Solarpunk is happening in Africa

Battery powered induction stoves exist, although they are not cheap enough yet. They are, however, truly excellent products. The one from Impulse Labs is not a case of “wow, I can get decent performance without the monster electric hookup it used to require” — it’s “wow, this seems to be the best stove of any sort on the market by a considerable margin, and it’s nifty that it happens to run off an integral battery, too.” If you’re so inclined, you can cook an entire meal or three on it while unplugged.

If someone wants to make them work in rural areas like this, I think the necessary ingredients will be:

1. Cheaper batteries. These are likely coming.

2. More energy. A meal might require 1 kWh or more. (Or less — scrambled eggs won’t require much energy at all.) This is solvable with more panels.

3. Copper. The coil itself is a decent sized hunk of copper. I assume this is part of why cheap little portable induction cooktops still cost $50 or more.

4. Power electronics? I’m not an expert, and I have no idea how much of the cost comes from the power electronics, but integrating the battery and the induction heater seems like it should result in a dramatically simpler system than, say, producing AC from a battery and then converting that AC into a form that will power the coil. The current list price of the Impulse Labs stove includes a hilariously high power output, and a stove targeting rural Africa could be 1/5 as powerful and would still be fantastic.

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could squeeze the cost of a decent battery powered stove down to $200 in a few years if they had appropriate scale.

AC makes power distribution easier (because you can have modulated phases). So it's correct to say it's easier to move it over a long distance. Additionally, and i'm really simplifying, at parity of nominal voltage, you can move a lot more power, at a lower dissipation cost. This has resulted in few high power electronics to be AC native (ie.: no AC - DC - AC conversion). Think about motors in the various appliances, etc. It doesn't need to be like that, investment in DC car motors have pushed the industry to optimizes design, and get similar power output of the motor at lower energy consumption.

That said, if you are a manufacturer of an appliance and you have an addressable user base of billions with AC, and a 'potential new user base' with DC... you might just want to swallow the cost and add a DC / AC converter for the sake to not have to produce two variants of the most complex / costly item (the motor in this case).

> I guess the bigger issue is the limited power -- you probably can't use a small scale solar installation for cooking or washing, not because it's DC, but because it just wont offer 1000W power.

Your average lead-acid starter battery can easily do that - 1 kW is less than 100 amps at 12V, less than 50A if you wire two in series. 200 Ah means about four hours worth of runtime.

The problem is switching off higher DC voltages and currents. AC is easy, it traverses through 0V 100 (or 120 in the US) times a second. But DC? The arc is just going on. That's why most electrical equipment, from switches over automated breakers to fuses, has distinct ratings for AC and DC, with DC ratings sometimes being half the AC rating.

Additionally, larger DC networks tend to have issues with weird current flows and electrochemical corrosion.

Lowtech magazine recently had an article about cooking with solar power:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2025/10/how-to-build-a-sol...

Thought provoking question! I am not an electrical engineer, but arguments I heard went along these lines: Almost all existing appliance markets are AC. Are we really going to be building a complete parallel appliance market? You wouldn't be able to sell a TV from the city in the country side and vice versa. I would be keen to hear what an electrical engineer on hackernews has to say!

Interestingly, when I visited the countryside, I saw some AC electrical appliances. One elder couple had an enormous 80ies style stereo-set gathering dust in the shed. I was told they were a wedding gift.

Thermal energy storage solves the problem of cooking and washing.

I have a half-liter thermos bottle that leaks about 0.3 watts at ΔT ≈ 50° (635g of water dropped from 71.9° to 69.8° over five hours and 8 minutes), so any power supply averaging over about a watt would be sufficient to boil water in it—eventually. If you needed to do it in the 4 hours the sun was near peak on a single day, you'd need at least 15 watts. (I don't live in Africa, but I do live in a third-world country. Blown-glass thermoses are pretty widely available because, although they're fragile, they're light and never wear out, just shatter.)

Sand batteries are potentially extremely cheap and can easily deliver cooking temperatures. A super-low-tech version of this approach is "salt frying", where you preheat a few kg of table salt (melting point 800.7°) to frying temperature, then stir dry food into it. Most of the salt won't stick to the food, but the few grains that do won't cause the edibility problems that sand would.

TCES potentially offers much greater storage density and much greater controllability than these sensible-heat energy-storage technologies, since you can store the "heat" indefinitely.

Phase-change thermal energy storage is another potentially appealing possibility, potentially offering a stable cooking temperature for many hours, although I don't know of any suitable materials. The MgCl₂-KCl–NaCl eutectic, for example, doesn't melt until 401°. Maybe something like calcium stearate (m.p. 150°–180°) would work, but its heat of fusion isn't great, I'd be worried about long-term stability, and although it's easy to get anywhere in the world, it's probably a lot more expensive than salt. (Table salt is US$100/tonne, but the eutectic mentioned above would be closer to US$400/tonne.)

