Comment by hangonhn
2 days ago
It really is a huge service not just to the developed world that needs to decarbonize but also a huge service to the developing world. Solar can be put up quickly and cheaply and is good for about 2 decades and can be paired with cheap LiFo batteries to give round the clock electricity. Both of these are relatively portable. It can really bootstrap the economies of local communities where infrastructure hasn't been built out. Then combined that with portable Internet connection via something like Starlink or one of the competitor networks, we can really enable the available human capital in developing nations to realize their potential.
It's all very exciting I think.
Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.
The solar+battery revolution is doing for power what cell phones did for communications in the third world in the 90's and 2000's.
I think India is a bad example. It's very densely populated, with high density in most of the country, and as such it's not a good target market for Starlink.
See for yourself: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen
India has 1.4B people on 3 million km^2, Africa has 1.4B people on 30 million km^2 (out of which 9 million is Sahara).
Starlink's use case is low population density areas, and Africa has plenty of those. Very different case from India.
How much is a Starlink setup? They are pretty expensive in Europe, are they cheaper in Africa?
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I witnessed this traveling through smaller islands in the Philippines. They have cell service without connection to an electric grid in some places. The children with solar charging now have access to education materials and there is access to banking and payments systems.
The effects of this are going to massive and huge in 10 years.
Yes indeed.
All those unfortunate children will be introduced to the toxic, horrid internet.
They'll be addicted, have no attention span, have their own data used against them to exploit and track them, and end up with their political system reeling under manipulative AI and generic bots.
Far better to just give them books for their educarional system, and leave the evil Internet out of it.
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The one issue with cellular connection is that some software and OS slurp data like there’s no tomorrow and you’re not paying for the connection.
That is a lot cheaper than it would cost in a developed country, but is not more affordable.
For example, that would cost about three times as much in the UK but median income is about an order of magnitude higher so its more affordable.
I do realise it is a lot more affordable than telecoms were in the past, but its something like a day of median income.
Communications and electricity aren't just luxury goods, they're also critical inputs to work. There are lots of anecdotes of one or both of these increasing income by substantially more than their costs.
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> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.
Does that operate at good speeds in rural areas?
> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.
There is a huge swath of Australia that does not have good internet access and/or very poor cell phone coverage.
And I am not talking about about people living in the middle of the desert, I am talking about people who are 10 to 15 minutes away by car from a small town.
So yes Starlink or it's local equivalent are necessary.
Can you help me understand. Is Starlink, or satellite enabled wifi really the only solution here if you're 10-15 min away from a populated area?
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Meanwhile here in UK, we’re unable to get phone signal in the middle of major population centres
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It is exciting.
> On farmland and on rooftops, Iraqis turn to solar as power grid falters
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/farmland-rooftops-ir...
The biggest bottle neck to really solving the energy problem is now the price and fragility of high voltage DC long haul connections. Between those and solar you can have energy anywhere any time.
Great point, you might dream of long range connections sending solar energy from the day into the night around the world.
But, what exactly do you mean by fragility? In what way are they fragile?
That they carry massive amounts of power so they'll help you to destruct themselves once the barrier is penetrated, are actually quite complex and can be sabotaged easily.
This is a nice text on the underwater version:
https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Introducti...
If only there was a way to deploy solar production at the point of consumption so power didn’t need to be transferred. We’d need large chunks of unused flat surface pointing towards the sky, preferably at an angle. Oh wait we have that on top of every home (coincidentally the south or west face of every roof provides about enough surface area to power most homes). Now we need some cheap way of storing energy produced during the day for use at night. Humm. Got that too. Government don’t even need to pay the full price for this resilience and climate mitigation. Programs offering fractional tax credits have shown great success in increasing deployments of rooftop solar and distributed battery storage.
You missed the point entirely. If you can distribute the energy you don't need the storage and the storage is the problem right now.