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.
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.
If someone wants to make them work in rural areas like this, I think the necessary ingredients will be:
1. Cheaper batteries. These are likely coming.
2. More energy. A meal might require 1 kWh or more. (Or less — scrambled eggs won’t require much energy at all.) This is solvable with more panels.
3. Copper. The coil itself is a decent sized hunk of copper. I assume this is part of why cheap little portable induction cooktops still cost $50 or more.
4. Power electronics? I’m not an expert, and I have no idea how much of the cost comes from the power electronics, but integrating the battery and the induction heater seems like it should result in a dramatically simpler system than, say, producing AC from a battery and then converting that AC into a form that will power the coil. The current list price of the Impulse Labs stove includes a hilariously high power output, and a stove targeting rural Africa could be 1/5 as powerful and would still be fantastic.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could squeeze the cost of a decent battery powered stove down to $200 in a few years if they had appropriate scale.
That said, if you are a manufacturer of an appliance and you have an addressable user base of billions with AC, and a 'potential new user base' with DC... you might just want to swallow the cost and add a DC / AC converter for the sake to not have to produce two variants of the most complex / costly item (the motor in this case).
Your average lead-acid starter battery can easily do that - 1 kW is less than 100 amps at 12V, less than 50A if you wire two in series. 200 Ah means about four hours worth of runtime.
The problem is switching off higher DC voltages and currents. AC is easy, it traverses through 0V 100 (or 120 in the US) times a second. But DC? The arc is just going on. That's why most electrical equipment, from switches over automated breakers to fuses, has distinct ratings for AC and DC, with DC ratings sometimes being half the AC rating.
Additionally, larger DC networks tend to have issues with weird current flows and electrochemical corrosion.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2025/10/how-to-build-a-sol...
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.
I have a half-liter thermos bottle that leaks about 0.3 watts at ΔT ≈ 50° (635g of water dropped from 71.9° to 69.8° over five hours and 8 minutes), so any power supply averaging over about a watt would be sufficient to boil water in it—eventually. If you needed to do it in the 4 hours the sun was near peak on a single day, you'd need at least 15 watts. (I don't live in Africa, but I do live in a third-world country. Blown-glass thermoses are pretty widely available because, although they're fragile, they're light and never wear out, just shatter.)
Sand batteries are potentially extremely cheap and can easily deliver cooking temperatures. A super-low-tech version of this approach is "salt frying", where you preheat a few kg of table salt (melting point 800.7°) to frying temperature, then stir dry food into it. Most of the salt won't stick to the food, but the few grains that do won't cause the edibility problems that sand would.
TCES potentially offers much greater storage density and much greater controllability than these sensible-heat energy-storage technologies, since you can store the "heat" indefinitely.
Phase-change thermal energy storage is another potentially appealing possibility, potentially offering a stable cooking temperature for many hours, although I don't know of any suitable materials. The MgCl₂-KCl–NaCl eutectic, for example, doesn't melt until 401°. Maybe something like calcium stearate (m.p. 150°–180°) would work, but its heat of fusion isn't great, I'd be worried about long-term stability, and although it's easy to get anywhere in the world, it's probably a lot more expensive than salt. (Table salt is US$100/tonne, but the eutectic mentioned above would be closer to US$400/tonne.)
Alternating current is substantially easier to step up/down in voltage, much nicer to anything that modulated current flow and has a lot of convenient aspects for motors. Like for like the DC solution costs just a little bit more every step of the way.
Even if you're not doing long distance transmission the cost of all those things that are worse about DC are going to be bore across the entirety of your economy that uses AC. DC makes sense here because the supply chain is so dysfunctional that making the "better" solution work would actually cost more than the "12v doodads from china" style solution. Eventually as electrification continues the choice of DC will become a drag though.
That's pretty interesting. Can you tell us more what kind of problems your software solved and how you convinced them to move from the spreadsheets?
I tried something similar (in another industry) and it's a mixed bag. Companies often straight up refuse to move past the spreadsheets even though it creates a significant backlog on their side.
This centerpiece tracks the outstanding loan amount that each customer has. It sutomatically sends payment reminder SMS messages a few days before payments are due. It connects to the hardware with internet-of-things to turn it off if payments aren't made. It connects to the bank to ensure payments are there, and confirms when payments are made. Really fun software to build with many different parts.
