arn3n
layoric
Everything gets captured by capital.. This aesthetic resonates the same with me. Its partly what drove me to join a startup to do global solar radiation forecasting as first employee. Burnt myself out over 4 years, but built platform that enabled higher penetration of solar pv power into grids all over the world, and was successful in this. I left due to burn out and realizing that most of the customers we would talk to about large scale solar utility sites that wanted integration with the data were basically banks/finance/insurance companies trying to return a better yield, they didn't care how. After I left got bought out by a risk management company.
Call me naive, but I went into it knowing solar power is _cheaper_, and the inability to measure how much solar energy was in an electricity network, and uncertainty about the generation were the main problems the startup was aiming to solve. The finance made it attractive to capital, I got that, partly why I was convinced it would succeed, but I underestimated how laser focused these groups are to "line go up". They would outsource everything because they were there as the money people, and have people in the meeting knowing just enough to gauge if project was on track for expectations of "line go up".
Problem being is that the margins aren't there. Everytime a solar panel is added to an electricity network, the life time ROI for ALL panels in the network goes down. This is due to pushing down the price of electricity during the day. Eg, when oversupply occurs in the middle of the day (and they don't store it cause X is cheaper), it causes electricity markets to drive prices down and even negative, meaning the return of possible life time generated power for each panel also gets reduced.
Saying all that, the adoption of renewables is growing at a rapid pace due to it being cheaper, but also slowed down by constant value extraction shenanigans.
tppiotrowski
Sorry about the burnout. Sounds like you've got skills and I'd encourage you to explore something smaller. There is a path as a solopreneur. I do sun and shadow modeling using publicly available datasets [1]. My customers are gardeners, permaculture, hunters, fishermen, photographers and also real estate prospectors but they're people not big orgs or banks. It feels good to work on this level and personally answer emails and questions. I don't make much revenue but I like the grassroots path. Maybe you'd find it rewarding as well.
[1] shademap.app
mcbishop
I came across shademap.app a ~month ago, and had a "the internet can be so awesome" moment. I wrote to my property mates: "I found a cool free website for seeing shade at our site throughout the day and year. Maybe helpful for garden planning. Our address is loaded in [here]". Reply: "Wow! That is cool!". It seems to be very much in the solarpunk spirit (even more so with your engagement here). I hope to incorporate it into my solar installation work. Thank you :)
Chilko
Thanks for the work you've done with ShadeMap - I used this extensively when I we were looking for somewhere to rent, as living in hilly city some areas lose the sun quite quickly. Happy to say we are now living in a place that gets plenty of sun, and this summer has yielded a lot of tomatoes in a city where that can be difficult.
davidw
That's pretty cool! I could definitely see that being quite useful for real estate in more northerly locales.
Caltopo has a similar feature including an 'average' for, say, the month of January, which gives more of a sense of where it's darker.
Gasp0de
Super cool, I just used your app to figure out where to place my clothes drying rack so it'll get sun sooner! Okay, I already new the result mostly, but still fun and useful!
szvsw
Mate, don’t give up! I think it’s time for you to go work on batteries!
Capital is never going away I don’t think, but that doesn’t mean you have to be resigned to its inexorable subsumption of all productive potentials for value extractions… just means you need to keep finding ways to leverage your own knowledge of its behavior and response modes to make positive change (eg start working on demand forecasting in p2p battery storage networks, or utility scale deployment controls, etc etc).
no_wizard
There was a time when capital knew its place though.
I humbly suggest we start to think about how we all can get back to that time. It’s come to rule the roost over all other concerns and we are not seeing the bright future we deserve as humanity in part but not solely, due to this fact.
We can change that, but it means drawing the line. And I mean all of us
bruce511
In one sense the more solar we install, the more energy is produced, the cheaper that energy gets. I'd suggest that's a feature not a bug.
I'll start by noting that in my region variable pricing does not exist, so that effect is not in play.
I'll also note that we use a lot more energy during the day than at night. They are very much not equal. (Residentially, WFH, about 75% of my daily energy is I the daytime, and hence "free".)
Lastly I point out that storage is the next silver bullet. I generate excess during the day (10 months of the year) and I have a small battery attached to the home. Potentially a larger battery in an electric car. Grid-level storage solutions (perhaps sodium-ion, perhaps something else) will radically move the needle.
