[HN Gopher] Solar power is changing life deep in the Amazon
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Solar power is changing life deep in the Amazon
Author : taylorbuley
Score : 69 points
Date : 2024-04-26 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| tromp wrote:
| https://archive.is/ftGO2
| epistasis wrote:
| Here in the US, solar panels are cheapear per sqft than many
| building materials, in particular fences. In bulk, a 2.4m x 1.3m
| (roughly 8ft x 4pt) panel is < $100, or $3/sqft. If you make it
| operational with wiring and an inverter, I've heard it's $5/sqft,
| and then you get electricity too. That's before any tax credits
| or subsidies. (Comparing right now to Home Depot pre-fab panels,
| metal is ~$20/sqft, composite materials are ~$10/sqft, and vinyl
| is $2-$4/sqft.)
|
| Combine that with LFP lithium batteries getting to consumers at
| roughly $200/kWh in many places, and the idea of running big
| transmission wires for many developing areas just simply won't
| make financial sense when compared to microgrids backed with
| batteries.
| kalessin wrote:
| I don't really understand the idea of micro-grids, how do you
| account for redundancy, or long term storage if inclement
| weather goes on for a few days? Do you just keep big fossil gas
| generators as backup? Moreover residential is one thing, but
| industrial is another.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think it should make sense if you compare it to the
| alternative: nothing at all.
| epistasis wrote:
| With microgrids, you have multiple days of storage. Maybe you
| have emergency backup generators, but that's unlikely.
| There's a cost tradeoff between extra solar capacity (on
| cloudy days you still get energy, after all) versus the cost
| of storage. It's all solvable, just takes money. As
| transmission would. And often, 3+ days of battery storage is
| going to be a looooot cheaper, particularly at the load
| levels that a lot of microgrids will see.
|
| Though I don't think developing areas will necessarily have
| large industrial needs, it turns out that industrial can be
| easier than residential if most of the industrial need is
| process heat. Because we have super super cheap tech for
| storing high amounts of heat for many many days. Lots of
| storage startups are exploring this space now.
|
| Having multiple days of battery storage is 5-15x more
| expensive than thermal storage at the moment, IIRC.
| turtlebits wrote:
| You just fall back to whatever use used to generate power
| before solar. From the article, it's gas generators. If you
| have money, battery storage.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| There are a bunch of existing spreadsheets that allow you to
| estimate sizing of the panels and batteries.
|
| You couple that with maps that show 'full hour equivalency'
| figures for your area, and add in how much extra reserve you
| want, using calculations based off "I want the system to
| handle X days of no solar" and "I want the system to be able
| to charge back to full, given typical household load, within
| Y days."
|
| A number of folks with off-grid systems have backup
| generators for the odd "two weeks of rain" situation or a
| failure of part of the system.
|
| It ends up being fairly efficient because you can size the
| charger to almost fully load the generator. A fridge uses
| about 1kWhr/day, which is about 15 minutes of a 3kW generator
| running...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I just want some big fridge/freezer manufacturer to build a
| "green fridge" with a 24-48VDC port and include a ~100W
| panel that anyone could wire up. Auto-switch to 120VAC as
| needed. Newer fridges run a variable drive motor, so the
| circuitry required has gone down.
| turtlebits wrote:
| As building material, how are you going to waterproof or even
| join solar panels together to actually be useful as a roof or
| wall covering?
|
| Also FYI - The cheapest siding you can get at your box hardware
| store is ~$1.30/sf (LP Smartside)
| epistasis wrote:
| I forgot to put in my comment originally that I was thinknig
| of fences (I just added a fence which prompted me to make the
| comparison)
|
| Siding would require a different style of mounting, but it's
| certainly not impossible. Nobody is really looking to do this
| at the moment, but give it 5-10 years and we may see more.
| Solar roofs have been mostly a boondoggle so far, but nobody
| has seriously tried them. Tesla/Musk don't count for
| "serious" on that axis of development.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| I'm ~50/50 divided on whether humanity will reach some post-
| scarcity, Star Trek like utopia. In harmony with nature, and the
| interests of society-at-large as #1 motivation for most people.
|
| Or that greed & selfishness will prevail and we lay this planet
| to waste, possibly removing our species in the process.
|
| Stories like this strengthen my belief in the former. More, plz!
| epistasis wrote:
| In Star Trek, there's still scarcity of Galaxy Class Starships,
| as well as great scarcity of commisions for captains of Galaxy
| Class Starships.
