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Solarpunk is happening in Africa

climatedrift.substack.com

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Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#431

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

manmal wrote: post #423
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 electricit…

> why should a gas plant get more for its electricity when it's indistinguishable from solar electricity? I already wrote it: levels of service. A gas plant powers up in minutes. A coal plant in hours. A nuclear reactor in years. Solar and wind isn’t controllable at all.

But why would anyone else being able to deliver at the same time get anything less?

I agree there's actually an issue here, ideally the price should be set by the next seller which just didn't get to sell.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#432

Post by chrneu »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #279
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.

I think the point of this article is to get people to say this. Considering half the numbers in this article are fabricated, it makes me wonder if this comment is also a part of the scam.

v7n's comment smells like a bot or they used AI to translate.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#433

Post by chrneu »

stingrae wrote: post #328

"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 was good in the moment. The issue is maintaining it without the same cheap labor and materials. PG&E in California is a perfect example. There is no way for them to maintain the grid which is aging and causing fires. We are going to have to swi…

Oh wow this is a very good point and not something I'd ever really considered. Good comment. Makes a lot of sense.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#434

Post by chrneu »

skandergarroum wrote: post #146
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…

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…

just fyi when I ran this through an AI detection tool it came up with likely ChatGPT. 60% written by non-human. So either you've started really writing like an AI or you used AI for this.

It fails the sniff test and the tool test.

You also didnt correct the math mistakes the AI made.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#435

Post by self »

Ray20 wrote: post #357
lambdaone wrote: post #199

There's also nothing stopping African communities from building peer-to-peer microgrids if they want to.

The same thing that's, you know, stopping them from having real power grids.

Extending the grid to power a remote village is not the same thing as the villagers running their own microgrid.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#436

Post by DecoySalamander »

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.

I think it's more of a link with a nice title getting 700+ upvotes. IMO many (and most non-tech) articles linked on HN are bad and most of their value lies in them being a conversation starter.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#437

Post by MrsPeaches »

chrneu wrote: post #425
dhoe wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's spent the last 3 years in Africa, if there's one thing I learnt here is that if it can be fixed, they'll find a way to fix it.

lol yeah I was gonna say that they fix everything. They can't just Amazon prime new shit. It's weird how OP just assumes they're inept at repairs when that's just not true at all.

I didn’t say, nor do I assume, people are inept at repairs. I said that the communities that are being targeted with off-grid solar don’t currently have the skills or infrastructure required to maintain these systems.

It’s something I’ve seen with my own eyes and that I’ve read in academic literature as a widespread problem. Cross and Murray 2018 [1] being one the first papers to talk about it, I saw it myself for the first time around that time in Tanzania.

I stayed in a village where each house had at least 2 broken solar lanterns stored in a corner (like those old routers people love to keep).

The next closest repair shop was first 30min motorbike ride then a 2 hour bus ride away.

This was a village of 8,000 people.

Yes, the person with a diploma from the local technical college can fix a lot of things but they live in the local town with grid electric etc. They don’t live in these remote rural regions where off grid is so important/impactful.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961...

Edit:

The solution is to teach more people how to design, build and maintain solar energy systems so that the skills are embedded in off grid communities and give them the tools to carry out the work. You can do a lot with a soldering iron and good grasp of electronics!

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#438

Post by duckmysick »

kaon_2 wrote: post #405

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…

> 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.

That's pretty interesting. Can you tell us more what kind of problems your software solved and how you convinced them to move from the spreadsheets?

I tried something similar (in another industry) and it's a mixed bag. Companies often straight up refuse to move past the spreadsheets even though it creates a significant backlog on their side.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#439

Post by kaon_2 »

chrneu wrote: post #426
kaon_2 wrote: post #405

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…

My understanding is that the main benefit of small solar like this is to get combustion out of the home, specifically kerosene or dung lamps/stoves. A lot of folks have respiratory issues because they cook indoors.

Yes and no. You are right that indoor cooking (or outdoor on wood) is indeed one of the biggest causes of death worldwide. It dwarfs deaths by malaria. And where people don't die, it causes respiratory issues. I don't know the math but it is similar to smoking X cigarettes a day.

- sidenote - You always learn that in centuries past, people didn't grow old. I never knew why but my current suspicion is that air pollution by stoves and hearths was probably the top 3 cause.

However, cooking isn't (yet) solved by solar. Making heat from electricity is hard! Clean Cooking solutions often use propane, butane, or wooden pallets. Clean Cooking companies face all of the same issues as the Off grid solar companies of this article. But you'd be surprised that it is really considered a different industry. Customers and price plans are the same, but funding often comes from different sources.

Making affordable, electric, clean cooking solutions would be one of the most impactful inventions of our generation. Even then, challenges remain: No cultural activity is as steeped in tradition as cooking, and convincing people to change this, resulting in different tasting meals, is hard. Particular if it is the man deciding on the money, and the woman doing the work.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#440

Post by epolanski »

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 article you link bundles together 5/10/15/20/25 years technology in one huge basket.

What about the most recent (last 5/10 years)?

Also, aren't almost all failures battery, rather than panel, related?

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