[MrsPeaches]

This revolution also has a dark side:

People are paying off these devices and then once they have paid them off, they break and people in these areas don’t have the skills or resources to fix them.

This has led to over 250 million of the units lying around broken in peoples homes, leading to solar being one of the fastest growing e-waste streams in the world.

It’s hardly solar punk to sell people cheap crap at a 10x mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over.

More details for the interested here: https://solar-aid.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/State-of-Re...

[jl6]

My takeaway from observing “tech in developing world” projects is that the key gap is usually maintenance. That is, continuous small investment to prevent things from breaking in the first place. To be fair, that’s not exactly a solved problem in developed countries either!

Sometimes development projects just throw solutions at rural communities then move onto their next project, leaving no legacy of training or continued supply of parts/tools/funding.

Sometimes solutions get treated as resources instead of infrastructure, like a water treatment plant that got strip-mined for metal (that example was from South America).

Tech is a whole ecosystem, mindset and lifestyle, not just magic hardware to parachute into situations that aren’t set up to manage it on a long term basis.

[gertrunde]

I knew a charity group many years ago that targeted this issue.

They noticed that aid charities would give modern motorcycles to rural medical workers that rapidly ended up in a non-working state.

So they gathered older motorbikes, more suitable and more repairable in the destination country, and spent time training the end users in maintenance and upkeep, and ongoing support.

[red-iron-pine]

ain't just tech in the developing world.

even in the Big IT Enterprise "support" is a byword that appears in all discussions.

it's not enough to have, or to build, you gotta maintain, fix, replace, and eventually, remove.

those discussions aren't fun or sexy, and everyone hates when you tank a blue-sky "it'll fix everything" discussion with the unpleasant realities of long-term care and feeding

[zdc1]

I don't understand this space very well, but I wonder if an iFixit-esque solution would work there: publish DIY guides on identifying and fixing common faults, and have a network of sellers for replacement parts and tools.

[jncfhnb]

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

[MrsPeaches]

Those who are talking about market opportunities, yes it’s big!

Bottom up calculation: average $10/repair x 250 million potential repairs = $2.5B market.

Problem is labour shortages and supply chain, as stated in the report. Both hard problems to solve.

We’ve been working on getting the labour shortages fixed and I personally believe that you can also skip some of the supply chain problems by localising labour.

For example: when we train people they can 4x their _household_ income within 6 months. This is young people who didn’t have an income before and are suddenly earning 3x as much as both their parents combined.

People just don’t know how to fix these things and when someone finally learns how, they can absolutely rake it in.

It’s actually insane to me how much education can be such a massive multiplier in this context!

Link to our recent work: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energy-makers-academy_strathm...

[cogman10]

Yeah, I'd imagine so. Especially since Solar systems are relatively simple. People are doing more complex repairs on car electrical systems.

What sort of repairs are you training them to do? Is it just simply testing and swaps of parts? Or are you training them on how to find and replace a bad capacitor?

[dhoe]

As someone who's spent the last 3 years in Africa, if there's one thing I learnt here is that if it can be fixed, they'll find a way to fix it.

[DanielHB]

Brazilian person here, when I moved to Europe I was baffled I couldn't find shops that fixed electronics. Like I wanted to get my Android phone charging port replaced, I literally couldn't find a shop in my city willing to do the repair.

I eventually went back to Brazil and had it fixed there and replaced the battery. Freaking phone lasted 8 years on my very clumsly hands, still works even. The fix cost me ~30 usd plus the battery cost.

[chrneu]

lol yeah I was gonna say that they fix everything. They can't just Amazon prime new shit. It's weird how OP just assumes they're inept at repairs when that's just not true at all.

[Tade0]

The same report says that 90% of those kits are repairable and the most common failure point is the battery and also that the vast majority of users hold on to their devices in hopes of repairing them in the future, as there exists some kind of repair service, it just isn't up to scale.

[MrsPeaches]

The repair service is really expensive for subtle reasons.

First of all there is the repair itself, but there isn’t any collection service so you need to travel (often a full day) to get to a repair centre. Then travel back. Not open on the weekend so you have to do it during the week, meaning you are also loosing 2 days of income. Then you have to go and get it once it’s done.