There were SaaS providers for this. In the beginning (2015) there was only 1 player, Angaza (Reed Hastings mentioned in the article is one of their sales guys). Nowadays there are a handful; PaygOps, BBoX pulse (not sure if that still exists), and a few smaller ones. They charge like $2-$7 per device managed on the platform.
Convincing customer to take this up was not hard at all. You pretty much needed it to run your operations on anything more than 100 customers, and as the above article shows, scale had big advantages. Moreover; if you could show to investors that you had the software infrastructure scale, they were significantly likely to give money. It was boom time until corona hit. Everyone was expecting 30% YoY growth like until 2019, but then everything stagnated. Many companies went bankrupt and a lot of consolidation happened in the distributor market. Companies saved money on their software first, and we called it a day.
In the manufacturing industry where I am now, I fully agree with the mixed bag. Companies are old, with many old people, they stay small and don't necessarily need to scale or "grow forever". They are conservative and happy with the way things are.
- sidenote - You always learn that in centuries past, people didn't grow old. I never knew why but my current suspicion is that air pollution by stoves and hearths was probably the top 3 cause.
However, cooking isn't (yet) solved by solar. Making heat from electricity is hard! Clean Cooking solutions often use propane, butane, or wooden pallets. Clean Cooking companies face all of the same issues as the Off grid solar companies of this article. But you'd be surprised that it is really considered a different industry. Customers and price plans are the same, but funding often comes from different sources.
Making affordable, electric, clean cooking solutions would be one of the most impactful inventions of our generation. Even then, challenges remain: No cultural activity is as steeped in tradition as cooking, and convincing people to change this, resulting in different tasting meals, is hard. Particular if it is the man deciding on the money, and the woman doing the work.
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-Re...
Sometimes development projects just throw solutions at rural communities then move onto their next project, leaving no legacy of training or continued supply of parts/tools/funding.
Sometimes solutions get treated as resources instead of infrastructure, like a water treatment plant that got strip-mined for metal (that example was from South America).
Tech is a whole ecosystem, mindset and lifestyle, not just magic hardware to parachute into situations that aren’t set up to manage it on a long term basis.
They noticed that aid charities would give modern motorcycles to rural medical workers that rapidly ended up in a non-working state.
So they gathered older motorbikes, more suitable and more repairable in the destination country, and spent time training the end users in maintenance and upkeep, and ongoing support.
even in the Big IT Enterprise "support" is a byword that appears in all discussions.
it's not enough to have, or to build, you gotta maintain, fix, replace, and eventually, remove.
those discussions aren't fun or sexy, and everyone hates when you tank a blue-sky "it'll fix everything" discussion with the unpleasant realities of long-term care and feeding
Bottom up calculation: average $10/repair x 250 million potential repairs = $2.5B market.
Problem is labour shortages and supply chain, as stated in the report. Both hard problems to solve.
We’ve been working on getting the labour shortages fixed and I personally believe that you can also skip some of the supply chain problems by localising labour.
For example: when we train people they can 4x their _household_ income within 6 months. This is young people who didn’t have an income before and are suddenly earning 3x as much as both their parents combined.
People just don’t know how to fix these things and when someone finally learns how, they can absolutely rake it in.
It’s actually insane to me how much education can be such a massive multiplier in this context!
Link to our recent work: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energy-makers-academy_strathm...
What sort of repairs are you training them to do? Is it just simply testing and swaps of parts? Or are you training them on how to find and replace a bad capacitor?
I eventually went back to Brazil and had it fixed there and replaced the battery. Freaking phone lasted 8 years on my very clumsly hands, still works even. The fix cost me ~30 usd plus the battery cost.
First of all there is the repair itself, but there isn’t any collection service so you need to travel (often a full day) to get to a repair centre. Then travel back. Not open on the weekend so you have to do it during the week, meaning you are also loosing 2 days of income. Then you have to go and get it once it’s done.
Total cost of repair for people using these devices might 10+ days worth of income if you include the opportunity cost.
That’s why we are training people to fix these systems within their communities.
Regarding parts you can get second life batteries in Kenya for $1-2 per cell from people like Acele Africa[1], so you can get total repair cost down to ~$10 (that’s ~3% of original purchase price)
You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.
