And earlier they say “$120 upfront might as well be a million when you’re making $2/day”. The whole article reads like it was vomited up by an LLM trained exclusively on LinkedIn posts. The math errors are consistent with that.

They mixed up the numbers for residential solar (Solar King) and agriculture solar (SunCulture).

The $100 down + $65/mo is for agriculture.

(not that the numbers are correct or make sense)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ib-atDnj5jE

video from sunking from 7 years ago where the cost of a basic system was 25¢ per day. Probably cheaper now.

the article wording/numbers seem mixed up but the overall argument holds up when you look at the actual products they're talking about here

Isn't $6 a month the cost of the subscription, but the $40-56 a month the cost of the installation?

It's obviously AI generated. Was a bummer because I was interested in the premise.

this, they also say 45-60/month which is NOT 0.21/day

> Thanks to all the entrepreneurs and engineers over the past decades

Hat tip also to China's ideological commitment to independence from external oil supplies, as nicely coupled to reducing pollution and greenwashing their image. It's their citizens who sacrifice to make solar power cheap enough.

Solar bribery is interestingly the exact opposite in some of the USA, where the solar contractors have basically gotten in bed with government for regulatory capture on the market.

Most places in my state you need an electrician license, permits, bonding, insurance, a special 'solar' warranty, and inspections if you want solar.

I built my house without any inspection or licensing and connected to the electric grid without anyone from the government ever even looking at it or taking money for it. If I wanted to add a solar system, it basically completely fucked everything and I would have had to gone through the normal permitting and inspection system for my house which would have made even building the house basically impossible for me.

>voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]

This is a disastrous misrepresentation of a complex case with lots of moving pieces. At no point in the history of the construction of that specific power line was there a challenge to legality of citizen initiative until after the vote. Meanwhile, as they were behind in the polls, the company rushed to build as much of it as they could knowing that the initiative was coming, so when they failed at the ballot box, they could claim a legally recognized "vested interest".

Absent the vested interest claim they would have been legally bound by the results of the ballot initiative, and the vested interest was not established until after the ballot had been voted on.

> 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.

Does decentralized solar plus batteries give you same amount of reliability? How many days without sunny weather can you survive without having to change your energy use habits?

Each 9 of reliability for infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive. And grid has a lot of 9s.

> in the US you just need to bribe landowners and hold-outs

If you really believe that then you need to read up on how the political system is financed. Members of congress spend a majority of their day calling "donors". That's not mom and dad, it's some corps (or rich individuals) who want to get sth done in return. And magically it gets done if the donations keep flowing. The only thing missing for "bribe" is to actually use the word.

Poor countries have different problems that don’t let decentralization to work.

Local gangs go around and demand protection money and if you don’t pay up your solar panels will unfortunately suffer some “accidental” catastrophic damage.

Here in Austria, grid costs are now on par with the actual electricity cost. Each are ca €0.1 per kWh now, plus again that in taxes.

Once the EU finally gets rid of the ridiculous pricing model where spot prices are dictated by the most expensive energy source (usually, gas), we might have a situation where grid costs exceed the cost of energy itself.

Oh and what do they do with that money? Hoard it for upcoming grid updates, which they supposedly have to make to accommodate solar peaks and EV charging. And buy solar parks in Spain, apparently.

> Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US.

How do they deal with the cost of storage for anything non trivial completely eclipsing any savings?

Where I live in California permitting is such a pain in the ass that a lot of work goes unpermitted. Contractors have a CYA clause in all of their contracts (along the lines of "the owner is responsible for all permits"). Permits significantly increase the time for a job, with inspectors needing to show up to inspect things before something else can go on top, and things that seem reasonable causing complete reworks[1]. The fact that so few people pull permits means many workers aren't used to inspections, causing even further delays.

1: e.g. I saw an inspector not allow two 90deg. bend in RMC because, while the existing RMC went through a wall, and came out in a straight line on the other side, without knocking out the wall, we couldn't prove that there weren't already 3 90deg. bends. Maybe that's the right call (the electrician certainly thought it was asinine), maybe not, but things like that can significantly increase the time for project completion, since there are downstream effects to the scheduling.

Since once all the land is accounted for, there is no such thing as construction without destruction, I am glad that destruction is difficult.

There are a few US Solar wholesaler companies that will draft and sign engineering drawings for a roof-top permit application in most states. Some folks claim https://www.pegasussolar.com/ was inexpensive, and might be worth a call.

The problem with Home Solar is the same as with Heat exchanger installs... some installers price gouge, and simply don't care about the quality of the work.

Best of luck, if you plan to stay someplace 8+ years a 10kW Solar+battery install and heat exchanger are fine investments. We've also donated a few of those cheap FlexSolar 40W Foldable Solar panels + power-bank kits to people in remote areas, and they reported phone/VHF-Handy charging was reliable. =3

Permitting hassle? What do you need permits for?

