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Solarpunk is happening in Africa

• energy123 11mo ago
  North Africa has a lot of sun, a lot of land, and not much solar seasonality. They will be hit hard with climate change though.
  • portaouflop 11mo ago
    Everyone will be hit hard by climate change. I do t see why it should be less in eg the Americas - where you already have pretty volatile climate events
    • energy123 11mo ago
      The equator is particularly vulnerable because it's already very hot
    • Tepix 11mo ago
      Scandinavia is likely to benefit from climate change.
• r14c 11mo ago
  solarpunk is just socialism with afrofuturist aesthetics. happy for them!
  • dingnuts 11mo ago
    why are you happy? many African nations attempted socialism in the 20th century, and all of those states have since collapsed. trying the same failed strategy over and over doesn't bode well. anyway, I hope they get electricity. the article said a lot about markets for something related to an ideology that rejects them.
    • HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
      > many African nations attempted socialism in the 20th century, and all of those states have since collapsed This is false. Senegal attempted small-s socialism under its first postcolonial regime (under Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1960–1980) and has had democratic political succession to the present day.
  • baq 11mo ago
    Funny. I read the article and couldn’t shake the feeling that this is exactly how capitalism lifts whole countries out of poverty.
    • czbond 11mo ago
      Agree - I am an ardent capitalist, but a conscious capitalist. I believe the purpose of capitalism redirected can be used as a vehicle for massively changing economies and lives - such as in this case.
    • griffzhowl 11mo ago
      It's not capitalism, it's technology. That can often go together with capitalism, but Russia from 1917-60 and China from 1960-2025, say, are big counter-examples. As are the many poor countries with capitalist economies. Growth in electrification, transport infrastructure, manufacturing and mechanized agriculture will grow any economy, capitalist or socialist
      • tick_tock_tick 11mo ago
        Strongly disagree, you're example is nonsensical as it's normally used to prove the exact opposite. Nearly every quality of life improvement and economic boom in China and Russia during those periods are directly tied to adopting some parts of capitalistic systems.
        • griffzhowl 11mo ago
          What quality of life improvements are you thinking of that weren't based on mass electrification and mechanization of agriculture?
          • Ray20 11mo ago
            Those that happened in the USSR and China, no? After the start of electrification and active mechanization of agriculture, more peasants died of hunger there than in the previous 100 years (in Russia more than in the previous 200 years).
  • p1necone 11mo ago
    How is small businesses selling solar panels to people socialism?
    • jandrese 11mo ago
      It's Power to the People.
    • AtlasBarfed 11mo ago
      It's part of modern double speak Capitalism is really centralized monopolistic oligarchical control in modern media parlance. Distributed empowering democratic grassroots level capitalistic allocation of resources that don't provide centralized control and administration is "socialism".
      • Avicebron 11mo ago
        I think this is really insightful definition, username aside, I think forcing the conversation to include "oligarchical control" (the part people usually have issue with) prevents the lazy "but muh free market!" arguments when discussing our modern economic system
      • onraglanroad 11mo ago
        You're attempting to be sarcastic but that's actually accurate: > 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.
        • beeflet 11mo ago
          >Of course, because the Capitalists try to control the industry they've invested in. But does the system eventually result in a small number of capitalists taking power or is it distributed over many capitalists? Not all monopolies are natural. What is the "work" being done here? Manufacturing or installation? It's not like all of the solar companies are co-ops and contractors.
• czbond 11mo ago
  Really, really great article.
  • qayxc 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    • czbond 11mo ago
      I guess that is the negative view - but I didn't view it as that way
      • skandergarroum 11mo ago
        haha author here, and this was my favorite interaction so far. Thanks czbond. 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.
        • qayxc 11mo ago
          > So no, not fake, not AI, just written under the flu over the weekend. Well, my apologies then. On the bright side you definitely have a super power when under the flu: the ability to perfectly emulate a chatbot in your writing :D I hope you're back to full health and doing well.
        • czbond 11mo ago
          @skandergarroum Do you have more on climate companies? I have been quite interested in the area (for profit, for good... where profit is returned to more "for good")
• tomasz_fm 11mo ago
  This article has ChatGPT written all over it
  • wlesieutre 11mo ago
    I don't get how it makes this jump > Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months > replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene)" in the next paragraph. If it's $40-65/month that's $1.33 to $2.17 per day, not $0.21/day (assuming month with 30 days)
    • hatthew 11mo ago
      Similarly > Crop yields increase 3-5× > Farmers go from $600/acre to $14,000/acre revenue Wouldn't that revenue jump require a 23x increase in crop yield?
      • abdullahkhalids 11mo ago
        Let's be very charitable and figure out a scenario where this could be true. 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.
        • hatthew 11mo ago
          Hmm yeah I didn't consider that they might use part of their yields in ways that don't generate revenue. However that would mean they use $2,400/acre/month of their crops for subsistence which doesn't seem very plausible, so I agree that's a very charitable interpretation. Would only make sense if their field is only a few square meters, in which case the framing of "revenue per acre" is extremely misleading. Edit: looks like those numbers might be per year (it doesn't seem to specify explicitly), so it actually might be vaguely plausible (though misleading) if we make several charitable assumptions.
• hexator 11mo ago
  Solarpunk with capitalism is kinda missing the point IMO.
  • lanfeust6 11mo ago
    It's not solarpunk, unless "lots of solar installations" qualifies. They just used the term to convey an aesthetic, or as bait. Being "punk" or socialist is not the point.
