People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them.
This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world.
It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over.
My takeaway from observing “tech in developing world” projects is that the key gap is usually maintenance. That is, continuous small investment to prevent things from breaking in the first place. To be fair, that’s not exactly a solved problem in developed countries either!
Sometimes development projects just throw solutions at rural communities then move onto their next project, leaving no legacy of training or continued supply of parts/tools/funding.
Sometimes solutions get treated as resources instead of infrastructure, like a water treatment plant that got strip-mined for metal (that example was from South America).
Tech is a whole ecosystem, mindset and lifestyle, not just magic hardware to parachute into situations that aren’t set up to manage it on a long term basis.
I knew a charity group many years ago that targeted this issue.
They noticed that aid charities would give modern motorcycles to rural medical workers that rapidly ended up in a non-working state.
So they gathered older motorbikes, more suitable and more repairable in the destination country, and spent time training the end users in maintenance and upkeep, and ongoing support.
Not an uncommon problem with charities working with foreign nations. They fail to capture the local populations because they think of these problems in a vacuum.
Person lacks reliable transportation -> give them some -> problem solved
There's another example - a charity provides treated mosquito nets for free to millions of families in Africa. Great!
People lack reliable mosquito protection -> give them treated nets -> problem solved!
But in reality it went like this:
People lack reliable mosquito protection -> give them treated nets -> many of these families are starving -> fine mesh nets are great at catching small fish -> all their food is now infected with insecticide, mosquitos continue to access the family as well
That was exactly the goal with the Buffalo Bicycle project, and I'd say it worked pretty well. Make a bike that's mechanically simple & reliable, maintainable with common tools, and train technicians to fix and upkeep them. Basically create the Toyota Landcruiser of bikes. I kind of want one, even though it's a "bad" bike by the standards of most western audiences (heavy, slow, ugly, etc)
even in the Big IT Enterprise "support" is a byword that appears in all discussions.
it's not enough to have, or to build, you gotta maintain, fix, replace, and eventually, remove.
those discussions aren't fun or sexy, and everyone hates when you tank a blue-sky "it'll fix everything" discussion with the unpleasant realities of long-term care and feeding
> it's not enough to have, or to build, you gotta maintain, fix, replace, and eventually, remove.
Indeed. I think many in the West fail to appreciate - and take for granted - the cultural dimensions (which include cultures of knowledge, skill transmission, cultivation, and development, and also worldview[0]) as well as the economic ecosystems and supply chains involved.
Dropping off a tractor in Africa or a bulldozer in rural India and calling it a day is superficial and worthless. Imagine shipping something suitably technologically advanced to some Germanic tribe during the Roman conquest of Europe if you need an analogy.
[0] The worldview bit might surprise some. As some have argued, there are reasons why enterprises like modern science arose and flourished only in the West, whereas everywhere else scientific development was historically quite limited. These reasons include a culture formed under the notion of the Logos which entails the belief in a thoroughly intelligible universe that can be fully known in principle; a rejection of pantheism with a distinction made between the transcendental and the immanent, allowing for exploration; a rejection of pantheism and so a world infested with capricious, personified natural phenomena; an omniscient and omnibenevolent God who is not capricious or voluntarist. Without these elements, the confidence and motivation needed to confidently exercise and develop intellectually, to try to understand the world - which contribute to the formation of a robust scientific culture - is stifled.
It's not just a failure to appreciate, it's an outright demonization of many of these observations as racist/imperialist. One of the prime motivators for this kind of development "aid" is the mistaken belief that the only issue is a lack of resources or external exploitation, and if you just provide the resources and/or remove the exploitation a given place will naturally turn into an enlightened Western nation-equivalent. Maybe with some fun unique cultural festivals, local cuisine, and some harmless, quirky native dances in exotic outfits!
Meanwhile even in the West it's easy to find people who win the lottery and are broke a year later, or rich celebrities/pro athletes who make tons of money and lose it all, or die with far less than you'd expect. Those people are laughed at and/or pitied, because even they are held to to a higher standard than some poor 3rd-worlder who's just a pure victim
Before the so-called scientific revolution and the later industrial revolution, that may be true - arguably for largely uninteresting reasons - but afterward, this is patently false.
Modern science arose only a couple of centuries ago in Europe. Prior to that, we see a long period of great European intellectual ferment, most notably the Scholastic period, that supplied the intellectual foundations and vocabulary that made modern science possible.
You're also reducing science to technology production, but even here, the sophistication of technology that modern science made possible far outstrips anything pre-scientific.
I don't understand this space very well, but I wonder if an iFixit-esque solution would work there: publish DIY guides on identifying and fixing common faults, and have a network of sellers for replacement parts and tools.
