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Solarpunk is happening in Africa
261–270 of 616 posts
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#263Kenya is an equatorial country so they basically have steady ~12 hours of sunlight every day year round. Pretty cool!
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#264The 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…
> 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!
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#265Earlier 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…
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.
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#267Earlier 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.
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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.
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#268Earlier 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…
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.
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 GW…
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.
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#270The 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…
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 wi…
> 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.