Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

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“While these projects will help build energy supply on the continent, the International Energy Agency has said sub-Saharan Africa needs to invest $300 billion in order to achieve universal electricity access by 2030.”

While that sounds like a lot of dosh – and it is – in the grand scheme of things the benefits would be unimaginably transformative.

Geek stats: https://ltwp.co.ke/ltwp-connected-to-grid/

  • Construction of 365 Wind Turbine Generators (WTGs), with a capacity of 850kW each, for a
    total project installed capacity of 310 MW connected via a 33kV collection grid to the substation;
  • Installation of 365 Step-up Transformers 0.69/33 kV per Unit;
  • Construction of a sectionalized 33kV Substation, Step-up Power Transformers 33/220(400) kV;
  • Installation of three Dynamic Reactive Power Compensation Systems (Statcoms);
  • Installation of a SCADA System;
  • Construction of the LTWP Accommodation Village, which houses 148 people;
  • Construction and maintenance of 130km of internal access roads; and,
  • Upgrading of 208km road from Laisamis to Sarima.

300 billion is actually a lot less than I would have thought... and incidentally it's about 6 times less than the US invasion of Iraq.

Last I calculated, All energy needs of all of the world would be supplied with solar plants worth a trillion dollar.

I'd love to see the numbers on this if you have them in a shareable format. How did your model account for value deflation and what assumptions did it make about storage tech?

Including storage and distribution ?

In theory a huge solar plant in the Sahara desert would cover all our needs, the problem is moving/storing the energy.

Nice segue to a completely off topic military/political bunny trail.

The global climate catastrophe is very much a political problem, as are its solutions.

Just saying instead of killing each other in pointless wars we could use those resources to avoid global warming and help raise people out of poverty. I can dream, no? ;-)

The CNN article links to a PDF. Where exactly in the PDF can you find the 300 billion number mentioned? It seems far too small to me.

Read to the very bottom of the CNN article :)

I know where it is in the CNN article. That sentence links to a PDF file [1] which is the one I'm wondering about.

[1]: https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio...

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