Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power | Hacker News Reader

Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power

bbc.com

230 pointspseudolus172 comments

I like solar and all, but I will say that just looking at the farming practices of these growers, this transformation will likely be shortlived (I am thinking in terms of generations, not in terms of seasons). Yes, the solar allows people to rapidly deploy solar to use as pumps, but those pumps are also depleting the aquifer. They are probably not putting anything back into the aquifer with practices such as rainwater harvesting (earthworks and improving infiltration, rather than rain barrels).

In metro Phoenix, AZ (here in the States) we have been seeing something similar as the deep water have been drying up. Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights (from the Colorado river), and people’s solutions have been to install an electric pump to get at the water. With so many people draining off of the aquifer, people who have been depending on the water have been having difficulty with getting consistent water. Many of them are finding that they have to try to sell the property. What they have not been doing are things like, capturing the rain that does come to the region to irrigate crops or landscape; use of greywater; use of a composting toilet (which cleans waste with the carbon cycle rather than the hydrologic cycle), and otherwise conserve drinking and cooking water. Tuscon, AZ and Flagstaff, AZ have residents and public policies in place that does a much better job with this than Phoenix.

With cheap solar added to the mix, what will happen is that it hastens the aquifer depletion.

So those poppy farmers are not thinking with whole systems or thinking in the long term. On the other hand, if they were thinking in the long term, they probably would not be growing poppy as a cash crop in the first place. Perhaps small batches to make high quality anesthesia for local use, as part of of a more diverse crop. You don’t kill off your aquifer, and you don’t make something that will kill off your customers. You’d have nothing left.

My conclusion is that that the market forces, while transformative, is also very limited and short-sighted, and there are better ways for humans to interact with each other.

Can't agree that the poppy farmers aren't thinking long term. Abusing the aquifer is the nash equilibrium. As soon as one person starts pumping everyone else has to too, because the water will be gone soon either way. This is a collaboration failure more than some sort of ignoring the long term for the short term.

Isn't that a clear example of the Tragedy of the Commons? I mean, if access to the aquifer required the replenishment of it as a barrier of entry wouldn't that in turn mitigate the issue? For example, requiring that 1:1 rainwater be recaptured, something Colorado only recently allowed, and pumped back into the aquifer? Enforceability becomes the real issue, but having lived most of my Life in CA and in CO in the US, Water wars are REAL and I only see them getting more serious unless we come up with better desalination techniques and processes in the immediate future.

My chemistry professor was saying in the mid 2000s that water had already become the new Gold.

>> For example, requiring that 1:1 rainwater be recaptured

Collection of rainwater is never an option in farming. The reason they are irrigating is because there isn't enough rain. To capture enough rain to facilitate irrigation requires devices as large or larger than the fields to be irrigated. Rain barrels aren't enough. Agriculture measures water in acre-feet.

So you turn field B into a pond to hold water for field A. How deep is that pond? If it is only a couple feet you will loose all your water to evaporation. You need deeper water. You need a dam. So you better be good at concrete retaining walls, or hope there is a convenient river valley on your plot.

Rainwater harvesting is not very efficient with a rain barrel. There are much better design patterns for harvesting rain:

1. To scale, you are really trying to capture water in the soil itself

2. This means taking advantage of terrain features to manage patterns of flow. The idea here is to slow down flow so that it cycles through the planting areas so that the water can infiltrate instead of running off.

3. Mosquitos is a problem if pooling remains for more than three days. The solution here is to add organic compounds (mulching) to cover the areas being pooled. It effectively makes the water go below the surface, and have the added benefit of carrying composting nutrients deeper into the soil.

4. Soil’s ability to hold water depends upon a number of factors. Among them is how much carbon material is there, which includes the remains of root systems. Living, healthy soil will act as a sponge and release water to the plant as needed.

5. So protecting soil erosion is a huge part of conserving water. If the rain is carrying off soil because it is running off too fast, there is never a build up of soil to act as a sponge.

6. You may need to plant more than a monocrop. At least plant ground cover to protect the farm’s soil fertility.

7. Certain soil amendments can have lasting effect on its ability to absorb water. Biochar — charcoal that have been prepared in a way to make it suitable for plants — have the property of absorbing water and releasing it as needed. They also form habitats for microbes and fungi, which can also enhance plant growth.

8. Heavy fertilizing may be contributing to soil loss. They don’t help accumulate the kind of properties that help soil absorb water.

Here is an example paper about it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biolog...

It is not as if this stuff is not well known

> Collection of rainwater is never an option in farming.

I used to be a Farm Manager, and did a 3 year apprenticeship in Biodyniamic Ag.

I know of very few crops that can remain fallow/non-irrigated and still do well come harvest, they exist but are hardly going to be widespread much less in AZ. And while there are practices that can be undertaken to conserve water (cover crops, large scale mulching, drip irrigation) all of which I have personal experience in utilizing, this was more about how to ensure the barrier of entry is excluded to those who would otherwise just deplete it in a tragedy of the commons manner.

Let me explain in more detail.

My idea was based on the following: to initially access the aquifer you must install another metered pump that must remain in operation and re-pump an equal amount that you pumped out of the table in earlier seasons throughout the year/season back into the source and failing to return it will not just incur costs/penalties but also deny you access to it.

When I was a Farm manager in Maui we had a similar issue with nearby dry land Taro growers, as a Biodynamic farm we have more active cultures with various water needs, so we had a large reservoir (20000 gallon capacity tank attached to a sand sand based filtration system) that ensured we could remain operational for extended periods of time of drought as we captured rain water as a ritual, but we could also replenish the source if need-be and often did to purge and clean the tanks. They can get moldy due to stagnation, and water is very important in Biodynamics, specifically that which if it is perturbed--its mainly just for water aeration.

The water source we captured from was a creek that came from Haleakala and was gravity fed to our cultures so it was considered sacred, and we were Haoles so we always had to make an even greater effort to maintain good relations with our Native neighbors. Nothing was ever good enough, but we did it anyway.

That meant fixing their neglected or poorly built dams/jetty, and offsetting their water needs when Maui electric shut off the water sources for maintenance and went way longer then they projected (Welcome to Hawaii!).

I lost all of my greenhouse starters so that our neighbors could have water that season and have something to bring to Market and I emptied my tank several times to do so and had to get creative about how I'd water my other active cultures with rain water and had to make due to continue to bring product to Market in order to keep our 1:1 profit sharing model with our vendors/produce managers.

We would was always be seen as foreigners taking resources, despite having been the only Farm on the Islands to take in people with special needs as part of our Program (Camphill), who we built an Art Studio for and then bought a large Home for that took money from our Ag program I was supposed to be managing. And after many 70+ work weeks we finally made them profitable for the first time in their entire existence proving the model can work, but requires EXTENSIVE amounts of hard-work, dedication, and sacrifice.

We often gave away any excess food we couldn't sell or had on hand after we fed our staff to the local food bank. I lost money that year as I had to stop getting paid after my 7th month there, and I often had to fight the Department of Ag in audits so much that I just paid out of pocket to finish the irrigation system myself.

I also made an effort to hire local people, of all colours, rather than my initial desire to take on European applicants who were already trained and I could take them on as non-paid apprentices working the 40+ work weeks, as I had.

