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.
> Thanks to all the entrepreneurs and engineers over the past decades
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.
the vast majority of solar panels are imaculately concieved in fully automated factorys,some where in fact there are NO people and they turn the lights off, as the robots are blind to those frequencys anyway.
surviving solar PV production facilities operate on razor thin margins, and gargantuan volumes, the results of which are the electrification of most of the world, useing the absolute minimum of carbon.
first lights, and dev8ces, small appliences, then the next step will be universal access to clean water and refrigeration, and then the worlds largest continent will be something to recon with.
This is a very rosy picture, unfortunately to the point of delusion. There are huge questions about the labour used in various stages, and the production of some of the raw materials is environmentally questionable.
Sure, but most of it happens in countries beyond china.
In any case, I literally have a cousin who's lived ten years in China building a 3d printing company, and the last reason he went to China was cheaper labor, that was borderline irrelevant.
Yes there is a bunch of automation in there, and still a ton of manual work and re-work. And it is done by the lowest cost labor, with a hefty government subsidy (by china) and a purchasing program.
This is pretty much bunk. There really is _very_ little space for manual unqualified work in solar panel manufacturing.
Does the supply chain contain less-than-free labor somewhere? Likely. Most probably somewhere in the raw material production, but it's not something that is a deciding factor in anything. These materials just as well likely go into making of iPhones and Lenovo laptops.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-xi... ("Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human Rights Concerns" / "The global industry is cutting some ties to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and companies are less transparent, a new report found")
However most of the "slave" talk these days comes from highly politicized sources, so it's hard to cut through to the truth. For example, it's not likely that there's enough Uyghur slave labor to be involved with "most" of the polysilicon even from Xinjiang, much less the entire world's supply.
IMHO, like the cobalt getting mined by children from artisanal-scale mines in Africa, it's a very serious issue that gets trotted out more as a political football against the entire technology, rather than expressed as an earnest concern to solve the underlying problem.
> IMHO, like the cobalt getting mined by children from artisanal-scale mines in Africa
Not really an issue for solar battery systems as they typically use the cheaper LFP chemistry that has a much higher cycle count. The gravimetric density is a bit less, but that only really matters for high-performance mobility.
Talking about degrees of slavery is decidedly not cool. If you have documentation of iPhone supply chain using forced labor like I linked to, please do share rather than trying to be morally ambiguous.
I dont think China deserves that hat tip. Their "commitment" was done years after all the major nations had committed to emissions reduction and seems to have only been done so they could sell the solution. They've made little attempt to reduce emissions and instead scaled their industrial base to capitalize on the demand from nations working to reduce their carbon footprint.
The only thing they've done to greenwash their image is spend money buying articles that present the false image of a green china.
besides toomuchtodo's nicely made argument, I would like to point that that many "major" nations (I'm assuming that refers to mostly western countries, correct me if I'm wrong) were able to focus on committing to emissions because they gave their dirty work (ie: mass manufacturing, waste disposal, resource extraction) to other countries, especially China.
toomuchtodo's arugments are deluded and ill respond to those in a bit. But I want to be clear that no one "gave" their dirty work to china. Industry in all these countries were priced out.
The Western and Asian governments increased environmental regulations and the cost to do business rose. In China the government ignored its climate obligations and slashed environmental regulations and increased coal investment to drive energy costs down and thus the manufacturing moved there. You think Germany couldnt have cut environmental regulations slapped down a few coal plants and made solar panels?
Thats why there was climate meetings to get everyone on the same track. If everyone is aligned in their goals then the economic hurt is easier to bare. China intentionally captialised on this and I do not think they deserve any praise for it.
> Global solar installations are breaking records again in 2025. In H1 2025, the world added 380 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity – a staggering 64% jump compared to the same period in 2024, when 232 GW came online. China was responsible for installing a massive 256 GW of that solar capacity. For context, it took until September last year to pass the 350 GW mark. This year, the milestone was achieved in June. That pace cements solar as the fastest-growing source of new electricity generation worldwide. In 2024, global solar output rose by 28% (+469 terawatt-hours) from 2023, more growth than any other energy source. Nicolas Fulghum, senior energy analyst at independent energy think tank Ember, said, “These latest numbers on solar deployment in 2025 defy gravity, with annual solar installations continuing their sharp rise. In a world of volatile energy markets, solar offers domestically produced power that can be rolled out at record speed to meet growing demand, independent of global fossil fuel supply chains.”
> Utility-scale solar power capacity in China reached more than 880 gigawatts (GW) in 2024, according to China’s National Energy Administration. China has more utility-scale solar than any other country. The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024. Planned solar capacity projects will likely lead to continued growth in China’s solar capacity. More than 720 GW of solar capacity are in development: about 250 GW under construction, nearly 300 GW in pre-construction phases, and 177 GW of announced projects, according to the Global Solar Power Tracker compiled by Global Energy Monitor.
> China’s coal-fired electricity generation took an unexpectedly sharp turn downward in the first quarter of 2025, signaling a potentially profound shift in the world’s largest coal-consuming economy. This wasn’t merely a seasonal dip or economic distress signal; rather, it represented a clear and structural turning point. Coal generation fell by approximately 4.7% year over year, significantly outpacing the overall grid electricity supply decline of just 1.3%. However, electricity demand, a better measure, went up by 1%. What gives?
> China’s Decarbonization Is So Fast Even New Coal Plants Aren’t Stopping It. In multiple sectors—transportation, renewable energy, and overall electrification—the clear trend is toward a greener energy system. In fact, in areas like renewables and electric vehicles, China is now the world’s leading player. With the United States essentially abandoning the field, it will become even more dominant.
> China’s installations of wind and solar in May are enough to generate as much electricity as Poland, as the world’s second-biggest economy breaks further records with its rapid buildup of renewable energy infrastructure. China installed 93 GW of solar capacity last month – almost 100 solar panels every second, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Wind power installations reached 26 GW, the equivalent of about 5,300 turbines.
(it is somewhat irrelevant that China has accomplished spinning up a clean tech machine of this scale out of energy security reasons, as it still accomplishes the goal of decarbonizing their economy first, and then, the rest of the world as their spun up manufacturing flywheel exports cheap clean tech to the world)
>voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]
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.
Solar bribery is interestingly the exact opposite in some of the USA, where the solar contractors have basically gotten in bed with government for regulatory capture on the market.
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.
> 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.
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.