Most of the people we’re talking about here are subsistence farmers who pick up casual labour at a local farm. Income is sporadic and seasonal.
That was the initial brilliance of the PAYGO system, it allows users to pay off their device sporadically I.e. they buy units when they get paid and that goes towards paying off an asset that in theory will then provide energy at 0 marginal cost. Turns out that last bit isn’t true.
Here the VC story is important, these companies were meant to be high growth and giving significant returns. We all know how that ends.
> You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.
I have been in the past, but not anymore. No one is saying people aren’t resourceful but there is a significant barrier to entry when it comes to electronics repairs for the general population. One part of what we provide is an off-grid repair lab bundled with our new education offering so it’s very much knowledge + tools.
> In terms of waste management, 85.3% of distributors reported that they had a waste management strategy. Mostly, this tended to involve collecting broken products, harvesting them for spare parts and then storing the remainder in a central warehouse before sending them to a (usually certified) local e-waste recycling facility. How effective these recycling facilities are, however, was beyond the scope of this report.
They seem to suggest that lithium batteries are the hardest to repair and recycle, but people want to do so. It feels like a problem that will get easier at scale.
The current cycle is 1. sell product 2. wait three years for it to break 3. Go back to 1.
The impact of the recycling can lessen the impact of that but it definitely doesn’t eliminate it. That’s just on environmental scale, think about the financial impact of carrying this debt for years on people earning $2 a day.
Also important to note that a lot of this is contingent of legislation that implements things like Extended Producer Responsibly (EPR) where you essentially have an additional tax on producers that gets used to fund collection. Kenya implemented this for the first time 12 months ago [1], so we will see the impact over the next couple years.
Re solar punk, my personal vision is that you basically teach people how to build and maintain these systems themselves by running solar tech bootcamp and giving them off-grid tools.
They then have tools and skills to fix anything without the need for the grid. Train 100k people and have them maintain these systems using a decentralised approach.
In fact, as part of our training we now have e-cooking stove suppliers who deliver training on their stoves to our students.
The economic impact of this cannot be over stated.
1. You are giving people the ability to 4x their income as repairers
2. You are saving the people who are getting new systems, instead of repairing them, multiples of their yearly income.
[1] https://cleanupkenya.org/30-things-to-know-about-kenyas-epr-...
… which is why our roads are so much better than those in Switzerland.
I guess even cyberpunk now has a bimodal supporter base - there are the would-be punks, and then there are the would-be (and actual) Zuckerbergs building the torment nexus/metaverse.
But also to fix their junk. 250 million?!
You can see a bit our latest work here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energy-makers-academy_strathm...
Make it more advantageous for someone to continue to pay maintenance, on the basis of modular upgrades over time, versus owning outright.
Essentially the "grid" becomes the physical distribution/repair/upgrade network.
What about the most recent (last 5/10 years)?
Also, aren't almost all failures battery, rather than panel, related?
Technically battery chemistry has obviously moved on but we are talking a device capacity similar to a medium power bank. How much innovation have you noticed in power banks recently?
Panels are big problem from a e-waste perspective as they very difficult to repair.
Batteries failures are repairable. Usually battery packs will be 2+ LFP 18650s or 32700s. If one cell goes bad the the whole pack goes but the others may be fine. Just need to test and match cells and you can make new packs.
I can’t remember exact recovery rate for cells, I think it is something like 40-60%.
Dealing with these batteries at end of life is a challenge, but that’s a global problem.
Still a lot of legacy Sealed Lead Acid batteries around but these are very recyclable.
The article talks a lot about replacing generators: they need complex maintenance.
There will be a new waste stream... But the question is whether the waste stream is smaller than the current status quo.
Two massive exaggerations inside one sentence to drive home a rhetorical point.
Provision of retail solar is a highly competitive market in developing countries and the profit margins are small.
I did a survey in partnership with a the African Leadership University in a Rwanda, where we surveyed people living in two rural villages and found 90% or units had broken within 3 years of purchase. This is the logical end point when 1/5 stop working after 6 months, which you can find in Cross and Murry 2018, linked in other comments.
10x mark up (i.e. the mark up on cost of the unit) comes from knowing that the COGS for one of these units is ~$20-30 and the premium sellers sell up to $300.
Sure it’s at the top end of the range but 10x markup on each unit is not an exaggeration, let alone a massive one.
