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.
> Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months
> replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene)" in the next paragraph.
If it's $40-65/month that's $1.33 to $2.17 per day, not $0.21/day (assuming month with 30 days)
> Crop yields increase 3-5×
> Farmers go from $600/acre to $14,000/acre revenue
Wouldn't that revenue jump require a 23x increase in crop yield?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every second paragraph thinks it's Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone.
I always wonder what the point is.
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...
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.
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/507496-knock-off-solar...
In fact many people here praise those gangs, and wish they were bigger and demand more money.
How do they deal with the cost of storage for anything non trivial completely eclipsing any savings?
And many will make do without a battery, just relying on power during the day.
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.
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.
Unless I add solar.
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.
If I added a solar system they would neither care nor have any idea. Only the government cares here.
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.
I wouldn't want to go to someone's home to hassle them about their DIY solar installation.
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.
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.
nice to discuss the degrees of slavery, little slavery is cool, little more perhaps not as much…
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.
The only thing they've done to greenwash their image is spend money buying articles that present the false image of a green china.
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)
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.
What city do you live in?
I've never lived anywhere where the power didn't go down for at least a few (cumulative) days a year.
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.
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.
PS I don't live in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Not as many as you might think.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Of course there are failure modes in any approach but "oh no! Herding cats is hard. Who could have imagined!" is funny to me
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
The $100 down + $65/mo is for agriculture.
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...
Inspiring. My only critique would be that the excited tone (and exclusivity) ends up detracting from the achievement and opportunity.
This a thing that needs to be more widely known. If you saying, as people here sometimes do, "oh but my new tech could help people move money in poor parts of the world" (not mentioning any specific tech right now) and you're not familiar with M-PESA, then you're just out of your depth and talking foolishly. The real world has already moved past you.
<sarc>M-PESA helps fight poverty through the ingenious application of a thousand paper cuts. </sarc>
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.
Flagged.
> 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".
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.
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?
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!
Being self reliant is indeed "very punk".
To what historic people did electricity come all by itself, without them haivng to figure out and build anything themselves?
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"?
But who is driving cost of solar? Is it China?
> This worked great if you were electrifying America in the 1930s, when labor was cheap, materials were subsidized, and the government could strong-arm right-of-way access. It works less great when you’re trying to reach a farmer four hours from the nearest paved road who earns $600 per year.
It's structured like a contrasting pair of sentences, but it just doesn't make any sense. The things it's calling out in 1930s America aren't - or don't have to be - dissimilar from modern Africa. The farmer making $600/yr is kind of a non-sequitur.
> But there was still a massive, seemingly insurmountable barrier: $120 upfront might as well be $1 million when you earn $2/day.
No, it's 60 days of earnings. It's just a weird sentence. Taking a median US wage of $60k/yr or $165/day, 60 days of earnings is $9,900. "Might as well be $1 million" is a wild take, and a sloppy way to say it.
So for the record: This isn't a chatgpt article, it's something I wrote over the weekend while I was down with a flu (although the idea has been running through my head for a while).
@America's 1930s: Most of US rural electrification happened at this point (90% of urban homes hat electricity, only around 10% of farms). Rural Electrification Act from 1936 changed that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
It 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.
Except that chip that can remotely shut it off is still in it, waiting for a ransom attacker.
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...
>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?
r14c•2h ago
dingnuts•2h ago
anyway, I hope they get electricity. the article said a lot about markets for something related to an ideology that rejects them.
HeinzStuckeIt•45m ago
This is false. Senegal attempted small-s socialism under its first postcolonial regime (under Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1960–1980) and has had democratic political succession to the present day.
baq•2h ago
czbond•1h ago
griffzhowl•1h ago
tick_tock_tick•1h ago
r14c•1h ago
baq•36m ago
manoDev•1h ago
p1necone•2h ago
jandrese•2h ago
AtlasBarfed•2h ago
Capitalism is really centralized monopolistic oligarchical control in modern media parlance.
Distributed empowering democratic grassroots level capitalistic allocation of resources that don't provide centralized control and administration is "socialism".
Avicebron•1h ago
onraglanroad•1h ago
> 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.
manoDev•1h ago
manoDev•1h ago