This revolution also has a dark side:
People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them.
This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world.
It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over.
More details for the interested here: https://solar-aid.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/State-of-Re...
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.
Buried lede (in that none of the comments mention this): wireless micro-financing without transaction fees works for 10 African countries and is enabling a rural energy revolution. (though M-PESA isn't without controversy, and clearly it could benefit from competition)
Meanwhile, developed nations have millions of people who pay up to 500% interest on payday loans, 29% interest on credit cards, and can't get bank accounts. Small businesses can't grow quickly due to (among other things) high transaction fees cutting into already-meager profits. We only hear news about big business and products and services for people with money. We forget that if we want our economy to grow, and adopt things like increased personal/residential solar power, we need to unburden the poorest, grow their own wealth, and infuse that back into the economy.
Perhaps we should stop obsessing so much over AI, and obsess a little more over making it less expensive and difficult to be poor. Seems to be working in Kenya.
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...
Isn't it a shame that 90% of the comments here are complaining that AI was involved in producing this article, and none of the comments are from a tech nerd kid in Africa who has electricity because of the solar schemes mentioned in the article?
I want to hear from the people affected.
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 phenomenon is vastly underestimated. Electricity can also amplify the influence of TikTok and Temu — a world no longer constrained by energy shortages, with social media less dominated by the West, and a marketplace for cheap and affordable industrial goods. Together, these forces will essentially curb uncontrolled population growth in any country and gradually raise living standards. (Also pakistan and many other countries)
Even North Korea is undergoing some changes. The country has long suffered from energy shortages, and the gradual spread of solar power can help address some of these issues. However, I doubt that North Korea’s geographic conditions will allow for much improvement.
And considering geography, if I understand correctly, the Middle East has once again gained a significant advantage?
This article has ChatGPT written all over it
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.
All the back to the land decentralized survivalists solarpunk people can do just about everything except for rare earth refining. That's the part of solarpunk that can only happen in China because nobody anywhere wants that in their backyard. One of the more interesting political/economic questions is can a non-authoritarian country that values environmental protection do rare earth refining, or is the ecological harm in isolation too abhorrent to the members of the community where it is done to counterbalance the ecological good it does elsewhere? In an authoritarian country, you can just tell the people who live around the processing plant to relocate or suffer because it helps the environment elsewhere. In a non-authoritarian country, the local people will all reject it because it will degrade the quality of life and their land. This has been happening in the backlash against mining in Madagascar for example.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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?
> 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.
I heard a fascinating interview with Sandeep Vaheesan[1]
He said in the early days of American electrification, private power companies wouldn't build lines to rural customers because it wasn't expected to be profitable. So rural customers joined together and formed public power companies and got the job done. Not only that, they innovated many cost saving technique which the private power companies eventually adopted.
Public power cooperatives still exist, but have themselves become ossified and commercialized over the years.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miyfj98lR38 (starts at 21:18)
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.
I understand why this is happening in Africa first — lack of infrastructure makes the solution much more competitive. But as prices fall, it seems that this might be cost competitive in other areas as well. Selfishly, I’d love to see this in the US! Any big issues that would prevent adoption in the US?
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.
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.
"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.
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_.
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?
It's hard to overstate the degree to which the United States is giving away the future to any country that can produce clean energy technology at scale.
Lithium is abundant in the United States. Nothing in the component chain of solar and battery systems is so complex it couldn't be made here. We could establish trade with African countries like China has, instead of doing these pointless tariffs. But for idiotic cultural reasons, we are not doing any of those things.
The world will permanently shift away from the fossil fuel economy sooner than most people think, and it will disrupt the entire system of dollar-denominated oil that underpins the U.S. empire. It's glaringly obvious where this is headed. And yet!
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...
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!
The problem is that there is no true manufacturing nor repairability capacity for high density electronics in africa. Hell, our customer in SA asks us to buy spare components for them because getting parts there from our favourite distributors is a nightmare.