Interesting. My utility let me do my own service entrance and everything. They didn't even give a shit what I connected it to. I ended up powering a whole house and a trailer without anyone from the power company even looking at either of them (I added them after I built a 200 amp service entrance as just a stubbed entrance with no load).
If I added a solar system they would neither care nor have any idea. Only the government cares here.
I feel very optimistic about battery storage for this reason. I would love nothing more than be able to run on battery for a week or so so I can give a middle finger to the utility and just rip out the grid connection. No more solar inverter or power limit permits needed.
"I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid"
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." ?
>"my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?
Nah they didn't give a shit what I connected it to. I literally stubbed a 200 amp service entrance on vacant land then just went wild connecting it to whatever I like. I shot the shit with their engineer when they ran secondary off the power pole and that was it, I've never seen them again.
> no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.
I don't know for certain but having an unpermitted solar panel visible via satellite would likely trigger a visit.
What law governs this? I'm familiar with a lot of restrictions on grid-tie systems, but I've never heard of it being this strict for something that could (presumably) be done without a back feed.
I mean, are you saying that someone sticking up a few panels+batteries to run an electric fence, gate, and camera system has to have permits?
Great, so it sounds like installing unpermitted solar at your house is about as illegal as jaywalking, and you probably shouldn't worry about it so much.
People have guns in all of the US. Sure, AZ ownership might be around double that of CA, but that's just going from 1 in 4 to 1 in 2. The odds are high either way.
Here in Austria, grid costs are now on par with the actual electricity cost. Each are ca €0.1 per kWh now, plus again that in taxes.
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.
>Once 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.
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.
comments like this really show that many people with strong opinions do not understand how the electricity grid, electricity markets or electricity economics work.
Electricity is priced at the edge entirely because demand must match supply at all times. You either meet all electric demand or someone will go without power. This is why marginal pricing exists and this is why the most expensive generator is always the last to be accepted. This is why electricity at night is cheaper that during the day.
Please, if you do not understand what you are talking about, it's ok to just say that you don't know. Don't spread misinformation like this.
> 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.
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.
Unfortunately, all such calculations are egocentric. People assume that everyone can use solar panels for 13 days 2 weeks, and when needed, we’ll just get electricity from the grid. But what they don’t take into account is that when there’s load today but none tomorrow, the grid becomes unstable.
2) This also increases costs. You might save electricity consumption in 14 times, but your expenses for grid electricity can increase in 14 times, because the grid still needs to be maintained — staff must be kept at power plants to ensure you can be supplied with 100% of your energy at any moment.
The tricky thing in cold climates is the part of the year when solar power is lowest but electricity use, for heating, is highest. Sometimes they have hydro or something.
When I go to https://model.energy/ and ask it to solve for providing steady output in China from 100% renewable energy (wind/solar/battery/hydrogen) at minimum cost using 2030 cost assumptions and 2011 weather data, the solar curtailment is just 7.3% (and most of the energy is coming from solar, not wind). If I remove hydrogen and solve again, solar curtailment increases to 16.7%. "200% overcapacity" is completely bogus.
And what was the storage requirement? I just ran those parameters myself with China's 2.9 TW of constant electricity demand, and the storage requirement was over 70,000 GWh of battery storage.
By comparison, global battery production is around 1,000 GWh per year.
Sounds good until you try to run a business. Having businesses randomly out of commission is not a way to bring country from developing to developed status.
Even if you have an under-provisioned solar+storage solution and don't want to splurge for a generator, even on cloudy days you still get power, just less.
Generally businesses are really great at balancing costs, and for highly-cost-constrained businesses if you give them 95% uptime at half the cost, the equation becomes clear. And in Africa, if the option is 95% uptime or 0% uptime, the choice is even clearer.
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.
I actually counted the number of outages after I got my battery unit in June -- it was six in five weeks, for anything from a couple of seconds to 30 minutes, which I noticed because the unit clicked over to running from the battery, and the clock on the oven (which is still only mains powered) flashes until I go over and hit a button.
In April I had a 40 hour outage after a storm. That's what caused me to order the brand new Pecron E3600LFP, first New Zealand model shipment in "early" June (I received mine June 19).
In February 2023 I had a 4 day outage during/after a storm.
There are even, every 2 or 3 months, scheduled and notified 9 AM - 3 PM outages for equipment maintenance, tree trimming etc. Just those alone lower the grid reliability to around 99.5%.
Six days outage in three years -- let's call it four -- drops grid reliability by another 0.4%.
So, yeah, two 9s is about right.
With the Pecron base unit (US$999 at the moment still on Halloween special, $1259 before that) I simply don't notice any outage under 4 hours, and that's even with a full winter heating load. In fact I deliberately turn the mains to it off from 7-9 AM and 5-9 PM every day.
A 4 hour outage was a little close sometimes, so in August I added a 3kWh expansion battery ($699 on pecron.com right now).
With 6kWh I can run my fridge, computers, Starlink, some LED lighting for 36 hours. Or 30 hours with typical kitchen appliance usage added (espresso machine, toaster, kettle, microwave, air fryer).
Or virtually forever now I added 6x 440W solar panels (cost me US$400 total) to it, which still generates around 200W between them in even the worse overcast and rain.
I'm running this stuff as a mini off-grid system, not connected to the house wiring at all -- except plugged into a standard socket to charge the battery if needed. I also have a $450 2kW petrol generator which I can use to charge the battery if needed, but needing that should be very rare.
Total cost: under US$3k. More like $2.3k at the current Halloween special prices.
The grid has a lot of 9s, but in a lot of places losing power for a day or two after a storm is not unusual at all. The grid per se being fine but your actual neighborhood being dark for a couple days is a pretty common experience in some places.
Last time my building lost power was about 19 years ago, when I was living in a Welsh valley halfway between the two nearest villages.
Since then, none of the extended Portsmouth conurbation, Sheffield, Cambridge, rural Cambridgeshire or Berlin have had any problems big enough to even notice while I've lived in them.
I have seen at least two circuit breakers trip in that time though.
I don’t know where you live, but I experienced outage in Budapest once in at least 10 years while I lived there. And only one phase was out, not all. We even lamented with my friends that we didn’t even remember when was the last time when something like that happened. I never had to reconfigure the clock on my microwave, just for daylight saving time. I know that even 30 kms from there my granddad still experiences outages monthly, but there are places where that happens very-very rarely nowadays.
And, for a refrigerator and a lot of loads, being down for 2 days straight is way worse than a few hours a year. losing 48 hours of supply a year if broken into 2 hour chunks is not nearly as bad as losing 48 consecutive hours.