• epistasis 11mo ago
  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 there are so many parties that have unilateral veto points. The advent of a new transmission route in the US these days is pretty much a miracle event. Now imagine a world where there's tons of bribes to government officials all along the way to get a grid going (in the US you just need to bribe landowners and hold-outs). Or there's bribes to get a permit for the large centralized electriticy generator. And you have to deal with importing a whole new skill set and trades, on top of importing all the materials, fuel, etc. Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US. The only thing stopping me is the permitting hassle or the contractor hassle. Out in greenfield, solar plus storage is so revolutionary. This is bigger than going straight to mobile phones instead of landlines. Africa is going to get so much power, and it's all going to be clean, renewable energy. Thanks to all the entrepreneurs and engineers over the past decades that have continuously and steadily improved this technology, it's one of the bright lights of humanity these days. [1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/maine-jury-clears-avangrids-145-mile-transmission-line-reversing-ballot-v/648209/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/maine-jury-clears-avangrids...
  • whatever1 11mo ago
    Poor countries have different problems that don’t let decentralization to work. Local gangs go around and demand protection money and if you don’t pay up your solar panels will unfortunately suffer some “accidental” catastrophic damage.
    • datadrivenangel 11mo ago
      Apparently solar panels that have fake cracks are moderately popular in some parts of the world to deter theft and similar behavior.
• interstice 11mo ago
  Every time I see $/watt charts like this I just want a single link to buy something at that price. 20c/watt? Yes please, _where_.
  • epistasis 11mo ago
    These prices are outside of the US, because the US has massive tariffs. But prices like $0.28/W are quite achievable, here's a random link: https://signaturesolar.com/waaree-405w-pallet-mono-31-panels/ https://signaturesolar.com/waaree-405w-pallet-mono-31-panels... The global average price for solar panels is $0.09/W in 2025. I think India, which also has tariffs to stimulate local factories, is around $0.18/W. Though at these prices you're likely going to be paying nearly as much for mounting materials as you are for the panels. Edit: Also, used solar panels are becoming a pretty thriving market. Definitely worth checking those out, especially for isolated projects like a solar car port or something.
    • jaggederest 11mo ago
      Yep I'm looking at used solar since I have a ton of roof space and land area, and the shipping is 50% of the price of a pallet of panels. Even if they're derated 25% and 20% fail, the racking and balance of system outweigh them to a silly degree. It's going to be 80% balance of system 20% panels.
      • theoreticalmal 11mo ago
        If you plan on mounting to your roof beware of expired fire ratings. I ran into this problem recently
    • bergie 11mo ago
      Here in Colombia we noticed that a lot of bars and such have awnings built out of solar panels. Cheap, durable, and makes power.
  • Tepix 11mo ago
    Here in Germany you can now buy 450W-500W solar panels at 50-60€ (§) That's already much lower than 20c/watt. (§) for example: https://www.mydealz.de/deals/sunpro-500-wp-solarmodul-210-r-spdg500-n108r12-bifazial-glasglas-fb-lokal-koln-2641796 https://www.mydealz.de/deals/sunpro-500-wp-solarmodul-210-r-...
• TrainedMonkey 11mo ago
  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.
  • tetris11 11mo ago
    Isn't $6 a month the cost of the subscription, but the $40-56 a month the cost of the installation?
  • icedshrimp 11mo ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ib-atDnj5jE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ib-atDnj5jE video from sunking from 7 years ago where the cost of a basic system was 25¢ per day. Probably cheaper now. the article wording/numbers seem mixed up but the overall argument holds up when you look at the actual products they're talking about here
  • titanomachy 11mo ago
    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.
    • safety1st 11mo ago
      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.
      • cycomanic 11mo ago
        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 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.
• fakedang 11mo ago
  This is embarrassing, getting frontpaged for a ChatGPT article with bullshit maths.
• alephnerd 11mo ago
  As I keep saying ad infinitum, Africa is not a single unitary region. 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-development.html https://nep.rea.gov.ng/solar-hybrid-mini-grid-for-economic-d... [1] - https://globalpi.org/research/south-africas-solar-boom/ https://globalpi.org/research/south-africas-solar-boom/ [2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/pakistans-solar-revolution-leaves-its-middle-class-behind-2025-04-29/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/pakistans-solar-revo...
  • Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
    I'm curious how you stay on top of African affairs. South Asia doesn't seem that hard to me but I don't know where to follow the regulatory landscape of African countries.
  • worik 11mo ago
    > Africa is not a single unitary region. Well, duh! Who is saying different? Nobody here A short little article that does not cover every aspect is not bad. It is good
• w10-1 11mo ago
  TLDR: dirty fuel is being displaced by clean electricity for 500M+ Africans beyond the grid via combination of cheap solar panels + batteries, microfinancing, electronic payments, and a carbon-credit kicker. Two main players captured most consumers and farmers via hard-to-reproduce integration. TAM should increase 3X with China's continued oversupply and govt-backed financing. Case studies available for key points. Inspiring. My only critique would be that the excited tone (and exclusivity) ends up detracting from the achievement and opportunity.
• asadm 11mo ago
  I also saw this on my recent visit to Pakistan, the country has flipped to solar instead of grid for most middle-class homes. Farmers and small industries also have started using solar a lot! Truly transformational (and cheap) thanks to China.
