481–490 of 616 posts
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 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…
I think this is really cool, but math seems off: > A company (Sun King, SunCulture) installs a solar system in your home > * You pay ~$100 down > * Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months But also: > The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system. You’re replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene) $1.5 week is $6 a month, not $60…
The 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…
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…
You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.
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…
> sell people cheap crap at a 10x mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over. Two massive exaggerations inside one sentence to drive home a rhetorical point. Provision of retail solar is a highly competitive market in developing countries and the profit margins are small.
I did a survey in partnership with a the African Leadership University in a Rwanda, where we surveyed people living in two rural villages and found 90% or units had broken within 3 years of purchase. This is the logical end point when 1/5 stop working after 6 months, which you can find in Cross and Murry 2018, linked in other comments.
10x mark up (i.e. the mark up on cost of the unit) comes from knowing that the COGS for one of these units is ~$20-30 and the premium sellers sell up to $300.
Sure it’s at the top end of the range but 10x markup on each unit is not an exaggeration, let alone a massive one.
Gross margins are indeed tight but that’s is a separate issue to markup. You can sell at a huge markup and still make a loss: for example if the default rate of loans you make turns out to be much higher than you expected.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I looked up that Impulse Labs induction hob. Holy Shit, 10kW peak on a single burner is ridiculous! I already managed to ruin a pan with just 3.7kW (heated it while empty), and I tought that was a lot. However, I think the cost is probably mostly the battery. Our induction hob (max power per burner 3.7kW / 7.2kW total) costs only 10% of the battery powered stove. Also, at the low cost, induction is a non-starter. Res…
Battery power for an oven like this is not necessarily cost-prohibitive; if you want cost effectiveness and long lifetime, LiFePo cells can be had for ~$60/kwh, which would be under Absolutely agree on resistive heating for cost effectiveness: Some cheap cells, resistive heating and minimal power electronics would probably be the way to go for the African market.
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…
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 con…
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 know you have some bias for the education solution, but I can't see why this is not a market problem. You have broken devices; you send them to get fixed; you have to travel one day to get them fixed; you have someone take them for a fee. You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country…