I get your point, but I personally would be grumpy if I lost power for two hours twice a month. I realize that is rich considering this article is about people who are lucky to get any amount of power reliably
When I lived in a city proper, the grid was doing well to maintain 98% uptime. Multiple day long outages were the rule, not uncommon to lose power 3-5 days in a row.
Now I live in a rural area and it's uncommon to avoid outages more than a month. We have an automatic transfer switch and fuel generator from previous owners and it saves hundreds of dollars in frozen food.
This is in the US by the way. If you're investing in a transfer switch and generator now, the cost is going to quickly approach a modest solar + battery set up with a whole house inverter, and of course, you save money all year that way, not just in outages.
I lost power for 10h in my city recently and it was a big fucking deal. The last 5 years that's the first time that happened. I would say I have less than a hour of downtime per year in the other years
Can confirm. I live in a US city and the only 9 involved is maybe the very first number. I've lived here just over a year and we've had 1 full day without power and probably 8 to 10 short outages between a few seconds and several 10s of minutes. I'm adding batteries and solar permitting be damned.
Wild! I’ve lived in Chicago and San Francisco and have never lost power for more than an hour. And can’t remember the last time it went out at all, maybe 2 years ago?
I'm (not GP) in the Chicago burbs and expect to lose power 1-3 times a year. Usually it's for less than twelve hours but last year it was out for three days straight. Most recent outage was ~10 minutes long a couple weeks ago - I still haven't set the oven clock.
The cause around here is usually storm + trees + above ground power lines, plus a low enough population density that you're not top priority for the utility company.
My concern is that it deflates any impetus to actually solve the problems of regulatory capture, profiteering, and other corruption.
Not everybody can afford the up front costs of installing solar + battery storage, plus replacement when the PV cells and batteries inevitably reach EoL. These people will be left behind on a decaying grid nobody with political capital wants to fix or at the mercy of landlords.
I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.
It is funny to me how fractally perverse systems gets when a centralised authority refuses to directly solve a problem but rather decide have it solved by third party uncooperative players by creating an endless stream of byzantine rules to force the solution to be a twisted copy of what the centralised authority could have done by itself.
Of course there are failure modes in any approach but "oh no! Herding cats is hard. Who could have imagined!" is funny to me
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.
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.
keep in mind the limitations of these forecasting calculations. On an AVERAGE day, assuming AVERAGE weather, assuming AVERAGE load, you should be fine.
The trouble with relying on the weather for your electricity is that it is entirely possible that you will go five days straight with cloud cover, limited to no solar generation and then be freezing. This is the problem that the electricity grid solves with varied sources of generation.
Distributed can do redundancy. It’s relatively cheap.
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.
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.
I read a decent essay about the difference between solar and wind reliability and fossil fuel reliability.
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.
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.
Poor countries have these problems, yes, but they don’t stop whatever, they just add some expense to it. In certain areas of Mexico, businesses have to pay taxes to the local cartel, but if you do, they’ll leave you alone-and they know that if they demand too much, that’s actually undermining their own self-interest. Effectively, the cartel is just another level of local government, taxing you like all the others do. An armed gang or warlord somewhere in Africa or Syria or Afghanistan very often functions similarly.
It increases costs of a solar system to about 1.5-2.2x (so an extra 50-120%), not several hundred fold. The hybrid inverter is slightly more expensive than a normal inverter, then you add the 4-16 kWh battery which is pretty cheap nowadays.
There are a few US Solar wholesaler companies that will draft and sign engineering drawings for a roof-top permit application in most states. Some folks claim https://www.pegasussolar.com/ was inexpensive, and might be worth a call.
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
Rural electrification in the US hugely proves your point. Yes, grid costs are fantastically expensive!!
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 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.
Hey there, author (Skander from Climate Drift) here.
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
Hey in the part 3 that introduces PAYG it jumps from $100 down $40-65 a month to $0.21 a day / $1.50 a week.
It seems your mixing up examples since they're off by an order of magnitude. Once I read that my trust in everything else started breaking down and I couldn't be bothered to read the rest with the same level of engagement.
Thanks! Maybe I'm a little too sensitive to AI signals. I actually really love the story and content, but if it was AI generated I didn't know how much to actually believe it. I still don't know who you are, but it's probably less likely to be totally fabricated if a human is responsible for it. So, thanks, I'll give it another read.
Rather than too sensitive, I think you’re making up AI signals. Poor writing (or, in this case, slightly less than perfect writing) is not a phenomenon to which humans are immune.
If you like the idea of human-written content on the Internet, I recommend against joining the chorus of voices baselessly accusing humans of being AI bots - an unfortunate trend lately which only serves to disincentivize future contributions.
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.
> $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?
> The farmer making $600/yr is kind of a non-sequitur.
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.
The structure of each section gives away that it's mostly AI even without having to read the actual words. I'm sure it was AI + writer, but there's something about ending each section with 3-4 short, question-like sentences that is strongly AI. This is the same format as the successful LinkedIn slop so maybe it's not AI and just algo-induced writing.
Yup. It's the colons after every paragraph's first sentence:
> 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.
> The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system.
> It gets even better: there are people who will pay for credits beforehand.
It's just again and again and again. It's sounds 100% ChatGPT.
Maybe this is 100% written by hand by someone who reads too many ChatGPT-generated articles. Possibly the author just spends a ton of time chatting with ChatGPT and have picked up its style. Or it's just more AI-written than OP wants to admit.
Huh? Even if the farmer could save 100% of that daily $2 earning it's still 60 days worth of wages, which while not exactly $1,000,000, is still a lot for the the farmer.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I could handle this style when it wasn't everywhere. But now I've developed a hypersensitivity and can't bear it. It's like suddenly most of the internet is in a language I can't read.
I always wonder now if an article was written by GPT, or by someone who spent so much time chatting with GPT that they've started sounding like an LLM.
I hand wrote something recently that I re-read the next day and I'm worried I sound like an LLM now, I'm pretty sure I always sounded like one because I like it to make exhaustive lists in my sentences, but it makes me wonder if the bot is rubbing off on me.
It's part of our ecosystem now, we unconsciously mirror the patterns that we notice around us. This will include the language of LLMs because it has been invited in.
We always affect the environment, and it always affects us.
I hope that the consequence will be that we reduce the fluff, we stop writing to sound important or to justify a position, but instead use language to operate on the level of insight and shift our future into one that benefits us all.
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.
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.
They stop growing a full amount of low value subsistence crops needed to survive and start growing cash crops on some portion or on all of the land. Those cash crops have a higher value.
