The ROI of using a diesel-powered pump isn't so high so few farmers have one. It means, they work well and those who don't have one, still get some water for their fields, too.

A solar pump is many times cheaper to run. It means ROI of using it is huge and many more people will get them. But it doesn't mean there will now be magically more groundwater to pump!

Which mean, those who don't have a pump, will soon find themselves completely without water - it will be all sucked out by people with pumps. So they will also HAVE to install those pumps.

As a result, no one will be better off because same amount of water will be redistributed among same number of farmers. Even an "arms race" of more and more powerful pumps is likely when people will realise theirs are not working as good anymore now than everyone has one.

All until the point where ROI of having a solar pump will become negligible.

Farmers will not be better off - they will be worse off. Chinese will make money - money funded by Western funds for "reducing" carbon emissions which do not really reduce anything as they are "replacing" diesel pumps 90+% of which did not exist.

And yes, people will also have a little bit of electricity at home - about 100x less than in grid-connected Western homes - a 200-watt panel per household at about 15% average output or maybe 20 KWh per month. It's not enough to run a blowdryer, or kettle, not even a fridge. But enough to charge a tablet to watch online TV - and become far right.

Bingo, enshittification comes to Africa, in it's purest form.

Only good thing about it is that money will go to Chinese vs Arabs for diesel fuel. Chinese are a problem that will gradually solve itself due to demography, while Arabs will not.

Except that chip that can remotely shut it off is still in it, waiting for a ransom attacker.

To what historic people did electricity come all by itself, without them haivng to figure out and build anything themselves?

Different countries in Africa have better grids than others, and different countries in Africa have stronger penetration of digital banking and DBT than others.

A country seeing a boom in domestic solar because of government subsidies and policies like Nigeria [0] is different from a country seeing a domestic solar boom because of a collapsing electric grid and regulatory failure like South Africa [1] or Pakistan [2] (not Africa but the same point holds).

At best this is an AI generated article, at worst this is someone who is truly misinformed and thinks about Africa this reductively.

[0] - https://nep.rea.gov.ng/solar-hybrid-mini-grid-for-economic-d...

[1] - https://globalpi.org/research/south-africas-solar-boom/

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/pakistans-solar-revo...

Some solar panel companies in China are trying to extract the idea of value from farmers whose hands change actual currency a couple of times a year to whoever brings it to market, all other times "money" is sent around in SMS. That bit of extracted wealth pays out in volume, eventually, but they also get a huge boost from selling "we did an environmentalism" dollars to corporate social responsibility brokers who are trying to help ai and oil and gas companies convince legislators that actually their businesses don't harm the environment because they bought the magic dollarydoos from the Chinese solar panel vendors who are making money selling solar panels but also selling magic dollarydoos.

It seems madness. This system is efficient and the best one we can do?

Who else could?

Don't engage with slop that seems lazily written, if not completely generated by Claude(sorry author if I'm wrong, I know you are claiming you wrote it but idk). This stuff kinda comes off like an article written on behalf of SunCulture or SunKing so they can go, hey guys look we were featured on a front page of HN article.

I swear: this was meant to be the pitch for like 99% of blockchain companies, only in this case they managed to do it. This is super interesting on so many levels.

The zero-cost payments with a low-barrier to entry. Again, this is what digital currencies were meant to do. Only, it turns out that at scale a combination of tech problems and legislative red tape made everything break. Just solving this one problem here is industry-defining in its own right. And shows the kind of products that open up when banking is enabled to everyone.

What about the hardware though? Well, I've worked at startups that were exactly dedicated to this kind of IoT stuff. They even were linking it with payments. But can you guess what happened? Well, of course: it had to be linked to blockchain shit, you know, just because... Then on the product side of things: nothing ever left the lab... Not that customers would have been able to use a blockchain-based payment rail anyway...

Getting reliable IoT hardware is hard enough but you still have to build customer relationships. They did it all through a simple technology the users were already familiar with. You don't need a frigging comp sci PhD to use SMS mobile payments. I think that's genius and blockchain tech bros could truly learn a lot from this. Pay-as-you-go here is also genius because as the author states: the chances of the owners having tons of disposal cash around to outright buy equipment are slim. Yet offering equipment to strangers under a pay-to-buy scheme by itself is risky for the lender and would typically lead to the kind of bureaucratic red tape that would slow down financing. With the IoT stuff, they can shut off the equipment on non-payment. But also: the economics are already there because the only other game in town is expensive disposal fuels like kerosene and petrol.