My parents are involved in an organization that helps developing parts of Togo. They helped build wells, structures (schools, bathrooms, .. ) and give material for agriculture and light manufacture, fund for tutoring, such things. All the electric and mechanical machinery they donated, including vehichles, are older models and the reason is simple: they must be serviced with the available technology, and they must be simple to service.
They made a conference in our town to showcase the project and i addressed the obvious elephant in the room: what about electricity? They are dependend on china for cheap panels and inverters, and they do not want to use alternative sources that require way less tech to operate: biofuel for example. They say it's not as efficient, and i concour, but i feel there is also a geopolitic issue, they do know they are making themselves dependent on china and there might be a small print condition for the cheap solar.. and they were elusive on the answers.
Also, not programs to train electronics technicians in the next future. If i ever get involved i'd like to help with setting up repair shops and train technicians. We'll see in the next few years what happens.
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.
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.
>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?
"This worked great if you were electrifying America in the 1930s, when labor was cheap, materials were subsidized, and the government could strong-arm right-of-way access."
It was good in the moment. The issue is maintaining it without the same cheap labor and materials. PG&E in California is a perfect example. There is no way for them to maintain the grid which is aging and causing fires. We are going to have to switch to a slightly similar regional power generation/storage model.
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.
Overall, democratization of utility and finance is great, but this article is so inconsistent with the pricing and statements it really reads like a sycophantic llm wrote the entire thing.
Here is the actual numbers from Sun King on their entry level system (Home Plus):
Basic (dc-only) panel for lighting and cellular/usb use:
Lighting: 1 x 240-lumen LED tube light, 2 x 120-lumen LED hanging lights. Up to 43 hours of light on a single charge on low-power mode
Battery: 3.2 V, 19.2 Wh lithium ferro-phosphate (LFP) battery. 10-year battery lifespan with typical daily use (over 2,500 cycles)
Solar: 7 Wp, 9 V solar panel with 8-metre rodent-resistant cable
Output ports: 2 x 12 V DC output ports for lighting (550 mA max. total), 1 x USB-A phone charging port (5 V, 1 A)
Larger dc system:
Home 500X + Pedestal Fan
Lighting: 4 x LED tube lights with individual wall switches, 200 lumen per tube light on max setting, 20 times brighter than a kerosene lamp, One motion-sensing 100 lumen security lamp
Battery: 141 Wh lithium-ion NMC battery, Up to 19 hours of runtime on low power mode. 5-year battery lifespan with typical daily use
Solar: 50 W, polycrystalline solar panel with aluminium frame and a 6 m cable
Charging Ports: 2 x 5 V/1.8 A USB ports for charging mobile devices, 4 x 12 V(+/-3 V) ports. One port is specially designed to power Sun King DC appliances
So yes, this does seem pretty viable in terms of Upfront, TCO and payment options.
Pretty sure this article is at least partially AI-written. Interesting content. Annoying style.
With famously weak energy grid[1], South Africa would certainly benefit from the same approach. Sadly, it seems, it isn't considered en masse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis
> 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"?
Kenya is an equatorial country so they basically have steady ~12 hours of sunlight every day year round. Pretty cool!
There's also nothing stopping African communities from building peer-to-peer microgrids if they want to.
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.
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.
The figures quoted are way out of date. Solar is already USD 0.11 per Watt and has been for over a year.
Solar is scalable. The cheapest system 10W with a powerbank and phone charger and 3 x 3W LED lights as about USD 20. Next level is more lights and a fan and the high end is a TV and fan powered by solar.
Charging phones and "studying at night" are cliches in this context. It completely misses the point. Yes, it's important. And obviously happening.
The article zooms in on cliche 2-3 use cases that while important show a lack of imagination and awareness of what's actually happening. Here are two more not mentioned in the article, at all. And they are transformational.
1) EVs. By that I don't mean the luxury four wheel road yachts common in the rich part of the world but its much more common two wheel variant: the e-bike. These are being produced by the hundreds of millions. The four wheel versions are are a rounding error. They show up all over Asia and Africa. We in the west have no concept of how important these things are to the local economies there.