I realized it was a lost-cause and that racism/exclusion is prevalent and cannot work due to issues that extend far before my Time there, so I resigned and left on a high (despite massive burn-out) only to be given an affirmation of Pono as I left from Maui.

The point is that collaboration with your neighbors is far more important than any water conserving or well mentioned actions ever will be. And that is how this how sustainability should be approached.

Because the truth is, Nestle has been doing this for some time, some large Multi-national could just show up buy the source, deplete what was there and then walk away and use the losses as a tax write-off. Then come back and buy back all the surrounding area in distress for cheap and recover any costs and hold it in their portfolio as assets to leverage in some other capacity.

The simplest solution would be to charge a fair price for water since the vast majority of water is used for farming. But since most corporate farms have multi-decade long water contracts, this isn't possible (aka you must legislate, which would also benefit corporate farms).

This is what happened in India. As aquifers have been depleted, people in many areas there are struggling to get drinking water. Once upon a time, people used to get drinking water from dug wells even in the summer. Now, there is no water even at 600 feet.

I saw a promotional video about harvesting rainwater made by an Indian non-profit. Have you seen that one?

I was describing alternative ways to get water rather than draining the aquifer, as well as long term effects of flooding the market with opium. I do not think the Nash equilibrium describes that.

Unfortunately, it does.

A farmer can convert now, and pay the extra price of doing so, while missing out on the easier aquifer water.

Or, they can do what everyone else does: pump now, then convert when their hand is forced.

Absent some group collaboration, this bad deal is the correct choice: anything else would be worse for an individual farmer.

That's a Nash equilibrium.

Not addressing the short vs long term thinking about opium, since it's unrelated, but I don't think your analysis is correct; the Pashtuns have been growing this crop for literally thousands of years.

That is a lot to think about. I did not know what a Nash equilibrium is. I don’t have an immediate answer to this. I only have some vague notions that the alternatives I am thinking of does not cost as much as it is perceived, and conversion strategies may not require a large investment with an immediate opportunity cost. In other words, not all viable strategies are known by the actors.

I tried looking up information on the Pashtuns and pre-modern cultivation of opium. So far, I have only found articles and papers talking about significant cultivation since the 1950s. I have found articles describing this as a fairly complex issue.

I am interested in understanding the traditional farming practices of the Pashtuns, and how and why it changed. Is there anything written about that you know off the top of your head?

You don't need to worry about the Nash equilibrium. What happens in many cases is that short-term rationality trumps the long-term rationality. When neighbors are making more money; when neighbors are sending their kids to good schools; when neighbors are doing better; it is irrational of one to harvest rain water to recharge groundwater.

Thank you for your view. I am trying to practice keeping an open mind, or at least, think through things from different perspectives. It also helps me to communicate better.

I think another point that the Nash equilibrium brings up is that all actors are non-cooperative. I thought I was making a point that self-interest would make rainwater harvesting rational.

I think rainwater harvesting is rational, having seen good designs, and what it can do. It may even cost less than the solar panels, pump, digging out a reservoir, and the drilling... but I don’t think I know the exact numbers to make that kind of comparison.

There is also an assumption that you choose between one or the other, rather than a succession, where one method is employed in the small scale and gradually replaces the other.

Another issue is whether it would scale.

I had not even brought up how specific soil amendments and practices can greatly increase the water retention ability of the water —- which is also a part of rainwater harvesting.

I don’t know how well rainwater harvesting scale to industrial agriculture. I _think_ it can be scalable. Looking at the harvesting practices, you are scarring the head and collecting the sap. So it probably does not require planting in a way to optimize for using a combine to harvest.

Finally, I also recall the farmer’s mindset. I was watching this show about American farmers. One thing they say a lot is how they make gambles. Sometimes it pays off and sometimes it does not. (Which I can say a lot about with regenerative agriculture that is also resilient against a single point of failure). So introducing new practices is risky for the farmer, and they would probably rather build on what they know works. As such, they would narrow their perceived viable choices, and it gets to the conditions for the Nash equilibrium.

Yes, it is non-cooperative. Cooperation works when there is cooperation in every other area, not just rainwater harvesting.

Will the neighbor's child, who has become a multi-millionaire, help another neighbor, whose kids are not as fortunate as that kid? I ask this question, not to bring in some silly contrast.

There is a deeper issue, since Arrow's impossibility theorem is shown to be equivalent to a special case of the Nash Equilibrium. As a consequence, Arrovian dictator (in social choice framework) is equivalent to shared compromise in Nash cooperative game. Unless there is a dictator to force cooperation, it is just a talk.

In an extreme, where everyone is poor and struggling for drinking water, you can see some cooperation. As long as the gravy train runs, one just milks it.

I think that depends on the mindset on what wealth is, and that the current, prevailing mindset has been conditioned. It isn’t as if such conditioning can cannot change.

I think there will always be some people who are going to be ruthless, but by and large, I think without that conditioning and given the choice, many people would prefer doing things that are fair for other people.

> I think without that conditioning and given the choice, many people would prefer doing things that are fair for other people.

It's interesting that you think this, as there really isn't a large body of strong examples of this behaviour. The person you were responding to came pretty close to something optimistic (there are solutions) but still realistic (most people are not nice to strangers).

The problem isn't farmer's, it's the breathless tone of the journalist who seems to know nothing about aquifer depletion.

Classic capitalism-aggrandizing faux-environmentalism.

You have a good argument about the aquifer.

That growing poppies is dumb because it will kill off all your customers is a bad argument for two reasons.

1. The heroin market has proven sustainable for generations.

2. Even if suddenly no one wants heroin anymore, the farmer can plant a different crop the next season.

1. That does not mean that heroine is a positive influence in the world that helps nourish people’s physical and emotional health.

2. It isn’t about whether you can adapt and find a different crop to grow. It is that you are growing something that helps things go into a degenerative, rather than a regenerative feedback loop.

You're making ethical arguments. That's good for discussing what people should do.

However, we live in a world where entities often do not make ethical decisions. They make practical decisions: should I grow coca or coffee beans? The gang with guns wants me to grow coca, and they are willing to kill people who don't work for them... so I guess I grow coca. You can wish for them to be dead heroes, but that's not how you should bet.

At a larger scale, ethics don't win over profits. There are for-profit prison corporations. I bet they have very well thought-out corporate mission statements.

If you want to talk about why people make the decisions they do, you need to think about psychology and economics. If you want to talk about how people can be supported to make better decisions, you need to talk about politics and economics.

I think if I were talking about small groups of people where much of the food production is done onsite, and there is a higher cooperation locally, this can be done. It has been done, even in just a regular neighborhood. I am not necessarily talking about changing large agricorps or policy changes.

Growing poppies has been consistently profitable for decades and is likely to remain profitable for the foreseeable future as the demand has yet to decrease.

It is true, however, that as the supply increases the likelihood that some consumers (namely addicts) won't be able to purchase any future batches increases as well (due to overdose, loss of income, etc). The market will likely reach an equilibrium eventually. Increases in supply have been met with increases in sales so the equilibrium hasn't been reached. This hasn't been a relevant consideration so far and there is no indication that it is now relevant. As such, it is hardly irrational or dumb to grow poppies at the moment.

The morality of the practice is another concern entirely. It is notable, however, that they do have legitimate medicinal applications.

