South Africa imported a power station's worth of solar panels(3.4GW) in 6 months | Hacker News Reader

South Africa imported a power station's worth of solar panels(3.4GW) in 6 months

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31 pointsbotanical23 comments

That’s what happens when the electricity monopoly, Eskom, is run by corrupt and utter idiots along with the whole country.

What a shame to see South Africa morph into just another African basket case…no successful country in the whole continent, what a shame.

> no successful country in the whole continent

Botswana is reasonably successful, and I chalk that up to less focus on revenge plotics (the idea of making amends died alongside Mandela in South Africa).

What's truly heartbreaking is how almost the whole continent has been strong-armed into colonialism. In South Africa, that's Anglo-Plat. Zimbabwe (my birth country) has been completely colonialized by the Chinese and is being stripped of everything (with no expense, much of the beauty of the country is gone - e.g. the Chimanimani mountain range).

Revenge isn't worth it.

If any colonialism is being done, it certainly is not being done by China. The "China.Debt Trap" nonsense has been.debunked too many times to count. As cited below.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/ch...

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/08/debunking-myth-debt-tra...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_-QDEWwSkP0 (Bloomberg)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19480881.2023.2... (From 2023)

Even where I am,CHEC is used as a local political tool, not the other way around.

I arrived at these conclusions independently while visiting my family who still live there. I had no idea the concept was a thing, or that there was debunking.

TIL, thanks for the links

There was no revenge - BEE was an attempt at restorative justice but unlike Botswana with it's small population that is less that Cape Town the cards were badly stacked.

It is easy to uplift 1.5 million than 30 million people.

Yes poor stupid policies and very mediocre implementation and endemic corruption under the govt you can blame but I don't think how anybody else could solve this horrendous mess.

I did not mention BEE at all - I fundamentally agree with it. I am talking about the day-to-day approach that is taken with politics in Africa.

In the rest of the world, private homes installing solar panels and batteries is seen as a good thing. Doesn't this at least give South Africa a head start in something, even if energy grid instability continues to be a problem?

You're effectively describing the "Parable of the broken window". Solar panels and the systems to run them now represent a significant outlay by businesses and some private individuals. Other countries don't have these expenses so the net effect is that South Africa becomes relatively less competitive and less attractive for investment.

Only a small percentage of the population are in a position to afford to install private solar. So while its great for some it doesn't help solve the issue for the majority.

The thing is, the small percentage of people who can afford the panels already subsidized a large part of the energy supply to the population. In the south african townships, illegal connections to the grid are very common and a substantial part of the population lives in such areas.

3.5GW is almost 4 levels worth of loadshedding...ok sure it won't have 100% efficiency but South Africa is one of the best countries in the world for solar.

If solar keeps getting installed at this rate, loadshedding will be just about completely averted within 2 years, for the entire population - whether you have solar or not. Poor people are benefitting from solar already from lower loadshedding levels, and by having more reliable power at work (since many businesses are now running on solar out of necessity...and generators of course)

SA still has a mostly functioning grid, just an ancient fleet of coal power stations and badly built new ones that don't give the power needed.

So while many homeowners wouldn't have installed solar if they weren't forced to, they (myself included) are also discovering that unlimited free power when the sun shines is awesome, and with a decent Lithium PO4 battery it's not hard to be fully off grid for much of the year. "Green loan" schemes from many banks are covering installation costs and it's easy to save more than half on you electricity bill since most of SA is really sunny.

+ the environment is a big winner...the more power plants worth of power that can be installed in solar & wind, the more old coal plants can be shut down forever.

So Tanzania,Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Togo, Botswana, Seychelles, Mauritius etc. don't exist?

At the end of the day, South Africa was always a basket case. Massive defense industry trying build Peacekeeper missiles and Apache type helps. Dumping the majority of your population into a racist totalitarian hellscape. The economy only worked due to resource extraction that used a massively underdeveloped and overtaxed majority controlled gybe totalitarian state.

As much of the above economic superstructure has not changed, one can hardly then expect the basket to become a bucket.

Mauritius is Asian, located in Africa

Thank you for the correction. Let me swap it out for Zambia

Wait, why is it corrupt to build more power?

It's not being built by Eskom.

The solar in question is mainly being installed by individuals at their own cost because the power grid is failing around them due to corruption and mismanagement.

Example article on Eskom

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africa-corruption...

South Africa used to have some of the cheapest power in the world. I have a friend who grew up there and he said it had never even occurred to him to calculate the cost of running a 100W bulb before he moved to the US. Further, at one point the electrical grid (and most infrastructure) was considered some of the best in the world. For me, it’s telling that solar is cost effective at all given how cheap and stable their power was 20 years ago. By all accounts the corruption in the country has grown to make their power unreliable enough that solar makes sense.

The article suggests the solar capacity is aggregate of installs by individuals because the power is so unreliable from the grid

> no successful country in the whole continent

That's a glaring statistical aberration

Saying it "morphed" implies it was ever not a basket case. When was this?

South Africa is on a quite another level of pathology ...

There was a manager who was hired by the government to fix the worst inefficiencies in Eskom (the electricity monopoly). The people who stood to lose the most crooked contracts tried to poison him.

He quit.

And all the money went to China - my panels, battery and inverter are all imported and that is money that did not enter the local economy except for the labor and installation costs.

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