You can charge those for next to nothing with solar. Most of these things only have a few hundred wh of battery on board. A single solar panel can top them up in an hour or so. What's the impact of that on in a place where subsistence farming is common and people have to walk hours to find a generator powered point to charge their phone or get some water? Well the obvious thing happens: lots of people now have affordable transport that doesn't require an arm and a leg to power.
2) AI. I know, we're all tired of the daily dose of AI utopia on HN. But like world + dog in the west has access to ChatGPT for free, so does all of Africa. "Hey chatgpt, what's a water pump and where can I find water here?". That's already a thing. AI usage is widely spread across Africa; and not just among the elite. Every subsistence farmer with a smart phone (most of them at this point) can now ask questions like that. That's massive. Knowledge is power. This is hugely empowering. People are naturally curious and now they can ask AIs for information instead of having to ask the local witch, village elder, or the nearest white person that actually had an education. That's very liberating.
Solar panels are going to be like smartphones were 15 years ago, everybody will have access to cheap power. And yes you can power one with the other. But it's really about what else you can power? IMHO this will transform some of the poorest/undeveloped regions in this world in a few mere years/decades.
The idea that Africa is skipping the grid in the same way it skipped landlines is compelling, but this goes even deeper: it’s infrastructure as a product, not a government service. And it’s being financed by the end user and the global North’s carbon tab. Wild.
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.
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 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.
This was one of the most interesting things I read today- good job Skander!
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?
> 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.
An interesting response from an LLM. I’d love to hear more from the person who prompted it.
> 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?
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...
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.
Africans doing it for themselves
Who else could?
AI slop writing, but interesting information nonetheless
The story is great, but is it just me who's tired of this style with ultra short sentences? It's getting to the point where it's distracting.
What do they do during the night? Do they use batteries to store the energy?
Good story but jesus fucking christ the ChatGPT. I cannot bear it.
it will get more exciting once those solar panel can charge electronic cars
People should learn to never trust a #1 ranked hacker news article. There are almost always hidden motives. The author (GPT???), or a company mentioned in the article likely is connected to a VC, or YC or both!
Don't engage with slop that seems lazily written, if not completely generated by Claude(sorry author if I'm wrong, I know you are claiming you wrote it but idk). This stuff kinda comes off like an article written on behalf of SunCulture or SunKing so they can go, hey guys look we were featured on a front page of HN article.
This is such a bunch of nonsense!
The ROI of using a diesel-powered pump isn't so high so few farmers have one. It means, they work well and those who don't have one, still get some water for their fields, too.
A solar pump is many times cheaper to run. It means ROI of using it is huge and many more people will get them. But it doesn't mean there will now be magically more groundwater to pump!
Which mean, those who don't have a pump, will soon find themselves completely without water - it will be all sucked out by people with pumps. So they will also HAVE to install those pumps.
As a result, no one will be better off because same amount of water will be redistributed among same number of farmers. Even an "arms race" of more and more powerful pumps is likely when people will realise theirs are not working as good anymore now than everyone has one.
All until the point where ROI of having a solar pump will become negligible.
Farmers will not be better off - they will be worse off. Chinese will make money - money funded by Western funds for "reducing" carbon emissions which do not really reduce anything as they are "replacing" diesel pumps 90+% of which did not exist.
And yes, people will also have a little bit of electricity at home - about 100x less than in grid-connected Western homes - a 200-watt panel per household at about 15% average output or maybe 20 KWh per month. It's not enough to run a blowdryer, or kettle, not even a fridge. But enough to charge a tablet to watch online TV - and become far right.
Bingo, enshittification comes to Africa, in it's purest form.
Only good thing about it is that money will go to Chinese vs Arabs for diesel fuel. Chinese are a problem that will gradually solve itself due to demography, while Arabs will not.
This is embarrassing, getting frontpaged for a ChatGPT article with bullshit maths.
Reading things like this makes me feel like there must be fundamentally something wrong with my brain, because it all seems like just a complicated song and dance that is maintained as a global share delusion for reasons I can't figure out.