Gross margins are indeed tight but that’s is a separate issue to markup. You can sell at a huge markup and still make a loss: for example if the default rate of loans you make turns out to be much higher than you expected.
Solar is dead simple. The cell puts out 12v. Theres some maths around parallel and serial but you don’t need to know that for repairs. The cells connect into a box that puts out ac. If the box fails you buy a new one (no user serviceable parts inside is what the sticker says). If the wires break you splice them.
If something hard breaks and you decommission a system the cells are still good and can be trivially reused. If a cell fails it’s obvious and it can be pulled out of rotation.
In conclusion, bullshit.
> 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.
LLM slop. Author couldn’t even be bothered to read the slop before clicking publish.
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.
The $100 down + $65/mo is for agriculture.
(not that the numbers are correct or make sense)
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
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.
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...
Hat tip also to China's ideological commitment to independence from external oil supplies, as nicely coupled to reducing pollution and greenwashing their image. It's their citizens who sacrifice to make solar power cheap enough.
No. Manufacturing labor cost in China is not cheap. In fact since 2012 or so, it is more expensive than in most of Asia. Companies who want cheap labor look elsewhere.
https://www.economist.com/business/2023/02/20/global-firms-a... (Archive link: https://archive.fo/tdhXJ )
China is also the only major economy where wages have increased at the same rate as GDP in the last 40 or so years.
The only thing they've done to greenwash their image is spend money buying articles that present the false image of a green china.
Most places in my state you need an electrician license, permits, bonding, insurance, a special 'solar' warranty, and inspections if you want solar.
I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid without anyone from the government ever even looking at it or taking money for it. If I wanted to add a solar system, it basically completely fucked everything and I would have had to gone through the normal permitting and inspection system for my house which would have made even building the house basically impossible for me.
That's... not common (perhaps more-so in rural areas).
In my area, being connected to the grid brings a lot more hassle: the utility gets a say in how much solar you can build, as well as how it's connected. Some of it makes sense (they want to make sure you're not going to backfeed during an outage and cause a hazard to linemen), but a lot of it is them protecting their bottom line.
Where exactly do you live? I'm not saying you're lying, but this smells like a tall tale. You can easily buy solar panels and batteries, and if no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.
Maybe what you're saying is, "my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?
Because its dangerous to own solar. If its guns, then its perfectly fine and safe.
This is a disastrous misrepresentation of a complex case with lots of moving pieces. At no point in the history of the construction of that specific power line was there a challenge to legality of citizen initiative until after the vote. Meanwhile, as they were behind in the polls, the company rushed to build as much of it as they could knowing that the initiative was coming, so when they failed at the ballot box, they could claim a legally recognized "vested interest".
Absent the vested interest claim they would have been legally bound by the results of the ballot initiative, and the vested interest was not established until after the ballot had been voted on.
Does decentralized solar plus batteries give you same amount of reliability? How many days without sunny weather can you survive without having to change your energy use habits?
Each 9 of reliability for infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive. And grid has a lot of 9s.
But having electricity 13 days every two weeks is much better than not having it at all.
This isn't about China building out their grid with an over capacity factor of 200% so they can keep everything running even if rain, sun and wind all fail for months on end. This is a developing county getting to the point they can charge mobile phones consistently.
Where I live, I only get two 9s from the utility. And I'm within commuting distance of Seattle. With my generator, I still got three nines the one year where the battery tender failed and the generator didn't start when needed, but only because that outage was less than 8 hours and I replaced the battery tender before further outages (I could have jump started the generator, but the outage started overnight and waiting it out was easier). Most years, the number of brief outages adds up, and I probably only get five 9s.
Solar + battery + generator for really bad weeks (but make sure you exercise it!) could pretty easily add up to the two nines I'd get from the utility here.
For developing countries, solar + battery alone is likely be better than many grids which often are intermittent rather than 24/7 and many places don't have any access to utility power.
Correction: should have a lot of 9s.
But in a lot of places in the U.S., even rich states, it doesn't because a combination of regulatory capture, profiteering and straight corruption.
I can see why solar and batteries are so attractive because at least its your prerogative when the power goes out.
According to PVWatts, a 10kW solar system would get me very close to my average usage in December. I'd be way over in the summer, could probably get away with a 4kW system and dial back use during an outage. I can lease two Powerwall 3 batteries from my utility company for $55/mo.
