Ignoring the politics, we have to say that China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service in strategically developing and mass producing super cheap solar panels.
They're fragile as heck, though, and contain mercury (albeit a small quantity in a relatively less-harmful form). Breakage needs to be handled appropriately, and disposal is as hazardous waste.
LEDs are more efficient, offer better (and often more flexible) light quality, are damndably rugged, and have far less toxic material load. Given the balance, I'd be swapping out CFLs (and have been).
Something sad about that, really.
Just today there was a newsletter from Construction Physics about Strap Rail. Literally wooden rails with a iron plate strapped on top put in the mud. Only in the US, 10 times cheaper. But more expensive to maintain and gone in years instead of decades for normal iron rails though.
That doesn't mean they always actually invested the money to rebuild properly... but it was sound engineering theory.
Of course, there were other financial shenanigans too- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_scandal
But since then there was an endless stream of negative press especially in English speaking countries against German energy policies, so not much of this positive comments are still remembered.
It's all very exciting I think.
The solar+battery revolution is doing for power what cell phones did for communications in the third world in the 90's and 2000's.
See for yourself: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen
India has 1.4B people on 3 million km^2, Africa has 1.4B people on 30 million km^2 (out of which 9 million is Sahara).
Starlink's use case is low population density areas, and Africa has plenty of those. Very different case from India.
Density, generally, makes service provision easier.
Contrarywise, Starlink (or other broadcast-based services) perform poorly in high-density areas, where there's high bandwidth contention. Building out to serve such locations, which are by definition few and fairly sparsely distributed, as your map indicates, increases total system costs markedly.
Starlink at scale is optimised for sparse, low-income populations, rather than dense, high-income ones. That's probably a significant liability eventually, though for now I'll have to note I'm impressed with the technical accomplishments, regardless of reservations on persons involved.
I found a nice website with prices by country: https://www.starlink-prices.com/personal/residential/usd/low
But it may be outdated, because it shows $90/mo price in Poland, while it's much cheaper as I said, even with the free dish.
And some recent articles about Starlink prices in Africa:
https://techlabari.com/average-starlink-prices-across-all-af...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-starlink-vs-lead...
Anyway, Starlink is mostly for places where you have no ISPs or cell service (or they are very bad), so not for 95% of Europe, and probably not for most of India, especially in the future.
The effects of this are going to massive and huge in 10 years.
All those unfortunate children will be introduced to the toxic, horrid internet.
They'll be addicted, have no attention span, have their own data used against them to exploit and track them, and end up with their political system reeling under manipulative AI and generic bots.
Far better to just give them books for their educarional system, and leave the evil Internet out of it.
This sort of arrogance where suddenly everyone remembers all reasons why some technology is bad once the "poor masses" get it (while they themselves had the technology for years), is hypocritical and frustrating.
The reality is that getting online makes a massive difference for someone in some remote poor area. Not just in terms of education but also economically.
What you describe at its worst is still better than the exploitation many of the children in the Philippines endure today by westerners. Hopefully, being able to communicate on the 'evil Internet', the rest of the world, like you, can truly understand what they endure.
There is a huge swath of Australia that does not have good internet access and/or very poor cell phone coverage.
And I am not talking about about people living in the middle of the desert, I am talking about people who are 10 to 15 minutes away by car from a small town.
So yes Starlink or it's local equivalent are necessary.
My parent's in law live on small farm 10 minutes out of a small town in NSW and on the best days, when the sky is clear, they get 1 bar of phone reception on their cell phone and they have to stay within a 10 sqm perimeter within their house in order to make phone calls otherwise calls drop out.
Video chat is basically out of the question unless you want to talk to pixelated blobs on a screen.
After waiting 10 years for the NBN to be rolled out to their property, they decided to bite the bullet and bought a Starlink terminal and now we can have normal conversations on the phone and they can use streaming services whereas that would have been impossible before.
But it is not just them that have issues. When I was living in Brisbane many moons ago, I remember how pitiful the internet speed was so much so that I ditched my home internet and started hot-spotting from my phone instead.
Things have improved in the cities since then I am sure, but for the people out there living in the country side, not much as changed.
If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll
Come to Munich, go into any of the large old buildings, the central stairwells usually are phone dead zones. Truly dead.