Flagged.

" Let’s dive in"

" Want to fight climate change?"

Seven hundred bullet points in the article, etc.

But who is driving cost of solar? Is it China?

Are massive infrastructure projects a failure ? Most definitely. But is corporate driven development the panacea this articles makes it out to be ? I don't think so. Especially telling is the last bit explaining how 3 households of a village sign a contract, then 30, but never does the whole village get solar. Public projects have that universality that is sorely needed. Should that one person that can't pay be left in the dark ? Too poor, too sick, too old, too unique, not profitable!

It is like saying that a sword is useless technology. It's directional: the pointy end goes in the other guy.

So no, not fake, not AI, just written under the flu over the weekend.

@qarzxc: Not fictional, spoke to users & investors of both companies, see my breakdowns on them for a deeper dive.

Seems like it's completely capitalism

> but Russia from 1917-60 and China from 1960-2025, say, are big counter-examples.

Russia and China are good examples of that.

We have Khrushchev's memoirs about how, before the communist revolution, he, as a simple worker, lived better than workers live 40 years after the revolution. That is, the period from 1917 to 1960 in the USSR was one of complete stagnation, despite all the technological progress.

And in the example of China in the second half of the 20th century, we see yet another confirmation: their standard of living was literally directly proportional to the level of implementation of capitalist mechanisms.

> As are the many poor countries with capitalist economies.

As far as I understand, there is not a single poor capitalist country. Name a single poor country where private property is reliably protected and people enjoy economic freedom. There is no such country. As soon as even the poorest country begins to protect private property and guarantee economic freedom, it becomes rich within 10 years or something.

The main difference is ownership of the means of production/companies by the workers or by a separate group that might not work at the company at all.

> Capitalism is really centralized monopolistic oligarchical control in modern media parlance.

Of course, because the Capitalists try to control the industry they've invested in.

> Distributed empowering democratic grassroots level <word> allocation of resources that don't provide centralized control and administration is "socialism".

Yes, it is. When the people who actually do the work own it.

Lithium is abundant in the United States. Nothing in the component chain of solar and battery systems is so complex it couldn't be made here. We could establish trade with African countries like China has, instead of doing these pointless tariffs. But for idiotic cultural reasons, we are not doing any of those things.

The world will permanently shift away from the fossil fuel economy sooner than most people think, and it will disrupt the entire system of dollar-denominated oil that underpins the U.S. empire. It's glaringly obvious where this is headed. And yet!

I've heard/read common criticisms about NGO's having more power and private funding than weak and poor governments, but then again, if there isn't a centralized effort to develop infrastructure, citizens are more likely to prefer outside funding/investment https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/internation...

Inspiring. My only critique would be that the excited tone (and exclusivity) ends up detracting from the achievement and opportunity.

>2008: $5,000 (affordable only for wealthy urban Kenyans)

>2015: $800 (middle-class farmers)

>2025: $120-$1,200 (true smallholders)

How does US solar cost so much?

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.

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 switch to a slightly similar regional power generation/storage model.

To what historic people did electricity come all by itself, without them having to figure out and build anything themselves?

For all those who have electricity, who was their "cable guy"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis

Here is the actual numbers from Sun King on their entry level system (Home Plus):

Basic (dc-only) panel for lighting and cellular/usb use:

  Lighting: 1 x 240-lumen LED tube light, 2 x 120-lumen LED hanging lights.  Up to 43 hours of light on a single charge on low-power mode

  Battery: 3.2 V, 19.2 Wh lithium ferro-phosphate (LFP) battery.  10-year battery lifespan with typical daily use (over 2,500 cycles)

  Solar: 7 Wp, 9 V solar panel with 8-metre rodent-resistant cable

  Output ports: 2 x 12 V DC output ports for lighting (550 mA max. total), 1 x USB-A phone charging port (5 V, 1 A)

Larger dc system:

Home 500X + Pedestal Fan

  Lighting: 4 x LED tube lights with individual wall switches, 200 lumen per tube light on max setting, 20 times brighter than a kerosene lamp, One motion-sensing 100 lumen security lamp

  Battery: 141 Wh lithium-ion NMC battery, Up to 19 hours of runtime on low power mode. 5-year battery lifespan with typical daily use

  Solar: 50 W, polycrystalline solar panel with aluminium frame and a 6 m cable

  Charging Ports: 2 x 5 V/1.8 A USB ports for charging mobile devices, 4 x 12 V(+/-3 V) ports. One port is specially designed to power Sun King DC appliances

So yes, this does seem pretty viable in terms of Upfront, TCO and payment options.