Total cost of repair for people using these devices might 10+ days worth of income if you include the opportunity cost.

That’s why we are training people to fix these systems within their communities.

Regarding parts you can get second life batteries in Kenya for $1-2 per cell from people like Acele Africa[1], so you can get total repair cost down to ~$10 (that’s ~3% of original purchase price)

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

[mtrovo]

I know you have some bias for the education solution, but I can't see why this is not a market problem. You have broken devices; you send them to get fixed; you have to travel one day to get them fixed; you have someone take them for a fee.

You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.

[MrsPeaches]

That’s the premium solution that some, but not most, can afford and only makes sense if the cost of repair is less than the cost a new unit. Travel just makes that tip in favour of getting a new system with a $10 deposit.

Most of the people we’re talking about here are subsistence farmers who pick up casual labour at a local farm. Income is sporadic and seasonal.

That was the initial brilliance of the PAYGO system, it allows users to pay off their device sporadically I.e. they buy units when they get paid and that goes towards paying off an asset that in theory will then provide energy at 0 marginal cost. Turns out that last bit isn’t true.

Here the VC story is important, these companies were meant to be high growth and giving significant returns. We all know how that ends.

> You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.

I have been in the past, but not anymore. No one is saying people aren’t resourceful but there is a significant barrier to entry when it comes to electronics repairs for the general population. One part of what we provide is an off-grid repair lab bundled with our new education offering so it’s very much knowledge + tools.

[randomtoast]

It depends. If the quality of the panels is similar to Temu products and not design with any repairablity in mind, then even with almost no labor costs, it still might be more cost-effective to simply replace the entire thing.

[reedf1]

This is a far more negative comment than the linked article for those who wish to read it.

[ZeroGravitas]

That seems more optimistic (or solar punk) than your summary e.g.:

> In terms of waste management, 85.3% of distributors reported that they had a waste management strategy. Mostly, this tended to involve collecting broken products, harvesting them for spare parts and then storing the remainder in a central warehouse before sending them to a (usually certified) local e-waste recycling facility. How effective these recycling facilities are, however, was beyond the scope of this report.

They seem to suggest that lithium batteries are the hardest to repair and recycle, but people want to do so. It feels like a problem that will get easier at scale.

[MrsPeaches]

For sure recycling is improving. That’s different from repair though.

The current cycle is 1. sell product 2. wait three years for it to break 3. Go back to 1.

The impact of the recycling can lessen the impact of that but it definitely doesn’t eliminate it. That’s just on environmental scale, think about the financial impact of carrying this debt for years on people earning $2 a day.

Also important to note that a lot of this is contingent of legislation that implements things like Extended Producer Responsibly (EPR) where you essentially have an additional tax on producers that gets used to fund collection. Kenya implemented this for the first time 12 months ago [1], so we will see the impact over the next couple years.

Re solar punk, my personal vision is that you basically teach people how to build and maintain these systems themselves by running solar tech bootcamp and giving them off-grid tools.

They then have tools and skills to fix anything without the need for the grid. Train 100k people and have them maintain these systems using a decentralised approach.

In fact, as part of our training we now have e-cooking stove suppliers who deliver training on their stoves to our students.

The economic impact of this cannot be over stated.

1. You are giving people the ability to 4x their income as repairers

2. You are saving the people who are getting new systems, instead of repairing them, multiples of their yearly income.

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

[thegabriele]

"Five billion phones to be thrown away in 2022"

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63245150

[segmondy]

Africans have more repair skills than westerners. Due to cost of things being expensive, repair culture is really big over there and in other 3rd world countries. You would be surprised at what folks can fix over there.

[ta20240528]

"Africans have more repair skills than westerners."

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

[4bpp]

The somethingpunk settings are supposed to be gritty and dominated by exploitative megacorps, though! As a rule, the thingpunk needs a Man dominating by means of the thing to rebel against. The only reason "solarpunk" has gotten such a rosy image is that its proponents tend to fancy themselves the Tessier-Ashpools were it to come to pass.

