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African Villages Glow With Renewable Energy
Peace Corps Online writes "The NY Times reports that as small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries playing an epic, transformative role. With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford. 'You're seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,' says energy adviser Dana Younger. In addition to small solar projects, renewable energy technologies designed for the poor include simple subterranean biogas chambers that make fuel and electricity from the manure of a few cows, and 'mini' hydroelectric dams that can harness the power of a local river for an entire village. 'It's a phenomenon that's sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,' says Younger."
But where can I buy these cheap lighting systems? If they're cheap enough for a yurt, I can probably get a payment plan.
A yurt is essentially a surface biogas chamber. Owing mainly to the yak milk they drink all year long.
I keep seeing these stories about how some poor sod is able to light his house with HE solar lights. But that is kind of trivial. What people need is useful amounts of power. The kind that can run a computer, or a blender, or a power saw.
Without that, all you've done for them is saved them the trouble of lighting a torch. Or a lantern.
Don't underestimate the importance of having interior light after sundown. In many villages, it is impossible to do any reading or studying since there is no artificial light, and work must be done outside while the sun is up. We take for granted the ability to read a book after the sun goes down, but this ability is critical for poor people in developing nations to better themselves.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
When did Inner Mongolia move to Africa?
Google "bugmenot nyt".
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=232874
KIPTUSURI, Kenya (The New York Times) — For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market.
Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid.
Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning.
That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches.
“My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things,” Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children.
As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.
Since Ms. Ruto hooked up the system, her teenagers’ grades have improved because they have light for studying. The toddlers no longer risk burns from the smoky kerosene lamp. And each month, she saves $15 in kerosene and battery costs — and the $20 she used to spend on travel.
In fact, neighbors now pay her 20 cents to charge their phones, although that business may soon evaporate: 63 families in Kiptusuri have recently installed their own solar power systems.
“You leapfrog over the need for fixed lines,” said Adam Kendall, head of the sub-Saharan Africa power practice for McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm. “Renewable energy becomes more and more important in less and less developed markets.”
The United Nations estimates that 1.5 billion people across the globe still live without electricity, including 85 percent of Kenyans, and that three billion still cook and heat with primitive fuels like wood or charcoal.
There is no reliable data on the spread of off-grid renewable energy on a small scale, in part because the projects are often installed by individuals or tiny nongovernmental organizations.
But Dana Younger, senior renewable energy adviser at the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank Group’s private lending arm, said there was no question that the trend was accelerating. “It’s a phenomenon that’s sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,” Mr. Younger said.
With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford, he noted. “You’re seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,” Mr. Younger said.
In Africa, nascent markets for the systems have sprung up in Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi and Ghana as well as in Kenya, said Francis Hillman, an energy entrepreneur who recently shifted his Eritrea-based business, Phaesun Asmara, from large solar projects financed by nongovernmental organizations to a greater emphasis on tiny rooftop systems.
One possible change that could result from this is a global paradigm shift about energy use. Poor countries that have been ignored (and largely overpopulated) or abused by larger, richer countries, can now change their literacy rates, enabling them to join the global markets--and conversations. The use of energy in first world countries is to a great extent exorbitant and capricious. Having a poor neighbor with equivalent education (India?) may have a dramatic effect on global policies--i.e. the changes of having India and China in the G20+ Summits. Bigger changes: solar power (not Fusion-on-Earth!) may become the (only practical) savior of climate change... It's fusion at a safe distance (93 million miles away) and yields more energy than the next 10 generations will ever need.
People in poor areas aren't running all those appliances; they're running 4-watt light bulbs per TFS. Plus prices in the US aren't the same as around the world.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
These are smaller panels, intended for basic needs--i.e. lights after dark. 4 Watts for several hours lighting a room, or even a small portion of a farm plot for plants or livestock... Now productivity doesn't stop at dusk. 18 hours days become possible... For cooking: the shi-t-reactors. Ever burn a buffalo turd? It burns. : )
Mod this up,
+1 copyright infringement
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
According to TFA we're talking about China selling directly to Africa. Aside from the lack of safety concerns I think they also have an advantage in that they aren't being held back by a billion patents and trolls.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I don't know why but this link bypasses the paywall: click.