• SideburnsOfDoom 11mo ago
  > 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 you.
  • astroflection 11mo ago
    The M-PESA transaction fees are high. <sarc>M-PESA helps fight poverty through the ingenious application of a thousand paper cuts. </sarc>
    • warkdarrior 11mo ago
      According to this page: https://www.safaricom.co.ke/main-mpesa/m-pesa-for-you/tariffs-limits/consumer-tariffs-limits https://www.safaricom.co.ke/main-mpesa/m-pesa-for-you/tariff... Fees are high (22-38%) for low amounts, and then they drop into the 1-2% range that is typical of Western credit card networks.
    • SideburnsOfDoom 11mo ago
      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.
  • 2d8a875f-39a2-4 11mo ago
    Yeah, MPESA was and is still an incredible product. A real lightning-in-a-bottle moment. Even if they've struggled to replicate that success in other geos, the original vision and execution back in the 200x's is a textbook case that bears study.
• shadowgovt 11mo ago
  Several African countries have also been fascinating for the growth of cellular telephone. Grids require an amount of cohesion that isn't always on-hand in that part of the world (a fancy way of saying "When they built the grid in Europe, they could mostly put copper on telephone poles and assume nobody would just show up and steal it later"). But a cellular node can be built to be self-contained and protected by a single property owner with a shotgun. It became a much faster and cheaper rollout solution and the demand created a market to justify the cost of improving and perfecting the technology.
• conductr 11mo ago
  Isn't this the same thing they did with the internet? They skipped the wired revolution and just implemented it when mobile phone networks made if more feasible. If you look at it only in the present, it seems revolutionary, their mobile usage is through the roof - how modern of them. But if you dig in, they also had decades with essentially no data services when the rest of the world was surfing the web full tilt and they still have a lower access to actual computers which may be lost jobs/skills/etc. In this case, they've had decades of power instability and all that comes with it. So there are tradeoffs being had. It's not a bad strategy for some of the poorer parts of the world to let the rest of the world do the innovating until things are affordable, it's quite smart and should be expected actually.
  • 3RTB297 11mo ago
    Kinda, but not really. IRL, feature phones and cheap smartphones subsidized to carry Whatsapp and Facebook apps starting 20 years ago pushed "people using the internet" and at this point Whatsapp is 90% of what people use internet for in Africa because data is cheaper than talk and text. There's also the perception of usability. I have personally had relatively well-paid Africans tell me that $4 a month for 10 GB of (4G mobile) data was "the most expensive on Earth." Which is not true, I checked, but people say it to try and rumor mill the price down. However, it's sort of almost true in the sense of trying to pay for streaming services and being online like anyone from London or LA on one's hone and not home fiber connections, which only the wealthy have. But that's not how people use their phones anyway. So there's no market for high bandwidth use, and only the wealthy are willing to use bandwidth and pay for it because prices drop per GB once you're doing unlimited fiber connections at home on post-paid accounts. The middle ground is the barrier. But people like the author who barely know where Africa is on a map love to throw around stats like "85% of Africa is online!" Not like how most Westerners think. Kids in wealthy areas will push being on IG and Tik Tok. In malls in larger cities there's a shop that sells gaming consoles.
• deadbabe 11mo ago
  Sick and tired of these AI articles. The cheery friendly tone at the beginning is classic example of ChatGPT. Flagged.
• marstall 11mo ago
  people saying this is AI-generated: why? It seems voicey, pacey, individualistic ... and contains new-to-the-world info. And it's good. None of these being qualities I associate with AI writing.
  • raincole 11mo ago
    Lack of sources. Questionable numbers and math. Tone. Emoji. In short: everything.
  • sirsar 11mo ago
    It's not good. If it were good, it wouldn't juxtapose random uncited numbers together that don't compute: > Crop yields increase 3-5× > Farmers go from $600/acre to $14,000/acre revenue 5×$600 is $3000. Where did the extra 4.7x come from? The new-to-the-world info looks more like "making stuff up on the fly".
  • nluken 11mo ago
    The giveaway is almost always an over-dependence on "Not 'x' but 'y'" structure. Even when the author changes the wording so that the phrase doesn't read exactly like that, they tend to leave the structure intact, and the bots really like to lead with the inverse of what the author wants to say to create contrast. A human author might have used this technique once to really emphasize a strong point, but today's LLMs use it so often that it loses its emphasis, and instead becomes a distinct stylistic fingerprint.
    • myself248 11mo ago
      As a human who's written like that for decades, this witch-hunt makes it really hard to participate online anymore. This was a standard expository device taught in school, some of us latched onto it, and now it's impossible to argue that we're human because someone's conviction that we're AI is just an opinion and there is no evidence that will convince them, nor do they deserve the effort it would take even if it were possible. What's the path forward?
      • 11mo ago
• barbazoo 11mo ago
  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.
  • TechDebtDevin 11mo ago
    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.
    • chrneu 11mo ago
      v7n's comment smells like a bot or they used AI to translate.
      • v7n 11mo ago
        I'm sorry you feel that way. I'm not a native speaker but neither do I use any of those tools to write my comments here. 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.
  • v7n 11mo ago
    If you're talking about fairly modest sums ($10k to 100k) and Kenya in particular is on your radar, I think we should discuss this further. I'm not Kenyan myself (European), but I frequent the area and have a solid network and resources already in place to make things happen. How may I reach out?
