impermanen_ 🕊️
@impermanen_@zirk.us  ·  activity timestamp 7 days ago

Somehow missed this:

Pakistan, home to more than 240 million people, is experiencing one of the most rapid #solar revolutions on the planet, even as it grapples with poverty and economic instability.

Suddenly about half the country’s electricity comes from solar. It’s not industrial solar farms or state-led: it’s a bottom-up revolution: households fed up with rising power costs and blackouts buying what are now ridiculously cheap solar panels.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-boom
Ninad Pundalik
@ni_nad@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
@impermanen_ here in India, many folks ended up installing inverters (called UPS here) because the local utilities could not handle peak load. When the government doesn't spend, citizens have to spend from their own pocket, usually at a much higher overall expense. This feels similar. Fortunately, the Indian government has been pushing subsidies for solar setups, so we may have learnt a tiny bit from our previous mistakes
Jones
@jones@todon.nl replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
@impermanen_

> buying what are now ridiculously cheap solar panels

Solar is cheap for a reason: https://gerrymcgovern.com/solar-is-cheap-for-a-reason/

«[...] Solar needs cheap coal because making silicon requires volcano-like heat. In the 2020s, China was building about two new coal plants a week—six times more than the rest of the world combined. Solar needs cheap charcoal. Every year, China was also going to its war-torn and destitute neighbor, Myanmar, and extracting 14,000 football fields’ worth of tropical forest wood to make cheap charcoal to help smelt its silicon.
Solar needs cheap nickel. Indonesia had become the world’s leading producer of nickel, much of it going to China. In Indonesia, by the mid-2020s, 50,000 hectares of tropical forests—home to uncontacted Indigenous people—had been cleared for nickel mining, with reports of constant strife and workers deaths at Chinese-run nickel mines in the country. Nickel needs cheap coal. By the 2020s, Indonesia’s coal industry was booming, partly driven by a surging nickel-smelting industry. Making one ton of Indonesian nickel caused about 45 tons of CO2. [...]»
João Tiago Rebelo (NAFO J-121)
@jt_rebelo@ciberlandia.pt replied  ·  activity timestamp 7 days ago
@bortzmeyer they are used to not having electricity for large parts of the day, specially during the day and most of the night. Blackouts and brownouts occur daily around there, so people finally have more reliable electricity (or electricity at all) during the sunny hours and keep doing whatever they already did into the night (gas generators or use no power at all).

Batteries (better, energy storage availability and cost) is the major hurdle that, if surpassed, will make solar the definitive renewable energy source for most of the Southern Hemisphere and a big part of the Northern Hemisphere.
@impermanen_
João Tiago Rebelo (NAFO J-121)
@jt_rebelo@ciberlandia.pt replied  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago
@bortzmeyer the chemical ones do, but fossil fuel based energy production does worse to the environment (we're not where we are on climate change because of batteries). There are storage methods (mainly gravity based) already in use without major environmental side effects and growing efficiency, and new chemical batteries' chemistry being developed as we speak that can change energy storage for the better (environmental and capacity wise). It can't be a Northern and Western Hemisphere's exclusive, and the Western Hemisphere is at the front anymore when it comes to research of better solutions and implementation (yes, lack of regulation is one of the major drivers, the risks that come from it are well-known, that is what the West might be useful for, as warning to the Global South and East).
@impermanen_