An example - say you have 4 acres of land and have a family of 4.
In the old world, say you needed one acre per person to grow enough food to the next crop harvest. This would be something like corn or potatoes that can keep. So all your land goes to growing food to survive and you cant make any money.
In the new world, with irrigation, you can do much more - say for the sake of argument, 4 times the crop, in the same space. Now, you only need 1/4 of an acre per person or an acre for everyone. So you grow vegetables that sell for 10 times as much on the 3/4s of land you have that you no longer need to use to survive.
Or even better, you grow high veg on the entire piece of land for income and use the cash to buy your corn and potatoes or whatever as you need them.
Just as all other commercial farmers do across the world.
In other words, solar allows them to become small business owners.
You've added the per month part. The article itself doesn't provide a time period but the two reasonable ones are month and year. For a year, that could actually be a reasonable amount of crops kept by a family for their own consumption and storage for later consumption.
maybe over the lifetime of the installation ? But then they say the battery must be replaced after 5 years... So 5*12 - 30 months = 30 months without paying. So one pays about half 2.17 per day over the 5 years. But that's still about 5 times more than 0.21$/day... I'd love to believe the article, but you're right, the maths seem wrong.
That's in a "bear case" section and honestly is far too bearish, warranties are typically 10+ years for. Unless you buy something super cheap that goes bad and the manufacturer is no longer around.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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/internation...
> 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"?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Are you confused by the idea that socialism and market are incompatible ideas, or is this a critique that they're merely selling and not manufacturing (therefore not fully owning the means of production)?
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".
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
If the value is staying with local workers (social ownership) instead of being captured by some multinational, that's closer to a textbook definition of socialism than capitalism. How's that double-speak?
The solar panels are produced by outside of the country with companies applying massive economies of scale. I don't know what about this is socialist.
I guess it is vaguely leftist in the sense that poor 3rd worlders are benefiting. But whether a system is capitalist or not does not hinge on this sort of grievance-based thinking.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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...
> Thanks to all the entrepreneurs and engineers over the past decades
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.
Like anything else that the world procures cheaply from China btw.
At this point this is a cliche.
There's tons of countries with much cheaper labor.
The reasons we build in china are not related to cheap labor, this hasn't been the case from quite some time.
Cheap labor is still a major factor, but infrastructure is definitely another.
This
I recal, the 1980s when Japanese manufacturing was dogy as. By 2000 it was the best
The same thing is happening in China
They are very good at everything they do, and getting better. Good.
the vast majority of solar panels are imaculately concieved in fully automated factorys,some where in fact there are NO people and they turn the lights off, as the robots are blind to those frequencys anyway. surviving solar PV production facilities operate on razor thin margins, and gargantuan volumes, the results of which are the electrification of most of the world, useing the absolute minimum of carbon. first lights, and dev8ces, small appliences, then the next step will be universal access to clean water and refrigeration, and then the worlds largest continent will be something to recon with.
This is a very rosy picture, unfortunately to the point of delusion. There are huge questions about the labour used in various stages, and the production of some of the raw materials is environmentally questionable.
Sure, but most of it happens in countries beyond china.
In any case, I literally have a cousin who's lived ten years in China building a 3d printing company, and the last reason he went to China was cheaper labor, that was borderline irrelevant.
> the vast majority of solar panels are imaculately concieved in fully automated factorys
What?
https://insights.issgovernance.com/posts/forced-labor-in-the...
Yes there is a bunch of automation in there, and still a ton of manual work and re-work. And it is done by the lowest cost labor, with a hefty government subsidy (by china) and a purchasing program.
This is pretty much bunk. There really is _very_ little space for manual unqualified work in solar panel manufacturing.
Does the supply chain contain less-than-free labor somewhere? Likely. Most probably somewhere in the raw material production, but it's not something that is a deciding factor in anything. These materials just as well likely go into making of iPhones and Lenovo laptops.
Some of the sacrifice is not voluntary - most panels contain parts and/or materials made by slaves in work camps.
I.e.,
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-xi... ("Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human Rights Concerns" / "The global industry is cutting some ties to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and companies are less transparent, a new report found")
Just like iPhones.
I think it's a bit different, I never heard a story of iPhones being manufactured like this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57124636
However most of the "slave" talk these days comes from highly politicized sources, so it's hard to cut through to the truth. For example, it's not likely that there's enough Uyghur slave labor to be involved with "most" of the polysilicon even from Xinjiang, much less the entire world's supply.
IMHO, like the cobalt getting mined by children from artisanal-scale mines in Africa, it's a very serious issue that gets trotted out more as a political football against the entire technology, rather than expressed as an earnest concern to solve the underlying problem.
> IMHO, like the cobalt getting mined by children from artisanal-scale mines in Africa
Not really an issue for solar battery systems as they typically use the cheaper LFP chemistry that has a much higher cycle count. The gravimetric density is a bit less, but that only really matters for high-performance mobility.
> I think it's a bit different
nice to discuss the degrees of slavery, little slavery is cool, little more perhaps not as much…
Talking about degrees of slavery is decidedly not cool. If you have documentation of iPhone supply chain using forced labor like I linked to, please do share rather than trying to be morally ambiguous.
You linked to a four and a half year old news article from a highly politicised source.
I wouldn’t call that “documentation”.
I wonder how much solar energy produced from these slave-built panels makes its way into iPhones.
Here in the US, the thirteenth amendment seems to think that a little slavery is cool.
As I understand it, much of the rest of the world has similar views, but I'm sure this varies a bit from country to country.
It's just that in the 21st century, we prefer to use some less-upsetting euphemism to refer to the practice domestically.
I dont think China deserves that hat tip. Their "commitment" was done years after all the major nations had committed to emissions reduction and seems to have only been done so they could sell the solution. They've made little attempt to reduce emissions and instead scaled their industrial base to capitalize on the demand from nations working to reduce their carbon footprint.
The only thing they've done to greenwash their image is spend money buying articles that present the false image of a green china.
besides toomuchtodo's nicely made argument, I would like to point that that many "major" nations (I'm assuming that refers to mostly western countries, correct me if I'm wrong) were able to focus on committing to emissions because they gave their dirty work (ie: mass manufacturing, waste disposal, resource extraction) to other countries, especially China.
toomuchtodo's arugments are deluded and ill respond to those in a bit. But I want to be clear that no one "gave" their dirty work to china. Industry in all these countries were priced out.