As the article says

  So much water is now being used that ground water levels in Helmand are estimated to be falling by 3m a year.
  The fear is that pretty soon the water will simply run out.
  "Maybe this boom will not last longer than 10 years," says Orzala Nemat, who runs the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, the country's biggest think tank.
  That won't just affect the people who have moved into the desert areas, she says. It will affect the entire region.

Yes eventually. Pima and Cochise counties are also similarly in trouble. Many rain collection techniques are really just starting to take off in Arizona. But they are also short sighted. You can tell when you listen to the radio there, news daily about the Colorado river problems and rural farmers. They literally don't know what to do.

In any case I do think as wells run dry in Afghanistan, they will migrate to these techniques too. However if they are just now pumping, it may be that they are many years behind AZ's farming culture and they probably have a good 20 years of pumping. Drugs, unfortunately is a long term crop. Even if that eventually goes away there are many crops that can make money. They'll adapt as US farmers do each year.

I do not mean to be snarky, but do you think they really care about long term. Even with education and healthcare slowly coming along around the world, the Afghanistan fertility rate is still above 5 kids per woman or something. It is a society still rooted in tradition. People from the West try to create a halo around traditional ways of living and tribals and other such things for different reasons (some genuine, some not). The truth is they are competing in their own Darwinian way to maximize their own benefit with whatever resources they can land their hand on. The farmers generally are relatively richer land owners and will alway strife for output maximization and regulation of output is not easy for the state in a place like this.

> It is a society still rooted in tradition.

Societies change. Do you know anything about Afghanistan of the 70's? Look it up if you don't. It was fairly westernized. I suspect there's a large portion of the population that would like to return to that, but they either don't have the control, or even if there are a majority of them, they don't have to the will to go against fundamentalists willing to die (or, more importantly, kill) to prevent it.

In any case, painting the entire country with such a broad brush seems unwarranted.

I think it would be more accurate to say that a small urban class was fairly westernised.

Sometimes, such a class starts a trend, and everyone follows. IMO it helps a lot if there's real economic growth, I mean from useful jobs not from oil etc, so that country bumpkins can live out the dream of moving to the city & having nicer things. But it's not a sure thing, sadly.

Sure, but I don't think it's a stretch to say it could have gone a route that left it significantly more modern and with much more of what we would consider western values, as portions of the country were already like that as recently as 50 years ago.

I think any narrative along the lines of "Afghanistan is traditional and tribal and you can't change that" which doesn't address that at all is at best poorly communicated, but more likely working from poor assumptions.

> and you can't change that

I didn't get this sense from anything anyone was saying.

Pashtuns make up the majority of the population of Afghanistan but the government and power has largely been controlled by the Tajiks. Pashtun culture is tribalistic and isolated. It's not wrong to say that it is a society rooted in tradition. It very much is. The westernization of Afghanistan was very much isolated to large cities like Kabul and Kandahar. Most of the country at the time (and still is to this day) smaller tribes of Pashtuns that remain largely isolated from even the happenings of their own government.

My point is mainly that I think a statement that "it's a society rooted in tradition" that doesn't cover the not-so-distant past where a significant portion of the population, even if not a majority, was much less traditional in views needs to either account for that. Kabul (and the metro area around it) looks to have had over 6% of the total population of Afghanistan in 1978, and that's just one city.

The median age in Afghanistan is ninteen.[1]

When the Soviet-Afghan War started in 1979, the population of Afghanistan was 13.41 million. Current population is 38.93 million.[2] Afghans who were 14 or older when that war started make up less than 7% of the population.[1]

While I don't doubt that many Afghans would like a more stable country, I'm skeptical that a large portion of them have any real idea of what their country was once like. (Nor do I know how accurate and the Westernized portrayals I've seen really were.)

1 https://www.indexmundi.com/afghanistan/demographics_profile....

2 https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/afghanistan-popu...

I was thinking less of people with specific memories, and more of the people those people raised and or interacted with. This can actually have even more of an impact than actually being in the period, as what's related may be selective, and based on what people want to remember.

There's a reason why the 50's in America were portrayed so often as a golden age and a time where things were simpler, and part of that is just people that wanted to remember a time before the 60's and 70's where there was lots of upheaval and unrest. Were the 50's as simple and wholesome as depicted? Surely not, there was plenty of intolerance for those that didn't fit into the mold ("beatniks"), and that's before we even broach the rampant racism, segregation, etc. Yet, if you're of a certain age in America, you were raised on the idea that the 50's were wonderful, everyone lived the nuclear family dream, and everyone's mom was like June Cleaver.

How much this applies to current Afghanistan? I have no idea. But I don't think it's impossible there's quite a bit of rose tinted longing for that age among certain segments of the population, even if they aren't old enough to remember it.

It seems like Arizona is not a very optimal place to grow crops not already suited to the environment. And the usage of water by residential customers has got to be extreme for the region. I have only flown into and out of Phoenix but the amount of backyard pools and golf courses visible during the approaches and departures was not something I could wrap my head around.

Phoenix is in many ways not an optimal place to see huge population growth, but with most of California, Portland, and Seattle choking off developing through zoning controls, and the same in NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia, the US population is filtering to where housing can be (relatively) easily built. If California, Portland, and Seattle removed height limits on housing, as well as parking minimums, a lot of the growth in Phoenix would taper off. They haven't, so it doesn't.

You can't build the kinds of housing in LA that you can build in Phoenix. The land is already filled up.

Ignoring the sizable demand for different types of housing is gonna give you an incomplete picture of things. Heck, a lot of the reason it's hard to build denser housing in many parts of LA is exactly that demand for a certain qualitative type of environment instead of density and growth above all else.

I've tried driving through Seattle (during non-pandemic) Its hell to drive because of all the cars. I don't understand people that want to increase populations in areas where there's literally no infrastructure for it.

I have a similar observation about Austin, TX. And there's every incentive not to live in a dense urban core due to absurd rents and not many folks are going to bike in a TX summer.

Brad Landcaster is growing a neighborhood of edible perennials using a fraction of the street runoff, out in Tucson. So we also end up with large structures for flood control.

Phoenix and Tuscon does get seasonal monsoons, but the infrastructure is largely designed to get rid of the water instead of letting it infiltrate the soil near where it lands.

And yes, the pools, golf courses, and lawns bug me too. Phoenix also has the worst tap water in the nation. Many residents, including me, get their drinking water from water and ice stores and water dispensing vending machines.

> capturing the rain that does come to the region to irrigate crops or landscape

Not sure they could if they wanted to. The downstream/aquifer water rights of the run off are already spoken for in a lot of the south-western US because there's just not enough water falling anywhere really.

It doesn't matter in Arizona as long as the water is caught before it hits the ground, it's OK.

Huh ok. I know some other states like Colorado have limits on the total amount you can capture at any one time. Kind of surprised Arizona doesn't have similar laws, guess it doesn't have too many rivers with downstream requirements.

If you've not read Cadillac Desert, I highly recommend it. One key learning - water always flows downhill towards money and by extension political power. Phoenix won't run dry, nor will LA - smaller communities and farmers will get hit first.

They should be showing videos like this at town hall meetings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8nqnOcoLqE

(warning: the intro is very loud)

"...water is effectively free..." yeah, until they deplete the groundwater. But until then it's good times! They should talk to farmers or more importantly, residents in central CA about how much fun it is to run out of groundwater. Good luck.

