it will get more exciting once those solar panel can charge electronic cars
They can do so today. Works great for my parents.
Solarpunk is happening in Africa
441–450 of 616 posts
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#442I 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…
> So you are looking at powering DC only appliances! Is there anything you actually need AC for? The big advantage of AC is that you can easily transform it for long range transmission. If you don't need that, AC is not really necessary, is it? I guess the bigger issue is the limited power -- you probably can't use a small scale solar installation for cooking or washing, not because it's DC, but because it just wont…
Lowtech magazine recently had an article about cooking with solar power:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2025/10/how-to-build-a-sol...
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#443I 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…
> So you are looking at powering DC only appliances! Is there anything you actually need AC for? The big advantage of AC is that you can easily transform it for long range transmission. If you don't need that, AC is not really necessary, is it? I guess the bigger issue is the limited power -- you probably can't use a small scale solar installation for cooking or washing, not because it's DC, but because it just wont…
AC makes power distribution easier (because you can have modulated phases). So it's correct to say it's easier to move it over a long distance.
Additionally, and i'm really simplifying, at parity of nominal voltage, you can move a lot more power, at a lower dissipation cost. This has resulted in few high power electronics to be AC native (ie.: no AC - DC - AC conversion). Think about motors in the various appliances, etc.
It doesn't need to be like that, investment in DC car motors have pushed the industry to optimizes design, and get similar power output of the motor at lower energy consumption.
That said, if you are a manufacturer of an appliance and you have an addressable user base of billions with AC, and a 'potential new user base' with DC... you might just want to swallow the cost and add a DC / AC converter for the sake to not have to produce two variants of the most complex / costly item (the motor in this case).
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So you are looking at powering DC only appliances! Is there anything you actually need AC for? The big advantage of AC is that you can easily transform it for long range transmission. If you don't need that, AC is not really necessary, is it? I guess the bigger issue is the limited power -- you probably can't use a small scale solar installation for cooking or washing, not because it's DC, but because it just wont…
Thought provoking question! I am not an electrical engineer, but arguments I heard went along these lines: Almost all existing appliance markets are AC. Are we really going to be building a complete parallel appliance market? You wouldn't be able to sell a TV from the city in the country side and vice versa. I would be keen to hear what an electrical engineer on hackernews has to say! Interestingly, when I visited th…
Laptops, TVs and other electronics already run from DC. Also, there are a lot of appliances for camper vans, boat which run on 12v or 24v DC. On Alibaba you can buy a stove for a few bucks: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Solar-DC-12V-24V-Batt...
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 polluti…
alibaba.com/product-detail/Solar-DC-12V-24V-Battery-Powered_60758353185.html
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thought provoking question! I am not an electrical engineer, but arguments I heard went along these lines: Almost all existing appliance markets are AC. Are we really going to be building a complete parallel appliance market? You wouldn't be able to sell a TV from the city in the country side and vice versa. I would be keen to hear what an electrical engineer on hackernews has to say! Interestingly, when I visited th…
I'm sort of an electrical engineer. Increasingly things don't run directly off 120/240V directly. Anything with a power supply could be designed to run of 48V DC nominal. My slight obsession is that really the world needs a low voltage standard. Things like lighting, low power appliances don't need 120/240V.
I'm with you, and actually bullish on this to be a viable way forward.
48V DC has been eyed already for a potential standard to emerge. Doesn't need massive cables to deliver decent power (4A ~200W). There is enough hardware around coming from use cases like EV and Boats that could make it work. Many battery solutions already 'talk' 48v without lossy stepdown of voltage, etc.
Big plus is that the regulation is A LOT less strict for <48v DC compared to AC 110/220/240.
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
This is interesting. Can you please consider expanding your outreach to venues other than linkedin? I understand that you are serving local needs, but I suspect that some people in the United States would be quite interested in learning about this. I've assumed that people used solar power in Africa, but didn't consider the restraints and challenges of keeping them operational.
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#448This 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…
That seems more optimistic (or solar punk) than your summary e.g.: > In terms of waste management, 85.3% of distributors reported that they had a waste management strategy. Mostly, this tended to involve collecting broken products, harvesting them for spare parts and then storing the remainder in a central warehouse before sending them to a (usually certified) local e-waste recycling facility. How effective these rec…
For sure recycling is improving. That’s different from repair though.
The current cycle is 1. sell product 2. wait three years for it to break 3. Go back to 1.
The impact of the recycling can lessen the impact of that but it definitely doesn’t eliminate it. That’s just on environmental scale, think about the financial impact of carrying this debt for years on people earning $2 a day.
Also important to note that a lot of this is contingent of legislation that implements things like Extended Producer Responsibly (EPR) where you essentially have an additional tax on producers that gets used to fund collection. Kenya implemented this for the first time 12 months ago [1], so we will see the impact over the next couple years.
Re solar punk, my personal vision is that you basically teach people how to build and maintain these systems themselves by running solar tech bootcamp and giving them off-grid tools.
They then have tools and skills to fix anything without the need for the grid. Train 100k people and have them maintain these systems using a decentralised approach.
In fact, as part of our training we now have e-cooking stove suppliers who deliver training on their stoves to our students.
The economic impact of this cannot be over stated.
1. You are giving people the ability to 4x their income as repairers
2. You are saving the people who are getting new systems, instead of repairing them, multiples of their yearly income.
[1] https://cleanupkenya.org/30-things-to-know-about-kenyas-epr-...
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#449This 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…
My takeaway from observing “tech in developing world” projects is that the key gap is usually maintenance. That is, continuous small investment to prevent things from breaking in the first place. To be fair, that’s not exactly a solved problem in developed countries either!
Sometimes development projects just throw solutions at rural communities then move onto their next project, leaving no legacy of training or continued supply of parts/tools/funding.
Sometimes solutions get treated as resources instead of infrastructure, like a water treatment plant that got strip-mined for metal (that example was from South America).
Tech is a whole ecosystem, mindset and lifestyle, not just magic hardware to parachute into situations that aren’t set up to manage it on a long term basis.
Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa
#450Earlier 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.
It's not even Amazon prime. It's all the random industrial doodads you need to keep a modern economy running.
The "modern world supply chain" just doesn't go into africa much or at least not in a way that general commerce has easy access to.