|
| Once one thing becomes abundant, other things start to feel
| more scarce.
|
| Where I live in California, we have an abundance of food,
| wealth, and materials for building homes. What is scarce is
| permission to actually build. Which sends housing prices
| through the roof, which then causes labor prices to go through
| the roof, which makes building itself more expensive.
|
| The politics will always be challenging, and I think most
| examples in the real world point to the politics of
| distribution to be more challenging than the act of production.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| I would love to see a Star Trek doing more with the Maquis,
| just seems like such an interesting change from the regular
| "people on a ship"
|
| The Lower Decks is really enjoyable too, funny to see the
| bureaucratic elements of Star Fleet joked about.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I thought Star Fleet actually wanted to limit the number of
| circulating Galaxy Class ships so as to not appear like they
| were maintaining a war fleet. They kept disassembled spares
| in case they needed to ramp up their forces.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It was made clear in Star Trek that even big picture stuff
| such as the entirety of Starfleet is more or less something
| humanity does to pass the time.
|
| > The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of
| our lives.
|
| > We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.
|
| In other words, they do it because they want to, not because
| they need to. No doubt they've got endless replicators on
| Earth. There is no economy, anything you want or need is just
| replicated into existence. There is an abundance of goods,
| virtually infinite supply, thus no need to economize. In Star
| Trek humanity is a galaxy spanning civilization so even land
| isn't scarce. Incredibly, they don't even seem to have
| artificial scarcity in the form of copyright since numerous
| episodes show characters freely copying works and data from
| their computers. Absolutely utopic.
|
| Social standing remains scarce. Obviously some people will be
| captains of the Enterprise while the vast majority will not.
| That will probably always be true. It ultimately matters
| little though. A humanity that can just replicate goods into
| existence has absolutely evolved beyond silly things like
| capitalism and communism. This is a humanity that is fully
| liberated from toil, a humanity that is free to enjoy
| themselves and to pursue their dreams. In that utopic
| setting, we watch the exploits of the humans who just
| happened to choose to explore the galaxy, in the startship
| enterprise. They pursue their dream with inexhaustible
| curiosity and incorruptible integrity, precisely because they
| _have_ no other concerns.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| DS9 did many things, including making Starfleet more
| believable as galactic power.
|
| Instead of the "everything is awesome, everything always
| works, there's plenty of everything" bullshit of ST:TNG, we
| see a Starfleet that has plenty...for the stuff it cares
| about. And under the veneer, it's also got its fair share of
| incompetence, bureaucracy, and turf wars/pissing contests -
| as would be expected from a massive organization.
|
| Starfleet doesn't care about some podunk space station in a
| former warzone above a planet full of religious
| zealots...even after it sports a wormhole.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > In harmony with nature,
|
| What does that even mean?
|
| I mean nature did do the transition from methane to oxygen
| which was pretty intense. And the K-T extinction was natural.
| And the glaciers and ice ages were natural. And humans are
| natural.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| For anyone else who feels similarly the genre "solarpunk" and
| specifically one of my favorite authors, Becky Chambers are
| worth checking out:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Psalm_for_the_Wild-Built
| binary132 wrote:
| As basically every world religion has observed, human beings
| are plagued by pathological behaviors by our nature, as
| beautiful and enlightened as it can also be. Without a drastic
| shift in how we approach that problem, I would bet my life on
| that pathology continuing unabated, if not deepening.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Yeah, one only need look at the multi-billionaires focused on
| growing their wealth instead of solving the many easily
| solvable problems of humanity like clean water and
| starvation.
| krapp wrote:
| If your utopia requires changing the laws of physics or human
| nature, as Star Trek's society would, then it can't happen.
|
| Maybe we can get a lot closer than we are now (I hope so) but
| the part where people evolve beyond their "base instincts and
| vices" and choose to work _as though_ they lived in a
| capitalist society, just without caring about personal gain, is
| a fantasy.
| sigmar wrote:
| Great article. Can't imagine what it would be like for this
| village to get so much new tech (solar radios, solar boats,
| solar-enabled internet) is such a short amount of time. In my
| childhood, getting access to an early Wikipedia after having to
| rely on physical encyclopedias was hugely transformative to how I
| learned. Boggles my mind to think about what it would be like to
| go from no internet to an internet with LLMs like chatgpt.
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