• manoDev 11mo ago
  This article is a good example of how, sometimes, starting from scratch is a blessing, since you can adopt the best tech right away instead of fighting market inertia and monopolies trying to keep a status quo - as a counter example, see Japan being stuck w/ fax past the internet advent.
• xipho 11mo ago
  "But here’s the thing: this massively understates the opportunity. The solar system is the Trojan horse. The real business is the financial relationship with 40 million customers." Soooo... they have a good thing going, there is an opportunity to fsk them over? Like more centralized fees?
• maxglute 11mo ago
  Would be interesting if renewable exporters are going to ge emission credit vs penalty vs fossil exporters. I mean it won't change anything, dead dinosaur sauce must flow, but it's a useful way to attribute actual emission producers at source.
• matthewfcarlson 11mo ago
  This was one of the most interesting things I read today- good job Skander!
• lebimas 11mo ago
  AI slop writing, but interesting information nonetheless
• ajnin 11mo ago
  Ah, capitalism. It's only rainbows, children laughing and happiness. Well, if you're a potentially profitable customer, of course, otherwise you're left on the side of the road. And if you're not part of that low 10% that can't repay the costs and presumably gets violently thrown back to the last century. 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!
• CobrastanJorji 11mo ago
  This is the most optimistic thing I've read about this year. When they got to "and also they replaced diesel farming with solar panels and are making bank," I had a big smile, and when I got to "and they're selling it as carbon credits on the side," I just started giggling. Wonderful!
• jchanimal 11mo ago
  I was staying at a Maasai owned ecolodge in Kenya on the day they switched over from generator to solar. It was so much quieter, and with their new electric Range Rover they don’t ever have to go into town except for parts.
  • riazrizvi 11mo ago
    This reads like a timeline in a game of Civ. Love it.
• ang_cire 11mo ago
  This is cool, but I don't think "move everyone off of government managed utilities to private profit extractors" is very Solar Punk.
  • nutjob2 11mo ago
    Huh? These people own their own equipment after 30 months and are then not reliant on usually corrupt and/or incompetent government. They're not exactly rent seeking. Being self reliant is indeed "very punk".
  • hshdhdhehd 11mo ago
    Capitalism isn't all bad. Example: you can actually buy real food.
• kazinator 11mo ago
  > Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, you stop waiting and figure it out yourself. To what historic people did electricity come all by itself, without them haivng to figure out and build anything themselves?
• kazinator 11mo ago
  > Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, you stop waiting and figure it out yourself. 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"?
• mattfrommars 11mo ago
  But solar energy itself cost more than other form of electricity. But who is driving cost of solar? Is it China?
  • theshackleford 11mo ago
    > But solar energy itself cost more than other form of electricity That is in fact, not correct. Maybe you should put that one back where you pulled it from.
    • hshdhdhehd 11mo ago
      Where the sun doesn't shine?
• losvedir 11mo ago
  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 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.
  • bluGill 11mo ago
    My grandpa (long dead) remembers his dad paying $600 in the 1920s (1930s?) to get electric to the farm. That is the actual cost, not inflation adjusted. Most of the neighbors didn't because that was too much money in those days.
    • mysterypie 11mo ago
      > $600 in the 1920s (1930s?), not inflation adjusted I consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator: $600 in 1925 would be $11,264 today $600 in 1935 would be $14,329 today A lot of money, but I've heard that it can easily cost $10-20K today to erect a couple of poles to bring power a hundred feet to your property in a rural area these days. Do you know what distance was being covered to bring power to your grandfather?
      • bluGill 11mo ago
        i didn't learn this until I was given a copy of his autobiography (about 5 pages) after he did so I have no way to ask.
  • deleted 11mo ago
• eric-burel 11mo ago
  I had this idea to rent roofs to install solar panels, building a kind of decentralized power plants. I live in the sunny southern France where summer are starting to become unbearably hot, but at least this comes with a lot of sunpower. There are plenty roofs but sadly we install solar plants in spaces that compete with forest/fertile soil. I am not an energy engineer so that's not a realistic project for me, but are there similar projects around?
  • thinkcontext 11mo ago
    There is a similar idea called "community solar" in the US. It allows electric customers to subscribe to the output of solar panels on someone else's roof. This allows a developer to build a solar array on a large commercial building's roof that they rent.
  • zzwzzw 11mo ago
    This model has actually taken off in rural China. Salespeople will tell you, "You only need to lend us your roof for 20 to 30 years,and in return, you'll receive a sum of money." Many people in rural China readily agree to this deal. I'm not entirely sure what these solar panel companies get out of the arrangement. Perhaps they sell the generated electricity for a profit, or supply it to factories with high energy demands.
• kazinator 11mo ago
  > After 30 months = you own it, free power forever Except that chip that can remotely shut it off is still in it, waiting for a ransom attacker.
  • myself248 11mo ago
    I was wondering about that. Is there some sort of removal process when the lease is up? If there were, folks would just do it early. Maybe there's enough enforcement/followup to discourage that while there's still outstanding debt, but perhaps it's a thing later. It's a good point. This purchase model with IoT-enabled PAYG devices means there's a built-in vulnerability in the entire infrastructure. And unlike with a centralized utility where hypothetically some action-movie hero could rip out the one central device that shut things down, here there's millions of them everywhere.
• dvrp 11mo ago
  Good story but jesus fucking christ the ChatGPT. I cannot bear it.