I guess even cyberpunk now has a bimodal supporter base - there are the would-be punks, and then there are the would-be (and actual) Zuckerbergs building the torment nexus/metaverse.

[stogot]

Sounds like an opportunity to do a buyback and sell to a refurb provider.

But also to fix their junk. 250 million?!

[MrsPeaches]

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

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

[zekrioca]

This looks more like an opportunity, especially compared to the worse downsides of these communities continuing with diesel.

[rswail]

As you develop the distribution network, you also establish the recovery network.

Make it more advantageous for someone to continue to pay maintenance, on the basis of modular upgrades over time, versus owning outright.

Essentially the "grid" becomes the physical distribution/repair/upgrade network.

[epolanski]

The article you link bundles together 5/10/15/20/25 years technology in one huge basket.

What about the most recent (last 5/10 years)?

Also, aren't almost all failures battery, rather than panel, related?

[MrsPeaches]

Yeah not much has changed, it’s simple technology that was developed in 2005. Main innovations of the PAYGO model in recent times was the ability to use the payment data you collected to offer other types of loans. One of the previous biggest companies in the space now sells mobile phones using PAYGO.

Technically battery chemistry has obviously moved on but we are talking a device capacity similar to a medium power bank. How much innovation have you noticed in power banks recently?

Panels are big problem from a e-waste perspective as they very difficult to repair.

Batteries failures are repairable. Usually battery packs will be 2+ LFP 18650s or 32700s. If one cell goes bad the the whole pack goes but the others may be fine. Just need to test and match cells and you can make new packs.

I can’t remember exact recovery rate for cells, I think it is something like 40-60%.

Dealing with these batteries at end of life is a challenge, but that’s a global problem.

Still a lot of legacy Sealed Lead Acid batteries around but these are very recyclable.

[robocat]

Yet it still might be marginally better off.

The article talks a lot about replacing generators: they need complex maintenance.

There will be a new waste stream... But the question is whether the waste stream is smaller than the current status quo.

[advael]

There is no sustainable future without repair and maintenance, and there are significant barriers to repair and maintenance imposed by governments in the name of "Intellectual property".

[xhkkffbf]

Is there some money in recycling them? The easiest way to get people interested in cleaning up trash is if you can pay them for the trash. Is there any money in a broken solar panel?

[energy123]

> sell people cheap crap at a 10x mark up that pretty much immediately breaks once the warranty period is over.

Two massive exaggerations inside one sentence to drive home a rhetorical point.

Provision of retail solar is a highly competitive market in developing countries and the profit margins are small.

[MrsPeaches]

Cheap crap = lasts only as long as the warranty period.

I did a survey in partnership with a the African Leadership University in a Rwanda, where we surveyed people living in two rural villages and found 90% or units had broken within 3 years of purchase. This is the logical end point when 1/5 stop working after 6 months, which you can find in Cross and Murry 2018, linked in other comments.

10x mark up (i.e. the mark up on cost of the unit) comes from knowing that the COGS for one of these units is ~$20-30 and the premium sellers sell up to $300.

Sure it’s at the top end of the range but 10x markup on each unit is not an exaggeration, let alone a massive one.

Gross margins are indeed tight but that’s is a separate issue to markup. You can sell at a huge markup and still make a loss: for example if the default rate of loans you make turns out to be much higher than you expected.

[throwawayq3423]

Perhaps the race to the bottom to create the cheapest possible solar panel wasn't the right way to approach this.

[veunes]

It highlights the gap between access and resilience

[more_corn]

What? No. I call bullshit on your whole premise.

Solar is dead simple. The cell puts out 12v. Theres some maths around parallel and serial but you don’t need to know that for repairs. The cells connect into a box that puts out ac. If the box fails you buy a new one (no user serviceable parts inside is what the sticker says). If the wires break you splice them.

If something hard breaks and you decommission a system the cells are still good and can be trivially reused. If a cell fails it’s obvious and it can be pulled out of rotation.

In conclusion, bullshit.

[wesleywt]

I don't see the problem. The market to fix these will eventually emerge.