Or try to go and hike in the Alps. Shit service, but as soon as you walk into Austrian territory, you'll suddenly have service.
Or try taking a train from Munich to, say, Landshut. You'll lose signal about 5 minutes after the train passes through the outskirts of Feldmoching.
Or try driving a car on the A8 highway to Salzburg in Austria. You'll lose signal about 5-10 minutes after passing Holzkirchen.
Or try taking a train from Passau to Wels in Austria. Passau is directly near the border. You will have a shit service right until the train passes the national border and Austrian towers take over.
The reason isn't technical. The Passau and Alps example shows it - identical geography, identical mountainous areas with about zero population... but wildly different attitudes in regulation.
> If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll
Here, you get death threats if you even propose putting up a tower on your land [1], in the UK nutjobs set a 5G tower ablaze [2].
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/wolfratshausen/icking-5...
[2] https://www.blick.ch/ausland/grossbritannien-handymast-eines...
Any organized resistance I’ve witnessed myself in the US has been something like an HOA saying no not tucked right here where our home values could take a hit or a view obstructed, please put it down the street or … anywhere else.
But if you had no cell service and your call dropped as you backed out of your garage or you tried to sell your house and the buyers phones suddenly had no service or they couldn’t get on the Internet at the open house, that’d feel like pretty concerning missing infrastructure.
I don’t think anti-5G wackos have dented a thing.
They have, at least here in Germany. We have a shitload of what we call "weiße Flecken", zones with zero service, of about the size of half of Schleswig-Holstein [1]. While a lot of these is in forests and mountainous areas, the zones in settlements are mostly due to the whackos and their organized campaigns.
[1] https://bmds.bund.de/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/detail/mob...
I have no phone signal in my village, a few miles from a major town. I have to use WiFi calling to talk on the phone. Our local politician campaigns against it, it is such an issue. Especially since analogue phone lines are due to be turned off soon. We still have a working red phone box though!
I travel around a bit in the area and blackspots are very common
In the context of “cheap mobile data devices are widely accessible” I don’t think the distinction matters. If you’re relying on your £1 sim to trigger your solar battery charger and it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter if you technically had signal or not.
Probably not that even since it's UK. Isn't it 999 in the UK? Has the UK started accepting 911->999 for the tourists?
> 911 redirects to 999 on mobile phones/public phonebooths[citation needed] and on telephones used in USAFE bases.
So maybe? But without the source who knows.
For example, that would cost about three times as much in the UK but median income is about an order of magnitude higher so its more affordable.
I do realise it is a lot more affordable than telecoms were in the past, but its something like a day of median income.
Does that operate at good speeds in rural areas?
> On farmland and on rooftops, Iraqis turn to solar as power grid falters
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/farmland-rooftops-ir...
But, what exactly do you mean by fragility? In what way are they fragile?
This is a nice text on the underwater version:
https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Introducti...
[0]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red... [1]: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/rene...
A third solution is to pipe it across timezones using HVDC and accept some level of efficiency loss and some geopolitical risks.
A fourth solution is to mix lots of wind, which performs better in winter and cancels out the lower insolation.
Realistically it's going to be all of the above, with the balance determined by local factors.
Solar changes the who and where, but really not the what significantly. Solar is far more distributed and less concentrated, and options for distribution are potentially more diverse (cables, direct power beaming, synfuel production and distribution) in ways that an oil-based economy hasn't been.
Even within national borders, power production and distribution are sufficiently centralised and choke-pointed that they are vulnerable to significant disruption, even by non-targeted accidents and natural disasters. Major national and regional power outages are not especially frequent, but neither are they unfamiliar: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages>.
During periods of conflict, national and irregular forces routinely target power infrastructure, with significant but rarely absolutely crippling effect. For the past three-and-some years, two major eastern-European adversaries have been directly targeting one anothers' energy infrastructure. Though the results are costly, neither has been bombed back to the stone age, or even the pre-electrical era:
"Resilience Under Fire: How Ukraine’s Energy Sector is Adapting – and What It Means for Europe"
<https://rasmussenglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/REPOR...> (PDF)
For the past 100+ years, the US has been spending a significant amount of money on protecting oil supplies to protect its oil billionaires and its economy. It's the #1 budget item, outspending the combined military spending of the next 10 economies. This can be reduced to zero, and ultimately, the $ 39 trillion deficit can be eliminated.