Absolutely a possibility. Solar systems, especially when not connected to a grid, are fairly simple beasts at the end of the day. Simple enough that I've seen more than a few youtube videos where guys build out their own custom solar system on a van.
There's only a few parts that go bad (it's probably a capacitor somewhere).
Those who are talking about market opportunities, yes it’s big!
Bottom up calculation: average $10/repair x 250 million potential repairs = $2.5B market.
Problem is labour shortages and supply chain, as stated in the report. Both hard problems to solve.
We’ve been working on getting the labour shortages fixed and I personally believe that you can also skip some of the supply chain problems by localising labour.
For example: when we train people they can 4x their _household_ income within 6 months. This is young people who didn’t have an income before and are suddenly earning 3x as much as both their parents combined.
People just don’t know how to fix these things and when someone finally learns how, they can absolutely rake it in.
It’s actually insane to me how much education can be such a massive multiplier in this context!
Yeah, I'd imagine so. Especially since Solar systems are relatively simple. People are doing more complex repairs on car electrical systems.
What sort of repairs are you training them to do? Is it just simply testing and swaps of parts? Or are you training them on how to find and replace a bad capacitor?
Brazilian person here, when I moved to Europe I was baffled I couldn't find shops that fixed electronics. Like I wanted to get my Android phone charging port replaced, I literally couldn't find a shop in my city willing to do the repair.
I eventually went back to Brazil and had it fixed there and replaced the battery. Freaking phone lasted 8 years on my very clumsly hands, still works even. The fix cost me ~30 usd plus the battery cost.
Yes, it's something extremely valuable, an expensive portable, and the new models all just keep getting worse and worse. There's no reason not to fix them.
It's also a repair that demands some amount of training. I imagine people fix a lot of things without getting them to a shop.
Hackers are down voting my comment. My question to them: If you could get paid twice the salary per hour to repair expensive machines, would you spend your time repairing mobile phones?
Everybody wants that juicy, juicy cheap labour, but nobody wants to be the cheap worker.
If nobody is offering cell phone repair services, that means repairing cell phones is not profitable enough compared to other things the person can do with their time. Otherwise people would offer these services.
Two economists were walking when they spotted a $100 bill. One asked the other "should one of us pick it up?", the other replied "no, if there was a $100 bill there, somebody would have picked it up already", so they kept walking.
Not even the joke is funny. People repeating it seriously is even less so.
Anyway, you would be right if you are trying to claim that the repairmen isn't the party maintaining the irrational situation, so they are powerless to fix it.
Then put your money where your mouth is and open as many cell phone repair shops in Europe as you please. You can mortgage your house and borrow a bunch of money if you need to get started.
But I think that there is always some reason or another why nobody is offering a service which seems to have great demand among customers.
And you can train those teenagers to do things which are much more profitable. If they have the dexterity and other skills needed to work on cell phone electronics, then they can work on other electronics.
If it was a good business, then there would be cell phone repair shops on every corner in Europe, like you have in other parts of the world where that makes sense.
lol yeah I was gonna say that they fix everything. They can't just Amazon prime new shit. It's weird how OP just assumes they're inept at repairs when that's just not true at all.
I didn’t say, nor do I assume, people are inept at repairs. I said that the communities that are being targeted with off-grid solar don’t currently have the skills or infrastructure required to maintain these systems.
It’s something I’ve seen with my own eyes and that I’ve read in academic literature as a widespread problem. Cross and Murray 2018 [1] being one the first papers to talk about it, I saw it myself for the first time around that time in Tanzania.
I stayed in a village where each house had at least 2 broken solar lanterns stored in a corner (like those old routers people love to keep).
The next closest repair shop was first 30min motorbike ride then a 2 hour bus ride away.
This was a village of 8,000 people.
Yes, the person with a diploma from the local technical college can fix a lot of things but they live in the local town with grid electric etc. They don’t live in these remote rural regions where off grid is so important/impactful.
The solution is to teach more people how to design, build and maintain solar energy systems so that the skills are embedded in off grid communities and give them the tools to carry out the work. You can do a lot with a soldering iron and good grasp of electronics!
Well, what is the alternative then? Probably the same problem when their diesel generator conks out. Small things you can do yourself, but rapidly you run into a situation where you need spare parts, or at least a competently run machine shop.
The same report says that 90% of those kits are repairable and the most common failure point is the battery and also that the vast majority of users hold on to their devices in hopes of repairing them in the future, as there exists some kind of repair service, it just isn't up to scale.
The repair service is really expensive for subtle reasons.
