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Solarpunk is happening in Africa

climatedrift.substack.com

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Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#81

Post by abakker »

ryandrake wrote: post #76
roywiggins wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#83

Post by sirsar »

marstall wrote: post #58

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.

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".

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#84

Post by astroflection »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #27

> 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…

The M-PESA transaction fees are high.

M-PESA helps fight poverty through the ingenious application of a thousand paper cuts.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#85

Post by badpun »

w10-1 wrote: post #38
epistasis wrote: post #9

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 ther…

> 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.

Some of the sacrifice is not voluntary - most panels contain parts and/or materials made by slaves in work camps.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#86

Post by maxglute »

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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#87

Post by titanomachy »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #16

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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#89

Post by badpun »

noosphr wrote: post #63
justapassenger wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 EXT…

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.

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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#90

Post by Jtsummers »

hatthew wrote: post #80
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 revenu…

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: l…

> $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.

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