It's discussed at the end of the article. Water level is dropping at ~3m/year. One NGO estimates the boom will only last ~10 years before causing massive problems for everyone living there (not just the farmers). Ironically solar is the opposite of sustainable here. Diesel power would at least be more self limiting.

Humanity at its finest: depleting a potentially valuable resource forever so you can make more of a drug that ruins hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of lives a year.

Indeed and looking at the graph of heroin production - kinda makes the Taliban look like good guys as they stopped it until they got removed by America and the heroin production grew. So pretty messed up.

Why no incentives or drive to curtail production and shift to more useful crops is something that seems to be ignored as an approach in that area.

If anything - 10 years times - second hand solar panels will be epicly cheap in that area and more so, all the land used for heroin production will be barren and that water shortage will impact far further than people will think. All these bore holes - only increase contamination of the water table and that may go unnoticed for decades.

This whole situation is creating a perfect storm on many levels and I welcome the sudden demise of heroin production.

However - all the money spent on customs and border patrol against drugs like heroin - if just a small percentage of that was used to incentivise produces to shift crops and stop producing heroin. That would actually work and be better overall. Though still going to have that water table issue come along and that is ticking clock of not if, but when.

Note that solar panels have limited lifespans in use. The usual industry warranty is 25 years, and they will have lost a fair amount of capacity by the end of it.

Standard warranty is 80% capacity after 25 years. At that rate you would have 50% capacity after 75 years.

Solar cells should last a long time. The panel itself will probably fail sooner - especially cheap ones made from plastic.

We are talking about people who don't have access to the electric grid. Honestly I am not in the position to judge their choice and how they decided to provide for themselves.

If we (as relatively wealthy people in the world) really want to judge them, we should start by providing education and resources to sustainably earn a living.

Sending there our army and creating chaos was not a great idea.

There is big American built hydroelectric plant (Kajaki) the renovation completion of which Taliban prevented for years

5% of them are literate. I find it exceedingly difficult to judge people in that situation, they're just trying to survive.

It's a selfish motive, sure, but higher in this comment section, people are pointing to California as an example of people depleting groundwater. It's not just something that happens because of drug production, people are often depleting resources to live, especially in places that are less than optimal for human settlements.

Instead of demonizing them, think a little, inform yourself and try to understand why they are doing.

Afghanistan was at the center of multiple proxy wars between America and Russia, all because of America feeling threatened by communism. The US then helped fundamentalists get into leader positions which further threw the country into disarray. Then to top it all off they started another beautiful war to look for Bin Laden.

I haven't looked into it in a while, but maybe the US still isn't out of there because of a lacking exit strategy.

Imagine living in a country that has continuously been in the crosshairs of foreign fundamentalist, political and capitalist interests for the better part of half a century. Do you really think they know or even care about the effects of their actions? Do you vote caring about Afghanistan? Are you outraged when another cultural site is destroyed by foreign or local terrorism?

We have the luxury of lying back in a comfy bed with a roof above our heads, some form of stable income and not worrying that tomorrow a market square close by will be rubble. Our women can go to schools (and so can we) and we aren't at the mercy of crazy people who want to violently, actively overthrow our government.

Thanks for the same history lesson I got in high school. I know it's not in-vogue today, but I'm in the game of describing reality of what is and trying to address it. The history of how we got here is only valuable as a lesson to avoid doing it again in the future. Insofar is it's a pointless blame game, I don't care.

It's not just central CA in the US that we should be paying attention to. It's all over the states where multiple companies are abusing aquifers. I would love to see a plan come forth to actually protect our aquifers before we lose our water reserces.

Yup, Wichita Falls in Texas nearly ceased being a town due to the dire condition they were in during the last drought. Tons of people wanted to leave, but nobody was going to buy houses in a town with no water.

Super cool, but not going to solve the question of renewable energy at scale.

Farmers have been doing things like this for generations. American Homesteaders - settlers of the sometimes-rather-arid Great Plains in the US - used windmills for exactly this purpose in the 1800s.

We know renewable energy is super useful under specific circumstances (remote/underdeveloped electrical grid, low power, low need for consistency). Another example in the US is emergency phones on the highway - solar panels power those too, and have for a decade or more.

The critical question is whether it can overcome those specific circumstances and be useful in developed electrical grids with strong needs for high power and consistency.

I don't think that's true, for example renewables were responsible for ~50% of the energy generated in the UK in Q1 2020[0], and Germany claims it's ~40%[1] and Sweden claims it's ~55%[2].

These aren't perfect numbers, but they clearly demonstrate renewable energy is deployable at national grid scale.

[0]: https://www.edie.net/news/10/Renewables-accounted-for-record...

[1]: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

[2]: https://sweden.se/nature/energy-use-in-sweden/

The only problem I have with that, is that renewables can mostly only be treated as a bonus. Trying to rely on them for baseline power means you have to put out a LOT more capacity than you'd need with fossils.

IMO baseline being nuclear and the rest being mostly renewables (With HEAVY reliance on pumped storage power plants, as a sort of capacitor) is the way to go to minimize emissions.

Renewables today are displacing energy 1:1. So, directly offsetting the fuel that would have otherwise been burned.

You're correct, that there is not a 1:1 reduction in fossil capacity through the construction of renewable capacity. But the fossil capacity is used less, as the marginal cost of the renewable energy is near zero.

Most pumped hydro today (at least in the US) was built during the nuclear build-out because nuclear can't easily be "load following." So, we had to build out additional infrastructure with low capacity factor.

IMO, tax emissions, let the free market figure it out.

For context: I live in austria, where we have the alps that provide a large amount of storage capacity.

Sadly we never got that nuclear power plant.

I wonder if Germany actually will start to decommision all nuclear plants in 2022. From what I've heard they had some insane corruption in storing waste and not the best reactor designs.

Your rumors are untrue. Germany has one of the best reactor designs (the Konvoi) which was the basis for the new European Pressurized Reactor (EPR).

Also, there is no corruption around storing waste because we aren't storing waste yet anywhere outside nuclear facilities which are supervised by the government and the IAEA.

Wow it looks like there has been some deep cleansing of articles about poor radioactive storage in Morsleben from a few reputable outlets. I'm not going to waste my life busting that censorship. Censoring those articles rather proves my point about corruption.

IAEA failed in Iran due to political posturing from europe. Europe has broken more than a few core international organizations. I'd rather not trust them to not cover up anything else for europe.

AFAIK they are already decomissioning nuclear plants. And replacing it with coal or gas. [1]

[1] https://cna.ca/news/germany-replaces-nuclear-coal-ghgs-skyro...

Germany could try to rely on the EU nuclear program but it's likely to be co-opted by France and their nuclear program.

> Renewables today are displacing energy 1:1. So, directly offsetting the fuel that would have otherwise been burned.

Except they are not. Otherwise Germany wouldn't be one of the dirtiest electricity producers in Europe.

I don't know why EE supporters keep ignoring the fact that any electricity not produced by wind and solar despite being needed will be produced by gas or coal which is why Germany is massively investing into new gas plants and a second gas pipeline to Russia (Nordstream 2).

