Yet another Hacker News

Africa's solar revolution is vast and speedy

90 points andsoitis 1 hour ago 27 comments

dan_grec 52 minutes ago | parent

Make no mistake, this is happening all over the globe with enormous success.

Australians now get free power for three hours a day. India, Pakistan and many other developing countries are deploying solar and batteries insanely fast because it’s so cheap direct from China.

China themselves add more solar capacity in a few months than the entire US grid.

There really is only one country with prohibitively expensive solar and batteries thanks to tariffs. Fingers crossed that will change soon.

bruce511 31 minutes ago | parent

Solar is also unique in that it is both affordable and practical to deploy locally.

Part of the difficulty in estimating growth is that a significant chunk of installed supply is not a "power station" that is easily counted and measured.

Residential solar is a few kw here, a few there. But it adds up quickly to mw and gw.

And yes, this results in a larger variable demand on the grid. Which makes planning harder. But it's cheap enough for any established business with a roof to install. It's cheap enough for residential. And from decision to power flowing can be measured in months not years.

adrianN 23 minutes ago | parent

What do panels cost in the US? I can order a 500W panel from amazon.de for a little under 100€. It looks like amazon.com only has panels for $300+. Is Amazon just very expensive?

nntwozz 43 minutes ago | parent

Meanwhile in Sweden we have skyrocketing prices each winter since the war started, even though we rank 3rd in the world for nuclear power per capita.

guepe 31 minutes ago | parent

Price of electricity is set by the last most expensive power generation. If peak power requires expensive gas… that’s normal.

stavros 23 minutes ago | parent

But why can't we get away from needing the most expensive form of power generation, even at peak power?

throwaway473825 17 minutes ago | parent

Sweden used to have twice as many nuclear reactors as it does today. There's also more export capacity, and for Germany anything from Sweden is considered cheap.

motionlessveloc 16 minutes ago | parent

Because most of Africa is great for solar, while Sweden is not.

Solar is also a great match for countries that need A/C during the day (like Africa), and less so for those that need heating at night (like Sweden).

blackoil 12 minutes ago | parent

Accept you'll have to work with China for solar and batteries.

stavros 10 minutes ago | parent

I'm working with China for everything else already.

bawolff 33 minutes ago | parent

Things change quickly when the economics make sense.

msy 32 minutes ago | parent

There are parallels here to the way much of Africa fixed land-lines phones and went straight to mobile. Which has also been powered by Chinese hardware.

riffic 19 minutes ago | parent

it's a known phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging#Examples

shimman 29 minutes ago | parent

People need to realize this is going to make a massive difference for developing countries to not have to rely on expensive alternatives like LNG. There is a tremendous cost when you have to build very labor + resource intensive infrastructure versus just buying solar panels + batteries.

Will follow a similar path of preferring cellular networks to fiber lines.

An interesting podcast series that goes over just this from earlier this year:

https://thepolycrisis.org/electric-world-order-ep-1-the-quie...

sheepscreek 22 minutes ago | parent

The current geopolitical climate is becoming a blessing for Africa, and much of the developing world. With China's ties with the US all but severed, it is incentivized to redirect most of its resources into building Africa. That in turn will reinvigorate the Chinese economy.

If Africa has abundance of electricity, they can become consumers of Chinese EVs, and more.

Affric 6 minutes ago | parent

And huge mineral wealth and quite a few countries with poor governance. Also far away enough from China that they don’t have any long standing disputes.

Couldn’t be much better for the Chinese.

hunglee2 20 minutes ago | parent

Decentralised power generation is the future for Africa, many of whose countries cannot rely on central government to efficiently operate a national grid. I am thinking primarily of South Africa, where many businesses and (rich enough) home owners have back up diesel generators to fill in in moments of load shedding. Solar of course is the most decentralised form of power of all. Positive stuff for Africa. This is where China overcapacity really does lead to more equitable power (literally) distribution, so congrats to them also

blackoil 19 minutes ago | parent

Was this scale of solar revolution inevitable or did China willed (subsidized) it?

numbsafari 10 minutes ago | parent

Probably both. Sunlight is all around us. Once the tech became good enough, it just needed growth capital and strategic willpower.

defrost 9 minutes ago | parent

Both, in the sense that it was absolutely inevitable (and predicted 20 years past in various looking forward forums), and that China made an informed high level plan to be first on the ground to make things happen in their favour.

Is it smart or stupid business to lose money upfront (subsidise) to establish and secure a market for years to follow?

Closely followed by, is China deeply sinister and evil for having long term plans and seeing them through, or are some simply upset to see China getting there first and doing it better?

throwaway473825 6 minutes ago | parent

It's inevitable, but China accelerated it (as did a few others). And solar isn't alone. Any professor in physics will say that EVs, heat pumps and LEDs are all inevitable.