Maybe one day we'll have so many panels installed that energy is "too cheap to measure", but its not today. Water is still measured, and that's already 100% renewable.
modo_mario
>In one sense the more solar we install, the more energy is produced, the cheaper that energy gets. I'd suggest that's a feature not a bug.
That's a feature from an overall perspective. Not for the seller. Additionally when those panels then don't or barely produce electricity such as at night or in most of europe during much of winter it mandates a costly variable additional source that can output for days on end so many battery solutions end up out of the question at grid scale. Often when pumped hydro isn't an option only co2 emitting gas remains.
layoric
> In one sense the more solar we install, the more energy is produced, the cheaper that energy gets. I'd suggest that's a feature not a bug.
I agree, was trying to convey the purely economical point of view that owner operators of large utility scale solar likely have.
> I'll start by noting that in my region variable pricing does not exist, so that effect is not in play.
Where abouts are you located? Most electricity networks have market mechanisms, even if the end consumer of the electricity only pays flat usage rate. Although it is a supply and demand problem to balance an electricity network, regulation needs to be carefully controlled and enforced since generators will actively seek out exploits to save/make money that goes against stability of the network.
> I'll also note that we use a lot more energy during the day than at night. They are very much not equal. (Residentially, WFH, about 75% of my daily energy is I the daytime, and hence "free".)
Yup, that is pretty normal in my neck of the woods as well.
> Lastly I point out that storage is the next silver bullet. I generate excess during the day (10 months of the year) and I have a small battery attached to the home. Potentially a larger battery in an electric car. Grid-level storage solutions (perhaps sodium-ion, perhaps something else) will radically move the needle.
It will likely move the needle yes, and for countries with publicly owned networks, they can do this now just at a larger upfront cost. As much as I like home solar panels for generation, but I'm actually not a fan of home batteries. They have a non zero fire risk (unless chemistries like LTO are used, again deemed too expensive) and require more equipment that can fail and then has to be maintained for such a small installation (less than 50kwh for example). When multiplied out, you have a much higher frequency of issues that can take out home power. Distributed solar generation has several weather based advantages as you spread out the generation, cloud disruptions get smoothed out for example. I get that home batteries make the system more resilient in ways, I still just don't think it should be in/around homes. Neighborhood batteries make a lot of sense, especially since networks commonly have zone substations distributed around.
toomuchtodo
Know when to rest, not to quit. Thank you for your service.
aperrien
I really wish there was a finance group for solarpunk stuff. It's a constant problem, and when I join any of the many groups online, no-one seems to acknowledge it. If there was some sort of fund that we could contribute to that handled the financing, and looked strictly for long term investments, I'm sure that it would make money, that could then be put back into more long-term solarpunk investments, for the good of all. I don't know how to set such a thing up, or I'd do it myself!
jimnotgym
I could help you with this. What you really need to begin with is someone willing to put a sizeable sum into it to start things rolling.
henglihong-jsu
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torginus
While I do like the appeal of this aesthetic, I honestly feel like putting solar panels on everything you own is a bit like growing tomatoes in your backyard.
If we as a species, were truly committed to clean energy on a civilization scale, we would go all in on nuclear, and have renewables be produced at dedicated sites, built and maintained by professionals.
Which goes against the DIY 'punk' idea of it, but I think 'punk' itself is a contradiction - the ability to live free from the constraints of society means you are using much more resources than someone who makes use of communal resources - flats, public transport, etc. The lifestyle of living in a detached house (or even a row house) is not available to everyone, on account of there not being enough resources to go around.
lukan
"like growing tomatoes in your backyard"
Have you tried it?
Those tomatoes taste like real tomatoes, unlike those things, you can usually buy in a supermarket.
And nuclear as the only sane choice is just your personal opinion, not a fact.
What is the worst outcome, with too many solar panels vs too many nuclear reactors?
Only in your nuclear Utopia all those reactors will be maintained to the highest standards. In reality humans cut corners, are still lazy, don't give shit and who cares, "it will be allright". Until it isn't when multiplied with lots of reactors and time.
itsoktocry
>Have you tried it?
Yeah, it's a niche hobby. Nobody is relying on their backyard tomato harvest without a lot of work. Just like your backyard solar array.
tim333
As a Brit I have been underwhelmed at our efforts to go nuclear (Sizewell C cost ‘has doubled since 2020 and could near £40bn’ https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/14/sizewell-c-...)
and would rather like some cheap solar panels and insulation to help get away from our impressively high energy costs. Sadly I live in a flat so it's not really a goer.
