is "socialism".
I think this is really insightful definition, username aside, I think forcing the conversation to include "oligarchical control" (the part people usually have issue with) prevents the lazy "but muh free market!" arguments when discussing our modern economic system
If the value is staying with local workers (social ownership) instead of being captured by some multinational, that's closer to a textbook definition of socialism than capitalism. How's that double-speak?
The solar panels are produced by outside of the country with companies applying massive economies of scale. I don't know what about this is socialist.
I guess it is vaguely leftist in the sense that poor 3rd worlders are benefiting. But whether a system is capitalist or not does not hinge on this sort of grievance-based thinking.
You're attempting to be sarcastic but that's actually accurate:
> Capitalism is really centralized monopolistic oligarchical control in modern media parlance.
Of course, because the Capitalists try to control the industry they've invested in.
> Distributed empowering democratic grassroots level <word> allocation of resources that don't provide centralized control and administration is "socialism".
Yes, it is. When the people who actually do the work own it.
>Of course, because the Capitalists try to control the industry they've invested in.
But does the system eventually result in a small number of capitalists taking power or is it distributed over many capitalists? Not all monopolies are natural.
What is the "work" being done here? Manufacturing or installation? It's not like all of the solar companies are co-ops and contractors.
Solar is inherently distributed in non-centralized.
Because it's based on sunlight which is distributed and noncentralized and free.
With battery storage, the intermittency is solved largely. Maybe you have your own gasoline peaker.
With enough solar, and an electric vehicle, you have transportation independence.
And I'm no expert on the historical and political nature of agriculture and centralized control, but I could argue agriculture is also fundamentally decentralized, certainly within the modern standards of deep technological stack control.
So if you can get your food, energy, transportation, water by yourself or within a local network... Then while I wouldn't call that socialist, I would call that highly democratilized, is that a word?
Now traditionally you also needed centralized power for defense.
And I'm wondering if drones will provide a fundamental advantage to guerilla defense.
why are you happy? many African nations attempted socialism in the 20th century, and all of those states have since collapsed. trying the same failed strategy over and over doesn't bode well.
anyway, I hope they get electricity. the article said a lot about markets for something related to an ideology that rejects them.
> many African nations attempted socialism in the 20th century, and all of those states have since collapsed
This is false. Senegal attempted small-s socialism under its first postcolonial regime (under Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1960–1980) and has had democratic political succession to the present day.
Really, really great article.
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I guess that is the negative view - but I didn't view it as that way
haha author here, and this was my favorite interaction so far. Thanks czbond.
So no, not fake, not AI, just written under the flu over the weekend.
@qarzxc: Not fictional, spoke to users & investors of both companies, see my breakdowns on them for a deeper dive.
> So no, not fake, not AI, just written under the flu over the weekend.
Well, my apologies then. On the bright side you definitely have a super power when under the flu: the ability to perfectly emulate a chatbot in your writing :D
I hope you're back to full health and doing well.
@skandergarroum
Do you have more on climate companies? I have been quite interested in the area (for profit, for good... where profit is returned to more "for good")
This is cool, but I don't think "move everyone off of government managed utilities to private profit extractors" is very Solar Punk.
Huh? These people own their own equipment after 30 months and are then not reliant on usually corrupt and/or incompetent government. They're not exactly rent seeking.
Being self reliant is indeed "very punk".
Capitalism isn't all bad. Example: you can actually buy real food.
But solar energy itself cost more than other form of electricity.
But who is driving cost of solar? Is it China?
> But solar energy itself cost more than other form of electricity
That is in fact, not correct. Maybe you should put that one back where you pulled it from.
Where the sun doesn't shine?
Ah, capitalism. It's only rainbows, children laughing and happiness. Well, if you're a potentially profitable customer, of course, otherwise you're left on the side of the road. And if you're not part of that low 10% that can't repay the costs and presumably gets violently thrown back to the last century.
Are massive infrastructure projects a failure ? Most definitely. But is corporate driven development the panacea this articles makes it out to be ? I don't think so. Especially telling is the last bit explaining how 3 households of a village sign a contract, then 30, but never does the whole village get solar. Public projects have that universality that is sorely needed. Should that one person that can't pay be left in the dark ? Too poor, too sick, too old, too unique, not profitable!