Or look at: https://www.franklinwh.com/products/apower2-home-battery-bac...
Edit: this also looks like a good option: https://www.santansolar.com/product/the-homesteady-kit/
We used to lose power 3-4 days a winter in our old house. It would have been really nice to have heat. A generator or smaller system could handle that.
Solar and wind tend to be regularly and predictably intermittent but not unreliable. That's something you can design around. Especially when you have cheap storage to handle critical loads.
It's instructive to look at California's ISO website's supply graphs over the year. Renewables follow a reliable daily cycle.
Consider a family with two cars instead of one. How often do they have zero working cars? The correlated failure rate squares while the cost doubles.
My home now has a grid connection, house battery and solar, a caravan with mounted solar/battery/fridge/inverter beside it, and I also have a portable “powerstation” and portable solar panel which is basically a UPS. My fridge contents and phone charging needs have a several extra 9’s now for costs that have scaled very well.
These systems are tech that is improving rapidly. In some years these African farmers with their increased yields will likely add a bigger, second solar & battery system. In a village you can run a cable next door. Etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Not as many as you might think.
I mean, it very much depends on where you are. Three 9s would be no more than about 8 hours downtime per year. A lot of rural locations would do worse than that, realistically.
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.
In fact many people here praise those gangs, and wish they were bigger and demand more money.
Once the EU finally gets rid of the ridiculous pricing model where spot prices are dictated by the most expensive energy source (usually, gas), we might have a situation where grid costs exceed the cost of energy itself.
Oh and what do they do with that money? Hoard it for upcoming grid updates, which they supposedly have to make to accommodate solar peaks and EV charging. And buy solar parks in Spain, apparently.
Why is it ridiculous? From a pure mathematical economics point of view it's genius I think. It means energy producers can just set their price at production price, knowing they will get the best deal that way and thus don't need to speculate on the electricity prices. It makes electricity as cheap as possible when it's abundant and expensive when it's not, also incentifying users of electricity to shift their consumption.
What's a better way of doing it?
The problem with Home Solar is the same as with Heat exchanger installs... some installers price gouge, and simply don't care about the quality of the work.
Best of luck, if you plan to stay someplace 8+ years a 10kW Solar+battery install and heat exchanger are fine investments. We've also donated a few of those cheap FlexSolar 40W Foldable Solar panels + power-bank kits to people in remote areas, and they reported phone/VHF-Handy charging was reliable. =3
At the time: we had no choice! Universal electricity access was (& is) vastly better than the alternative: not having universal access. But what's happening in this article isn't an alternative, not so far: it's leaving the masses behind, dropping the pretense that electricity is a utility that ought be available to society broadly.
Perhaps the private rental systems here provide pretty good access. In general though, I think society really ought to accept pretty big inefficiencies/costs (if that's what it takes) if thats what it takes to provide these base demands widely. It feels horrific to consider only the costs here, to see the inefficiency, without regarding what electrification, transport, and other base utilities enable your people to do, how much it changes lives.
Narrow, mercenary cost analysis is an awful way to run your society. For sure, I deeply hope solar maybe can reduce some of the grid maintenance costs, by decentralizing energy. Over time. But this article &b this comment broadly accept a cost-based analysis, that largely revolve around the failure of a public works, one that needs to be efficient but that also has to be more willing to lose some money, to operate no matter what in unprofitable places. States have to make utilities available, period, whatever combination of political & economic will/unprofitability is required.
I'm excited for solar! The decentralized nature is amazing! But beyond the glory of possibility, it scares the heck out of me that society might just give up on a tie that binds us, might abandon the basic sense of utility that most states have been able to keep going for around a hundred years now.
The success & market capture of the companies spotlighted here is both a success, but also an liability. Solar is plentiful but the middlemen here have enormous price control, that maybe they are not flexing on now, but over time is a capability I would far prefer states tap & use for public benefit, rather than comingling with private interest.
This is about advances in the technology allowing the people to take care of themselves in cases when the overall society is so poor that it can't provide the central electricity grid.
If you really believe that then you need to read up on how the political system is financed. Members of congress spend a majority of their day calling "donors". That's not mom and dad, it's some corps (or rich individuals) who want to get sth done in return. And magically it gets done if the donations keep flowing. The only thing missing for "bribe" is to actually use the word.
