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Solarpunk is happening in Africa

climatedrift.substack.com

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Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#191

Post by Incipient »

metalman wrote: post #103
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.

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 lig…

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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#192

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#193

Post by tobyjsullivan »

losvedir wrote: post #162
skandergarroum wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#194

Post by aeonfox »

epistasis wrote: post #102
omnimus wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ent…

> 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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#195

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#196

Post by SamBam »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #148
losvedir wrote: post #125

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 w…

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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#197

Post by cyberax »

zer00eyz wrote: post #110
metalman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lig…

> 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.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#198

Post by nandomrumber »

epistasis wrote: post #168
bdangubic wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's a bit different nice to discuss the degrees of slavery, little slavery is cool, little more perhaps not as much…

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”.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#200

Post by w_for_wumbo »

neom wrote: post #100
drmath wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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