First of all there is the repair itself, but there isn’t any collection service so you need to travel (often a full day) to get to a repair centre. Then travel back. Not open on the weekend so you have to do it during the week, meaning you are also loosing 2 days of income. Then you have to go and get it once it’s done.
Total cost of repair for people using these devices might 10+ days worth of income if you include the opportunity cost.
That’s why we are training people to fix these systems within their communities.
Regarding parts you can get second life batteries in Kenya for $1-2 per cell from people like Acele Africa[1], so you can get total repair cost down to ~$10 (that’s ~3% of original purchase price)
> First of all there is the repair itself, but there isn’t any collection service so you need to travel (often a full day) to get to a repair centre
This is a good reminder of how much we in the developed world take our publicly funded transportation infrastructure for granted, which allows a repairman to easily reach us or vice versions.
This mirrors our public health infrastructure, which in the US at least is being degraded, the consequences of which we're all likely to experience soon.
I know you have some bias for the education solution, but I can't see why this is not a market problem. You have broken devices; you send them to get fixed; you have to travel one day to get them fixed; you have someone take them for a fee.
You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.
That’s the premium solution that some, but not most, can afford and only makes sense if the cost of repair is less than the cost a new unit. Travel just makes that tip in favour of getting a new system with a $10 deposit.
Most of the people we’re talking about here are subsistence farmers who pick up casual labour at a local farm. Income is sporadic and seasonal.
That was the initial brilliance of the PAYGO system, it allows users to pay off their device sporadically I.e. they buy units when they get paid and that goes towards paying off an asset that in theory will then provide energy at 0 marginal cost. Turns out that last bit isn’t true.
Here the VC story is important, these companies were meant to be high growth and giving significant returns. We all know how that ends.
> You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.
I have been in the past, but not anymore. No one is saying people aren’t resourceful but there is a significant barrier to entry when it comes to electronics repairs for the general population. One part of what we provide is an off-grid repair lab bundled with our new education offering so it’s very much knowledge + tools.
It depends. If the quality of the panels is similar to Temu products and not design with any repairablity in mind, then even with almost no labor costs, it still might be more cost-effective to simply replace the entire thing.
I was thinking about this too. There are tradeoffs around repairability. As an example, if you're expecting the unit to live in a wet environment it's not unreasonable to consider potting the circuit boards. This makes water ingress as a source of failure significantly less likely, but also has thermal effects (heat can't radiate very well through a block of silicone) that can hurt the overall lifetime as well as make it almost impossible to repair.
The most likely part to fail is the charge controller. That's got enough brains and parts that are ultimately likely to fail due to something like a bad capacitor. Next up is the batteries. If they are lead acid, then simply letting them under charge or dry out could have damaged them. Then the transformer/convert would be my next guess. It's got the right set of parts to go wrong. Panels is the last thing that might fail. They have no real parts to them, just cells and wires. About the only thing that could go wrong is if the wires somehow corrode (someone removes or scratches off the protective layer). Otherwise, the panels will likely just lose efficiency over time. They'll still generate power, but like 70% of their new condition.
That seems more optimistic (or solar punk) than your summary e.g.:
> In terms of waste management, 85.3% of distributors reported
that they had a waste management strategy. Mostly, this
tended to involve collecting broken products, harvesting
them for spare parts and then storing the remainder in a
central warehouse before sending them to a (usually certified)
local e-waste recycling facility. How effective these recycling
facilities are, however, was beyond the scope of this report.
They seem to suggest that lithium batteries are the hardest to repair and recycle, but people want to do so. It feels like a problem that will get easier at scale.
For sure recycling is improving. That’s different from repair though.
The current cycle is
1. sell product
2. wait three years for it to break
3. Go back to 1.
The impact of the recycling can lessen the impact of that but it definitely doesn’t eliminate it. That’s just on environmental scale, think about the financial impact of carrying this debt for years on people earning $2 a day.
Also important to note that a lot of this is contingent of legislation that implements things like Extended Producer Responsibly (EPR) where you essentially have an additional tax on producers that gets used to fund collection. Kenya implemented this for the first time 12 months ago [1], so we will see the impact over the next couple years.
Re solar punk, my personal vision is that you basically teach people how to build and maintain these systems themselves by running solar tech bootcamp and giving them off-grid tools.
They then have tools and skills to fix anything without the need for the grid. Train 100k people and have them maintain these systems using a decentralised approach.
In fact, as part of our training we now have e-cooking stove suppliers who deliver training on their stoves to our students.
The economic impact of this cannot be over stated.