They're essentially using scaled up versions of those stakes you stick in the yard next to your cement walk to light their houses. You know, the ones that cost 8 bucks and consist of a small solar panel, a couple of NiCads, an ic and an LED or two?
Woop de doo, poor people in impoverished countries can now spend their entire savings purchasing the solar panels needed to light a few rooms when it's not cloudy outside.
Still doesn't change the fact that, by disallowing them to use the massive amounts of coal under their feet, we're disallowing them to build infrastructure and means of production so that they can accumulate capital. They need to be more than plain consumers to bring themselves up to our standards of living, and for that they need cheap, plentiful energy such as coal so that they can start producing wealth. They need factories, not tea lights.
Aside from what other posters have noted, I think you forget one crusial point: You have access to a well maintained electrical system, an African village does not. The alternative to using decentralized renewable energy sources is to wait for the central government to build power plants and wires all over the country. Which requires a lot of organization and stability, not to mention that such structures are prime targets during the unrests that plague Africa.
To some extent this is similar to how phone networks are spreading in Africa. Building centralized phone networks and putting copper in the ground requires a large investment, making it somewhat infeasable. However, building a few mobile phone towers is a much smaller investment and, thus, much more feasable for a business. Over time, if the business yields a profit, more towers can be constructed, giving better coverage. Or one can make trade aggreements between the different service providers to ensure maximum coverage.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
The big tech companies should start investing in these rural electricity providers since these villages are untapped revenue for potential consumers. Just like rural America, there's money to be had in "them there hills".
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I suspect this also will help reduce population growth, with people able to do also other things after dark. And this isn't meant just as a joke.
Also, condoms are easier to use when there's light, for that theoretical group of people who do know what they are, do have them, are actually willing to use them, but do not have enough light to put them on.
...of you, to not know about the central problem of development we've been discovering since the 1960's. By the 90's, it was accepted wisdom and changes slowly began to be made, despite all the money to be made from selling them hydroelectric dams.
You see, attempting to catapult unready societies into the late industrial revolution from a 1700's-era starting point kept failing and failing and failing. Books like "The Road to Hell" by aid professional Michael Maren and "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins brought out how so much of that "aid" was to benefit the givers, not the receivers. Perkins was particularly damning about hydroelectric dams and power stations being built all over the world with "aid" money all those loans that went into default. It was a straightforward recipe:
(1) Bogus economic study of how the country would blossom and prosper if only they had power, a market would explode as soon as it was available, and the national or World Bank loan would be paid back in years. (Perkins' job - he goes over it in detail for Ecuador and Indonesia).
(2) Local "400 families" get extravagant cuts of the action, of course, and they approve the deal, being also the government.
(3) Dam is built, Western engineering firms do well, 400 families do well, local people are bumped off the reservoir land, sometimes at gunpoint, etc.
(4) No market actually arises, country wasn't ready after all, loan goes into default.
(5) People of country end up with higher taxes and lower services for about 40 years to pay back World Bank and IMF.
High capital investments come with high risk. You can substitute "coal-fired" for "hydroelectric" if you like, it actually makes it worse since you now have to develop TWO major plants - a coal mine and a power station - with a populace that has trouble keeping a local chlorine-drip 1-man water treatment plant running reliably.
We built up to a massively centralized economy with small numbers of very large stations and plants and factories and so forth for power and materiel production, only after more than a century of slowly scaling up from very small distributed ones. We thought we could take them straight to Big Industry, and we were wrong. And it was not an "honest mistake"; the decision to try that at all was highly affected by the profits to be made just attempting it, because others had to pay the price for the error.
lives. Give them a $20 cellphone and a $20 solar panel with LED light and battery charger; this alone will transform their life in a multitude of ways.
There are many NGOs building up skills so that the locals can learn to become technicians to assemble the solar lights, cookers, chargers, ect... using the basic raw materials - which also has the added benefit of providing employment and ensuring sustainability. When things break down, you need someone in the village who has the spare parts and know-how to fix it.
Solar panels are also being used to sterilize drinking water, cook, and even more exciting - provide refrigeration. Many batches of vaccines in the past have gone bad because of lack of refrigeration. Refrigeration also helps to preserve food nutrition.