How do they deal with the cost of storage for anything non trivial completely eclipsing any savings?
And many will make do without a battery, just relying on power during the day.
1: e.g. I saw an inspector not allow two 90deg. bend in RMC because, while the existing RMC went through a wall, and came out in a straight line on the other side, without knocking out the wall, we couldn't prove that there weren't already 3 90deg. bends. Maybe that's the right call (the electrician certainly thought it was asinine), maybe not, but things like that can significantly increase the time for project completion, since there are downstream effects to the scheduling.
The reason more than 180 degrees of bends is not allowed is because it becomes too hard to pull the wires through. If the inspector was there looking at finished work, the wires are already pulled.
The idea that a private company should get to unilaterally change our environment for profit is gross.
I think it's funny you use this example when CMP has been utterly refusing to connect tens of solar power and community solar projects to our grid, which suffers from a lack of generation contributing to our staggeringly high electricity costs.
Meanwhile, CMP insists that they have to double our rates (again), and don't really provide justification. This despite our generation and distribution costs being entirely separated, CMP having monopoly power over most of the state for distribution buildout, CMP having one of the least reliable grids in the nation despite supposedly spending enormously within the last few years to upgrade parts of the grid, and the whole time, CMP is extracting tidy profits to an entirely different country, from my fellow Mainers who are primarily old and on fixed incomes.
Maybe, just maybe, you don't have an accurate understanding of this issue?
We have several fully built solar farms, desperately needed new generation, just sitting idle as CMP refuses to connect them, because connecting more distributed infrastructure like that would eat into their profit margins, which continue to stay high as they continue to yearly increase our rates while sending out multiple leaflets telling people that they are totally not at fault for increasing their distribution rates because oh my generation costs also went up.
You should look up how much CMP spent on playing ads about how they would totally respect our nature and it would be vaguely great for us to build a transmission line to another state, as they continue to refuse to hook up generation that could reduce our power prices, and not even their chunk of that price!
Having had three major transmission lines for energy (two electric one gas) come through the area I live in the last 8 years, this is just false.
In the US it's not hard to get it done as long as you have mountains of cash and a state willing to imminent domain people.
I want to hear from the people affected.
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.
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.
> 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)
> 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?
Just one sentence here.
Then I realized.
That another sentence came after that.
Every second paragraph thinks it's Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone.
I always wonder what the point is.
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.
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?
You don't actually need rare-earths to produce solar panels, control systems and batteries - at least not in the amounts that require the scale China is operating at.
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.
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.
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.
<sarc>M-PESA helps fight poverty through the ingenious application of a thousand paper cuts. </sarc>
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?
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.
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 (starts at 21:18)
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.
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.
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.
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.
(§) for example: https://www.mydealz.de/deals/sunpro-500-wp-solarmodul-210-r-...
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?
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)
https://www.ny-engineers.com/blog/breaking-down-the-price-of...
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.
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).
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.
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.
Modern hybrid & multi-mode inverters are capable of isolating themselves from the grid, generating their own reference frequency and managing connection and disconnection from the grid. However you might not get one of these types of inverters unless you specifically ask for "backup power" or similar.
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.
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.
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.
So for the record: This isn't a chatgpt article, it's something I wrote over the weekend while I was down with a flu (although the idea has been running through my head for a while).
@America's 1930s: Most of US rural electrification happened at this point (90% of urban homes hat electricity, only around 10% of farms). Rural Electrification Act from 1936 changed that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
It's even sadder to me that the author says this is not GPT. I believe them. Which means we have reached a point where the style of how ChatGPT writes has made its way into our sub-conscious...
It's less than a non-sequitur. It makes the contrasting even weaker because it means in modern Africa labor is still cheap, just like in 1930s America.
> I love the story of it, but I can't take the writing
My personally heuristic is that if the style is AI, the substance is likely AI too.
> It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.
> Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.
Ah yes, not AI slop at all! /s
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.
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.
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...
Well, duh!
Who is saying different? Nobody here
A short little article that does not cover every aspect is not bad. It is good
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.
> 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".
Because they themselves have nothing interesting to say
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.
anyway, I hope they get electricity. the article said a lot about markets for something related to an ideology that rejects them.
Being self reliant is indeed "very punk".
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!