My dad had a 160 acre farm outside London on which you could have had loads of solarpunk type dwelling at zero cost to the government but instead it's impossible to build anything due to regulations plus they spend the billions on overpriced Sizewells.
I daresay the reason you can't build anything is people want green countryside rather than packed in unsightly housing estates but maybe something like the art in the Wikipedia could satisfy both? Functional while not hideous?
WhyNotHugo
An aspect of solarpunk is that individuals and small communities can opt into this mindset and change their habits. E.g.: having your own power source, growing your own vegetables, etc. It's not only sustainable, but quite resilient; there's not as much dependency of a larger scale network.
Switching to solar requires a nation-wide initiative (or something close to that scale).
> The lifestyle of living in a detached house (or even a row house) is not available to everyone, on account of there not being enough resources to go around.
This is true, but you don't need a detached house. A row of houses can also have solar on top. A building with a couple of floors and a few apartments can have a shared roof and garden.
Sure, none of this works in a large metropolitan city, but living in a metropolis is kind of the antithesis of solarpunk.
torginus
> but living in a metropolis is kind of the antithesis of solarpunk.
It might be, but I'd wager it's a pretty efficient way for humans to live, in terms of carbon footprint.
itsoktocry
It's not only sustainable, but quite resilient
Really? Do you have any examples of these communities?
hedora
You might like H.G. Wells’s utopia “The World Set Free.”
It’s as relevant now as it was when it was written.
hnthrowaway0315
It is a possible future. But it calls for knowledgeable citizens who are not afraid to act.
corimaith
Might be controversial, but I don't. Because solarpunk is insistent on the notion of negative rights, the notion of how one lives their life remains the same as today, and no better than the hunter-gatherers of the past.
There will always be those who seek more, who admire those towers reaching into the sky, even as others admonish it as tyranny. And they are right, ambition will result in tyranny, in oppression and conflict, but even so, I would still believe in a future over an eternal present.
hnthrowaway0315
You need knowledgeable citizens who are not afraid to act. They will naturally push back those people who seek more power/status.
zmgsabst
How did that work out in the USSR and CCP, where groups regulated the corrupt power of others on behalf of the people?
What you’re describing is the perennially utopian pitch of Marxist societies — a century of failure, not withstanding.
aaron695
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Voultapher
As much as it sounds like a nice future, I've come to the painful realization that solarpunk triggers the same trap that the "Technology will save us" mind virus lures us into. A future where we get to keep doing the same destructive practices that abundant evidence suggests are the prescription for the termination of life on earth. Concepts like "Abundance without waste" are like saying "Humane torture", sorry that's an oxymoron. We have absolutely zero idea how to maintain current lifestyles for N billion people across tens of thousands of years. 10k years of heavy mining to replace solar panels will poison this world, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of problems with ideas like solarpunk.
notarobot123
> a future where we get to keep doing the same destructive practices
If anything, I see it as an antidote to the trap you describe. It doesn't reject technology (it's fundamentally progressive) but it also doesn't imagine a future where technology solves all the problems.
The objective of Solarpunk is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits. It is very much about re-imagining culture and exploring what a meaningful lifestyle looks like with a strong focus on community and creative self-expression. It resists the ideology of limitless growth and necessary scarcity while also saying that human societies can continue to progress and flourish in ways that matter.
Every genre of "punk" has explicitly resisted the status-quo and this one is no different.
grumpy-de-sre
The real mind virus is that "Technology is evil" and it's been infecting the western world for the last fifty years. Technology is completely indifferent to human and environmental outcomes.
Solar panels are insanely resource efficient, and every study has shown lifespans in practice far exceeding initial expectations. Due to the fact that energy is inherently valuable, I'm sure there'll be a rich circular economy for solar cells/panels (same goes for batteries).
No idea if it leads to a solarpunk "utopia" or just a world with much cleaner air, and electricity abundance.
lm28469
> Technology is completely indifferent to human and environmental outcomes.
"technology" doesn't mean anything... Are we talking about mass made penicillin or the Twitter guy pretending to solve the world by replacing 1.5B ICE vehicles with 1.5B EVs ? I can defend the former all day long, but to believe the later you have to be quite uninformed and subscribe to the technosolutionist cult blindly
I'm still not convinced anything good came out of mainstream tech after google maps. We get a few ultra niche gadgets that are useful but the bulk of it is at the service of the people in charge and are net negatives to the bulk of humanity
lukan
"10k years of heavy mining to replace solar panels will poison this world"
Have you heard of this new concept called recycling?