The article zooms in on cliche 2-3 use cases that while important show a lack of imagination and awareness of what's actually happening. Here are two more not mentioned in the article, at all. And they are transformational.

1) EVs. By that I don't mean the luxury four wheel road yachts common in the rich part of the world but its much more common two wheel variant: the e-bike. These are being produced by the hundreds of millions. The four wheel versions are are a rounding error. They show up all over Asia and Africa. We in the west have no concept of how important these things are to the local economies there.

You can charge those for next to nothing with solar. Most of these things only have a few hundred wh of battery on board. A single solar panel can top them up in an hour or so. What's the impact of that on in a place where subsistence farming is common and people have to walk hours to find a generator powered point to charge their phone or get some water? Well the obvious thing happens: lots of people now have affordable transport that doesn't require an arm and a leg to power.

2) AI. I know, we're all tired of the daily dose of AI utopia on HN. But like world + dog in the west has access to ChatGPT for free, so does all of Africa. "Hey chatgpt, what's a water pump and where can I find water here?". That's already a thing. AI usage is widely spread across Africa; and not just among the elite. Every subsistence farmer with a smart phone (most of them at this point) can now ask questions like that. That's massive. Knowledge is power. This is hugely empowering. People are naturally curious and now they can ask AIs for information instead of having to ask the local witch, village elder, or the nearest white person that actually had an education. That's very liberating.

Solar panels are going to be like smartphones were 15 years ago, everybody will have access to cheap power. And yes you can power one with the other. But it's really about what else you can power? IMHO this will transform some of the poorest/undeveloped regions in this world in a few mere years/decades.

I’ve heard that if you have a solar system and a battery system connected to the grid, if the grid goes out for whatever reason, your battery gets cut off as well. Meaning that it’s essentially useless as power backup.

Is this true? Can you really go fully off-grid in Australia?

I’ve heard this from rural people in Victoria, where they do experience blackouts and where an actual backup would be useful.

Solar is scalable. The cheapest system 10W with a powerbank and phone charger and 3 x 3W LED lights as about USD 20. Next level is more lights and a fan and the high end is a TV and fan powered by solar.

> 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 who earns $600 per year.

It's structured like a contrasting pair of sentences, but it just doesn't make any sense. The things it's calling out in 1930s America aren't - or don't have to be - dissimilar from modern Africa. The farmer making $600/yr is kind of a non-sequitur.

> But there was still a massive, seemingly insurmountable barrier: $120 upfront might as well be $1 million when you earn $2/day.

No, it's 60 days of earnings. It's just a weird sentence. Taking a median US wage of $60k/yr or $165/day, 60 days of earnings is $9,900. "Might as well be $1 million" is a wild take, and a sloppy way to say it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

If you like the idea of human-written content on the Internet, I recommend against joining the chorus of voices baselessly accusing humans of being AI bots - an unfortunate trend lately which only serves to disincentivize future contributions.

When you buy corn or gas or tires for your car do you really care if it’s subsidized and say something like “oh yeah it was $x, but heavily subsidized”?

Of course not, you only care about how much it costs you.

Fancy drills already have a lot of electronics that do care about the polarity of the applied voltage, but they usually want it to be DC. Once you get anything more sophisticated than phase-angle control with a TRIAC, you're using MOSFETs anyway, and you can often use half as many of them if you're using DC, because MOSFETs like DC.

The community I have the privilege to be involved with in Kenya is facing many challenges when it comes to propagating access to solar energy, and one relatively small thing that can be done would be to service the lead-acid batteries most commonly used there: the environment is quite hostile to them as I understand it, and lead-acid is "the affordable chemistry" of choice. The problem is that there is a lack of knowledge and toxic waste (sulphuric acid, lead) handling capability. Otherwise topping up old batteries as a service is absolutely an achievable goal, much needed, and there is money to be made.

This is a good reminder of how much we in the developed world take our publicly funded transportation infrastructure for granted, which allows a repairman to easily reach us or vice versions.

This mirrors our public health infrastructure, which in the US at least is being degraded, the consequences of which we're all likely to experience soon.

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.