To quote the Mosquito Coast, "Ice is civilization"
You live up to your namesake. ;)
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Or any number of other kinds of mini-computers. Smartphones are becoming very popular in Sub Saharan africa.
A cheap 20-30W panel and a cheap car battery will go a long way toward charging a cell phone, running a radio and providing a few hours of light at night, which is what they're after.
Bingo. Most of these commenters are clearly not reading TFA. It describes the woman having to take a 3-hour ride and pay a fee *to charge her cell phone*. This economic decision of hers wasn't made lightly, she shopped and worked it out the way you'd have to justify buying a car. With this trickle of power, she has lighting at night, and she can charge the cell phone, and she can charge others in the village to charge *their* cell-phones, though that payback is just for early adopters; everybody in her village will have them soon.
The picture gets better going forward five years. By then, most poor Africans will have cell phones. LED lighting is expected to double in lumens/watt efficiency in that time, and more so in economic efficiency as prices may drop by 40%. (The market for LED over here is going to explode soon, because Compact-Fluorescent is always going to look bluish and cold, but LED's are coming out now with CRI [colour indexes] as nice as incandescent. The economies of scale will start to kick in then.) And, of course, solar panels are improving too.
At some point, development in these places will reach a point where they have so many electrical needs that they will pay for a few local wires to a small generator. Once the locals pay to wire up the village, a market has just appeared for an entrepreneur who can get a line out to them from a real power station. At least we can hope that works, since 50 years of attempts to teleport these villages from nothing to mid-20th century in one Big Development have done almost nothing but fail.
Yup, CFLs and LEDs offer about the same efficiacy (lumens/watt) although most people prefer LEDs because colour temperature is warmer (less blue in the mix). However a 155V/230V AC operating CCFL is cheap to produce - the active components are only two transistors. Cheap AC operating LED lamps use capacitive droppers and typically have short life (see FTC lawsuit: www.ftc.gov/opa/2010/09/lightsofamerica.shtm ).
What's happening here is that the solar/battery system is low voltage only (so low cost), driving LEDs through probably just a resistive dropper and providing 5V USB outputs to charge the phones.
Sometimes it is even worse than that. The plant may be built, but crucial infrastructure is left out, or it is built at a terrible location. The plant may not even work. All to often these "aid" schemes are little more than direct aid to engineering firms (based in an Industrialized country) and bribes to local leaders. Helping developing countries industrialize is not an easy task. First of all, it requires that the aid giver is genuinly interested in helping them industrialize (instead of, say, enriching local corperations). Second, it requires that the local government in the developing country wants the country to industrialize, and that other key groups support this drive. Improved literacy could help the people put pressure on their government to get their act together.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
I've put a solar panel array in the back yard....it wasn't cheap...
How much would it have cost you to have grid power if it hadn't been installed already at your house? If the nearest bit of the grid were just a mile away, you'd probably be out a good $50,000 -- and a lot of these villages are a lot further from reliable power than that. Don't forget that in some of these remote areas a long stretch of unguarded power line might as well have a "Steal me for free scrap metal!" sign on it, too. Gasoline or diesel (not to mention spare parts) for a generator are going to be costly and difficult to acquire.
If each home runs a pair of 4-watt LEDs for six hours each evening, that's 48 watt-hours: four hours of daytime sunlight from a small 12-watt panel (let's say five hours to allow for losses). That's well below-average sun for rural Africa, and even a modest battery should be able to carry them through a few days of cloud. (In a pinch, they can cut back to one lamp for a few nights, too.) There's no inverter costs or losses; the whole system can run at 12 volts DC.
~Idarubicin
The article makes absolutely no sense. There are no supporting details.
She travelled 3 hours by motorcycle taxi and waited three days to charge her cell phone? How many things are wrong with that picture?
She spent $80 on solar panels primarily to charge a cell phone? Again, what is wrong with that picture?
Sounds like there is a market for cell phone charges that are either hand cranked, solar powered, or apparently motor-cycle powered. What would solar cell capable of keeping a cell phone fully charged cost?
What is the cost break-down of this lighting system? How much is being spent on the solar cells? How long are the storage batteries going to last? What are the competing technologies?