Also, solar panels are mostly made of Si, which is basically pure sand. Melt it, reforge it. Done.
I believe Uranium mining is somewhat dirtier.
pjc50
> We have absolutely zero idea how to maintain current lifestyles for N billion people across tens of thousands of years
Perhaps, but then you end up in the extinctionist/Malthusian doom loop instead.
9dev
Please don't use the mind virus adage. That term is completely burnt by Musk's braindead agenda—there is no virus, if anything, there's opposing viewpoints that you may not agree with, but are just as valid as yours.
itsoktocry
>there's opposing viewpoints that you may not agree with, but are just as valid as yours.
>"Musk's braindead agenda"
AstralStorm
The worst part of the aesthetic is the actual cost of building in it. Solarpunk designs are notorious for being expensive to make, compared to native ones they try to crib off of.
Some of it could be reduced with say 3D printing, or more advanced ground engineering. Some of it requires particular local conditions.
See, solarpunk is distinct from classic futurism in that it is supposed to be both bespoke and green. Zero waste is not the goal. None of it scales... Which degrowth advocates think actually helps.
The question of cost brings out its shadow - colonialism in a green paint. Someone pays the costs of manufacturing, mining and transport.
berkes
Why must everything always "scale" in order to be good? That's a very limited view, IMO.
I've come to love working in my garden, producing fruit, vegetables, eggs, honey. None of it has to scale. Our 8 chickens provide our six households with eggs. My 6m2 vegetable patch gives me enough veggies for my household and some more (to give away). My three hives produce enough honey and wax to sell off and give away.
None of it scales. None of it is optimized. None of it has to. My time spent on these "chores" is free, because I recharge and enjoy that time.
I am aware this isn't "self sustaining". But it does relieve from my footprint a lot. I'm not contributing to bio industry, contributing much less or non at all to food dragged all over the world. All of it while gaining mental energy, joy and happiness.
We could easily start doing more of this. It doesn't have to be absolute and "everything or nothing". I mean, I drink coffee, for example that won't grow here. But only a little, because all the tea that I can and do grow, brings my coffee "needs" down to a handful of coffees a week.
I don't want it to scale or be made efficient, because it would remove a lot of the joy I get from it.
pjc50
> Why must everything always "scale" in order to be good?
Because there's eight billion of us. A lot of things work for one person but not for everybody. The big issues of land use, density, water, and transport end up forcing people into choice that perhaps nobody ultimately wants.
(this is not a reason for you or anybody else not to do it! But it's a reason against all sorts of "why doesn't everybody just X")
rcxdude
That's fine in and of itself, as a hobby. But it's not going to save the world, either, due to aformentioned inability to scale (most importantly, it would be impossible for the whole world to live like this: the world population is large enough that we rely on high-yield farming).
itsoktocry
>None of it scales. None of it is optimized. None of it has to. My time spent on these "chores" is free, because I recharge and enjoy that time.
80% of the resources you are buying to support your hobby farm are produced by people living in places where this makes no sense.
The fact that you're saying "I don't care if it scales" implies you're solving a problem for yourself, not the world.
roughly
Becky Chambers’ “A Psalm for the Wild Built” is a nice dose of solarpunk fiction if you need a pick-me-up: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-psalm-for-the-wild-built-beck...
(Chambers’ entire body of work is just generally a nice cup of tea and a warm blanket for the soul in sci-fi form - the Wayfarers series starting with “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” is maybe the best collection of before-bed reading I’ve ever found.)
tstack
> the Wayfarers series starting with “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” is maybe the best collection of before-bed reading I’ve ever found.
I agree wholeheartedly and do, in fact, read them in bed. I transitioned to the Wayfarers after souring on The Expanse (I enjoyed most parts of those books, but the black ooze is not for me). The low-stakes, slice-of-life content is more up my alley.
selykg
I really didn’t enjoy The Wayfarers. But I absolutely adore the Monk & Robot books. I just wish she would write more. It does not feel finished after two books. That series is my warm blanket on a cold winter day book.
runfaster2000
I quite enjoyed both series. They are not similar (as you implicitly suggest).