The Western and Asian governments increased environmental regulations and the cost to do business rose. In China the government ignored its climate obligations and slashed environmental regulations and increased coal investment to drive energy costs down and thus the manufacturing moved there. You think Germany couldnt have cut environmental regulations slapped down a few coal plants and made solar panels?
Thats why there was climate meetings to get everyone on the same track. If everyone is aligned in their goals then the economic hurt is easier to bare. China intentionally captialised on this and I do not think they deserve any praise for it.
This isn't factually accurate at all, and I would encourage some research so your statements can be more accurate.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener...
https://electrek.co/2025/09/02/h1-2025-china-installs-more-s...
> Global solar installations are breaking records again in 2025. In H1 2025, the world added 380 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity – a staggering 64% jump compared to the same period in 2024, when 232 GW came online. China was responsible for installing a massive 256 GW of that solar capacity. For context, it took until September last year to pass the 350 GW mark. This year, the milestone was achieved in June. That pace cements solar as the fastest-growing source of new electricity generation worldwide. In 2024, global solar output rose by 28% (+469 terawatt-hours) from 2023, more growth than any other energy source. Nicolas Fulghum, senior energy analyst at independent energy think tank Ember, said, “These latest numbers on solar deployment in 2025 defy gravity, with annual solar installations continuing their sharp rise. In a world of volatile energy markets, solar offers domestically produced power that can be rolled out at record speed to meet growing demand, independent of global fossil fuel supply chains.”
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064
> Utility-scale solar power capacity in China reached more than 880 gigawatts (GW) in 2024, according to China’s National Energy Administration. China has more utility-scale solar than any other country. The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024. Planned solar capacity projects will likely lead to continued growth in China’s solar capacity. More than 720 GW of solar capacity are in development: about 250 GW under construction, nearly 300 GW in pre-construction phases, and 177 GW of announced projects, according to the Global Solar Power Tracker compiled by Global Energy Monitor.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/20/chinas-coal-generation-...
> China’s coal-fired electricity generation took an unexpectedly sharp turn downward in the first quarter of 2025, signaling a potentially profound shift in the world’s largest coal-consuming economy. This wasn’t merely a seasonal dip or economic distress signal; rather, it represented a clear and structural turning point. Coal generation fell by approximately 4.7% year over year, significantly outpacing the overall grid electricity supply decline of just 1.3%. However, electricity demand, a better measure, went up by 1%. What gives?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/08/21/china-clean-renewable-e...
> China’s Decarbonization Is So Fast Even New Coal Plants Aren’t Stopping It. In multiple sectors—transportation, renewable energy, and overall electrification—the clear trend is toward a greener energy system. In fact, in areas like renewables and electric vehicles, China is now the world’s leading player. With the United States essentially abandoning the field, it will become even more dominant.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...
> China’s installations of wind and solar in May are enough to generate as much electricity as Poland, as the world’s second-biggest economy breaks further records with its rapid buildup of renewable energy infrastructure. China installed 93 GW of solar capacity last month – almost 100 solar panels every second, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Wind power installations reached 26 GW, the equivalent of about 5,300 turbines.
(it is somewhat irrelevant that China has accomplished spinning up a clean tech machine of this scale out of energy security reasons, as it still accomplishes the goal of decarbonizing their economy first, and then, the rest of the world as their spun up manufacturing flywheel exports cheap clean tech to the world)
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
> They've made little attempt to reduce emissions
They are a growing economy of a billion + people.
You need to realize this is a population that was virtually 90% poor just 3 decades ago.
>voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]
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.
Solar bribery is interestingly the exact opposite in some of the USA, where the solar contractors have basically gotten in bed with government for regulatory capture on the market.
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.
> 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.
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.
Interesting. My utility let me do my own service entrance and everything. They didn't even give a shit what I connected it to. I ended up powering a whole house and a trailer without anyone from the power company even looking at either of them (I added them after I built a 200 amp service entrance as just a stubbed entrance with no load).
If I added a solar system they would neither care nor have any idea. Only the government cares here.
Where did you build a house without a permit and get away with it?
I have a permit. And the permit basically says I don't have to get it inspected, show building plans, or do anything but tip my hat to the government.
Unless I add solar.
I feel very optimistic about battery storage for this reason. I would love nothing more than be able to run on battery for a week or so so I can give a middle finger to the utility and just rip out the grid connection. No more solar inverter or power limit permits needed.
"I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid"
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." ?
Rural AZ
>"my power company wouldn't let me use grid-tied solar without it being permitted." ?
Nah they didn't give a shit what I connected it to. I literally stubbed a 200 amp service entrance on vacant land then just went wild connecting it to whatever I like. I shot the shit with their engineer when they ran secondary off the power pole and that was it, I've never seen them again.
> no government inspectors are coming by anyway, then it doesn't matter.
I don't know for certain but having an unpermitted solar panel visible via satellite would likely trigger a visit.
What law governs this? I'm familiar with a lot of restrictions on grid-tie systems, but I've never heard of it being this strict for something that could (presumably) be done without a back feed.
I mean, are you saying that someone sticking up a few panels+batteries to run an electric fence, gate, and camera system has to have permits?
This all seems strange.
Great, so it sounds like installing unpermitted solar at your house is about as illegal as jaywalking, and you probably shouldn't worry about it so much.
As long as it's not visible by satellite, yes.
just never upset the wrong person that knows they have leverage over you keeping your home.
Don't people have guns in AZ, especially rural?
I wouldn't want to go to someone's home to hassle them about their DIY solar installation.
People have guns in all of the US. Sure, AZ ownership might be around double that of CA, but that's just going from 1 in 4 to 1 in 2. The odds are high either way.
Here in Austria, grid costs are now on par with the actual electricity cost. Each are ca €0.1 per kWh now, plus again that in taxes.
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.
>Once 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.
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?
Any way that is more fair for the end user.
Why should a solar generator, who has virtually zero inputs, demand the same rate as a gas or coal generator who’s costs are dominated by inputs?
Where’s the promised savings to the end user? That’s right, there aren’t any.
And people bang on about solar being cheaper.
No it isn’t.
Solar electricity is the same price as gas peaker-plant electricity. Everywhere I’ve looked, same story.
And there’s no solar power without gas.
If you can make a great profit from solar, you are incentivised to build more of it for an even greater profit.
Soon there is so much solar that you don't need the expensive gas most of the time.
comments like this really show that many people with strong opinions do not understand how the electricity grid, electricity markets or electricity economics work.
