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Solarpunk is happening in Africa

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Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#521

Post by MattSayar »

Version467 wrote: post #380
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…

All of those tools are garbage. There is no reliable automated way to detect ai generated text. In 2023 OpenAI had a tool for this as well and they eventually took it down because it wasn't accurate enough. The major AI labs are probably best positioned to make such a tool work. If even they can't, then some random company with access to a fraction of a data and a fraction of the compute almost certainly also cannot.

Agree those tools are unreliable. Unless you have a massive amount of ML models trained on individuals' writing[0], the best you can do is vibe-checking[1].

[0] https://mattsayar.com/can-ai-tell-if-im-writing-ai-slop-a-ma...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#522

Post by kaon_2 »

duckmysick wrote: post #438
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…

Happy to oblige. Basically we digitized a company from spreadsheets or paper to ERP. We'd introduce accounting software, stock management software, help desk software. But the biggest thing you need is some kind of "Loan Account Management Software" which is the center piece.

This centerpiece tracks the outstanding loan amount that each customer has. It sutomatically sends payment reminder SMS messages a few days before payments are due. It connects to the hardware with internet-of-things to turn it off if payments aren't made. It connects to the bank to ensure payments are there, and confirms when payments are made. Really fun software to build with many different parts.

There were SaaS providers for this. In the beginning (2015) there was only 1 player, Angaza (Reed Hastings mentioned in the article is one of their sales guys). Nowadays there are a handful; PaygOps, BBoX pulse (not sure if that still exists), and a few smaller ones. They charge like $2-$7 per device managed on the platform.

Convincing customer to take this up was not hard at all. You pretty much needed it to run your operations on anything more than 100 customers, and as the above article shows, scale had big advantages. Moreover; if you could show to investors that you had the software infrastructure scale, they were significantly likely to give money. It was boom time until corona hit. Everyone was expecting 30% YoY growth like until 2019, but then everything stagnated. Many companies went bankrupt and a lot of consolidation happened in the distributor market. Companies saved money on their software first, and we called it a day.

In the manufacturing industry where I am now, I fully agree with the mixed bag. Companies are old, with many old people, they stay small and don't necessarily need to scale or "grow forever". They are conservative and happy with the way things are.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#523

Post by throwawayq3423 »

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…

Perhaps the race to the bottom to create the cheapest possible solar panel wasn't the right way to approach this.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#524

Post by oezi »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #452
epolanski wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah not much has changed, it’s simple technology that was developed in 2005. Main innovations of the PAYGO model in recent times was the ability to use the payment data you collected to offer other types of loans. One of the previous biggest companies in the space now sells mobile phones using PAYGO. Technically battery chemistry has obviously moved on but we are talking a device capacity similar to a medium power b…

If we look at the growth curves it is clear that the actual real boom in solar will be happening between now and the next 10 (maybe 20 years) until the S-curve flattens.

The pictures in the report show panels which are so tiny in comparison to what you can buy today for 50 USD that it seems incomprehensible why anybody would repair them.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#525

Post by jchanimal »

gimmeThaBeet wrote: post #512
amluto wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery powered induction stoves exist, although they are not cheap enough yet. They are, however, truly excellent products. The one from Impulse Labs is not a case of “wow, I can get decent performance without the monster electric hookup it used to require” — it’s “wow, this seems to be the best stove of any sort on the market by a considerable margin, and it’s nifty that it happens to run off an integral battery, t…

Dang that 6k is pretty prohibitive not for the overall level, but because it's 4 hobs or nothing. Hardly a "give it a swag" kind of level. I assume they are probably somewhat comparable to the Breville Control Freak, so at a single hob you'd be competing against $1500. But the battery is a nice philosophy, similar to hybrid/mild electric cars. You don't need all the power forever. You just need more than a 120V circu…

The marginal cost of a hob is likely not the price driver.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#526

Post by ducttapecrown »

jabl wrote: post #466
MrsPeaches wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Well, what is the alternative then? Probably the same problem when their diesel generator conks out. Small things you can do yourself, but rapidly you run into a situation where you need spare parts, or at least a competently run machine shop.

How long did it take for mobile repair shops to proliferate? Surely solar repair shops will also appear.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#527

Post by gertrunde »

jl6 wrote: post #449
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…

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…

I knew a charity group many years ago that targeted this issue.

They noticed that aid charities would give modern motorcycles to rural medical workers that rapidly ended up in a non-working state.

So they gathered older motorbikes, more suitable and more repairable in the destination country, and spent time training the end users in maintenance and upkeep, and ongoing support.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#528

Post by brohee »

snickmy wrote: post #443
jjcob wrote: post #413

Earlier 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…

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,…

That wheel has turned. The king of long distance transmission is now HVDC, to be point of sometimes being used intra-grid and not just for interconnects.

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#529

Post by xhkkffbf »

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…

Is there some money in recycling them? The easiest way to get people interested in cleaning up trash is if you can pay them for the trash. Is there any money in a broken solar panel?

Re: Solarpunk is happening in Africa

#530

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

astroflection wrote: post #84
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #27

> M-PESA, a mobile money platform that let people transfer cash via SMS. This a thing that needs to be more widely known. If you saying, as people here sometimes do, "oh but my new tech could help people move money in poor parts of the world" (not mentioning any specific tech right now) and you're not familiar with M-PESA, then you're just out of your depth and talking foolishly. The real world has already moved past…

The M-PESA transaction fees are high. M-PESA helps fight poverty through the ingenious application of a thousand paper cuts.

I didn't say that you had to praise it extravagantly, just to be aware of it. To know what the current state of play is. What demonstrably has succeeded, and what untapped niches remain.
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