You cannot solely rely on wind or solar which are intermittent and have a low energy density.

We have a solar array on the house. A lot of the Dc to AC solar inverters used in residential installs use the grid to match the frequency of the AC.

The downside is with no grid power the solar system doesn’t work to power the house. There are systems that can but they’re more money.

Take a look at online UPS systems. They convert incoming power to battery voltage, keep the battery charged, and output via an inverter that's made to run without being tied to the grid. They shouldn't be that costly if you can find them without large batteries, instead just hooking them up to your own.

Transfer switch to a very small inverter run off a battery; add your loads one-by-one and you should be fine during a prolonged outage (and as long as there is sunshine...)

can you directly use the DC as a reserve source? like, install car plugs in the house? there are lots of smaller everyday electrical gear for this standard

It's actually a much more interesting question than you might expect. Lots of modern appliances could run perfectly on DC of around the RMS voltage. For example the most modern fridges rectify the incoming mains to drive a brushless DC motor, this allows them to run at an appropriate speed rather than using bang bang control. Even an an induction hob, you might think it was most reliant on having an AC waveform but actually they need a much higher frequency so again they rectify the incoming mains.

Obviously it's not quite that easy, for example an oven uses resistive heating elements which would work fine on DC, however, the relay in the control circuitry wouldn't be able to switch a DC voltage.

That works for small cabins and lighting, as a 12v car outlet requires the same thickness of wire as a normal AC outlet. This is somewhat popular to do if you don’t need to use any high power appliances as then you can skip needing an inverter.

The 50% solution with CCGT making up for variability seems to be working just fine. Wind is a lot more consistent than you think, especially offshore. Does mean we're dependent on gas for the medium term.

Nuclear and pumped storage takes a very long time to build. The other storage systems are starting to make inroads - tiny ones so far, but growing rapidly. The "fast frequency response" market provides them economic support.

> The 50% solution with CCGT making up for variability seems to be working just fine. Wind is a lot more consistent than you think, especially offshore. Does mean we're dependent on gas for the medium term.

It does not work fine at all. Germany is one of the dirtiest electricity producers in Europe.

France emits 50 grams of CO2 per produced kilowatthour while Germany produces 400 grams on average:

> https://www.electricitymap.org

Germany also has the highest electrity prices in Europe:

> https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

NASA also disagrees that gas plants are a good solution:

> https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/

That's because Germany still uses a lot of coal.

It seems to work, but this is about at the limit of what it can achieve - the UK is having to switch off renewable power sources increasingly aggressively to stop them from going any higher for grid stability reasons, and pay them quite a bit to do so.

The ability of utilities to incorporate renewables seems to have improved over the years. I'm sure it will only get better. In particular the approach of handling excess production by producing "green" hydrogen and storing it in the natural gas distribution network seems promising.

Germany needs 1.6 TWh of electricty per day. If you know the caloric value of methane for example, you will be able to calculate the amount of methane you need to synthesize to just store the electricity of one day which will be roughly 3.2 million gas trucks (45.000 liters each).

There is a reason why the UK is building or planning new nuclear power plants in Hinkley Point, Sizewell and Bredwell.

The German gas network can store 200TWh. I believe that power to gas has a bright future. Check out what Hydrogenics is doing. Also, storage doesn’t have to be day scale to be useful.

There's no need for baseline power in any power grid. The only type of power needed is peak power. You could run a grid on 100% natural gas peaker plants. The only reason to add baseline or intermittent power is if they're cheaper than the peaker plants or have some other advantage like being more green.

Yeah the base load debate seems to often get supply and demand mixed up. It's actually supply driven (old power plants are slow to start and stop and want a number to run at without wasting too much money).

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-10-12/renewable-ene...

"Technology has moved on from base load, and now you want flexible power. And that's what demand management, batteries and pumped hydro is," says Professor Andrew Blakers, director of the ANU Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems.

"If you have an increase in demand, a coal power station will take hours [to meet it], a gas turbine 20 to 30 minutes, batteries about a second, demand management about a second, and pumped hydro will take anywhere between 20 seconds and two minutes."

I meant environmentally independent power sources as being baseline power. Probably bad wording on my part.

You can not guarantee, no matter the capacity of power storage, that you never produce too little power over a long enough period.

This is the basis of my opinion that the closer to 100% renewable you get the faster the amount of additional capacity you need rises.

Something like 1/x over-provisioning[1] needed, where x is the percentage of environmentally independent power sources.

[1] Not sure if that is the right word.

Conventional plants need to be over-provisioned too, because of the possibility that one or more plants have a malfunction and have to shut down, possibly during a period of high load.

Put another way, it's probably more likely that they'll be some sort of equipment malfunction than we go an entire month with no wind.

Providing redundancy through independent mechanism (over-provisioning, storage, diverse sources) helps a lot.

But you're right. A grid that's 99% renewable with a natural gas peaker providing that last 1% will be a lot cheaper than a grid that's 100% renewable.

Working in that industry, my eyes roll whenever I see someone talk about "baseline" power.

You are right in that there is no such thing as "baseline" generation really. And thermal plants also need to be over-provisioned.

There is dispatchable and non dispatchable power, the former being plants that can alter output on demand.

Base-load is the point which the 24 hour cycle of demand doesn't go below. It's pretty much just a number.

Who occupies the base of the generation stack and will stay running during low demand, is the one who is cheapest. If wind is cheaper than nuclear, it will displace nuclear. The people who say "IMO we need nuclear for baseline and renewable for peaking" completely miss these facts.

The way it is going is renewable at the base of the stack and dispatchable power filling in the gaps, be that during peak or periods of low renewable output.

> The way it is going is renewable at the base of the stack and dispatchable power filling in the gaps, be that during peak or periods of low renewable output.

Very good idea to run gas plants with 490 grams CO2 per kWh instead of nuclear power plants with 12 grams CO2 per kWh, indeed.

France produces 50 grams of CO2 per kWh while Germany has 400 grams on average:

> https://www.electricitymap.org/

Your ideal model for producing electricity actually hurts the environment as the times where gas plants need to run are much more often than you think.

"dispatchable power" doesn't necessarily mean gas, it could mean storage.

Also nuclear is only weakly dispatchable, something the comment you replied to misses. So it is not suitable for filling the gaps.

A 100% nuclear grid will need dispatchable peak power as well, be it gas or storage.

> There's no need for baseline power in any power grid.

Go to smard.de, check "Market data visuals" and "Electricity consumption->Actual consumption" and you will be presented with the baseline which is never below 40 GWh in Germany at any hour.

Sure, baseline demand exists. But I'm talking about supply. If you have a system that can supply 120GWh at any time then it can also supply 40GWh at all times. If it can't supply 40GWh at all times then it obviously can't supply 120GWh at any time.

For the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1)

For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2)

(1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.1 GW installed, 68.7% capacity factor

(2) https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors

Not far from so-called "baseload"

That's quite misleading though. You can choose and schedule maintenance slots so they don't overlap all at once. Much harder to do with wind, hence you get 0MW output at some times, and massive overgenereration at once causing very negative electricity prices.

Yes and sometimes you have unplanned 680 MW to 0 with "baseload" nuclear:

https://www.energylivenews.com/2015/12/15/unplanned-shutdown...