The most likely part to fail is the charge controller. That's got enough brains and parts that are ultimately likely to fail due to something like a bad capacitor. Next up is the batteries. If they are lead acid, then simply letting them under charge or dry out could have damaged them. Then the transformer/convert would be my next guess. It's got the right set of parts to go wrong. Panels is the last thing that might fail. They have no real parts to them, just cells and wires. About the only thing that could go wrong is if the wires somehow corrode (someone removes or scratches off the protective layer). Otherwise, the panels will likely just lose efficiency over time. They'll still generate power, but like 70% of their new condition.

I actually counted the number of outages after I got my battery unit in June -- it was six in five weeks, for anything from a couple of seconds to 30 minutes, which I noticed because the unit clicked over to running from the battery, and the clock on the oven (which is still only mains powered) flashes until I go over and hit a button.

In April I had a 40 hour outage after a storm. That's what caused me to order the brand new Pecron E3600LFP, first New Zealand model shipment in "early" June (I received mine June 19).

In February 2023 I had a 4 day outage during/after a storm.

There are even, every 2 or 3 months, scheduled and notified 9 AM - 3 PM outages for equipment maintenance, tree trimming etc. Just those alone lower the grid reliability to around 99.5%.

Six days outage in three years -- let's call it four -- drops grid reliability by another 0.4%.

So, yeah, two 9s is about right.

With the Pecron base unit (US$999 at the moment still on Halloween special, $1259 before that) I simply don't notice any outage under 4 hours, and that's even with a full winter heating load. In fact I deliberately turn the mains to it off from 7-9 AM and 5-9 PM every day.

A 4 hour outage was a little close sometimes, so in August I added a 3kWh expansion battery ($699 on pecron.com right now).

With 6kWh I can run my fridge, computers, Starlink, some LED lighting for 36 hours. Or 30 hours with typical kitchen appliance usage added (espresso machine, toaster, kettle, microwave, air fryer).

Or virtually forever now I added 6x 440W solar panels (cost me US$400 total) to it, which still generates around 200W between them in even the worse overcast and rain.

I'm running this stuff as a mini off-grid system, not connected to the house wiring at all -- except plugged into a standard socket to charge the battery if needed. I also have a $450 2kW petrol generator which I can use to charge the battery if needed, but needing that should be very rare.

Total cost: under US$3k. More like $2.3k at the current Halloween special prices.

https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/1984782313386099022

I maintain a 20 year old Corolla, which is incredibly common throughout Africa (exported 2nd/3rd/4th hand).

But users from there rarely pop up in the forums or anywhere else I’ve found.

I dunno how they diagnose obscure condition XYZ without the like 9 retired mechanics on the forum.

Do they all use closed WhatsApp groups? Do they just consume tech info but not produce?

I appreciate they don’t all speak English, nor a language that Google Translate is good at.

They’ve gotta be dealing with the same problems we do fixing these, if not more.

Don’t know about uptake:

https://solar-aid.org/news/repair-app/

There's only a few parts that go bad (it's probably a capacitor somewhere).

If I added a solar system they would neither care nor have any idea. Only the government cares here.

The trouble with relying on the weather for your electricity is that it is entirely possible that you will go five days straight with cloud cover, limited to no solar generation and then be freezing. This is the problem that the electricity grid solves with varied sources of generation.

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/507496-knock-off-solar...

Person lacks reliable transportation -> give them some -> problem solved

There's another example - a charity provides treated mosquito nets for free to millions of families in Africa. Great!

People lack reliable mosquito protection -> give them treated nets -> problem solved!

But in reality it went like this:

People lack reliable mosquito protection -> give them treated nets -> many of these families are starving -> fine mesh nets are great at catching small fish -> all their food is now infected with insecticide, mosquitos continue to access the family as well

https://buffaloride.org/buffalobicycle https://worldbicyclerelief.org/product-development/

Why? All you need is resistive wires, and minimal, dirt cheap electronics for regulation and shutdown/safety.

You can find this in literally any $20 kettle or toaster, no need to supply Africans with induction cooktops for thousands of dollars...

The article says two packs a day.

I mean it's several hundred fold more expensive I'd call that "eclipse" but maybe you have a higher threshold for that word?

> And many will make do without a battery, just relying on power during the day.

I mean I guess that's an option if you don't want these places to advance in quality of life or produce much of anything.

Unless I add solar.

Indeed. I think many in the West fail to appreciate - and take for granted - the cultural dimensions (which include cultures of knowledge, skill transmission, cultivation, and development, and also worldview[0]) as well as the economic ecosystems and supply chains involved.

Dropping off a tractor in Africa or a bulldozer in rural India and calling it a day is superficial and worthless. Imagine shipping something suitably technologically advanced to some Germanic tribe during the Roman conquest of Europe if you need an analogy.