Electricity is priced at the edge entirely because demand must match supply at all times. You either meet all electric demand or someone will go without power. This is why marginal pricing exists and this is why the most expensive generator is always the last to be accepted. This is why electricity at night is cheaper that during the day.
Please, if you do not understand what you are talking about, it's ok to just say that you don't know. Don't spread misinformation like this.
> 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.
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.
It absolutely does not.
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.
Unfortunately, all such calculations are egocentric. People assume that everyone can use solar panels for 13 days 2 weeks, and when needed, we’ll just get electricity from the grid. But what they don’t take into account is that when there’s load today but none tomorrow, the grid becomes unstable. 2) This also increases costs. You might save electricity consumption in 14 times, but your expenses for grid electricity can increase in 14 times, because the grid still needs to be maintained — staff must be kept at power plants to ensure you can be supplied with 100% of your energy at any moment.
These people don't have access to the grid. That's the issue to begin with.
The tricky thing in cold climates is the part of the year when solar power is lowest but electricity use, for heating, is highest. Sometimes they have hydro or something.
When I go to https://model.energy/ and ask it to solve for providing steady output in China from 100% renewable energy (wind/solar/battery/hydrogen) at minimum cost using 2030 cost assumptions and 2011 weather data, the solar curtailment is just 7.3% (and most of the energy is coming from solar, not wind). If I remove hydrogen and solve again, solar curtailment increases to 16.7%. "200% overcapacity" is completely bogus.
And what was the storage requirement? I just ran those parameters myself with China's 2.9 TW of constant electricity demand, and the storage requirement was over 70,000 GWh of battery storage.
By comparison, global battery production is around 1,000 GWh per year.
It's their 2060 plan. Take it up with the CPP.
Press 'X' to doubt.
Assuming someone actually told you that, I think you need to reevaluate the credibility of that source.
Sounds good until you try to run a business. Having businesses randomly out of commission is not a way to bring country from developing to developed status.
If that’s your first thought, then you’ll hate this influential perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Even if you have an under-provisioned solar+storage solution and don't want to splurge for a generator, even on cloudy days you still get power, just less.
Generally businesses are really great at balancing costs, and for highly-cost-constrained businesses if you give them 95% uptime at half the cost, the equation becomes clear. And in Africa, if the option is 95% uptime or 0% uptime, the choice is even clearer.
Better make sure they don't depend on AWS, then.
> And grid has a lot of 9s.
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.
Same here in rural far north New Zealand.
I actually counted the number of outages after I got my battery unit in June -- it was six in five weeks, for anything from a couple of seconds to 30 minutes, which I noticed because the unit clicked over to running from the battery, and the clock on the oven (which is still only mains powered) flashes until I go over and hit a button.
In April I had a 40 hour outage after a storm. That's what caused me to order the brand new Pecron E3600LFP, first New Zealand model shipment in "early" June (I received mine June 19).
In February 2023 I had a 4 day outage during/after a storm.
There are even, every 2 or 3 months, scheduled and notified 9 AM - 3 PM outages for equipment maintenance, tree trimming etc. Just those alone lower the grid reliability to around 99.5%.
Six days outage in three years -- let's call it four -- drops grid reliability by another 0.4%.
So, yeah, two 9s is about right.
With the Pecron base unit (US$999 at the moment still on Halloween special, $1259 before that) I simply don't notice any outage under 4 hours, and that's even with a full winter heating load. In fact I deliberately turn the mains to it off from 7-9 AM and 5-9 PM every day.
A 4 hour outage was a little close sometimes, so in August I added a 3kWh expansion battery ($699 on pecron.com right now).
With 6kWh I can run my fridge, computers, Starlink, some LED lighting for 36 hours. Or 30 hours with typical kitchen appliance usage added (espresso machine, toaster, kettle, microwave, air fryer).
Or virtually forever now I added 6x 440W solar panels (cost me US$400 total) to it, which still generates around 200W between them in even the worse overcast and rain.
I'm running this stuff as a mini off-grid system, not connected to the house wiring at all -- except plugged into a standard socket to charge the battery if needed. I also have a $450 2kW petrol generator which I can use to charge the battery if needed, but needing that should be very rare.
Total cost: under US$3k. More like $2.3k at the current Halloween special prices.
https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/1984782313386099022
The grid has a lot of 9s, but in a lot of places losing power for a day or two after a storm is not unusual at all. The grid per se being fine but your actual neighborhood being dark for a couple days is a pretty common experience in some places.
If you have ever lost power for just 12 hours in an entire year, you're already down to only two 9's: 99.863%
I've never lived anywhere where the power didn't go down for at least a few (cumulative) days a year.
Last time my building lost power was about 19 years ago, when I was living in a Welsh valley halfway between the two nearest villages.
Since then, none of the extended Portsmouth conurbation, Sheffield, Cambridge, rural Cambridgeshire or Berlin have had any problems big enough to even notice while I've lived in them.
I have seen at least two circuit breakers trip in that time though.
I don’t know where you live, but I experienced outage in Budapest once in at least 10 years while I lived there. And only one phase was out, not all. We even lamented with my friends that we didn’t even remember when was the last time when something like that happened. I never had to reconfigure the clock on my microwave, just for daylight saving time. I know that even 30 kms from there my granddad still experiences outages monthly, but there are places where that happens very-very rarely nowadays.
And, for a refrigerator and a lot of loads, being down for 2 days straight is way worse than a few hours a year. losing 48 hours of supply a year if broken into 2 hour chunks is not nearly as bad as losing 48 consecutive hours.
I get your point, but I personally would be grumpy if I lost power for two hours twice a month. I realize that is rich considering this article is about people who are lucky to get any amount of power reliably
When I lived in a city proper, the grid was doing well to maintain 98% uptime. Multiple day long outages were the rule, not uncommon to lose power 3-5 days in a row.
Now I live in a rural area and it's uncommon to avoid outages more than a month. We have an automatic transfer switch and fuel generator from previous owners and it saves hundreds of dollars in frozen food.
This is in the US by the way. If you're investing in a transfer switch and generator now, the cost is going to quickly approach a modest solar + battery set up with a whole house inverter, and of course, you save money all year that way, not just in outages.
I lost power for 10h in my city recently and it was a big fucking deal. The last 5 years that's the first time that happened. I would say I have less than a hour of downtime per year in the other years
PS I don't live in the US.
Can confirm. I live in a US city and the only 9 involved is maybe the very first number. I've lived here just over a year and we've had 1 full day without power and probably 8 to 10 short outages between a few seconds and several 10s of minutes. I'm adding batteries and solar permitting be damned.