If a village of 20 homes needed a few watts (25W?) of power each day for 4 hours after sundown every day, what else could be purchased for $1600 plus the cost the ongoing cost of replacing the storage batteries?
I agree. The thing I find so funny is how the write up claims this trend is now "exploding".
I remember reading about small bio gas setups in India in the 80s and maybe the 70s. Small solar lights? Yes leds make that a lot more practical.
But to be honest large dams do tend to do more than just make power. They can help with seasonal flooding and with irrigation.
The can also cause other eco problems as well so they are not all sunshine and bunnies.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In this case I have both halogen spots and LED replacements in the fittings and they seem to be about equivalent. What I will have to do, to be more thorough, is to remove all bar one 50W halogen and one 7W LED, point both at a wall, and take a photo to compare the brightness and area of the spots .
FWIW, I also had some older (single LED) 3W LEDs and they aren't a patch on these newer ones, so maybe the tech has moved on.
Your "exploding' in the 70's and 80's was like the "explosive growth" of Apple II computer sales, into the hundreds of thousands, then, gasp Millions, at the same time. The exponential was slower for this than computers, though. We are now up to the start of the "explosive" growth of the IBM PC DOS era when the cheap clones hit, mid-80's. Still to come: the "explosive" growth after Win95 and the Internet made everybody get one. I'm predicting that for post-2015 when the LED's have really dropped in price and improved in colour quality and efficiency, plus the usual incremental solar improvements.
Every part of an exponential curve looks back on the previous bit as "before the explosion *really* started".
According to TFA we're talking about China selling directly to Africa. Aside from the lack of safety concerns I think they also have an advantage in that they aren't being held back by a billion patents and trolls.
I think also without the limitations of those billions of patents and the trolls that go with them, we can see villages innovate new uses beyond what is already being done with these small power generation units.
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
One thing in the NYT article that did not make sense was the claim the large amounts of capital are needed to make this happen. If local people can afford the solar units and they pay for themselves in a few months, what's holding the wide scale deployment up?
See my site, linked below, there's some pix of my system with some other systems soon to be featured under the alt energy forum. What's happening in the third world is what I call "leapfrogging" -- they're going to skip entire expensive steps in energy development. Good for them! They will also be skipping the control a monopoly power company (aptly named for more than one meaning of the word power) over themselves. Double good. I'm not particularly a greenie, though it works out that I'm much more green than most of them (heat off my own woodlot too for example) -- for me it was the power and control issue that got me going, and heck, if a world class engineer can't pull it off, then who?
Funny thing, you know who makes just about the best panels for the money (taking TCO into account, panels that only live a couple years need not apply) -- Solarex, who is owned by, you guessed it, BP of all people. They know the music is going to stop, so they are reserving a chair. That tells you more than their astroturfing about endless oil, no such thing as global warming etc -- follow the money....
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Sorry I had to.
But... the future refused to change.
good for population control because they can put condoms on better when there is light?
Uh, the "theoretical group of people" was there to indicate that that part was a joke. So, I think I'm allowed to say "Woooosh".
The only thing that reduces population is education. Those who are better educated have fewer children. Being able to study after dark increases one's odds to further their education. It's not rocket science.
Education undoubtedly has a much large effect. However, if you've ever spent a long time with a wife/girlfriend/"friend with benefits" in an environment where there's nothing else to do, and nothing actually stopping you from having sex... Trust me, pretty soon you'll even be willing to take chances with lack of proper contraception... ;-)
You still sound like a moron though.
Hmm mm. It's hard to judge based on just one post of yours (didn't check others), but based on that, this actually feels more like a compliment.
But biogas systems have not changed in a very long time. The pick up on these really seems to be too slow and I would love to know the reason why.
Solar plus LEDs make perfect sense but biogas?
Heck a BBC sitcom from from the 70s involved a couple with a biogas powered generator in the basment!
I think it was called the Goode Life.
And community hydropower dates back to the local mills all over New England and I believe England.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
“You leapfrog over the need for fixed lines,” said Adam Kendall, head of the sub-Saharan Africa power practice for McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm. “Renewable energy becomes more and more important in less and less developed markets."