Wind is intermitent but predictable. Loosing a turbine will not make the plant production go to zero (albeit loosing transmission will but same for all power plants).

One nuclear reactor out of 57. Wow, that's really a problem.

On the other hand, we have times in Germany when wind and solar are producing less than 1% of their installed power.

Pumped storage, like all hydro can be the cause of major emissions depending on how much and what they flood. Anything with forest and suddenly they're actually worse than coal (in terms of Climate Change emissions, not the other nasty shit)

A good visualization of those numbers: https://www.electricitymap.org/map

I don't think we disagree at all! I think we agree on the core question (can it be used at scale), and that there have been GREAT strides in developed countries towards an answer ("yes!").

I just think Opium farmers in Afghanistan fail to demonstrate a unique use case: great idea, but we've known this works for a while, so this use case isn't not exactly a panacea of novel insight.

At least 40% of the renewables used in Europe (I think it is over 60% now) is biomass, so it's arguable how renewable it really is.

renewable energy including wood for heating yes.

But for electricity it's only about 6% in the EU, see table page 7 of the following PDF:

https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin2/Projekte/2018/E...

Pretty sure that's renewable. I think renewable just means we can replace it/make more of it, which isn't the case with oil. You can renew the supply.

It depends how fast you use them. Are we using biomass at faster than replacement rate? Probably. And cutting down forests for biomass does irreparable damage to forest ecosystems.

Which cause 290 grams of CO2 per kWh according to IPCC unlike nuclear which just accounts for 12 grams of CO2 per kWh.

These numbers are highly misleading as:

- they count biomass as renewable which is not (it is responsible for 230 g CO2 per kWh)

- these numbers are accumulated, i.e integrated values which don't help much because you buy electricity when you need it, not vice versa

- despite Germany being 50% renenwable, we still are one of the dirtiest electricity producers in Europe with 400 g CO2 per kWh on average while France has 50 g on average per kWh

- we also have the highest electricity prices in Europe and the second-highest electricity prices world-wide

> https://www.electricitymap.org/

> https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Oh, and Germany is replacing nuclear with gas and coal, which means replacing 12 g CO2 per kWh with 490 g CO2 or even 800 g CO2 per kWh:

> https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/nachfolge-fuer-gundremm...

> https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.energieversorgung-...

> https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ruhrgebiet/datteln-vier-geht...

The so-called Energiewende will have cost Germany 520 billion Euros by 2025:

> https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article158668152/Energiewende...

Yet it had hardly any impact on our emissions in the energy sector:

> https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/treibhausgas-emissionen-...

If you want to understand why the Energiewende (replacing everything with renewables) doesn't work, go to smard.de, click "Market Data Visuals" and "Actual Generation" and you will see that there are recurring points in time where the power generation of wind and solar is around just 1%.

Note: Before you suggest storage: Germany consumes 1600 GWh electricity per day. We have only 40 GWh of pump-storage capacity, so that won't work. And in case you want to suggest "Power2Gas", I suggest having a look at the caloric value of methane and calculate how much methane you will at least need to generate if you want to store 1.6 TWh of electricity.

>- they count biomass as renewable which is not (it is responsible for 230 g CO2 per kWh)

Renewable doesn't mean 0 CO2, it means you can renew the fuel. We know how to turn that CO2 back into biomass, it just takes a field. We historically haven't known how to make large quantities of oil without expending some other non-renewable fuel.

I personally feel with solar prices so cheap renewable power is a solved problem what market is waiting for is batteries to get cheap enough. I am expecting in the next decade tesla powerwall type batteries to be in every house even apartments for storing power for night time use now will these batteries be owned by the house/property owners or leased from the power companies that is something the market will decide.

> I personally feel with solar prices so cheap renewable power is a solved problem what market is waiting for is batteries to get cheap enough.

Germany consumes 1.6 TWh of electricity per day. The battery of a Tesla S has 100 kWh. So you will need to charge 16 million Tesla S batteries to provide the electricity of Germany for just one day.

Good luck trying to implement that.

The answer to that question is the answer to the critical question “Can we use solar to help replace oil, natural gas, and coal.” That’s really a different thing that what this article talks about. This article is about how solar can help people and the economy today.

The main purpose is the article is the show the afghan farmers thriving with solar but doing so by exporting a product that is considered very harmful to the rest of the world. It’s thrilling, captures attention, is topical, and has more substance than your average clickbait.

> low need for consistency

I believe this could be extended significantly. If we really wanted to. There is no a real need to run say an auto-manufacturing plant 24/7. There is no reason why we couldn't run it only on sunny days and give everyone a paid day off othertimes.

No reason, other than, you know, making manufacturing much more expensive.

If a car company knows it can sell 1 million cars a year, it needs to be able to manufacture 1 million cars a year. If they operate their plant 24/7, their plants need to have enough throughout to build 2 cars a minute. However, if they plan to only operate during sunny days, their plants will only operate probably a third of the time, so they need to build three times as many factories, buy three times as many machines, build three times the number of manufacturing lines, and hire more employees.

Or produce one third of the cars. I don't think there is a shortage of cars in the world.

This is not possible in market capitalism. Companies will produce as many cars as people will buy. Even if one company decides to restrict its production, another will fill its place. You need central planning to decide how many cars are to be built, and to be sure, if you look at the centrally planned economies of communist countries, they definitely did produce less than third the number of cars their citizens enjoy now.

> You need central planning to decide how many cars are to be built

Isn't it what every non-banana-republic is doing already, indirectly [0]. And if we get serious about achieving net-zero economy and price carbon accordingly the car makers will have to adjust even further. They could plant trillions of trees, or they could make fewer cars. Up to them. I am just saying that in my view making fewer cars will be a more viable economic decision. And consumers will redirect their purchasing power to something else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_emission_standard

> Isn't it what every non-banana-republic is doing already, indirectly

Emission standards do reduce number of cars produced, to be sure, but much less than you propose. Mostly what they do is make the cars kinda suck, especially compared to how expensive they are. People buy cars anyway, and put up with it.

I’m all for renewables but this is an unacceptable compromise. Seriously, this isn’t how large business can operate.

Really it's the wrong example. The best way to distribute "demand response" is in systems which have a big thermal mass attached to them. You can turn an industrial freezer off for half an hour without anyone noticing.

An 80/20 compromise where most of the power is from renewables and the rest made up by CCGT seems very much within reach for the UK.

And finally, ideally, the last 20% shifts to gas turbines fueled with clean hydrogen.

The UK has about 1000 TWh of hydrogen storage potential in onshore salt deposits that could be solution-mined to make underground hydrogen storage caverns.

"Technical potential of salt caverns for hydrogen storage in Europe"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...

Siemens is providing a gas turbine generator that will run on 100% renewable hydrogen as part of the HYFLEXPOWER demonstrator project:

https://press.siemens.com/global/en/pressrelease/hyflexpower...

Siemens and General Electric both have roadmaps for gas turbines running on pure hydrogen:

"Siemens’ Roadmap to 100% Hydrogen Gas Turbines"

https://www.powermag.com/siemens-roadmap-to-100-hydrogen-gas...

GE Power "Hydrogen fueled gas turbines"

https://www.ge.com/power/gas/fuel-capability/hydrogen-fueled...

Most current turbine models are already capable of running on a methane-hydrogen blend.