In many places more of your electric bill pays for the grid than for the power.

>The advent of a new transmission route in the US these days is pretty much a miracle event.

Having had three major transmission lines for energy (two electric one gas) come through the area I live in the last 8 years, this is just false.

In the US it's not hard to get it done as long as you have mountains of cash and a state willing to imminent domain people.

Rural electrification in the US hugely proves your point. Yes, grid costs are fantastically expensive!!

At the time: we had no choice! Universal electricity access was (& is) vastly better than the alternative: not having universal access. But what's happening in this article isn't an alternative, not so far: it's leaving the masses behind, dropping the pretense that electricity is a utility that ought be available to society broadly.

Perhaps the private rental systems here provide pretty good access. In general though, I think society really ought to accept pretty big inefficiencies/costs (if that's what it takes) if thats what it takes to provide these base demands widely. It feels horrific to consider only the costs here, to see the inefficiency, without regarding what electrification, transport, and other base utilities enable your people to do, how much it changes lives.

Narrow, mercenary cost analysis is an awful way to run your society. For sure, I deeply hope solar maybe can reduce some of the grid maintenance costs, by decentralizing energy. Over time. But this article &b this comment broadly accept a cost-based analysis, that largely revolve around the failure of a public works, one that needs to be efficient but that also has to be more willing to lose some money, to operate no matter what in unprofitable places. States have to make utilities available, period, whatever combination of political & economic will/unprofitability is required.

I'm excited for solar! The decentralized nature is amazing! But beyond the glory of possibility, it scares the heck out of me that society might just give up on a tie that binds us, might abandon the basic sense of utility that most states have been able to keep going for around a hundred years now.

The success & market capture of the companies spotlighted here is both a success, but also an liability. Solar is plentiful but the middlemen here have enormous price control, that maybe they are not flexing on now, but over time is a capability I would far prefer states tap & use for public benefit, rather than comingling with private interest.

> voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]

The idea that a private company should get to unilaterally change our environment for profit is gross.

I think it's funny you use this example when CMP has been utterly refusing to connect tens of solar power and community solar projects to our grid, which suffers from a lack of generation contributing to our staggeringly high electricity costs.

Meanwhile, CMP insists that they have to double our rates (again), and don't really provide justification. This despite our generation and distribution costs being entirely separated, CMP having monopoly power over most of the state for distribution buildout, CMP having one of the least reliable grids in the nation despite supposedly spending enormously within the last few years to upgrade parts of the grid, and the whole time, CMP is extracting tidy profits to an entirely different country, from my fellow Mainers who are primarily old and on fixed incomes.

Maybe, just maybe, you don't have an accurate understanding of this issue?

We have several fully built solar farms, desperately needed new generation, just sitting idle as CMP refuses to connect them, because connecting more distributed infrastructure like that would eat into their profit margins, which continue to stay high as they continue to yearly increase our rates while sending out multiple leaflets telling people that they are totally not at fault for increasing their distribution rates because oh my generation costs also went up.

You should look up how much CMP spent on playing ads about how they would totally respect our nature and it would be vaguely great for us to build a transmission line to another state, as they continue to refuse to hook up generation that could reduce our power prices, and not even their chunk of that price!

Trading uncrontrolled population growth for TikTok sounds like a deal with the devil.

I wonder this as well - it seems the most strategic path forward for any nation or community is to localize the supply chain as much as possible, but like oil before there's some things that are just impossible or super difficult to get locally. And unfortunately to find new ways to turn sun into electricity costs money to do and won't happen because the cost of the current method is too low to justify trying to turn sand into solar panels or whatever other thing you might try.

I dream of a solar punk future where basically any community can generate power without any horrifying pollution anywhere in the supply chain. Mirror powered smelters, sand batteries.

Conspiratorially, if all places were non-authoritarian and did not tolerate cheap refining, a regime change would have to be ordered

I could handle this style when it wasn't everywhere. But now I've developed a hypersensitivity and can't bear it. It's like suddenly most of the internet is in a language I can't read.

I don't get how it makes this jump

> Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months

> replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene)" in the next paragraph.

If it's $40-65/month that's $1.33 to $2.17 per day, not $0.21/day (assuming month with 30 days)

Even if it's not written by ChatGPT, it's the /exact style/ used by the linkedin AI evangelists

It has a voice don't it...

"Modular. Distributed. Digital. Financed by the people using it, subsidized by the carbon it avoids."

Every second paragraph thinks it's Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone.

Yeah pure shit for us to eat.

I always wonder what the point is.

Kinda, but not really. IRL, feature phones and cheap smartphones subsidized to carry Whatsapp and Facebook apps starting 20 years ago pushed "people using the internet" and at this point Whatsapp is 90% of what people use internet for in Africa because data is cheaper than talk and text.