[0] The worldview bit might surprise some. As some have argued, there are reasons why enterprises like modern science arose and flourished only in the West, whereas everywhere else scientific development was historically quite limited. These reasons include a culture formed under the notion of the Logos which entails the belief in a thoroughly intelligible universe that can be fully known in principle; a rejection of pantheism with a distinction made between the transcendental and the immanent, allowing for exploration; a rejection of pantheism and so a world infested with capricious, personified natural phenomena; an omniscient and omnibenevolent God who is not capricious or voluntarist. Without these elements, the confidence and motivation needed to confidently exercise and develop intellectually, to try to understand the world - which contribute to the formation of a robust scientific culture - is stifled.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-xi... ("Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human Rights Concerns" / "The global industry is cutting some ties to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and companies are less transparent, a new report found")

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!

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.

Not everybody can afford the up front costs of installing solar + battery storage, plus replacement when the PV cells and batteries inevitably reach EoL. These people will be left behind on a decaying grid nobody with political capital wants to fix or at the mercy of landlords.

I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.

Oh boy.

They are incentivized to BULID but not to maintain or upgrade because that grants them guarantee rate of return.

It was enlightening to see what caused the big blackout during a big snowfall in texas a few years ago

Suppose, a farmer has a farm which produces 1 unit of crop. Farmer uses 0.8 of the crop for subsistence and sells 0.2 of the crop. They get $600/acre.

Now, crop yields go up 5x, so now the farm produces 5 units of crop. Subsistence needs are the same, so the farmer is now able to sell 4.2 units of crop. This is 4.2/0.2 = 21 times more revenue or $12,600/acre.

They are a growing economy of a billion + people.

You need to realize this is a population that was virtually 90% poor just 3 decades ago.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener...

https://electrek.co/2025/09/02/h1-2025-china-installs-more-s...

> Global solar installations are breaking records again in 2025. In H1 2025, the world added 380 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity – a staggering 64% jump compared to the same period in 2024, when 232 GW came online. China was responsible for installing a massive 256 GW of that solar capacity. For context, it took until September last year to pass the 350 GW mark. This year, the milestone was achieved in June. That pace cements solar as the fastest-growing source of new electricity generation worldwide. In 2024, global solar output rose by 28% (+469 terawatt-hours) from 2023, more growth than any other energy source. Nicolas Fulghum, senior energy analyst at independent energy think tank Ember, said, “These latest numbers on solar deployment in 2025 defy gravity, with annual solar installations continuing their sharp rise. In a world of volatile energy markets, solar offers domestically produced power that can be rolled out at record speed to meet growing demand, independent of global fossil fuel supply chains.”

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064

> Utility-scale solar power capacity in China reached more than 880 gigawatts (GW) in 2024, according to China’s National Energy Administration. China has more utility-scale solar than any other country. The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024. Planned solar capacity projects will likely lead to continued growth in China’s solar capacity. More than 720 GW of solar capacity are in development: about 250 GW under construction, nearly 300 GW in pre-construction phases, and 177 GW of announced projects, according to the Global Solar Power Tracker compiled by Global Energy Monitor.

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/20/chinas-coal-generation-...

> China’s coal-fired electricity generation took an unexpectedly sharp turn downward in the first quarter of 2025, signaling a potentially profound shift in the world’s largest coal-consuming economy. This wasn’t merely a seasonal dip or economic distress signal; rather, it represented a clear and structural turning point. Coal generation fell by approximately 4.7% year over year, significantly outpacing the overall grid electricity supply decline of just 1.3%. However, electricity demand, a better measure, went up by 1%. What gives?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/08/21/china-clean-renewable-e...

> China’s Decarbonization Is So Fast Even New Coal Plants Aren’t Stopping It. In multiple sectors—transportation, renewable energy, and overall electrification—the clear trend is toward a greener energy system. In fact, in areas like renewables and electric vehicles, China is now the world’s leading player. With the United States essentially abandoning the field, it will become even more dominant.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...

> China’s installations of wind and solar in May are enough to generate as much electricity as Poland, as the world’s second-biggest economy breaks further records with its rapid buildup of renewable energy infrastructure. China installed 93 GW of solar capacity last month – almost 100 solar panels every second, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Wind power installations reached 26 GW, the equivalent of about 5,300 turbines.