I like to highlight these projects because people sometimes mistakenly think that seasonal-scale storage with hydrogen also requires breakthroughs in scaling fuel cell technology. Evolutionary developments in gas turbine technology will also make it practical.

The UK has opted for nuclear. They are building and planning in Bradwell, Hinkley Point and Sizewell.

Given the high costs of Hinkley Point C, I suspect that the new reactors planned for Sizewell and Bradwell may not actually be built.

"Hinkley Point C nuclear plant to run £2.9bn over budget"

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49823305

French power company EDF said the new nuclear plant it is building at Hinkley Point C will cost up to £2.9bn more than thought.

It raised its estimate for the project, in Somerset, to between £21.5bn and £22.5bn, blaming "challenging ground conditions".

It also said the risk of the project being 15 months late had risen.

...

These cost overruns will not hit UK consumers. However, a new way of paying for further nuclear stations, such as Sizewell, is being considered.

Under this new model, consumers would see costs of construction added to their bills as the project went along. It means that customers could be exposed to cost overruns.

That is why today's announcement is important and why EDF will find it harder to make the argument for building Sizewell.

> this isn’t how large business can operate

Why not?

The capital costs of something like a automobile factory ($500 mil+) pretty much force you to run 24/7. Also, automobiles are labor intensive to produce, so idling the workforce alone would cost more than building more power.

Something low capital, low labor and high energy like steel recycling has already shifted to operate when electricity is cheap.

In the current economic environment, yes. But suppose we transitioned into a new economic reality. Imagine that net-zero-carbon global economy is a hard requirement. Imposed by god or something. I guess adjustable demand would be a feasible option then.

Even then it might not change the vehicle factory much, as it moves from a high $ capital cost, to a high environmental capital cost that you will want to spread over as many vehicles as possible. The easiest thing to reduce capital costs would be to stop painting vehicles and switch to stainless steel skins as paint is one of the single largest capital expenses in building a car.

Downstream suppliers of the plant might change, mainly ones that have a high energy, low capital(either $ or environmental) process.

Socialism doesn't work. It has been proven multiple times.

That's an interesting idea but production lines cannot just be stopped and started like that - you could carry much more produced inventory to make up for lost days but that will be expensive.

Everything is expensive when it comes to climate mitigation/adaptation. The question is what is more expensive - say CCS or stopping/starting production lines.

> Everything is expensive when it comes to climate mitigation/adaptation. The question is what is more expensive - say CCS or stopping/starting production lines.

Or, you know, just use nuclear power:

> https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/

> There is no a real need to run say an auto-manufacturing plant 24/7.

There are plants like steel furnace that have to run 24/7 as the iron has to be kept melted. If solidifies, you will never be able to get it liquid again.

You are about two decades behind the times in your understanding of the renewable energy grid application situation.

> For an upfront payment of $5,000 they can buy an array of solar panels and an electric pump. Once it is installed, there are virtually no running costs.

I don't know much about solar panels, but I thought they broke down fairly frequently and required specialized tools and knowledge to repair? This article makes it sound like the panels are pretty reliable over time, which would be welcome news to me.

2) Drilling down 100M to groundwater -- does this require industrial equipment? I wonder how these farmers afford it, if so, or perhaps drilling 100M is much easier than I believe?

> I don't know much about solar panels, but I thought they broke down fairly frequently and required specialized tools and knowledge to repair?

Where did you hear that? Have they perchance been trying to mislead you about renewables?

A solar cell is a huge flat diode. A panel is a chain of them in series. It sits there and makes electricity when exposed to light. There are no moving parts other than electrons. It requires no lubrication and no maintenance. Since they're sealed units under glass, the only thing you might have to worry about is leaks and damage from weather, which can be addressed with sealant if the panel is still functional. Admittedly if you crack it badly enough it will be unrepairable.

The inverter is slightly more fragile, being a big piece of power electronics, but still usually guaranteed for 10 years. The most fragile part of the system is probably the pump.

>The most fragile part of the system is probably the pump.

Most submersible clean-water pumps don't require lubrication and have very little wear as they use fluid bearings. They usually last at least 8-10 years without any maintenance as long as you follow the specs - avoid running dry, starting/stopping too frequently, particles that are too large etc.

I believe I developed that impression from reading about peace corps projects involving solar panels, that, once the volunteers left, no one has the expertise to maintain, so they just went unused. I am glad to learn otherwise! I’m looking at some property in upstate NY and would love to install some panels.

Highly recommend it, though beware your yields will be truly abysmal during the winter. I live entirely off-grid in California and even here the dead of winter can be a bit tight on power. I will say setting the whole thing up is super duper easy, and if you buy second-hand solar your price/watt can be very very cheap. I paid about 30c/watt for panels.

Ah right - that is more a problem of peace corps and similar projects. You can't just "air drop" technology into a place to produce economic results, it has to fit in with the local economy. Unfortunately in Afghanistan the local economy is opium.

(see also: attempted modernisation of collective farming in communist countries; "rocket stoves"; pumps driven by "children playing", and so on.)

I have a 4kW set up here at 56 degrees north in Scotland. The big downside is not the diurnal cycle but the seasonal one; off-grid is not viable here without wind. If I've read this map correctly New York state goes up to 45N, so you should get great power in summer but need to think carefully about winter. I believe you also get colder winters than us?

> I don't know much about solar panels, but I thought they broke down fairly frequently and required specialized tools and knowledge to repair?

My grandparents installed a solar panel at their (now my) cabin over 35 years ago. We typically have lots of snow during winter and temperatures down to -20C. During spring and fall it is usually quite windy, with lots of rain and some hail now and then. Summer time it often goes above 30C.

The panel itself has had zero maintenance during that time. It's just been standing there, doing its thing. Maybe someone wiped it once in a while, but not more than that.

A couple of years ago I had to dismount it to do some repairs on the cabin, and then the "cables" going from the outside connection into the panel broke. Some fragile foil-looking things. But up until then it was working just fine.

The battery required more care, but the panel just worked.

I'm stoked to hear that, thank you! I am actually looking at buying some property in the Catskills and I was thinking of adding in some solar panels because I thought it would be fun, and this is welcome news.

Keep in mind that at this point, the solar panels may be the cheapest and longest lasting component of your build. My 5Kw system has about $3k in inverter+charger controller+battery, $600 in solar panels (producing 2.6Kw peak), and I spent about $250 on angle iron and fasteners. Batteries will need replaced more often. Though in the article's case, if your pump can run across a wide range of voltage, you could skip quite a bit and just run your pump directly from solar during the day.

General life expectancy of a solar panel is 25-30 years. If they get damaged though (cracked glass), that will let water get into the cells and that will drastically reduce life expectancy. But otherwise, a nice long life. They'll also keep operating beyond that lifespan, however the cells do degrade and produce less power.

Where it gets interesting though is that the cost of solar keeps decreasing and the cells themselves become more efficient. I have some used solar panels that are 78" x 39" and produce 265W. I got 10 of them for $600 shipped (technically $400 for the panels and $200 for the shipping). So used, I'm about 23 cents/watt shipped; 15cents/watt basic. But obviously no warranty and these are less efficient. You can get a used 380W panel that fits in the same space, but around 59cents/watt. In a few years, those 380W panels will be even cheaper, and I could theoretically add an additional KW of power on the same footprint on my roof.