Ignoring the cost of the battery how much does a cordless drill that'll break your wrist cost? A non-trivial amount more than the corded one that's for sure. You're gonna see comparable cost difference in just about every "final appliance" that actually turns the jiggling electrons into results (whether those results are work or heat).

Alternating current is substantially easier to step up/down in voltage, much nicer to anything that modulated current flow and has a lot of convenient aspects for motors. Like for like the DC solution costs just a little bit more every step of the way.

Even if you're not doing long distance transmission the cost of all those things that are worse about DC are going to be bore across the entirety of your economy that uses AC. DC makes sense here because the supply chain is so dysfunctional that making the "better" solution work would actually cost more than the "12v doodads from china" style solution. Eventually as electrification continues the choice of DC will become a drag though.

Happy to oblige. Basically we digitized a company from spreadsheets or paper to ERP. We'd introduce accounting software, stock management software, help desk software. But the biggest thing you need is some kind of "Loan Account Management Software" which is the center piece.

This centerpiece tracks the outstanding loan amount that each customer has. It sutomatically sends payment reminder SMS messages a few days before payments are due. It connects to the hardware with internet-of-things to turn it off if payments aren't made. It connects to the bank to ensure payments are there, and confirms when payments are made. Really fun software to build with many different parts.

There were SaaS providers for this. In the beginning (2015) there was only 1 player, Angaza (Reed Hastings mentioned in the article is one of their sales guys). Nowadays there are a handful; PaygOps, BBoX pulse (not sure if that still exists), and a few smaller ones. They charge like $2-$7 per device managed on the platform.

Convincing customer to take this up was not hard at all. You pretty much needed it to run your operations on anything more than 100 customers, and as the above article shows, scale had big advantages. Moreover; if you could show to investors that you had the software infrastructure scale, they were significantly likely to give money. It was boom time until corona hit. Everyone was expecting 30% YoY growth like until 2019, but then everything stagnated. Many companies went bankrupt and a lot of consolidation happened in the distributor market. Companies saved money on their software first, and we called it a day.

In the manufacturing industry where I am now, I fully agree with the mixed bag. Companies are old, with many old people, they stay small and don't necessarily need to scale or "grow forever". They are conservative and happy with the way things are.

Yes and no. You are right that indoor cooking (or outdoor on wood) is indeed one of the biggest causes of death worldwide. It dwarfs deaths by malaria. And where people don't die, it causes respiratory issues. I don't know the math but it is similar to smoking X cigarettes a day.

- sidenote - You always learn that in centuries past, people didn't grow old. I never knew why but my current suspicion is that air pollution by stoves and hearths was probably the top 3 cause.

However, cooking isn't (yet) solved by solar. Making heat from electricity is hard! Clean Cooking solutions often use propane, butane, or wooden pallets. Clean Cooking companies face all of the same issues as the Off grid solar companies of this article. But you'd be surprised that it is really considered a different industry. Customers and price plans are the same, but funding often comes from different sources.

Making affordable, electric, clean cooking solutions would be one of the most impactful inventions of our generation. Even then, challenges remain: No cultural activity is as steeped in tradition as cooking, and convincing people to change this, resulting in different tasting meals, is hard. Particular if it is the man deciding on the money, and the woman doing the work.

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.

ain't just tech in the developing world.

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

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.

On some level economies of scale and improving technology don’t warrant maintenance

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.

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.

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)

[1] https://www.aceleafrica.com/

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.

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.

[1] https://cleanupkenya.org/30-things-to-know-about-kenyas-epr-...

"Africans have more repair skills than westerners."

… which is why our roads are so much better than those in Switzerland.

We are teaching people how to fix them so that the income stays within those communities.

You can see a bit our latest work here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energy-makers-academy_strathm...

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.

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.

They say $120 might as well be a million and they immediately follow that up with “$100 down payment to get started”. But I thought it was like a million dollars??

LLM slop. Author couldn’t even be bothered to read the slop before clicking publish.

Yeah way too many tell-tale ChatGPT rhetorical devices in this article, which is a shame because the topic and premise are fascinating, but those turned me off from finishing it.

AI slop hits 700+ upvotes on Hacker News. The Dead Internet and the triumph of quantity over quality loom. A sign of things to come.

These 0.21/day are MPESA transaction fees. I stumbled upon that, too.

the vast majority of solar panels are imaculately concieved in fully automated factorys,some where in fact there are NO people and they turn the lights off, as the robots are blind to those frequencys anyway. surviving solar PV production facilities operate on razor thin margins, and gargantuan volumes, the results of which are the electrification of most of the world, useing the absolute minimum of carbon. first lights, and dev8ces, small appliences, then the next step will be universal access to clean water and refrigeration, and then the worlds largest continent will be something to recon with.

Like anything else that the world procures cheaply from China btw.