There's also the perception of usability. I have personally had relatively well-paid Africans tell me that $4 a month for 10 GB of (4G mobile) data was "the most expensive on Earth." Which is not true, I checked, but people say it to try and rumor mill the price down. However, it's sort of almost true in the sense of trying to pay for streaming services and being online like anyone from London or LA on one's hone and not home fiber connections, which only the wealthy have. But that's not how people use their phones anyway. So there's no market for high bandwidth use, and only the wealthy are willing to use bandwidth and pay for it because prices drop per GB once you're doing unlimited fiber connections at home on post-paid accounts. The middle ground is the barrier.

But people like the author who barely know where Africa is on a map love to throw around stats like "85% of Africa is online!" Not like how most Westerners think. Kids in wealthy areas will push being on IG and Tik Tok. In malls in larger cities there's a shop that sells gaming consoles.

This reads like a timeline in a game of Civ. Love it.

It's mostly politics stopping this in the US. But even with current political roadblocks to solar, it's an absolutely massive part of new builds for grid scale electricity generation:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65964

I'm sure you can think of one at the moment.

I think the point of this article is to get people to say this. Considering half the numbers in this article are fabricated, it makes me wonder if this comment is also a part of the scam.

These prices are outside of the US, because the US has massive tariffs. But prices like $0.28/W are quite achievable, here's a random link:

https://signaturesolar.com/waaree-405w-pallet-mono-31-panels...

The global average price for solar panels is $0.09/W in 2025. I think India, which also has tariffs to stimulate local factories, is around $0.18/W.

Though at these prices you're likely going to be paying nearly as much for mounting materials as you are for the panels.

Edit: Also, used solar panels are becoming a pretty thriving market. Definitely worth checking those out, especially for isolated projects like a solar car port or something.

This model has actually taken off in rural China. Salespeople will tell you, "You only need to lend us your roof for 20 to 30 years,and in return, you'll receive a sum of money." Many people in rural China readily agree to this deal. I'm not entirely sure what these solar panel companies get out of the arrangement. Perhaps they sell the generated electricity for a profit, or supply it to factories with high energy demands.

There is a similar idea called "community solar" in the US. It allows electric customers to subscribe to the output of solar panels on someone else's roof. This allows a developer to build a solar array on a large commercial building's roof that they rent.

And, much of the rural population is in the Great Rift Valley, a particularly high elevation region which as a result enjoys higher solar flux.

It depends on the inverter. Older "grid-following" inverters would isolate themselves from the grid to avoid putting any current on the line when presumably in an outage it should be de-energised, as well as relying on the grid for reference frequency.

Modern hybrid & multi-mode inverters are capable of isolating themselves from the grid, generating their own reference frequency and managing connection and disconnection from the grid. However you might not get one of these types of inverters unless you specifically ask for "backup power" or similar.

Many systems, especially older ones, are set up this way by default.

But you can get, for extra $$, a switch to disconnect you from the grid entirely when it's down and run from your own solar power / battery. People who live in cities with underground wires normally don't bother, but it's essential in the countryside (IMHO).

Note however that many people have only maybe 5kW or 8kW or something like that being added to grid power by their solar setup, so if there is no mains power then it doesn't take many 2kW appliances (microwave, kettle, clothes washer (when heating water), dish washer (ditto), hairdryer, vacuum cleaner) to overload it. Not to mention 3kW hot water heater or 3kW+ stove oven.

I have a 3600W off-grid system (Pecron E3600LFP) and I run pretty much all that stuff from it. I added up and I could try to turn on 14kW of stuff at the same time. But I don't, obviously.

I've had solar for ten years and just added a battery to it which _should_ keep the house running through a power failure for as long as the battery holds out.

This is yet to be tested, but it's very specifically setup to me able to.

There are some specific electronics required to continue operation when the grid is down, and with the explosion of popularity of home batteries, I think these options are also more common.

you heard wrong. What most electricity grids forbid is exporting power from your home to the grid when the grid is down. The claimed danger is that energised power lines will kill people working on the lines.

The reality is that the vast majority of home inverters (in an EV, battery or solar PV) is nowhere near powerful enough to energise even a single distribution transformer.

This is yet another example of electricity codes being unrealistically restrictive.

Generally, there's nothing stopping you from disconnecting your home from the grid during a power outage and running your own devices off a battery. Going fully off-grid depends on your local laws.

