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Solarpunk is happening in Africa

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Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#401

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

manmal wrote: post #337
pantalaimon wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can make a great profit from solar, you are incentivised to build more of it for an even greater profit. Soon there is so much solar that you don't need the expensive gas most of the time.

> Soon there is so much solar that you don't need the expensive gas most of the time. In the EU (winters with weak solar radiation) this only works if you can store power over multiple months. Getting rid of gas means purchasing and maintaining a giant amount of batteries. Slow storage won’t save you from outages during peaks. We do have very cheap power from solar, during the hot months. In winter, its wind and offs…

Right now providing grid stability is maximally rewarded because you get paid a lot when it's needed and little when there's a lot of electricity available. Storage providers can use this spread to make money and create grid stability.

I'm not sure what you mean by second peak market?

Let me turn around the question, why should a gas plant get more for its electricity when it's indistinguishable from solar electricity?

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#402

Post by MrsPeaches »

Tade0 wrote: post #396
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…

The same report says that 90% of those kits are repairable and the most common failure point is the battery and also that the vast majority of users hold on to their devices in hopes of repairing them in the future, as there exists some kind of repair service, it just isn't up to scale.

The repair service is really expensive for subtle reasons.

First of all there is the repair itself, but there isn’t any collection service so you need to travel (often a full day) to get to a repair centre. Then travel back. Not open on the weekend so you have to do it during the week, meaning you are also loosing 2 days of income. Then you have to go and get it once it’s done.

Total cost of repair for people using these devices might 10+ days worth of income if you include the opportunity cost.

That’s why we are training people to fix these systems within their communities.

Regarding parts you can get second life batteries in Kenya for $1-2 per cell from people like Acele Africa[1], so you can get total repair cost down to ~$10 (that’s ~3% of original purchase price)

[1] https://www.aceleafrica.com/

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#403

Post by manmal »

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…

> the fundamental logic of markets is that there's a price point consumers will pay that's also profitable for the company

Electricity demand is price inelastic, meaning the consumer has no direct influence on prices, and will pay practically any price (well, up to a point). In the EU, the day-ahead spot prices are published every day at 2PM CEST, and it's a bidding market driven only by suppliers. If gas price goes up by x3, total electricity price average will go up by some linear factor, because gas turbines are absolutely required for surges/peaks - at least until we have enough batteries.

Calling this a market is stretching it IMO.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#404

Post by v7n »

barbazoo wrote: post #67

I wish I could invest in that. I heard about a solar power cooperative here in Canada recently and I’m curious how to get involved in that.

If you're talking about fairly modest sums ($10k to 100k) and Kenya in particular is on your radar, I think we should discuss this further. I'm not Kenyan myself (European), but I frequent the area and have a solid network and resources already in place to make things happen. How may I reach out?

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#405

Post by kaon_2 »

I worked in this industry as a software developer. Companies like SunCulture (who used to be a customer of ours) started maintaining all their customers on spreadsheets. But with high volume low-value sales, you need to have good software to manage this. We were a player.

I once had to do a mobile money integration with a Zimbabwean bank. A dozen skype calls led to nothing. Then I visited the country, bought a local cell phone, made a few phone calls, and within several days I'd reached the developer I needed. He said: "Wait all I need to do is add this string?". "Yes.". He did so at midnight and our integration worked. Next evening we partied.

It shows how integrations are often more of a human/organizational navigation more than anything technical.

As for the article; the tone is hyped, and it is also somewhat true. Hundreds of millions will be using electricity. Still I want to point out one thing: This is all Solar powered DC electricity. No inverters! So you are looking at powering DC only appliances! Inverters are generally simply too expensive for this. Also the impact on income is very limited; you can't really do anything significantly more productive with the electricity, as several reports have shown. But I don't want to downplay the impact; The quality of life improvement is hard to overstate. Maybe somewhat comparable to say; you are forbidden to use any form of transport (bike, car, bus) to suddenly having all 3. Life becomes so much more convenient. For example: You don't have to take the bus anymore to town to charge your phone - yes people do this.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#406

Post by zekrioca »

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…

This looks more like an opportunity, especially compared to the worse downsides of these communities continuing with diesel.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#407

Post by Ray20 »

baq wrote: post #398
Ray20 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those that happened in the USSR and China, no? After the start of electrification and active mechanization of agriculture, more peasants died of hunger there than in the previous 100 years (in Russia more than in the previous 200 years).

At least some of them died because they weren't allowed to consume what they produced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

That is simply how socialism works. Land as a mean of production is no different from a factory, so naturally, the products created on the land belong not to the peasants (Petite Bourgeoisie), but to society as a whole.

And guess what this bourgeoisie did when they found out that the grain they produced would now become common property (they sharply reduced the amount they producing).

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#408

Post by monegator »

The problem is that there is no true manufacturing nor repairability capacity for high density electronics in africa. Hell, our customer in SA asks us to buy spare components for them because getting parts there from our favourite distributors is a nightmare.

My parents are involved in an organization that helps developing parts of Togo. They helped build wells, structures (schools, bathrooms, .. ) and give material for agriculture and light manufacture, fund for tutoring, such things. All the electric and mechanical machinery they donated, including vehichles, are older models and the reason is simple: they must be serviced with the available technology, and they must be simple to service.

They made a conference in our town to showcase the project and i addressed the obvious elephant in the room: what about electricity? They are dependend on china for cheap panels and inverters, and they do not want to use alternative sources that require way less tech to operate: biofuel for example. They say it's not as efficient, and i concour, but i feel there is also a geopolitic issue, they do know they are making themselves dependent on china and there might be a small print condition for the cheap solar.. and they were elusive on the answers.

Also, not programs to train electronics technicians in the next future. If i ever get involved i'd like to help with setting up repair shops and train technicians. We'll see in the next few years what happens.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#409

Post by cycomanic »

mattvr wrote: post #382
cycomanic wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

You realise the irony right? You say say AI "slop" has a distinctive structure, but at the same time you (and the other poster) say that AI tools can not detect it? For what it's worth I'm an AI sceptic, but one thing that AI tools are good at is pattern matching (that's really all they do). But somehow pattern matching AI writing is so obvious to human's but it completely fails all AI tools (just tried another tool which said 100% human).

It doesn't match up. Moreover it's getting tiring, because every single article has these comments on them, and I've seen enough examples where authors showed up in discussions or texts were from before LLMs were widely available, but posters were still adamant that the text was AI generated.

I highly doubt that people here would reliably pick out (success rate > 60%, i.e. you get 60% of guesses correctly if text was generated by a human or LLM) LLM generated text that completely fools 90% of AI detectors.

Regarding the setup-punchline format, guess what, those were popular way before LLMs (not surprising LLMs must have learned them from somewhere).

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#410

Post by darkwater »

monegator wrote: post #408

The problem is that there is no true manufacturing nor repairability capacity for high density electronics in africa. Hell, our customer in SA asks us to buy spare components for them because getting parts there from our favourite distributors is a nightmare. My parents are involved in an organization that helps developing parts of Togo. They helped build wells, structures (schools, bathrooms, .. ) and give material…

Are we really able to service solar panels and batteries in Europe either, for example? Or most of the time is just a game of moving refurbished devices to replace the broken ones, that are then shipped back to... China? to be refurbished once again? I know that for more costly EV batteries there is some refurbishment capacity in Europe but what about the rest?
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