The EU is actually extremely special because its souvereign member states collaborate in almost all areas on a level that is unmatched anywhere else. But the ideological foundation is getting eroded by propaganda and if that assault is effective, Europe will balcanize again and end up experiencing many more armed conflicts.
Most in depth analysis I’ve seen of these Russia - Ukraine conflicts cite this as one of the top factors in why Russia invaded both a decade ago and the most recent war that is ongoing.
That is to say - mutual cooperation agreements like that have enough teeth to keep conflicts to a minimum as the repercussions are severe
Also another ultimate irony is that Russia didn’t completely cut the rest of Europe off from its oil and gas. That symbiosis continues albeit not the same way. Perhaps electricity would be the same
Maybe something like microwave transmission or cheap superconductors will solve it.
Extend that to 10k km and you're looking at approximately 25%, but if it's surplus solar, who cares?
Such a line costs as much as a highway broadly speaking, so it's not impossible to build.
Local power costs are over 30 cents per KWh, so that could be pretty competitive.
The problem is that, no profit based organization will ever build "surplus" solar to enable that kind of thing. If we want surplus power, if we want a strong grid, if we want cheap power, if we want to enable the ability to quite literally waste solar power on inefficient processes (including things like industrial processes that produce less CO2 or generating hydrogen or methane as long term energy storage), we have to get the government to make it happen
But, uh, we hired people who would rather spend $170 billion on harassing random cities and brown people so..... Everyone get ready to pay absurd rates for electricity to support outdated businesses that have been directing American energy policy since Reagan, including paying about 60k coal miners in west virginia for a resource that is economically inferior to other fossil fuels but because they voted for a democrat once they now get a stranglehold on the US economy.
I think what we seeing in a lot of places now is quite the opposite. There are significant opportunities for arbitrage, so private entities are building HVDC lines in Europe for example (without special subsidies over the usual ones that all big infrastructure always seems to get AFAIK). That's part of the beauty of the renewables revolution it breaks up the stronghold that only a few big corps held over generation.
There are huge orbortunities for arbitrage in these areas. That's why in Europe there has been significant investment into HVDC connections recently. AFAIK they are mostly (all? ) build privately without special government subsidies (over the usual ones that all large infrastructure projects always seem to get). I think this partly the beauty of the renewable revolution, it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...
My understanding of the intentions of connecting international grids is for things like emergency supply of electricity to a different grid to stabilise the frequency and prevent blackouts.
I also know breakers for HVDC are extremely challenging to make, AC power has the benefit of sine waves crossing the zero line so power can be switched/broken a lot easier than with DC.
The argument always seemed disingenuous. For sure, China produces a lot of pollution as they are modernizing, but they are also investing a lot in the direction of sustainability. If we take the balance of (pollution produced - pollution prevented) for the two countries, the day will come, if it isn't now, that the US is on the losing side of that comparison, and I wonder what the new argument will be for the US not doing more.
China's numbers did rise quickly on that measure and is above the EU now I think but still way below the US.
And if you don't like per capita, then China with 4x as many people is still behind the US when you compare cumulative CO2.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ending...
The Chinese leadership understands several things very clearly:
- The country has experienced multiple catastrophic natural disasters in the past.
- Such disasters often lead to regime change (losing the mandate of heaven via natural disasters leading to social unrest)
- The leadership is comprised of smart people (and a lot of engineers) and they don't play dumb political games like denying the reality of climate change.
- Climate change will bring far worse problems in future, which threatens the country's economic growth and therefore their hold on power.
So they have massive incentive to care about the reality of climate change and do everything they can to mitigate it and protect their environment.
On the concrete side we do know that they also care deeply about local pollution. They made massive efforts to clean the air for the Beijing Olympics, amongst other many other moves to reduce local air pollution.
Of course there are still a lot of obvious problems to be addressed, but the rate of progress is the really impressive thing.
My whole post was an ask for more information on the Chinese side (each of my 3 phrases were asking this!), which you have provided thank you very much, but I could do without the "you're dumb" when I ask a question.
