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Comment by Gil-galad | Hacker News Reader

How about the market for private solar energy systems? Must be experiencing a massive boom

Lebanon, "massive boom". Poor choice of words. Or an accidental darkly humourous pun.

It's starting to kick off, several households are implementing it, it costs $5k+ here which given the current situation isn't the top priority But honestly I do hope we reach a point where private solar and wind take over the main grid and the generators

But $10 solar panels enough to charge a phone and laptop presumably are in widespread use?

International transactions are pretty hard in Lebanon the government constantly puts restrictions on dollar accounts and other accounts that can process international transfers.

Many payments services are also unavailable in Lebanon for various reasons.

If you are in a position to order things from Alibaba or eBay you are already pretty well off and anything sold locally would be sold at a very steep markup.

Can you please show me an example product? personally I wired my router to a power bank so the internet stays up

This kind of thing:

US $9.50 5V 1200mA 6Watt Battery Charger USB port DC 5.5*2.1 Charge Regulators Solar Panel 6W https://a.aliexpress.com/_u842IG

Probably won't be sufficient for a router, but it would charge a battery bank or phone pretty well (make sure it's angled 30 degrees south, and use a usb battery bank between it and the phone because the phone usually won't adjust the charging current up and down as clouds come over). For laptops, use a power bank with a laptop 19v output.

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