Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

knowablemagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 99 posts

Re: For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

#51

Post by viktour19 »

breakyerself wrote: post #14

It's been obvious for a long time this was going to be the development path for Africa. Just as they leapfrogged land line telephones for cellular. Africa was never going to build out massive coal and natural gas based electrical grids with transmission lines substations and utility poles bringing electricity to every home. The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.

The world’s first hydrogen exploration company was founded in Mali. No one knows for a fact what the development pathway is. Solar might turn out to be inconsequential.

https://news.mit.edu/2024/iwnetim-abate-aims-extract-hydroge...

> In 1987, well-diggers drilling for water in Mali in Western Africa uncovered a natural hydrogen deposit, causing an explosion. Decades later, Malian entrepreneur Aliou Diallo and his Canadian oil and gas company tapped the well and used an engine to burn hydrogen and power electricity in the nearby village.

> Ditching oil and gas, Diallo launched Hydroma, the world’s first hydrogen exploration enterprise. The company is drilling wells near the original site that have yielded high concentrations of the gas.

Re: For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

#52

Post by manmal »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #19
postepowanieadm wrote: post #16

Mini-grids may be the part the EU is missing. Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use.

But with mini grids you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind with nobody at all to sell the excess to

That’s a problem big grids also share. It‘s probably easier to buffer power for a small neighborhood, than for a city.

Re: For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

#53

Post by decimalenough »

alephnerd wrote: post #25
bluGill wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grids are better if you have the capital to build them. Most of arfica has been too unstable to safely invest in. Everytime things start looking up there is another revolution and all investment is lost. Of course with the large number of countries there, that generalization is false. But it is overall close a enough to true.

> Most of arfica (sic) has been too unstable to safely invest in. Everytime things start looking up there is another revolution and all investment is lost You can't view Africa with such broad strokes. A West African country with British administrative norms like Nigeria is going to have entirely different outcomes compared to a former Portuguese colony impacted by the Colonial Wars like Mozambique. Reality is, plent…

Are you really characterizing Nigeria's notoriously kleptocratic bureaucratic system as "relatively competent", while self-styled Singapore of Africa Rwanda is a "basket case"? Most observers would reverse those labels.

Re: For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

#54

Post by lurk2 »

dehrmann wrote: post #42
Etheryte wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think transmission losses are exactly the point? Locally, the losses are practically zero, the further you need to push it, the more significant various losses become. If you could line up someone's production to someone else nearby who needs to consume, as a whole the system would incur considerably less losses, no?

US grid transmission losses are estimated to be 5%. You'd come out ahead pretty quickly if your neighbors can't use your surplus.

> US grid transmission losses are estimated to be 5%

That’s interesting, I had always assumed it would be far higher. Could I trouble you for a source?

Re: For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

#55

Post by dehrmann »

lurk2 wrote: post #54
dehrmann wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US grid transmission losses are estimated to be 5%. You'd come out ahead pretty quickly if your neighbors can't use your surplus.

> US grid transmission losses are estimated to be 5% That’s interesting, I had always assumed it would be far higher. Could I trouble you for a source?

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3

Re: For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

#56

Post by lurk2 »

twoodfin wrote: post #9
soulofmischief wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have conveniently forgotten about centuries of colonialism, resource exploitation and state-sponsored regime changes, which still plague Africa today.

How would you differentiate Africa from East Asia in those regards?

Most colonization in Asia occurred in the South and Southeastern regions.

Re: For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

#57

Post by scns »

alephnerd wrote: post #17

Small pet peeve - saying "Africa" is too broad a statement for a continent with 54 countries, and does a disservice to the actual government institutions working on development. They should explicitly call out Nigeria instead of treating it as "Africa". Nigeria is unique in how they actually have a formal industrial strategy for mini-grids [0] thanks to World Bank support [1] It's a uniquely Nigerian program and Nige…

> Small pet peeve - saying "Africa" is too broad a statement for a continent with 54 countries

And in one of those 54, Cameroon to be exact, there are over 300 languages spoken.

Re: For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

#58

Post by bsder »

breakyerself wrote: post #14

It's been obvious for a long time this was going to be the development path for Africa. Just as they leapfrogged land line telephones for cellular. Africa was never going to build out massive coal and natural gas based electrical grids with transmission lines substations and utility poles bringing electricity to every home. The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.

> The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.

It doesn't help that Africa is huge and the population density of most of it is damn near zero. Grids of any form make very little sense given those constraints.

Re: For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

#59

Post by throwaway4220 »

viktour19 wrote: post #51
breakyerself wrote: post #14

It's been obvious for a long time this was going to be the development path for Africa. Just as they leapfrogged land line telephones for cellular. Africa was never going to build out massive coal and natural gas based electrical grids with transmission lines substations and utility poles bringing electricity to every home. The capital isn't there and the cost of renewables keeps falling.

The world’s first hydrogen exploration company was founded in Mali. No one knows for a fact what the development pathway is. Solar might turn out to be inconsequential. https://news.mit.edu/2024/iwnetim-abate-aims-extract-hydroge... > In 1987, well-diggers drilling for water in Mali in Western Africa uncovered a natural hydrogen deposit, causing an explosion. Decades later, Malian entrepreneur Aliou Diallo and his Ca…

Promising but how do pipelines deal with hydrogen?

Re: For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

#60

Post by mmooss »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #49
mmooss wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's look at the successful economies of East Asia: Japan was a first world country, an economic success before WWII, and then had the US occupation after the war to rebuild it economically and politically as a hedge against future Japanese threats and against Russia and China. South Korea never suffered Western colonialism (?) but did suffer under Japan. After that and the Korean War, iirc it was one of the poorest…

I would assume that Africa will in fact be the global center of population in a few decades? Natural resources plus population is usually a winning formula for long-term growth.

Compare all of Africa with East Asia. The latter is a heavily coastal population along an oceanic trade route, also near the massive South Asian population.

Also, Africa doesn't have the geopoitical importance, an accident of geography but a reality. Unless and until world power changes dramatically to Africa from the US, Europe, and East Asia, it doesn't seem like that will change.

That doesn't mean they can't grow wealthier, etc. But compared to East Asian countries, they lack the means to compel investment

Post reply on HN