New panels will run about $2-$4/watt. Each generation of solar tends to be more efficient, packing more wattage into less space, and each generation often leads to some place deciding to replace or upgrade their 10-20yr old panels, which then end up on the used market benefitting people like me.

im currently an off grid farmer i used to work in tech. the current iteration of solar panels are very reliable even the dirt cheap chinese panels will last 10 plus years. the screw pumps a really simple and only need the rubber screw replaced every few years. the pump controller is probably the most complex part that varies pump to pump, in theory you could solder something up very cheap if you just want an on off situation. going down 100 meters is a long way for a bore and not all ground water is equal, the better aquifers for irrigation are often a lot closer to the surface. to drill a bore you need a drilling rig. for an example in australia i had a bore put down it cost me $160 a meter so you can do the math on what a 100M hole would cost. (also no guarantee you hit water at all or its usable). this article while well meaning doesn't understand how farmers irrigate. while i dont contest the heroin output of afghanistan is going up i can't conclude its the access to solar pumps that are doing it.

In this area the water seems like the least renewable resource / more of a short term concern:

“So much water is now being used that ground water levels in Helmand are estimated to be falling by 3m a year.

The fear is that pretty soon the water will simply run out.

"Maybe this boom will not last longer than 10 years," says Orzala Nemat.”

Home solar panels seem to typically come with guarantees of ~80% capacity up to 20-25 years. I think they need cleaning for peak performance, but that doesn't seem important in this use case.

When I was growing up my family had a goat stud - we had one of these wells drilled and if I remember correctly it cost somewhere in the order of ~$50k AUD

My parents’ exurb in Idaho features houses with wells down 100 meters or more. It costs about $10K USD to drill a well these days.

...Do we think that opium farmers in Afghanistan have the same equipment as your parents' exurb? I would be surprised

Just googled to see what's out there. Simple and pretty small rigs can do 150ft, so I don't think it'd a huge challenge to get a slightly bigger one. They also seem to be relatively cheap. I think a lot of people underestimate the level of access to products/services if the right money is involved. If I was buying opium from those farmers I'd give it for free as long as I'd know I'd get lots of products for years to come.

I bought an Alibaba well drilling rig for $3k plus shipping and tariffs. I drilled 130ft deep with it. It took months to fix problems the machine came with and get proper drill bits adapted to it. Then at 130 ft I hit a void. All the drilling mud that you intend to recirculate drained into the ground. This can be a great sign. Aquifers also can absorb liquid. But I couldn't drill further. I did some testing with an airlift pump out the drill stem. It seemed I hit an aquifer. I had to reem the hole larger and used bentonite at the bottom of the hole to restore circulation.

During the whole process the manufacturer offered little guidance. The user manual is just a few pages of poor translation. Their YouTube channel is disjointed 10sec clips of them drilling. The best advice I got was from a local retired driller that came by.

In the end, I still can't get water out of the hole. I drilled some geothermal wells next to my house so I can theoretically use those and not feel like it's a waste. I'm selling the machine and hiring a pro haha. That was a fun hobby for a year. I had better success on friends property's with shallower water tables where we could hand auger 30ft down to water for $100 worth of tools.

The wells were already there I understand. Solar is just replacing diesel generators...

TFA says there is way more area being cultivated and more farmers in the existing area, which must also imply there are plenty more wells being drilled.

From the article:

> "It's just how opium poppy is farmed now," Mr Brittan tells me. "They drill down 100m (325ft) or so to the ground water, put in an electric pump and wire it up to a few panels and bingo, the water starts flowing."

This suggests, to me, that the farmers dug the wells. But maybe they are a relic of soviet times?

Point is, there is more to the story here w.r.t. existing capital, I think.

While the opium growers' perspective is an interesting one, the conclusion is misleading.

>The story of the revolution in Afghan heroin production shows us just how transformative solar power can be. Don't imagine this is some kind of benign "green" technology. Solar is getting so cheap that it is capable of changing the way we do things in fundamental ways and with consequences that can affect the entire world.

It's not exactly solar that is transformative here, but the access to any electricity at all. It's not like they can use a normal power grid for heroin production, even if they had one there.

Photovoltaic panels are more convenient for providing very small scale off-grid power than most other tech like thermal solar or diesel generators, thanks to being heavily subsidized by other people - that would be the more accurate conclusion.

Grow ops in the US are also prone to use solar power for their grow lights, so that the Feds don’t hunt them down based on the power bill. This isn’t an endorsement of solar more generally, either.

It can work the other way too:

https://kmarp.com/home

Solar powered aquifer recharge stations were close contenders for the project.

Wow, that's a really interesting site.

Aquifer recharge is an interesting topic that one doesn't hear much about.

I guess Domesday dopamine chasers hate missing their rush.

The company I once contracted for once bided for the project. When bids started to close on $100k, solar panels solidly lost to mains powered pumping stations, and the company bailed out of the tender.

This is the problem with infrastructure tenders all around the world, even immediate operations cost is rarely considered to count against lowest upfront payment.

It sounds like a mess to be honest. More production of heroin for 10 years, then 1.5 million refugees because there is no ground water anymore

You’re going to get the refugees anyway due to government and public health failures [1] in the area (see: Afghanistan fertility rates, the level of female empowerment and education compared to elsewhere, and healthcare infrastructure). If you’re anti heroin production, get in there and pump that water faster than the farmers to deprive them of it.

[1] https://eurasianet.org/afghanistan-population-boom-threatens...

Reminds me of this Outside/In episode about (possibly) the earliest adopters of solar in the US:

http://outsideinradio.org/shows/2018/1/4/stoner-panels

Is there a real risk of depleting groundwater reservoirs making this non-sustainable?

at the end of the article:

> So much water is now being used that ground water levels in Helmand are estimated to be falling by 3m a year. The fear is that pretty soon the water will simply run out. "Maybe this boom will not last longer than 10 years," says Orzala Nemat, who runs the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, the country's biggest think tank.

this rate factors in growth. it says nothing about the rate once market settles.

The fear, i guess, must be that a lot of the water doesn't come back to the aquifier.

Of course it is, and not just in Afghanistan. The US is at risk (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/8/140819-ground...), and even Europe is not safe (https://eos.org/articles/southern-europes-groundwater-use-wi...).

To make it worse: when groundwater gets depleted, there is a very real risk that the soil on top collapses/compresses, so even if there were enough rain the aquifers would physically be unable to retain the water (https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie....

That was my first thought too: at least by using solar power the opium farmers are not polluting the environment and generating CO2, but that benefit is tiny compared to the damage done by depleting the groundwater. And that in turn pales in comparison to the corruption and political instability caused by the drug industry and what that means for the country.

*Some Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power.

This is the free market in full effect. The market is actually larger than what you can fulfill yourself, why wouldn't you produce as much as possible?

Solar is presumably attractive to Afghan opium growers also because it's decentralised, not directly depending directly on another party to provide power.

I heard they’re being switched to meth because the cartels don’t buy poppies as much anymore and pay partly in amphetamine pills.

Don't all plants grown with solar power?

We need cia investment and us military troops to protect the fields.

Interesting story, but the article reads like it was written to be used as an exercise for teaching English to 15 year olds.

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