Tariffs (government tax) on Chinese panels, corruption (companies bribing(lobbying) to get monopolies on installs) and more corruption ( power companies bribing to get guaranteed profits)

Based on comments here my 7.8kw rooftop solar in Canada was 3-5x cheaper than people pay in the US. It was $8k CAD ($5,660 usd) My Dad in Australia got a 10kw system fully installed for $5k AUD ($3,250 usd)

Solar panels represent approximately 12% of the total average cost for solar projects in the United States. The remaining costs are primarily composed of soft costs, which include permitting, financing, installation labor, customer acquisition, and other non-hardware expenses.

https://www.ny-engineers.com/blog/breaking-down-the-price-of...

probably CCP subsidizing manufacturing and sales (like they do with EV) because it's a command economy and getting the world to run on their stuff is good for their "national security". and US taxing it for that reason

The same thing that's, you know, stopping them from having real power grids.

Hey there, author (Skander from Climate Drift) here.

So for the record: This isn't a chatgpt article, it's something I wrote over the weekend while I was down with a flu (although the idea has been running through my head for a while).

@America's 1930s: Most of US rural electrification happened at this point (90% of urban homes hat electricity, only around 10% of farms). Rural Electrification Act from 1936 changed that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act

My grandpa (long dead) remembers his dad paying $600 in the 1920s (1930s?) to get electric to the farm. That is the actual cost, not inflation adjusted. Most of the neighbors didn't because that was too much money in those days.

I also got ChatGPT vibes... all this repetition of "why it matters" and all the lists, and going back and forth between contradictions...

It's even sadder to me that the author says this is not GPT. I believe them. Which means we have reached a point where the style of how ChatGPT writes has made its way into our sub-conscious...

don't know if the article is chatgpt or not, but "might as well be a million dollars" is a super common way of saying "completely out of reach"

> The farmer making $600/yr is kind of a non-sequitur.

It's less than a non-sequitur. It makes the contrasting even weaker because it means in modern Africa labor is still cheap, just like in 1930s America.

> I love the story of it, but I can't take the writing

My personally heuristic is that if the style is AI, the substance is likely AI too.

Huh? Even if the farmer could save 100% of that daily $2 earning it's still 60 days worth of wages, which while not exactly $1,000,000, is still a lot for the the farmer.

The structure of each section gives away that it's mostly AI even without having to read the actual words. I'm sure it was AI + writer, but there's something about ending each section with 3-4 short, question-like sentences that is strongly AI. This is the same format as the successful LinkedIn slop so maybe it's not AI and just algo-induced writing.

Lets see a small paragraph from the article:

> It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.

> Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.

Ah yes, not AI slop at all! /s

Everyone will be hit hard by climate change. I do t see why it should be less in eg the Americas - where you already have pretty volatile climate events

The giveaway is almost always an over-dependence on "Not 'x' but 'y'" structure. Even when the author changes the wording so that the phrase doesn't read exactly like that, they tend to leave the structure intact, and the bots really like to lead with the inverse of what the author wants to say to create contrast.

A human author might have used this technique once to really emphasize a strong point, but today's LLMs use it so often that it loses its emphasis, and instead becomes a distinct stylistic fingerprint.

It's not good. If it were good, it wouldn't juxtapose random uncited numbers together that don't compute:

> Crop yields increase 3-5×

> Farmers go from $600/acre to $14,000/acre revenue

5×$600 is $3000. Where did the extra 4.7x come from? The new-to-the-world info looks more like "making stuff up on the fly".

Lack of sources. Questionable numbers and math. Tone. Emoji. In short: everything.

> people saying this is AI-generated: why?

Because they themselves have nothing interesting to say

Yeah, MPESA was and is still an incredible product. A real lightning-in-a-bottle moment. Even if they've struggled to replicate that success in other geos, the original vision and execution back in the 200x's is a textbook case that bears study.

The M-PESA transaction fees are high.

<sarc>M-PESA helps fight poverty through the ingenious application of a thousand paper cuts. </sarc>

Huh? These people own their own equipment after 30 months and are then not reliant on usually corrupt and/or incompetent government. They're not exactly rent seeking.

Being self reliant is indeed "very punk".

"lets dive in"

It's even a tad worse; They are just one of those "career accelerator" companies. In fact most if not all of their articles seem to be AI generated

I'm curious how you stay on top of African affairs. South Asia doesn't seem that hard to me but I don't know where to follow the regulatory landscape of African countries.

> Africa is not a single unitary region.

Well, duh!

Who is saying different? Nobody here

A short little article that does not cover every aspect is not bad. It is good

It's not solarpunk, unless "lots of solar installations" qualifies. They just used the term to convey an aesthetic, or as bait. Being "punk" or socialist is not the point.

Funny. I read the article and couldn’t shake the feeling that this is exactly how capitalism lifts whole countries out of poverty.

How is small businesses selling solar panels to people socialism?

why are you happy? many African nations attempted socialism in the 20th century, and all of those states have since collapsed. trying the same failed strategy over and over doesn't bode well.

anyway, I hope they get electricity. the article said a lot about markets for something related to an ideology that rejects them.

[flagged]

> But solar energy itself cost more than other form of electricity

That is in fact, not correct. Maybe you should put that one back where you pulled it from.