  • kanary 11mo ago
    "lets dive in"
• initramfs 11mo ago
  I think those authors have been trying to figure out what I've long suspected- infrastructure can't be build locally as easily as one that can be exported with extreme modularity. Building a nuclear power plant, even a small modern one, still requires a ton of permitting and environmental review. Setting up a portable solar power plant, with imported panels and inverters, in theory allows for much more adaptability and affordability. 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/international-aid-development-ngos-crowding-out-government https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/internation...
• htrp 11mo ago
  >Solar Home System Evolution: >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?
  • testing22321 11mo ago
    Tariffs (government tax) on Chinese panels, corruption (companies bribing(lobbying) to get monopolies on installs) and more corruption ( power companies bribing to get guaranteed profits) Based on comments here my 7.8kw rooftop solar in Canada was 3-5x cheaper than people pay in the US. It was $8k CAD ($5,660 usd) My Dad in Australia got a 10kw system fully installed for $5k AUD ($3,250 usd)
    • bave8672 11mo ago
      To be fair, prices in Aus have been heavily subsidised until recently.
      • testing22321 11mo ago
        Of course, which is a great thing! 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.
        • bave8672 11mo ago
          On the contrary, I care because I don't buy these things at all, yet my taxes are being used to subsidise the people that do.
          • testing22321 11mo ago
            You don’t buy any foods with corn in them? Or use fossil fuels?
  • 11mo ago
• jacob019 11mo ago
  "The global North's carbon problem subsidizes the global South's energy access." This is problematic. The subsidized economy will grow inefficiently, the wealth transfer will inevitably result in a corrupt class of bureaucrats who seek to maintain the status quo even when it doesn't make sense. Time will pass and it will get worse until there is political will for change, and that change will result in the suffering of those whom the initial intent was to help.
• apitman 11mo ago
  > How Africa is building the future by skipping the past They did the same thing with internet. Went straight to cell/fiber. If you've never heard of M-Pesa, I highly recommend learning about it.
• m3h 11mo ago
  Same in Pakistan: https://www.dawn.com/news/1924573 https://www.dawn.com/news/1924573 After COVID, grid electricity became hugely expensive, but the pushback was massive and unexpected, as people transitioned from a fixed supply to a hybrid online or offline (battery-powered) system.
• zkmon 11mo ago
  So, if the electricity gets cheaper the way information got cheaper, does it make our muscles and mind weaker due to lack of work and thought?
• Fr0styMatt88 11mo ago
  Wondering if any Aussies here know this. 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.
  • eldaisfish 11mo ago
    you heard wrong. What most electricity grids forbid is exporting power from your home to the grid when the grid is down. The claimed danger is that energised power lines will kill people working on the lines. The reality is that the vast majority of home inverters (in an EV, battery or solar PV) is nowhere near powerful enough to energise even a single distribution transformer. This is yet another example of electricity codes being unrealistically restrictive. Generally, there's nothing stopping you from disconnecting your home from the grid during a power outage and running your own devices off a battery. Going fully off-grid depends on your local laws.
  • brucehoult 11mo ago
    Many systems, especially older ones, are set up this way by default. But you can get, for extra $$, a switch to disconnect you from the grid entirely when it's down and run from your own solar power / battery. People who live in cities with underground wires normally don't bother, but it's essential in the countryside (IMHO). Note however that many people have only maybe 5kW or 8kW or something like that being added to grid power by their solar setup, so if there is no mains power then it doesn't take many 2kW appliances (microwave, kettle, clothes washer (when heating water), dish washer (ditto), hairdryer, vacuum cleaner) to overload it. Not to mention 3kW hot water heater or 3kW+ stove oven. I have a 3600W off-grid system (Pecron E3600LFP) and I run pretty much all that stuff from it. I added up and I could try to turn on 14kW of stuff at the same time. But I don't, obviously.
  • BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
    I've had solar for ten years and just added a battery to it which _should_ keep the house running through a power failure for as long as the battery holds out. This is yet to be tested, but it's very specifically setup to me able to. There are some specific electronics required to continue operation when the grid is down, and with the explosion of popularity of home batteries, I think these options are also more common.
• lambdaone 11mo ago
  There's also nothing stopping African communities from building peer-to-peer microgrids if they want to.
  • Ray20 11mo ago
    The same thing that's, you know, stopping them from having real power grids.
    • self 11mo ago
      Extending the grid to power a remote village is not the same thing as the villagers running their own microgrid.
    • lambdaone 11mo ago
      A microgrid lets you power your neighbors, or receive power from them. This paper cites several examples of peer-to-peer electricity trading: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261918303398 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...
• nextworddev 11mo ago
  Someone really wants to pump solar here lol. I get it, the retail solar bags must be heavy for many
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• xbmcuser 11mo ago
  I have been saying this for a few years now that people are underestimating the change solar, batteries and electric transport/machinery will bring about im many of parts of the world. People are not going to just get access to cheap electricity but also a lot of machinery that they can run with that electricity that was not possible before.
  • utopiah 11mo ago
    Yep, a memory that changed my perspective on this was in a tiny island in Italy where a grandma was riding her electrical bike uphill with no effort in the middle of the Summer. When I mean uphill I mean not Tour de France level but damn steep still. And yet, here she was with her grocery in her bag, no problem. That was absolutely wonderful because, despite my envy, she was autonomous! She didn't need no stinking petrol station, she could charge at home. She didn't need a humongous garage where streets were ridiculous narrow. She could park somewhere, charge the battery home. This moment was genuinely wonderful... and my point is that I do believe even though it felt relatively new, I can easily imagine it to deploy at scale for the benefit of most.