(it is somewhat irrelevant that China has accomplished spinning up a clean tech machine of this scale out of energy security reasons, as it still accomplishes the goal of decarbonizing their economy first, and then, the rest of the world as their spun up manufacturing flywheel exports cheap clean tech to the world)

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...

That is objectively dirt-cheap compared to basically all of the west.

Yes, wages might be even cheaper in neighboring countries, but those lag behind in infrastructure, education, political stability, availability of capital and network effects from existing industry (and are thus not a viable alternative to China yet for lots of things).

What?

https://insights.issgovernance.com/posts/forced-labor-in-the...

Yes there is a bunch of automation in there, and still a ton of manual work and re-work. And it is done by the lowest cost labor, with a hefty government subsidy (by china) and a purchasing program.

Why should a solar generator, who has virtually zero inputs, demand the same rate as a gas or coal generator who’s costs are dominated by inputs?

Where’s the promised savings to the end user? That’s right, there aren’t any.

And people bang on about solar being cheaper.

No it isn’t.

Solar electricity is the same price as gas peaker-plant electricity. Everywhere I’ve looked, same story.

And there’s no solar power without gas.

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. Resistive heating elements are dirt cheap, and the efficiency is not much less than induction. Induction is just way nicer :)

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 circuit can provide.

It’s connected with a 3000W inverter.

600W of solar helps a lot.

/obvious sarcasm

- https://www.businesselectricityprices.org.uk/media/n35dlcza/...

- https://www.endfuelpoverty.org.uk/energy-giants-see-457-bill...

>"my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?

Nah they didn't give a shit what I connected it to. I literally stubbed a 200 amp service entrance on vacant land then just went wild connecting it to whatever I like. I shot the shit with their engineer when they ran secondary off the power pole and that was it, I've never seen them again.

> no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.

I don't know for certain but having an unpermitted solar panel visible via satellite would likely trigger a visit.

Industrial dishwasher breaks down? You need to get an electrician there ASAP.

Cell phone breaks down? Throw it away and buy a new one.

Brazil has very low salaries for skilled workers, so it makes sense that it's cheap to find somebody to fix your phone.

There's tons of countries with much cheaper labor.

The reasons we build in china are not related to cheap labor, this hasn't been the case from quite some time.

I've never lived anywhere where the power didn't go down for at least a few (cumulative) days a year.

A few products do exist in that ultralight camping world, the Toaks D95 Pot Pocket[2], the Trangia Pot Cozy[3], Glacier Minimalist "pot with insulating sleeves". In standard size maybe the "So-Vida Sous Vide Insulation Band and Mat for Pots - Protects Your Work Surfaces and Saves You Electricity From Increased Insulation"[5] which is out of stock.

The Wonderbag[6] marketed as for communities in Africa and not available in the USA. From the Wikipedia page on Thermal Cooking[7], in a normal size kitchen people probably go with a vacuum flask cooker, popular in Asia.

[1] https://www.tristanridley.com/post/2019/01/21/diy-pot-cosy-t...

[2] https://www.toaksoutdoor.com/products/coz-m

[3] https://trangia.se/en/shop/pot-cozy/

[4] https://gsioutdoors.com/products/glacier-minimalist

[5] https://www.amazon.com/stores/SO-VIDA/page/BB00BAE8-07C8-4B4...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderbag

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_cooking

What does any of that have to do with cobalt?

Of course they are intellectually capable of laying asphalt, but they end up spending it on salaries, ridiculously enriching small elites, etc. Its not unique to Africa, but its certainly endemic here.

And not all of the citizens like it like this - hence the massive diaspora. Which is why I used the word "failed", not "dumb".

But thanks for taking my comment in the best possible interpretation - perhaps you should refresh yourself with the HN guidelines if these kinds of serious conversations distress you.

Footnote: I se you say you are from Ghana. Well Ghana and Singapore become independent at about the same time. Both got to run their country themselves. Only one decided it was important for their families and grandchildren to pour said asphalt.

The key takeaways - that solar is super cheap, that technology has unlocked offering hire purchase to incredibly poor remote communities, and that westerners looking to buy carbon credits are basically subsidising that - are pretty interesting. There was a lot of fluff around those points though.

always_has_been.jpg

The Internet has drowned to death in garbage back when they coined the term "content marketing". That was long before transformer models were a thing.

People have this weird impression that LLMs created a deluge of slop and reduced overall quality of most text on-line. I disagree - the quality arguably improved, since SOTA LLMs write better than most people. The only thing that dropped is content marketing salaries. You were already reading slop, LLMs just let the publisher skip the human content spouter middleman.

