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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Same for South Africa. Thanks to the grid being severely mismanaged upper middle class and beyond are installing home solar where possible to maintain some semblance of normalcy

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Seems somewhat similar to the situation where cellphones/handiphones took off in infrastructure poor regions quicker than in many advanced economies?

That a pretty common thing, the last to modernize have more modern tech. Kind of like skipping levels in CIV. Interesting to think that the USA is bring back and build out nanoscale chip fabs, speculation is that we will be at this nanoscale for a long time.

In Africa for sure. People kept digging up phone lines and phone infrastructure to sell the copper. Service was always down, or spotty at best. Cell sites were easier to secure (they're defended like military installations, razor wire and all) from scavengers, and you need a lot less of them to service a large number of people.

Source: I've spent a lot of time in West Africa.

> People kept digging up phone lines and phone infrastructure to sell the copper.

This became a bigger problem in South Africa with its reliable load shedding schedules.

Ideally, municipalities in SA would be poised to create municipal solar farms a la municipal broadband.

But if you can't get the energy to the consumer because of theft, then only people who can afford it and have space can use it.

The municipalities are also on trouble so I’m not holding my breath on that one.

I also suspect one needs grid scale to balance out the fluctuations of renewables to be honest

We are visiting family for Easter. My wife’s mom bought a generator as well, so we should at least have enough power to keep the fridge running through stage 4 (I think?) load shedding (= planned rolling blackouts).

Fridges are fine during loadshedding...just need to be careful not to open them - they hold temp long enough. The compressors in them don't always like generators though fyi.

I would suggest bringing a decent powerbank though to keep the phone charged.

Thanks, I’ll forward that. And yeah, we bring a beefy powerbank anyway.

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