  • chrneu 11mo ago
    EV powertrains also have way fewer parts. Arguably, repairs are easier.
• worik 11mo ago
  Africans doing it for themselves Who else could?
• chmod775 11mo ago
  You'll see these little solar panels outside people's homes in any country that doesn't have all of its population (reliably) connected to the grid. They're everywhere in rural Afghanistan as well for instance.
• gandalfian 11mo ago
  Equator, poorest countries with 12 hours of sun 365 days a year. If batteries really fall in price it may rapidly have the cheapest, cleanest energy on the planet. The future of energy intensive industries may be Africa, which would be nice, they could use a break. Not to mention the cheapest place to launch your rockets into orbit.
• sosodev 11mo ago
  I can't help but be reminded of the bitter lesson when I read about the continual spread of solar energy. The simple, scalable system wins over everything else. I wonder how many aspects of our lives could be transformed in this way.
• nielsbot 11mo ago
  I heard a fascinating interview with Sandeep Vaheesan[1] He said in the early days of American electrification, private power companies wouldn't build lines to rural customers because it wasn't expected to be profitable. So rural customers joined together and formed public power companies and got the job done. Not only that, they innovated many cost saving technique which the private power companies eventually adopted. Public power cooperatives still exist, but have themselves become ossified and commercialized over the years. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miyfj98lR38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miyfj98lR38 (starts at 21:18)
• thehappypm 11mo ago
  Kenya is an equatorial country so they basically have steady ~12 hours of sunlight every day year round. Pretty cool!
  • ricksunny 11mo ago
    And, much of the rural population is in the Great Rift Valley, a particularly high elevation region which as a result enjoys higher solar flux.
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• TechDebtDevin 11mo ago
  People should learn to never trust a #1 ranked hacker news article. There are almost always hidden motives. The author (GPT???), or a company mentioned in the article likely is connected to a VC, or YC or both! 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.
  • tomalbrc 11mo ago
    It's even a tad worse; They are just one of those "career accelerator" companies. In fact most if not all of their articles seem to be AI generated
• pinkmuffinere 11mo ago
  I understand why this is happening in Africa first — lack of infrastructure makes the solution much more competitive. But as prices fall, it seems that this might be cost competitive in other areas as well. Selfishly, I’d love to see this in the US! Any big issues that would prevent adoption in the US?
  • tencentshill 11mo ago
    I'm sure you can think of one at the moment.
  • epistasis 11mo ago
    It's mostly politics stopping this in the US. But even with current political roadblocks to solar, it's an absolutely massive part of new builds for grid scale electricity generation: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964
  • chrneu 11mo ago
    >Any big issues that would prevent adoption in the US? Lol is this sarcasm? America is back on the fossil fuel train baby! If you're a patriot, jump on board as we sink this ship! Solar panels are for soyboys and we eat beef out hur. Joking aside, solar is so cheap that even without subsidies the US is installing more solar than anything else. Fossil fuels are dirty and expensive in comparison.
  • Tepix 11mo ago
    Already in Germany people are putting solar on their roofs and batteries in their basements which makes them no longer need the grid 80+% of the time. With Sodium-Ion batteries this will go to 90+% at the same cost. It's happening pretty much everywhere.
• narrator 11mo ago
  All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard. One of the more interesting political/economic questions is can a non-authoritarian country that values environmental protection do rare earth refining, or is the ecological harm in isolation too abhorrent to the members of the community where it is done to counterbalance the ecological good it does elsewhere? In an authoritarian country, you can just tell the people who live around the processing plant to relocate or suffer because it helps the environment elsewhere. In a non-authoritarian country, the local people will all reject it because it will degrade the quality of life and their land. This has been happening in the backlash against mining in Madagascar for example.
  • komali2 11mo ago
    I wonder this as well - it seems the most strategic path forward for any nation or community is to localize the supply chain as much as possible, but like oil before there's some things that are just impossible or super difficult to get locally. And unfortunately to find new ways to turn sun into electricity costs money to do and won't happen because the cost of the current method is too low to justify trying to turn sand into solar panels or whatever other thing you might try. I dream of a solar punk future where basically any community can generate power without any horrifying pollution anywhere in the supply chain. Mirror powered smelters, sand batteries.
  • mkoubaa 11mo ago
    Conspiratorially, if all places were non-authoritarian and did not tolerate cheap refining, a regime change would have to be ordered
  • whatshisface 11mo ago
    Rare earth refining isn't a specific industrial process. The cheapest possible method is a specific industrial process, and is very dirty. In a "survivalist solarpunk world" it would probably be done less cheaply.
  • Tade0 11mo ago
• yanhangyhy 11mo ago
  This phenomenon is vastly underestimated. Electricity can also amplify the influence of TikTok and Temu — a world no longer constrained by energy shortages, with social media less dominated by the West, and a marketplace for cheap and affordable industrial goods. Together, these forces will essentially curb uncontrolled population growth in any country and gradually raise living standards. (Also pakistan and many other countries) Even North Korea is undergoing some changes. The country has long suffered from energy shortages, and the gradual spread of solar power can help address some of these issues. However, I doubt that North Korea’s geographic conditions will allow for much improvement. And considering geography, if I understand correctly, the Middle East has once again gained a significant advantage?