Wild! I’ve lived in Chicago and San Francisco and have never lost power for more than an hour. And can’t remember the last time it went out at all, maybe 2 years ago?
What city do you live in?
I'm (not GP) in the Chicago burbs and expect to lose power 1-3 times a year. Usually it's for less than twelve hours but last year it was out for three days straight. Most recent outage was ~10 minutes long a couple weeks ago - I still haven't set the oven clock.
The cause around here is usually storm + trees + above ground power lines, plus a low enough population density that you're not top priority for the utility company.
Checks out - you aren’t in a city.
I was surprised that the original comment said they were in a city
> Each 9 of reliability for infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive. And grid has a lot of 9s.
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.
My concern is that it deflates any impetus to actually solve the problems of regulatory capture, profiteering, and other corruption.
Not everybody can afford the up front costs of installing solar + battery storage, plus replacement when the PV cells and batteries inevitably reach EoL. These people will be left behind on a decaying grid nobody with political capital wants to fix or at the mercy of landlords.
I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.
Have you heard how companies makes money on the US grid?
Oh boy.
They are incentivized to BULID but not to maintain or upgrade because that grants them guarantee rate of return.
It was enlightening to see what caused the big blackout during a big snowfall in texas a few years ago
It is funny to me how fractally perverse systems gets when a centralised authority refuses to directly solve a problem but rather decide have it solved by third party uncooperative players by creating an endless stream of byzantine rules to force the solution to be a twisted copy of what the centralised authority could have done by itself.
Of course there are failure modes in any approach but "oh no! Herding cats is hard. Who could have imagined!" is funny to me
PVWatts will help you figure this out: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov
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.
keep in mind the limitations of these forecasting calculations. On an AVERAGE day, assuming AVERAGE weather, assuming AVERAGE load, you should be fine.
The trouble with relying on the weather for your electricity is that it is entirely possible that you will go five days straight with cloud cover, limited to no solar generation and then be freezing. This is the problem that the electricity grid solves with varied sources of generation.
Distributed can do redundancy. It’s relatively cheap.
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.
> And grid has a lot of 9s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Not as many as you might think.
A grid in a remote place in Africa would have less 9's than self reliance on solar.
> And grid has a lot of 9s.
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.
I read a decent essay about the difference between solar and wind reliability and fossil fuel reliability.
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.
https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
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.
Apparently solar panels that have fake cracks are moderately popular in some parts of the world to deter theft and similar behavior.
Counterfeit panels are also a huge problem
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/507496-knock-off-solar...
Poor countries have these problems, yes, but they don’t stop whatever, they just add some expense to it. In certain areas of Mexico, businesses have to pay taxes to the local cartel, but if you do, they’ll leave you alone-and they know that if they demand too much, that’s actually undermining their own self-interest. Effectively, the cartel is just another level of local government, taxing you like all the others do. An armed gang or warlord somewhere in Africa or Syria or Afghanistan very often functions similarly.
Sounds like taxes and government to me and that hasn't (so far) stopped people from building.
In fact many people here praise those gangs, and wish they were bigger and demand more money.
Since once all the land is accounted for, there is no such thing as construction without destruction, I am glad that destruction is difficult.
> Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US.
How do they deal with the cost of storage for anything non trivial completely eclipsing any savings?
Well it doesn't eclipse savings, you can still get about 12% annual ROI in developing countries with a battery.
And many will make do without a battery, just relying on power during the day.
> Well it doesn't eclipse savings
I mean it's several hundred fold more expensive I'd call that "eclipse" but maybe you have a higher threshold for that word?
> And many will make do without a battery, just relying on power during the day.
I mean I guess that's an option if you don't want these places to advance in quality of life or produce much of anything.
It increases costs of a solar system to about 1.5-2.2x (so an extra 50-120%), not several hundred fold. The hybrid inverter is slightly more expensive than a normal inverter, then you add the 4-16 kWh battery which is pretty cheap nowadays.
In many places more of your electric bill pays for the grid than for the power.
Permitting hassle? What do you need permits for?
To build meaningful solar on your house/property would require permits most municipalities.
There are a few US Solar wholesaler companies that will draft and sign engineering drawings for a roof-top permit application in most states. Some folks claim https://www.pegasussolar.com/ was inexpensive, and might be worth a call.
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
Rural electrification in the US hugely proves your point. Yes, grid costs are fantastically expensive!!
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.
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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.
Hey there, author (Skander from Climate Drift) here.
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
Hey in the part 3 that introduces PAYG it jumps from $100 down $40-65 a month to $0.21 a day / $1.50 a week.
It seems your mixing up examples since they're off by an order of magnitude. Once I read that my trust in everything else started breaking down and I couldn't be bothered to read the rest with the same level of engagement.
Thanks! Maybe I'm a little too sensitive to AI signals. I actually really love the story and content, but if it was AI generated I didn't know how much to actually believe it. I still don't know who you are, but it's probably less likely to be totally fabricated if a human is responsible for it. So, thanks, I'll give it another read.
Rather than too sensitive, I think you’re making up AI signals. Poor writing (or, in this case, slightly less than perfect writing) is not a phenomenon to which humans are immune.
If you like the idea of human-written content on the Internet, I recommend against joining the chorus of voices baselessly accusing humans of being AI bots - an unfortunate trend lately which only serves to disincentivize future contributions.
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.
> $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?
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.
don't know if the article is chatgpt or not, but "might as well be a million dollars" is a super common way of saying "completely out of reach"
And from that $2 you probably still have to spend something on food / shelter / clothing, so it's not like you could just save it all.
> The farmer making $600/yr is kind of a non-sequitur.
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.
The structure of each section gives away that it's mostly AI even without having to read the actual words. I'm sure it was AI + writer, but there's something about ending each section with 3-4 short, question-like sentences that is strongly AI. This is the same format as the successful LinkedIn slop so maybe it's not AI and just algo-induced writing.
Yup. It's the colons after every paragraph's first sentence:
> 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.
> The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system.
> It gets even better: there are people who will pay for credits beforehand.
It's just again and again and again. It's sounds 100% ChatGPT.
Maybe this is 100% written by hand by someone who reads too many ChatGPT-generated articles. Possibly the author just spends a ton of time chatting with ChatGPT and have picked up its style. Or it's just more AI-written than OP wants to admit.
Huh? Even if the farmer could save 100% of that daily $2 earning it's still 60 days worth of wages, which while not exactly $1,000,000, is still a lot for the the farmer.
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.