Much like wireless "leapfrogged" the need for a heavy infrastructure.
Yet while these off-grid systems have proved their worth, the lack of an effective distribution network or a reliable way of financing the start-up costs has prevented them from becoming more widespread.
Microloans.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
" 'mini' hydroelectric dams that can harness the power of a local river for an entire village"
These 'mini' hydroelectric dams can destroy an entire migrating fish fauna because of the power for a village. The migrating fish tend to be the staple food for the neighboring villagers, too...
America and Europe have long since understood the , but can afford building fish ladders.
Not to speak of all the stagnant water, which harbor bilharzia and malaria. Don't forget the rotten acidic waters it produces which erodes high quality steel in a few years.
The side effects?! Brrr...
I believe the Ukrainian government might want to say something about the risks of that.
I'm not sure I agree on your efficiency there. I have replaced 60+W incandescents with the curly CFLs that used something like 15W and am now replacing THOSE with LED that use 8W and are rated as "40W replacements". Except that they produce as much or more light than the CFL in the right fixture! In one case in particular the change in brightness was striking and a very large improvement.
I am using the $30 Sylvania "Ultra LED" lights which are new and part of their High Performance Series. Lowes, in the US, sells these cheaper than anyone I've found BTW. In a "can" fixture in the ceiling in my bathroom they proved to light instantly as compared to the slow glow curlies and to provide MORE light. In the light fixtures on my porch however they proved too directional and created bad shadows. In my normal bathroom sconces they work awesome and in my nightstand lamp they also work great. Used in a freestanding torch sort of light they threw too sharp a shadow line as most of the light went up and not out. I have yet to find one of either CFL or LEF that can replace a single bright 100W incandescent in a ceiling fan I have. :-(
I have begun using some other LEDs in a pendant fixture that used to use incandescent and it's working okay but not as well as the Sylvania bulbs. The LED is a much whiter\bluer light than CFL in my experience so far but they are WAY cooler and use way less juice. The cost is a bit rude but so far they seem to be holding up very well - for the price they had better.
In any case for efficiency I'd argue on the side of LED over CFL for sure based on my experience. Perhaps if I wasn't driving them from 120v mains that wouldn't be the case and I realize that in the case of running them off of a battery they aren't using 120v. I'd still argue for LED though since they are much less fragile!
What I'd really like to know is how well the Sylvania Ultra LED floods work. The price of admission has been too high for me to try them yet but if they work well I have several 150Watt floods I'd LOVE to dump! These are on motion sensors and swapping them so high in the air would be a chore but the overall cost savings long term might be worth it if someone could vouch that they don't suck :-)
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Otherwise called Ecological footprint
I have always hoped, at least, that a significant number of slashdoters were imbued with a bit of earth respect, and earth sense.
It may well be that I have been wrong.
A goodly proportion of Mongolian yak herders, and Angolan mamas' concerned about the education of their kids will instinctively know the concept of carrying capacity. From when they were hunters, from the production of their yaks, from the very vigour of the kids.
Any rancher with a brain knows that a piece of land is best grazed with a critical eye on the most sensitive sites on it. The sensitive sites are like the proverbial Canaries in the mineshaft. It is true liberties can be taken in this regard, but ultimately nature catches up.
The ground will only put up with a certain amount of mistreatment before it begins a negative feedback loop in direct response.
So what really ticks me is that most, not all, of the comments on this topic, on /. of all sites, don't get the simple fact that we as a species are reaching towards Carrying Capacity.
Me here in Canada, you there in Usa, and you in Germany are going to have to cut that ecological footprint 5% per year until it is down to 25% of what it is right now. Figure it out, what will that really mean? Do you doubt that what I suggest is true?
At the same time it is not fair, or just, to promote what is clearly an unsustainable expectation among the less historicaly favoured peoples of the world.
YES, I have lived with kerosene lanterns for decades of my life, and no my kids were never inept enough to sustain any consequential injury, relied on solar panels, butchered horses for jerky, you name it.....
