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

Solarpunk is happening in Africa

climatedrift.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 616 posts

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#381

Post by Manuel_D »

epistasis wrote: post #321
Steven_Vellon wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Battery production capacity grows by 10x every five years. It was four years ago when I first heard that, and we are exactly on track still. In 2031 we will be at 20-30 TWh/year production capacity. There are few things that grow this fast when it comes to manufactured things, atoms are far harder to arrange and scale than bits. But it's happening at a tremendous scale. Natural gas turbine production capacity is tapp…

Understand that only ~6 TWh of lithium batteries have been produced to date. As in, every single year of production combined adds up to less than 6 Twh. Moore's law largely stemmed from the fact that making a processer faster also meant making transistors smaller. Reducing the width of a transistor to a half, a quarter, etc. increased compute per cm^2 by double, quadruple, etc. Chemistry doesn't obtain that kind of exponential growth - we have hard limits on the number of joules we can store per gram of anode and cathode, so scaling up production means digging up more anode and cathode material out of the ground. The nature of resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are exhausted first, and continued production is contingent on accessing the progressively more and more inconvenient reserves. Maybe in 2030 annual global production will be 30 TWh - we'll know in 4 years. But there's a lot of people who probably don't want to make trillion-dollar investments gambling on that possibility panning out.

Regardless of your confidence in battery production's continued growth, I think you'd agree that if someone is making a calculation about the required amount of overproduction required to maintain a stable grid, they should at least mention that their calculation is contingent on provisioning tens of terawatt hours worth of grid storage.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#382

Post by mattvr »

cycomanic wrote: post #371
safety1st wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah way too many tell-tale ChatGPT rhetorical devices in this article, which is a shame because the topic and premise are fascinating, but those turned me off from finishing it. AI slop hits 700+ upvotes on Hacker News. The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom. A sign of things to come.

It's getting boring how every. single. article. has comments how the article is AI generated. The funny thing is the article writing styles are completely different, but every one has apparently "tell-tale" signs of "AI slop". It just gets tiring. For what it's worth I pasted the first couple of paragraphs into several AI detectors and 4/5 said it's clean, while one said mixed (partly AI generated partly human). So e…

The detectors are wrong. Here’s the thing: AI slop has a distinctive structure that many of us spot from a mile away.

The kicker? This setup-punchline format sets off a red alert for astute readers’ AI detectors.

This isn’t just AI slop, it’s an industrial AI sludge factory.

(note: this was ironically written by a human)

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#383

Post by TeMPOraL »

safety1st wrote: post #356
titanomachy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah way too many tell-tale ChatGPT rhetorical devices in this article, which is a shame because the topic and premise are fascinating, but those turned me off from finishing it. AI slop hits 700+ upvotes on Hacker News. The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom. A sign of things to come.

> The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom

always_has_been.jpg

The Internet has drowned to death in garbage back when they coined the term "content marketing". That was long before transformer models were a thing.

People have this weird impression that LLMs created a deluge of slop and reduced overall quality of most text on-line. I disagree - the quality arguably improved, since SOTA LLMs write better than most people. The only thing that dropped is content marketing salaries. You were already reading slop, LLMs just let the publisher skip the human content spouter middleman.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#384

Post by MrsPeaches »

stogot wrote: post #374
MrsPeaches wrote: post #372

This revolution also has a dark side: People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them. This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world. It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x…

Sounds like an opportunity to do a buyback and sell to a refurb provider. But also to fix their junk. 250 million?!

We are teaching people how to fix them so that the income stays within those communities.

You can see a bit our latest work here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energy-makers-academy_strathm...

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#385

Post by energy123 »

portaouflop wrote: post #286
energy123 wrote: post #82

North Africa has a lot of sun, a lot of land, and not much solar seasonality. They will be hit hard with climate change though.

Everyone will be hit hard by climate change. I do t see why it should be less in eg the Americas - where you already have pretty volatile climate events

The equator is particularly vulnerable because it's already very hot

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#386

Post by jabl »

glenstein wrote: post #297
istjohn wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let’s put aside that this isn’t good for the end user, as it openly admits the whole point of solar is great profit, rather than savings for the end user. The whole point of capitalism is that in a well-regulated, open, competitive market, an ecosystem of companies pursuing maximum profit drive down each other's profit margins as they compete for a limited pool of consumers. In other words, it is precisely the prof…

Exactly. The same principles that apply for solar energy are already in place for natural gas and for every other form of energy and the fundamental logic of markets is that there's a price point consumers will pay that's also profitable for the company. That didn't newly become an issue for the first time once solar entered the picture. There should be a word for this type of argument where people relitigate settled…

Even more generally, this applies to commodity markets. Price of potatoes is x EUR/kg, set by supply and demand. If some farmer can produce potatoes for 0.1x EUR/kg, they get to make a good profit.

Now electricity wholesale markets are an artificial construct, but it has been designed to mimic other commodity markets in that the producer on the margin sets the price.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#387

Post by wesleywt »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #372

This revolution also has a dark side: People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them. This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world. It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x…

I don't see the problem. The market to fix these will eventually emerge.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#389

Post by eskibars »

jimnotgym wrote: post #379

Isn't it a shame that 90% of the comments here are complaining that AI was involved in producing this article, and none of the comments are from a tech nerd kid in Africa who has electricity because of the solar schemes mentioned in the article? I want to hear from the people affected.

I agree in principal, but this whole post is lazy if it's AI-produced. There's certainly no original thought and as the comments mention here, most of the math is outright incorrect

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#390

Post by baq »

jimnotgym wrote: post #379

Isn't it a shame that 90% of the comments here are complaining that AI was involved in producing this article, and none of the comments are from a tech nerd kid in Africa who has electricity because of the solar schemes mentioned in the article? I want to hear from the people affected.

You’ll likely need to wait a couple decades for this. Kids need to not spend all their free time helping on the farm first and their currency has to appreciate such that they can afford a computing device that isn’t a toy. With yields seeing such big increases it looks feasible, but we’re still early.
Post reply on HN