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 either all these AI generation tools are crap, or the text is not so "obviously" AI generated. Not saying either way, but it seems to at least not be so obvious.

Didn't they lose their edge earlier and because the US togheter with some european nations forced their arm after a trade war to limit their exports, enforce an unfavourable currency regime, etc?

They were not built to last so became unreliable after ~5 years.

That was because in the Japanese market five years as a long time to run a car. Not so in the west

I was surprised that the original comment said they were in a city

Now I live in a rural area and it's uncommon to avoid outages more than a month. We have an automatic transfer switch and fuel generator from previous owners and it saves hundreds of dollars in frozen food.

This is in the US by the way. If you're investing in a transfer switch and generator now, the cost is going to quickly approach a modest solar + battery set up with a whole house inverter, and of course, you save money all year that way, not just in outages.

Korean manufacturing might've been considered dodgy in the 80s but great by 2000. Taiwan (ROC) went through this also (70s vs 90s, ish?). And now China.

Food for thought, fwiw I think you have some valid points.

As I understand it, much of the rest of the world has similar views, but I'm sure this varies a bit from country to country.

It's just that in the 21st century, we prefer to use some less-upsetting euphemism to refer to the practice domestically.

You need to be able to fix microscopic flaws in soldering.

There are locked-down components that you cannot replace.

Here is a referenece: https://www.ipadrehab.com/index.cfm?Page=About

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 profit motive that creates savings for the end user.

I don't think trust has much to do with it

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?

Have you actually read the regulation?

  The AEMC said the new rules were in response to requests from Australia's energy minsters. They will:

    * prevent retailers from increasing prices more than once a year
    * ban excessive charges like late-payment fees for all retail contracts
    * ensure all consumers are entitled to a fee-free payment method
    * prohibit retail fees for vulnerable consumers
    * ensure vulnerable Australians are receiving their retailer’s best offer
    * prevent retailers from charging more than the standing offer price if the customer's initial offer changes or expires. This will protect customers from paying higher prices for their loyalty.

  The rules to improve consumer confidence in retail energy plans will come into effect on 1 July 2026. Those that assist hardship customers take effect from 30 December 2026.

A) regulation that forces a price rise once a year.

and

B) regulation that stops more than one price rise (if any) in any year.

And remember what this thread is about - Solarpunk in Africa, off the grid, which is a case that has nothing to do with regulated utility grids, so it couldn't possibly have less to do with the article that this thread is about.

You're insisting you're not discovering the concept for the first time, yet even in this comment you're still doing the same thing, treating systemic regulations that apply to energy markets writ large like they somehow only apply to solar. You wouldn't be doing that if you understood beforehand that these systemic problems had nothing to do with solar in particular, you would be doing it if you were just starting to look into solar and discovered those issues for the first time, which I what I think is happening.

For starters, numbers I've seen suggest something day ahead prices are something like 10% to 30% of the overall energy supply because most of it's sold outside of that context via things like regulated utility pricing, forward and futures markets which sell weeks to years ahead, and long-term bilateral contracts such as power purchase agreements. So most energy is not purchased this way over the short term.

Moreover, for goodness sake, inelasticity at the margin doesn't make something not a market, that's simply not what inelasticity means, and none of these considerations have anything to do with whether solar power in particular can be profitably offered to customers. (Again, why would it be just applying uniquely and exclusively to solar power but not other forms of energy?)

Investments of various kind occur over horizons of days, months, and years where these market dynamics unfold. Every energy source on offer whether it be solar panel, gas turbine and storage facility is financed built and dispatched based on the expectations of cost and profit. Demand is quite elastic over the horizon of months and years, and demand inelasticity is sometimes a feature of markets not something that identifies any specific phenomena that prevents solar power in particular from entering markets.

Solar power rises and falls throughout the day in a manner that conveniently aligns with actual energy consumption patterns, and its net effect on the grid is de-stressing peaking infrastructure.

So it's certainly true that there are day ahead markets but if you think the upshot of that is that it somehow means solar can't be provided at a price point affordable to consumers that simultaneously profitable to the companies providing it, well, the phrase "missing the forest for the trees" was practically invented for moments like this.

It‘s still a gamble for suppliers btw. The prices change every 15 minutes, and every cheap supplier is at the whim of more expensive suppliers.