I am too disturbed to continue at this time, but I would like to say that over the past, say a year, my estimation of the survival intelligence value afforded by /. commenters has lessened some
Why is this a big deal? I have seen a few posts here that don't understand this, that don't understand why someone has to use up DAYS of time to charge a phone, why kerosene isn't good enough etc. The best was the guy who thinks solar is crap because his big dollar system only runs a few lights, a TV, computer, and bummer can't run the stove. Seriously?!
READ THIS! -> http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50799
^^ That's a damn good story about a couple who took a trip through The Democratic Republic of Congo in a Toyota Landcruiser. Dude when you have to bribe someone to ferry you across a river using a battery borrowed from a village far away just to start the damned engines you know you are NOT in the developed world anymore. When a broken down truck sits in place with people living in it and guarding it for a YEAR while awaiting replacements parts you know things are fucked up.
This guy's accounts of what it was like to make this trek to include just how clueless damn near everyone was he asked concerning conditions speaks VOLUMES. People here, including myself, bitch about organized religion and whatnot but wow over there that seems to be one of the only halfway stable support systems going on.
After reading that I understood just how important some simple things can be when you can't just flip a switch and make it happen. The corruption down there just really screws everyone too :-(
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I just bought a 4-pack of BR30 form factor 65W light equivalent, 15W power consumption CFL bulbs to replace 75W halogen floods. Yeah they take a minute or so to ramp to full light output and they're not dim-able (no dimmer on this circuit). Their total price was $4.80, which included an energy company instant rebate. The light is nice and soft, the 4 of them take less power than just 1 of the previous bulbs, these lights are typically left on for a minimum of 15 minutes up to a couple of hours at a time, I air condition more than I heat in this climate, and the 4 bulbs total cost what a single halogen replacement would have set me back. Given the expected longer CFL lifetime as well, this was just an impossible deal to beat. I'd love an equivalent LED replacement someday, but seriously at this price how long before LEDs can compete with this?
At the same time they were selling a 4-pack of those bare 60W equivalent twisty CFL bulbs for $0.99 after energy company rebate. That's cheaper than 60W incandescent bulbs! This was at Costco last weekend.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If the nearest town with electricity is 3 hours away, how are they powering the towers? Why would they even have towers around there?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I think some of that comes down to "zero maintenance" vs "any maintenance". Not a knock on the customers overseas; customers here run their appliances into the ground all the time, if they are "any maintenance".
Sometimes the poorest of the poor lead the way. Adoption of efficient lighting methods reminds me of the tendency of slum dwellers to recycle every item almost endlessly. One pair of pants may be used by three kids growing up. No beer can is safe in the trash from the poor scavenging for aluminum. Folks who are better off lack motivation.
I'd say the resulting (planned) situation is worse than point 5. As Joe Stiglitz, former World Bank Chief Economist says [0], due to the conditionalities of the loan, privatisation of resources and infrastructure is mandated:
"By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation - laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official WTO rules."
When the loan can't be paid (due to lack of double digit growth), extra conditions are imposed such as provision of military bases and favoured access to natural resources. Of course, the interest on the loan is not cancelled, merely deferred.
It's quite suspicious that the four step plan (the conditionalities) that the IMF espouses for each country results in riots that further drive down the price of that country's assets:
1. Privatisation (Briberisation)
2. Capital Market Liberalisation
3. Market Based Pricing
4. Free Trade
1. "Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets. ...
And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via kick-backs for his campaign.
Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation."
2. "In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.
"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries."
3. "At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, "The IMF riot."
The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.
And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings,
My point was that most of this stuff has been around for a long time. The problem with alternative energy is that so far it has gone in and out of fashion. When I was a kid in the 70s the government was all about building wind mills, solar panels, and biofuels. Then oil dropped in price, more power plants went to coal from oil and so on.
Now in the US at least the same thing is happening. I have a friend that works in a power companies Solar and Wind division. They are the biggest in the nation. Guess what they have found. Very few people are willing to pay extra for renewables.
Natural gas has come way down and that is where the action is.
His company is betting on Nuclear long term. Since the build times and capital costs are high they are starting now. They see that as the only economical way to really reduce carbon output.
They will keep the Solar and Wind going as a long term project but they are not looking at new projects. The build time is low enough that they can just wait until they see where the market is going.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
...small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford....
Would it have a white dwarf in the middle?
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."