  • hotpotat 11mo ago
    Trading uncrontrolled population growth for TikTok sounds like a deal with the devil.
    • yanhangyhy 11mo ago
      i think no one can stop that from happening.. you have electricity, you have apps. people will have more thinking on the child thing. and more time on the internet and less time on the home.
      • dustypotato 11mo ago
        One thing i think a lot of people forget is the effect of Porn on fertility rates.
        • chrneu 11mo ago
          lmao what? Is this some /r/nofap stuff leaking?
          • brazukadev 11mo ago
            It does not take too much brainpower to see the relationship between fast sexual relief through porn and lower fertility rate.
• teilarer 11mo ago
  AI slop on the frontpage. "Hey there! " " Let’s dive in" " Want to fight climate change?" Seven hundred bullet points in the article, etc.
• komali2 11mo ago
  Reading things like this makes me feel like there must be fundamentally something wrong with my brain, because it all seems like just a complicated song and dance that is maintained as a global share delusion for reasons I can't figure out. 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?
• mbgerring 11mo ago
  It's hard to overstate the degree to which the United States is giving away the future to any country that can produce clean energy technology at scale. 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!
• stingrae 11mo ago
  "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 switch to a slightly similar regional power generation/storage model.
  • chrneu 11mo ago
    Oh wow this is a very good point and not something I'd ever really considered. Good comment. Makes a lot of sense.
  • edelbitter 11mo ago
    As long as grid upgrades & maintenance continue to work reasonably well across western Europe, bad examples from the US are not particularly worrying. Economics of scale still very much apply; there is a point in maintaining expensive grid infrastructure. Especially so when using it to improve other expensive infrastructure, such as electric high-speed passenger rail.
• xvilka 11mo ago
  With famously weak energy grid[1], South Africa would certainly benefit from the same approach. Sadly, it seems, it isn't considered en masse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis
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• 0xbadcafebee 11mo ago
  Buried lede (in that none of the comments mention this): wireless micro-financing without transaction fees works for 10 African countries and is enabling a rural energy revolution. (though M-PESA isn't without controversy, and clearly it could benefit from competition) Meanwhile, developed nations have millions of people who pay up to 500% interest on payday loans, 29% interest on credit cards, and can't get bank accounts. Small businesses can't grow quickly due to (among other things) high transaction fees cutting into already-meager profits. We only hear news about big business and products and services for people with money. We forget that if we want our economy to grow, and adopt things like increased personal/residential solar power, we need to unburden the poorest, grow their own wealth, and infuse that back into the economy. Perhaps we should stop obsessing so much over AI, and obsess a little more over making it less expensive and difficult to be poor. Seems to be working in Kenya.
• DeathArrow 11mo ago
  What do they do during the night? Do they use batteries to store the energy?
• flave 11mo ago
  An interesting response from an LLM. I’d love to hear more from the person who prompted it.
• anovikov 11mo ago
  This is such a bunch of nonsense! 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.
  • anovikov 11mo ago
    I meant to say: this is a new sleek tool to make people compete more intensely against each other in the race to exhaust a limited resource. Just like freelance sites made life of everyone miserable while extracting cash out of them, simply because they did not increase the amount of work available - just forced everyone to compete stronger and pay to play. Until the work was ruined and people simply churned out.
• Uptrenda 11mo ago
  >IOT-backed hardware linked to a novel asset whose issuance serves to make the world a little bit better 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.
• jillesvangurp 11mo ago
  Charging phones and "studying at night" are cliches in this context. It completely misses the point. Yes, it's important. And obviously happening. 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.
• MrsPeaches 11mo ago
  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 mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over. More details for the interested here: https://solar-aid.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/State-of-Repair-Off-Grid-Solar-Sector-Oct-2024.-UNSW-SolarAid.pdf https://solar-aid.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/State-of-Re...
  • stogot 11mo ago
    Sounds like an opportunity to do a buyback and sell to a refurb provider. But also to fix their junk. 250 million?!
    • MrsPeaches 11mo ago
      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_strathmoreuniversity-openenergylabs-energymakersacademy-activity-7387522485681897472-vJGT https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energy-makers-academy_strathm...
      • jonway 11mo ago
        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.
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• jimnotgym 11mo ago
  Isn't it a shame that 90% of the comments here are complaining that AI was involved in producing this article, and none of the comments are from a tech nerd kid in Africa who has electricity because of the solar schemes mentioned in the article? I want to hear from the people affected.
  • eskibars 11mo ago
    I agree in principal, but this whole post is lazy if it's AI-produced. There's certainly no original thought and as the comments mention here, most of the math is outright incorrect
  • baq 11mo ago
    You’ll likely need to wait a couple decades for this. Kids need to not spend all their free time helping on the farm first and their currency has to appreciate such that they can afford a computing device that isn’t a toy. With yields seeing such big increases it looks feasible, but we’re still early.
  • kaon_2 11mo ago
    I worked in this industry, visited several rural areas. Spoke to many people. Sunculture used to be a customer of our software company. The article doesn't quite do justice to the introduction of electricity; it claims that people replace kerosine or diesel with electricity. From what i've seen this is rarely true. Most people just sit in the dark. This means you go from total darkness at night to electricity. Even the smallest 100lumen light is transformative. You can talk to your family at night. You can make love while seeing your spouse. You can see the spiders and the snakes. You are less afraid of bandits in the night. The biggest impact isn't made by the pumps or the larger systems, but by the significantly more affordable $5-$10 solar lanterns. The poorest of the poorest will get this and pay $0.20 per day or week for this.