Regardless, 14 hours of China's electricity demand is a whopping 40,600 GWh. By comparison, 2024's lithium ion battery production figure was 1.5 TWh [1]. Even assuming 100% of this went to EV's we're still talking about roughly 25 years worth of global battery production to fulfill only China's demand for storage in this model. As you point out, we still have loads of battery demand for EV adoption, so nowhere near 100% of production will be able to be diverted to grid storage.

The scale of storage required to make intermittent sources viable without being backed by a dispatchable energy source really is tremendous, and this often gets overlooked in pushes for a fully renewable grid.

1. https://www.argusmedia.com/ja/news-and-insights/latest-marke...

Because while the precise definitions of servitude do vary from dictionary to dictionary, and some define it more harshly than others, in general it fits. One definition I found online (with no reference to which dictionary it came from) defines servitude as "A condition in which an individual is bound to work for another person or organization, typically without pay." Another one (Cambridge dictionary) says it's "the state of being under the control of someone else and of having no freedom". I couldn't check the Oxford English Dictionary as it requires a subscription to look up even one word. Merriam-Webster lists two meanings, one of which applies to land. the one that applies to people is "a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life".

Now, being sentenced to community service is only a temporary condition of servitude, which ends as soon as a given number of hours have been served. And it might not fit the strict definition if the person being sentenced is allowed to choose the form their community service will take; I lack knowledge of what kinds of community-servitude sentences are commonly handed out. But if the person being sentenced does not get to choose the form his community service will take, but instead is told "Your community service will be served in the city clerk's office. Show up at 9:00 AM on Monday ready to make photocopies and run errands," then that counts as being under the control of another and lacking freedom during the period of community service. It's not a permanent state of servitude, but even a temporary state of servitude is forbidden by the 13th amendment (other than as a sentence for a crime), because otherwise people at the time would have argued "Oh, fifty years of involuntary servitude still counts as 'temporary', so I'm allowed to carry on with imposing debt peonage on my debtors."

(I should also mention that I am not a lawyer, so perhaps US lawyers have already reached broad consensus on whether community service counts as involuntary servitude under US law; if someone knows whether that's true, I welcome being corrected on my point).

Trust implies shared values/worldview and past experiences where outcomes match expectations. Also respect.

Trust is not possible when there are regularly incongruous outcomes, or where definition of respect / values are just aren't aligned.

Do you think your counterparts overseas believe themselves to be as trustable as you are, and it's just a cultural rift? Or is that too charitable?

The learning rate for batteries has not been as steep as Moore's Law for ICs. But the value of being able to store mass quantities of electricity at low cost is so incredibly valuable that it's going to blow up into a huuuuge number of factories.

You look at the 6TWh of all time and see that as a limitation. I haven't seen that stat before but I trust you, because with the growth rate of battery production it has to be a tiny number, because it's exponential growth. In 2024, 1.2 TWh of batteries were produced, 20% of all storage capacity ever. That was a single year! What if, in 2024, we produced 20% of all CPU capacity every produced? That's obviously a hugely growing market.

> The nature of resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are exhausted first, and continued production is contingent on accessing the progressively more and more inconvenient reserves. Maybe in 2030 annual global production will be 30 TWh - we'll know in 4 years. But there's a lot of people who probably don't want to make trillion-dollar investments gambling on that possibility panning out.

If you spend a small amount of time diving into the industry, you'll see that there's a massive number of very smart people solving all these resource constraint problems, securing supply chains years in advance, and building like fucking mad. Sure, there's a lot of people that don't want to get involved, but they will be left in the dust.

We are witnessing a massive energy interchange. This is like when the PC came along, but much bigger in terms of quantity and speed. Sure, there are those who are still skeptical of energy storage, 5-10 years after it became blazingly obvious that batteries are cheap and getting cheaper and will take over the enery world. But they are the same people who saw the iPhone and said "it will never catch up to my BlackBerry."

Electricity storage in batteries is a swiss-army knife for the grid that never existed until recently. We couldn't do time arbitrage, always had to match supply and demand instantaneously, across grids spanning hundreds and thousands of miles. No more, that's all gone. We can do tiny microgrids, we can do single houses, we can do 10 TWh installs across grids, because batteries scale small, scale big, are cheap, getting cheaper, and are being produced on a growing scale that most people do not understand.

Single massive peaker plants Vs. many smaller battery parks and pumped hydro nodes.

It depends upon the population distributions, topologies, power grid, etc.

Adelaide is a state capital with massive battery banks and large amounts of renewable energy, they have long periods of self suffiency and export excess power to neighbouring states.

This is dull power infrastructure engineering reality, not woo woo imaginary hype.