But none of that matters, China would pursue massive solar power infrastructure regardless, because they want energy independence. Stupid amounts of solar power means they will no longer be importing lots of oil and fuel, and that means they would be less vulnerable to the US blockading them in some sort of conflict, which is one of their primary geopolitical concerns.
They would do this even if solar power was dramatically less effective or was significantly more expensive, because solar power is the first kind of power generation that it is economical to way overbuild, and have serious redundancy and surplus and excess, because there's no consumables that scale your running costs like if you tried to build massive amounts of coal power plants.
China would like to have that kind of scale for power because they can use it to subsidize things like datacenters running less efficient Chinese made computer components. The fact that power doesn't have to run a profit in China helps this.
The US should be taking fucking notes, about how nationalized infrastructure can be a force multiplier economically, and how infrastructure that doesn't have to be profitable can be even more powerful.
Slaving ourselves to the enrichment of well connected capital owners is harming our country, and preventing a literal energy revolution. We have the option to, for the first time in human history, actually have energy resources that are too cheap to meter.
Therefore reaching self sufficiency in terms of power generation will make this threat less relevant and an enemy will no be able to use it to make them back off.
And??? The parent commenter wrote about the manufacturer of said solar panels, going outside the frame of that article to something related but still relevant, given that that article surely is meant to stimulate a more general discussion.
I doubt the Uyghurs would agree:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57124636
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/in-broad...
https://sustainabilitymag.com/articles/gb-energy-blocks-use-...
https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/solar-companies-linked-to-...
The ends don't justify the means.
I would suggest a more nuanced understanding that not everything fits into a binary good/bad mentality, especially when talking about decisions made by many people. Even individuals often have decidedly varied track records - Watson is in the news this week, and while his later racism and sexism don’t cancel out his scientific career, you have to know about both to understand how flawed people can still make large accomplishments (repeat for Shockley or Millikan, etc.). Recognizing the conflict helps you understand the whole situation, without detracting from your ability to say certain parts of the story are unambiguously bad.
You began your comments by calling me a creationist. You never had good faith to begin with.
> I would suggest a more nuanced understanding
There is nothing nuanced or subtle here. This is not complex.
We're talking specifically about solar panels. Slave labour is being used to produce those solar panels. You're trying to make the case that's somehow a net good. That's ugly.
Your position is not defensible. I doubt you read anything I linked to.
This is highly relevant to your penultimate and last sentence, which demonstrate how you're arguing against a strawman: I never said it was a net good, and nor does it appear that OP did, and nothing you linked to could change the opinion of anyone in this thread on how the Uyghurs have been treated since everyone already agreed that it's very bad.
That still doesn't remove the benefits of cheap solar, especially because it's not like 100% of their solar production depends on forced labor. Both the current and previous administration have been willing to enforce the existing laws banning those imports (as have other countries such as Australia) so it's not like the only two options are “no Chinese solar panels” or “look the other way”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_Forced_Labor_Prevention...
The entire coerced labour propaganda are bunch of country bumpkin Uyghurs getting enrolled in poverty alleviation programs where they're paid close to median wage, i.e. 2x+ typical subsistent agri income. This is equivalent to US starting a jobs program to give bottom quantile earners (15k) a median income (40k).
The reality is these are well paying jobs, relative to bottom quantile recruits these programs are designed to uplift usually go towards more ethnically "Chinese" applicants, because factory bosses don't want to deal with Uyghurs who don't Mandarin Good until central pushed Uyghurs (and Tibetans) to front of queue, when frankly much more qualified "Chinese" applicants exist.
Are individuals sometimes fucked in the process, of course, statistic inevitability, but poverty alleivation is net good for Uyghurs, XJ solar is net good for the world.
If I was to post a comment that frames the armenian or rohingya genocide, or indeed any genocide, in a good light, would my comment be flagged? What exactly is HN policy on moderating genocide-washing propaganda?
asking for a chinese friend
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53220713
https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/explainers/sterilizations-and-manda...
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/28/21333345/uighurs-china-internm...
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22311356/china-uyghur-bir...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-23/china-uyghur-policies...
https://www.rferl.org/a/china-uyghur-uzbek-xinjiang-muslim/3...