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Solarpunk is happening in Africa

climatedrift.substack.com

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Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#91

Post by matthewfcarlson »

abakker wrote: post #81
ryandrake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#93

Post by throwaway201606 »

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…

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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#94

Post by o11c »

badpun wrote: post #89
noosphr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Better make sure they don't depend on AWS, then.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#96

Post by omnimus »

badpun wrote: post #85
w10-1 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Just like iPhones.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#97

Post by baxtr »

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.

Like anything else that the world procures cheaply from China btw.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#98

Post by nluken »

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.

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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#99

Post by ajnin »

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!

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#100

Post by neom »

drmath wrote: post #40
tomasz_fm wrote: post #6

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 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.
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