Wayfarer bugged me at first because each book is a massive departure from the next (somewhat like Ender 1 and 2). As much as it pained me to leave the characters of the first book, the following books were more meaningful and stayed with me much longer.
I also wish Chambers wrote more. Amazing author.
bbminner
Same. You can clearly tell how much better of an author she got by the time the Psalm came out. It is a very solid book. The second one in the series seemed more confused, but the first one felt very thought though and intentional.
gggggggoodlord
It's the other way around for me. "Psalm" and its sequel dialed up the coziness in exchange for anything resembling stakes. I feel the Murderbot series strike a better balance, where there's still some sort of conflict side dish to go with the hygge.
hinkley
Braiding Sweetgrass, if you haven’t read it already.
araes
Fell down the rabbit hole of reading about this subject for several hours. Yet a couple of cool architectural applications I found were kind of neat.
Bosco Verticale, isn't all that far away in link jumps, yet one of the most applicable current constructions using those types of sci-fi ideas.
Here's the Streetview version at ground level in Milan: https://maps.app.goo.gl/RS4FBzQE1JcYWYH36
The other one that was quite a bit further, from looking at Earthships, tin can walls, and bottle walls, was Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew in Thailand. The Buddhist temple of 1.5 million empty Heineken and Chang beer bottles.
WP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Pa_Maha_Chedi_Kaew
The photo tour's pretty incredible on Google.
WhyNotHugo
There are a few crazy buildings of this style in Amsterdam.
E.g.: https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/mvrdv-bre...
Not entirely sure how sustainable they are compared to building shorter houses spread horizontally, but the truth is that this country doesn't have any more space to keep doing that.
digdugdirk
One thought that keeps popping into my head every time I see something solarpunk related - Solarpunk is proto Star Trek.
It's the closest concept we have to that post scarcity utopia, albeit on a very small scale, and likely completely unsustainable for any decently sized chunk of the global population. But it makes me wonder what the best way to chart that progress would be, and what the present day equivalent for quality of life it would be best to aim at based on current levels of technology.
Wickedflickr
Sustainability for large populations is kind've a cornerstone of solarpunk, alongside decentralization and horizontal power to empower individuals and communities against corporation and government control.
There's a lot of discussion on how to implement solarpunk in the here and now over on the fediverse, like Lemmy, but a condensed version of short term goals tends to be:
1. Switch to solar and wind on a mass scale, including personal solar such as the type described in low-tech magazine, combined with reducing energy use as much as is reasonable.
2. Embrace permaculture urbanism, where energy and food production take place in cities. The most well researched proposal put forward is by the Edenicity project.
3. Replace as many cars as possible by implementing more robust and far reaching public transport and bicycle infrastructure in urban and rural areas, more in line with the Netherlands.
4. Build new societal structures that are bottom up through mutual aid, to wean ourselves off corporatism and consumerism, and to develop community independence.
None of those objectives are too far fetched, and would lay the groundwork for even more positive change.
Avicebron
I would also add that all of these would provide jobs, construction, high-level engineering, etc and any knock on benefit people with paying work contribute to their local/national economies would bring.
whearyou
I agree. But it has a similar aspirational quality, to me, as well thought out proposals for eg Moon colonization.
I suppose the question left is overcoming the blocking path dependence - the method of mass action to get there.
Wickedflickr
Moon colonization requires billions or even trillions of capital all at once, and can only be done by elite experts in a very specialized field, with no practical gain to society toward solving or global warming. It would be an expense almost impossible to justify, and only corporations building the parts would truly benefit.
Solarpunk, on the other hand, is accessible for an incredibly wide swath of people to contribute toward achieving, as a solarpunk life would actually save money while improving quality of life and mitigating global warming.
Solar panels are within the financial reach of most parts of society, bicycles are far more affordable than cars, better zoning laws are only a stroke of a pen, gardening your food or creating a larger communal gardening area creates food resiliency while saving money, and again is within reach of almost all economic situations.
It can be a big government program, but it scales down incredibly well compared to colonizing the moon, and I believe that is key to it being viable.
autoexec
It seems like Trek handwaved away or ignored a lot of the issues that weren't directly solved by replicators. Joseph Sisko had a restaurant on earth. The idea of a guy who loves to cook for people having a place where anyone can walk in off the street, order from a menu, and eat for free is easy to envision. The problem comes when you start to think about how there's a very finite amount of physical space. Questions like who decided that he should have that property for his restaurant vs anyone else who wanted to do something with it just never come up.