1. You are giving people the ability to 4x their income as repairers
2. You are saving the people who are getting new systems, instead of repairing them, multiples of their yearly income.
Africans have more repair skills than westerners. Due to cost of things being expensive, repair culture is really big over there and in other 3rd world countries. You would be surprised at what folks can fix over there.
Are you saying the reason roads are bad in some parts of Africa is that the people there are too dumb to know how to repair the roads? That their problem is figuring out how to mix and pour asphalt, cement, or gravel on their roads?
That would be very dumb, if that's what you are saying.
No, I'm saying their/our societies are broken. Wrong values, wrong incentives w.r.t. to the skills required to build modern, well-maintained cities with roads, schools, hospitals, etc. when compared to similar peers in e.g. Asia.
Of course they are intellectually capable of laying asphalt, but they end up spending it on salaries, ridiculously enriching small elites, etc. Its not unique to Africa, but its certainly endemic here.
And not all of the citizens like it like this - hence the massive diaspora. Which is why I used the word "failed", not "dumb".
But thanks for taking my comment in the best possible interpretation - perhaps you should refresh yourself with the HN guidelines if these kinds of serious conversations distress you.
Footnote: I se you say you are from Ghana. Well Ghana and Singapore become independent at about the same time. Both got to run their country themselves. Only one decided it was important for their families and grandchildren to pour said asphalt.
The somethingpunk settings are supposed to be gritty and dominated by exploitative megacorps, though! As a rule, the thingpunk needs a Man dominating by means of the thing to rebel against. The only reason "solarpunk" has gotten such a rosy image is that its proponents tend to fancy themselves the Tessier-Ashpools were it to come to pass.
I guess even cyberpunk now has a bimodal supporter base - there are the would-be punks, and then there are the would-be (and actual) Zuckerbergs building the torment nexus/metaverse.
This is interesting. Can you please consider expanding your outreach to venues other than linkedin? I understand that you are serving local needs, but I suspect that some people in the United States would be quite interested in learning about this. I've assumed that people used solar power in Africa, but didn't consider the restraints and challenges of keeping them operational.
Yeah not much has changed, it’s simple technology that was developed in 2005. Main innovations of the PAYGO model in recent times was the ability to use the payment data you collected to offer other types of loans. One of the previous biggest companies in the space now sells mobile phones using PAYGO.
Technically battery chemistry has obviously moved on but we are talking a device capacity similar to a medium power bank. How much innovation have you noticed in power banks recently?
Panels are big problem from a e-waste perspective as they very difficult to repair.
Batteries failures are repairable. Usually battery packs will be 2+ LFP 18650s or 32700s. If one cell goes bad the the whole pack goes but the others may be fine. Just need to test and match cells and you can make new packs.
I can’t remember exact recovery rate for cells, I think it is something like 40-60%.
Dealing with these batteries at end of life is a challenge, but that’s a global problem.
Still a lot of legacy Sealed Lead Acid batteries around but these are very recyclable.
If we look at the growth curves it is clear that the actual real boom in solar will be happening between now and the next 10 (maybe 20 years) until the S-curve flattens.
The pictures in the report show panels which are so tiny in comparison to what you can buy today for 50 USD that it seems incomprehensible why anybody would repair them.
There is no sustainable future without repair and maintenance, and there are significant barriers to repair and maintenance imposed by governments in the name of "Intellectual property".
Is there some money in recycling them? The easiest way to get people interested in cleaning up trash is if you can pay them for the trash. Is there any money in a broken solar panel?
Cheap crap = lasts only as long as the warranty period.
I did a survey in partnership with a the African Leadership University in a Rwanda, where we surveyed people living in two rural villages and found 90% or units had broken within 3 years of purchase. This is the logical end point when 1/5 stop working after 6 months, which you can find in Cross and Murry 2018, linked in other comments.
10x mark up (i.e. the mark up on cost of the unit) comes from knowing that the COGS for one of these units is ~$20-30 and the premium sellers sell up to $300.
Sure it’s at the top end of the range but 10x markup on each unit is not an exaggeration, let alone a massive one.
Gross margins are indeed tight but that’s is a separate issue to markup. You can sell at a huge markup and still make a loss: for example if the default rate of loans you make turns out to be much higher than you expected.
Solar is dead simple. The cell puts out 12v. Theres some maths around parallel and serial but you don’t need to know that for repairs. The cells connect into a box that puts out ac. If the box fails you buy a new one (no user serviceable parts inside is what the sticker says). If the wires break you splice them.
If something hard breaks and you decommission a system the cells are still good and can be trivially reused. If a cell fails it’s obvious and it can be pulled out of rotation.
People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them.
This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world.
It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over.
More details for the interested here: https://solar-aid.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/State-of-Re...