    • lawrenceyan 11mo ago
      I appreciate your response! It’s nice to see the impact of technology from people actually there on the ground. Too easy to forget that there are ~10 billion people in the world. I live in the US, and it always gives me awe when I realize we represent <5% of humanity.
• yangcheng 11mo ago
  it will get more exciting once those solar panel can charge electronic cars
  • ruperthair 11mo ago
    They can do so today. Works great for my parents.
• kaon_2 11mo ago
  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 cell phone, made a few phone calls, and within several days I'd reached the developer I needed. He said: "Wait all I need to do is add this string?". "Yes.". He did so at midnight and our integration worked. Next evening we partied. It shows how integrations are often more of a human/organizational navigation more than anything technical. As for the article; the tone is hyped, and it is also somewhat true. Hundreds of millions will be using electricity. Still I want to point out one thing: This is all Solar powered DC electricity. No inverters! So you are looking at powering DC only appliances! Inverters are generally simply too expensive for this. Also the impact on income is very limited; you can't really do anything significantly more productive with the electricity, as several reports have shown. But I don't want to downplay the impact; The quality of life improvement is hard to overstate. Maybe somewhat comparable to say; you are forbidden to use any form of transport (bike, car, bus) to suddenly having all 3. Life becomes so much more convenient. For example: You don't have to take the bus anymore to town to charge your phone - yes people do this.
  • jjcob 11mo ago
    > 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 offer 1000W power.
    • kaon_2 11mo ago
      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 the countryside, I saw some AC electrical appliances. One elder couple had an enormous 80ies style stereo-set gathering dust in the shed. I was told they were a wedding gift.
• monegator 11mo ago
  The problem is that there is no true manufacturing nor repairability capacity for high density electronics in africa. Hell, our customer in SA asks us to buy spare components for them because getting parts there from our favourite distributors is a nightmare. 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.
  • darkwater 11mo ago
    Are we really able to service solar panels and batteries in Europe either, for example? Or most of the time is just a game of moving refurbished devices to replace the broken ones, that are then shipped back to... China? to be refurbished once again? I know that for more costly EV batteries there is some refurbishment capacity in Europe but what about the rest?
• veunes 11mo ago
  The idea that Africa is skipping the grid in the same way it skipped landlines is compelling, but this goes even deeper: it’s infrastructure as a product, not a government service. And it’s being financed by the end user and the global North’s carbon tab. Wild.
• jsrozner 11mo ago
  Pretty sure this article is at least partially AI-written. Interesting content. Annoying style.
• Tepix 11mo ago
  The story is great, but is it just me who's tired of this style with ultra short sentences? It's getting to the point where it's distracting.
• qqxufo 11mo ago
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• deleted 11mo ago
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• tgtweak 11mo ago
  Overall, democratization of utility and finance is great, but this article is so inconsistent with the pricing and statements it really reads like a sycophantic llm wrote the entire thing. 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) >₦2,000 per week ($1.39 USD/week) x 60 weekly payments, ₦3,500 down payment ($2.43 USD) = $85.83 =~ 20kWh over that 60 week period (Just over 1 year), over 10 years = ~200 kWh... ~$0.429/kWh (reasonable given the lighting hardware is included, and the only thing that should need changing during that time is the lfp battery which the price is dropping very quickly on). 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 >₦5,600 per week ($3.82 USD/week) x 60 weekly payments, ₦15,500 down payment ($10.78 USD) = $239.98 =~ 147kWh over that 60 week period (Just over 1 year), over 10 years = ~1300 kWh... ~$0.184/kWh (again very reasonable given the lighting hardware is included, and again the nmc battery at 5 years which the price and quality of is improving very quickly on). So yes, this does seem pretty viable in terms of Upfront, TCO and payment options.
  • tgtweak 11mo ago
    The larger systems (solar + AC Inverter + home-scale battery): PowerHub Core (2 kW AC inverter 230VAC, 2.5kWh lfp battery storage, 1800-2700W solar panels - ₦48,000 per week, 80 weekly payments, ₦240,000 down payment ₦4,080,000 ($2,836.94 USD) financed or ₦2,400,000 ($1668.79 USD) buy outright PowerHub Plus (3.3kW AC inverter 230VAC, 5.0 kWh lfp battery storage, 1800-3600W solar panels - ₦64,000 per week, 80 weekly payments, ₦320,000 down payment ₦5,440,000 ($3782.58 USD) financed or ₦3,200,000 ($2225.05 USD) buy outright = yields ~47,600kWh over 10 years, =$0.0350-0.0795/kWh (2.5kWh/1800W system bought outright vs 5kWh/1800W system on finance), very competitive, with storage included. These are the "starting from" costs - so likely the with 1800w of panels on both systems. Pretty crazy cost of financing, but still pretty reasonably priced for an installed, warrantied system. For reference, that's cheaper than most of these ecoflow-style "solar generators" with ~3.3kWh batteries, 3000W output and 4x400W solar panels cost here (typically $4500-5000 USD).
• aussiegreenie 11mo ago
  The figures quoted are way out of date. Solar is already USD 0.11 per Watt and has been for over a year. 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.
• deleted 11mo ago
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