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.
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
They mixed up the numbers for residential solar (Solar King) and agriculture solar (SunCulture).
The $100 down + $65/mo is for agriculture.
(not that the numbers are correct or make sense)
Isn't $6 a month the cost of the subscription, but the $40-56 a month the cost of the installation?
this, they also say 45-60/month which is NOT 0.21/day
It's obviously AI generated. Was a bummer because I was interested in the premise.
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.
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.
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.
This article has ChatGPT written all over it
I could handle this style when it wasn't everywhere. But now I've developed a hypersensitivity and can't bear it. It's like suddenly most of the internet is in a language I can't read.
I always wonder now if an article was written by GPT, or by someone who spent so much time chatting with GPT that they've started sounding like an LLM.
I hand wrote something recently that I re-read the next day and I'm worried I sound like an LLM now, I'm pretty sure I always sounded like one because I like it to make exhaustive lists in my sentences, but it makes me wonder if the bot is rubbing off on me.
It's part of our ecosystem now, we unconsciously mirror the patterns that we notice around us. This will include the language of LLMs because it has been invited in. We always affect the environment, and it always affects us. I hope that the consequence will be that we reduce the fluff, we stop writing to sound important or to justify a position, but instead use language to operate on the level of insight and shift our future into one that benefits us all.
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)
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?
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.
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.
They stop growing a full amount of low value subsistence crops needed to survive and start growing cash crops on some portion or on all of the land. Those cash crops have a higher value.
An example - say you have 4 acres of land and have a family of 4.
In the old world, say you needed one acre per person to grow enough food to the next crop harvest. This would be something like corn or potatoes that can keep. So all your land goes to growing food to survive and you cant make any money.
In the new world, with irrigation, you can do much more - say for the sake of argument, 4 times the crop, in the same space. Now, you only need 1/4 of an acre per person or an acre for everyone. So you grow vegetables that sell for 10 times as much on the 3/4s of land you have that you no longer need to use to survive.
Or even better, you grow high veg on the entire piece of land for income and use the cash to buy your corn and potatoes or whatever as you need them.
Just as all other commercial farmers do across the world.
In other words, solar allows them to become small business owners.
> $2,400/acre/month
You've added the per month part. The article itself doesn't provide a time period but the two reasonable ones are month and year. For a year, that could actually be a reasonable amount of crops kept by a family for their own consumption and storage for later consumption.
If it's monthly, that is pretty high.
It's an AI generated article full of errors. Simple arithmetic errors. Probably copied from a video or another article.
maybe over the lifetime of the installation ? But then they say the battery must be replaced after 5 years... So 5*12 - 30 months = 30 months without paying. So one pays about half 2.17 per day over the 5 years. But that's still about 5 times more than 0.21$/day... I'd love to believe the article, but you're right, the maths seem wrong.
That's in a "bear case" section and honestly is far too bearish, warranties are typically 10+ years for. Unless you buy something super cheap that goes bad and the manufacturer is no longer around.
ChatGPT math.
Even if it's not written by ChatGPT, it's the /exact style/ used by the linkedin AI evangelists
It has a voice don't it...
"Modular. Distributed. Digital. Financed by the people using it, subsidized by the carbon it avoids."
Every second paragraph thinks it's Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone.
Yeah pure shit for us to eat.
I always wonder what the point is.
"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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
This reads like a timeline in a game of Civ. Love it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/internation...
> 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"?
> 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.
Same in Pakistan: 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.
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_.
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...
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.
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.
>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?
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)
To be fair, prices in Aus have been heavily subsidised until recently.
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.
There's also nothing stopping African communities from building peer-to-peer microgrids if they want to.
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!
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?
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.
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.
This was one of the most interesting things I read today- good job Skander!
> 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.
Africans doing it for themselves
Who else could?
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.
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.
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".
> people saying this is AI-generated: why?
Because they themselves have nothing interesting to say
Lack of sources. Questionable numbers and math. Tone. Emoji. In short: everything.
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.
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!
> 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.
The M-PESA transaction fees are high.
<sarc>M-PESA helps fight poverty through the ingenious application of a thousand paper cuts. </sarc>
According to this page: 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.
> 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?
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.
Good story but jesus fucking christ the ChatGPT. I cannot bear it.
AI slop writing, but interesting information nonetheless
Someone really wants to pump solar here lol. I get it, the retail solar bags must be heavy for many
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-d...
[1] - https://globalpi.org/research/south-africas-solar-boom/
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/pakistans-solar-revo...
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.
> 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
This is embarrassing, getting frontpaged for a ChatGPT article with bullshit maths.
Sick and tired of these AI articles. The cheery friendly tone at the beginning is classic example of ChatGPT.
Flagged.
Solarpunk with capitalism is kinda missing the point IMO.
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.
solarpunk is just socialism with afrofuturist aesthetics. happy for them!
Funny. I read the article and couldn’t shake the feeling that this is exactly how capitalism lifts whole countries out of poverty.
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.
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
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.
What quality of life improvements are you thinking of that weren't based on mass electrification and mechanization of agriculture?
What's capitalism to you?
A system based on ownership
People buying and selling things with minimal interference from protection rackets
an economic system which rewards winners and tears itself apart in a winner-takes-all tragic finale without an impartial regulator/judge.
Sure, capitalism has been working great for Africa since the 1700! The poverty was caused by not enough capitalism.
I find that arguments against capitalism like this are unconvincing.
It is like saying that a sword is useless technology. It's directional: the pointy end goes in the other guy.
How is small businesses selling solar panels to people socialism?
It's Power to the People.
Are you confused by the idea that socialism and market are incompatible ideas, or is this a critique that they're merely selling and not manufacturing (therefore not fully owning the means of production)?
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".
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
If the value is staying with local workers (social ownership) instead of being captured by some multinational, that's closer to a textbook definition of socialism than capitalism. How's that double-speak?
The solar panels are produced by outside of the country with companies applying massive economies of scale. I don't know what about this is socialist.
I guess it is vaguely leftist in the sense that poor 3rd worlders are benefiting. But whether a system is capitalist or not does not hinge on this sort of grievance-based thinking.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
Really, really great article.
Yep. I also love my daily dose of cheap, broken, and mostly fictional AI slop :)
I guess that is the negative view - but I didn't view it as that way
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.
> 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.
@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")
But solar energy itself cost more than other form of electricity.
But who is driving cost of solar? Is it China?
This is cool, but I don't think "move everyone off of government managed utilities to private profit extractors" is very Solar Punk.
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".