Some solar panel companies in China are trying to extract the idea of value from farmers whose hands change actual currency a couple of times a year to whoever brings it to market, all other times "money" is sent around in SMS. That bit of extracted wealth pays out in volume, eventually, but they also get a huge boost from selling "we did an environmentalism" dollars to corporate social responsibility brokers who are trying to help ai and oil and gas companies convince legislators that actually their businesses don't harm the environment because they bought the magic dollarydoos from the Chinese solar panel vendors who are making money selling solar panels but also selling magic dollarydoos.
It seems madness. This system is efficient and the best one we can do?
>IOT-backed hardware linked to a novel asset whose issuance serves to make the world a little bit better
I swear: this was meant to be the pitch for like 99% of blockchain companies, only in this case they managed to do it. This is super interesting on so many levels.
The zero-cost payments with a low-barrier to entry. Again, this is what digital currencies were meant to do. Only, it turns out that at scale a combination of tech problems and legislative red tape made everything break. Just solving this one problem here is industry-defining in its own right. And shows the kind of products that open up when banking is enabled to everyone.
What about the hardware though? Well, I've worked at startups that were exactly dedicated to this kind of IoT stuff. They even were linking it with payments. But can you guess what happened? Well, of course: it had to be linked to blockchain shit, you know, just because... Then on the product side of things: nothing ever left the lab... Not that customers would have been able to use a blockchain-based payment rail anyway...
Getting reliable IoT hardware is hard enough but you still have to build customer relationships. They did it all through a simple technology the users were already familiar with. You don't need a frigging comp sci PhD to use SMS mobile payments. I think that's genius and blockchain tech bros could truly learn a lot from this. Pay-as-you-go here is also genius because as the author states: the chances of the owners having tons of disposal cash around to outright buy equipment are slim. Yet offering equipment to strangers under a pay-to-buy scheme by itself is risky for the lender and would typically lead to the kind of bureaucratic red tape that would slow down financing. With the IoT stuff, they can shut off the equipment on non-payment. But also: the economics are already there because the only other game in town is expensive disposal fuels like kerosene and petrol.
Solarpunk with capitalism is kinda missing the point IMO.
Sick and tired of these AI articles. The cheery friendly tone at the beginning is classic example of ChatGPT.
Flagged.
AI slop on the frontpage. "Hey there! "
" Let’s dive in"
" Want to fight climate change?"
Seven hundred bullet points in the article, etc.
Someone really wants to pump solar here lol. I get it, the retail solar bags must be heavy for many
solarpunk is just socialism with afrofuturist aesthetics. happy for them!
Really, really great article.
This is cool, but I don't think "move everyone off of government managed utilities to private profit extractors" is very Solar Punk.
But solar energy itself cost more than other form of electricity.
But who is driving cost of solar? Is it China?
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!
I worked in this industry as a software developer. Companies like SunCulture (who used to be a customer of ours) started maintaining all their customers on spreadsheets. But with high volume low-value sales, you need to have good software to manage this. We were a player.
I once had to do a mobile money integration with a Zimbabwean bank. A dozen skype calls led to nothing. Then I visited the country, bought a local cell phone, made a few phone calls, and within several days I'd reached the developer I needed. He said: "Wait all I need to do is add this string?". "Yes.". He did so at midnight and our integration worked. Next evening we partied.
It shows how integrations are often more of a human/organizational navigation more than anything technical.
As for the article; the tone is hyped, and it is also somewhat true. Hundreds of millions will be using electricity. Still I want to point out one thing: This is all Solar powered DC electricity. No inverters! So you are looking at powering DC only appliances! Inverters are generally simply too expensive for this. Also the impact on income is very limited; you can't really do anything significantly more productive with the electricity, as several reports have shown. But I don't want to downplay the impact; The quality of life improvement is hard to overstate. Maybe somewhat comparable to say; you are forbidden to use any form of transport (bike, car, bus) to suddenly having all 3. Life becomes so much more convenient. For example: You don't have to take the bus anymore to town to charge your phone - yes people do this.