I'm interested in seeing Solarpunk grow so that we can see different people's ideas on how issues like this can be addressed without these fictional worlds becoming dystopian.
slightwinder
> The problem comes when you start to think about how there's a very finite amount of physical space.
It's not finite in a practical sense, especially if you are a space faring civilization. Certain space is treasured and in demand, but space usage overall comes down to how well you can utilize it (how tall your buildings can be), and how you access it. And in Star Trek, they have transporter, allowing people to live everywhere and still visiting most places casually for breakfast.
Even today, humankind on earth is not going out of space. Instead, we have problems with finding places which are easier to utilize for the majority, or which are popular for cultural reasons. But the first one is no problem in Star Trek, and the second one seems to have reached a peaceful solution.
> Questions like who decided that he should have that property for his restaurant vs anyone else who wanted to do something with it just never come up.
Who decides today that someone should have a certain space? And I'm not talking about money, welfare-projects exists today too. Every society has their organization, why should this different just because they have no money by our understanding?
And why do you think it's a privilege for Sisko to open a restaurant that others have not? I would think everyone can open a restaurant if they wish, but they simply do not wish to do this if they have no monetary stress doing it. At the end, a restaurant is hard work, not everyone is willing to put up with this.
harimau777
That part that bothered me is that everyone in the Federation appears to have more or less the same worldview. That struck me as sort of a cop out versus depicting the characters having to navigate different worldviews/religions/ideologies making up the Federation.
autoexec
Most of that kind of conflict was usually framed in terms of human vs alien. Sometimes it was still within the federation (Worf trying to get someone to kill him when he was injured and likely wouldn't fully recover for example), but a lot of it was dealing with outsiders like humans having to deal with Ferengi who had very different ideology when it came to things like greed or women's rights.
For outsiders, while the show was pretty careful about expressing a respect for differing cultural views, they did seem to side one way or the other. When there was disagreement within the federation it tended to be a single person or small fraction with an unpopular opinion (like the guy who wanted to disassemble and reverse-engineer Data) creating conflict vs a sizable faction.
protocolture
Yeah. Star Trek is very "Look at this cool society" without "This is how we got there"
I dont know if it is still canon, but the vulcans supposedly simply "fixed" earths economy and transitioned humans away from money. Its very surface level. They never go into depth about how that was done or what the downsides were.
Even in say, Arthur C Clarke's childhoods end, there were details about the how and why people resisted the overlords.
rkagerer
Some episodes explored steps along the journey. Eg. DS9's Past Tense where they're taken back in time to a Sanctuary District confronts poverty and homelessness.
mistermann
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nullstyle
To me, it seemed pretty clear that in the Federation context a restaurant or a bar is a cultural space and its value would be beyond its ability to produce meals for hungry people
BirAdam
Once a replicator is invented, human economic systems don’t make any sense. In a society without scarcity, money is meaningless as anyone can have whatever he/she desires nearly instantly. Of course, there are great discussions around what this would do to people psychologically and thus what such a breakthrough would do to human civilization.
ravetcofx
I wonder if the replicators were made in real life if they' hallucinate generations like Stable Diffusion
krapp
Replicators as depicted in Star Trek cannot exist in the real world because they violate the laws of physics.
cosmic_cheese
Do they though? I thought the way they worked was by composing requested items from raw materials kept somewhere in the ship using energy provided by the warp core. If I recall there’s mention of devices that go the other direction, decomposing waste to help replenish raw matter reserves. It’s a bit handwavy but doesn’t seem like it violates the laws of conservation at least.
roughly
> completely unsustainable for any decently sized chunk of the global population
I think the inherent critique in Solarpunk is that our current way of doing things is unsustainable for any decently-sized chunk of the global population - that climate change and general environmental collapse are signs that capitalism as we’ve run it so far cannot continue. If you take the critique at face value, it becomes less of a trade-off, because we don’t really have the thing we think we’re trading against: we’re not trading a successful capitalist future for a gamble on sustainability, we’re trying to find a successful future to begin with.
AstralStorm
The heart is in the right place, but the means to achieve it are incorrect and incomplete.
We should at least try to experiment with various social, ecological and economical approaches, as we're currently being held stuck.
woah
It's a cool aesthetic, but as a practical movement has some issues with reality. You get stuff like the solar powered website that runs out of batteries when enough people visit it. Cool statement but it would probably have been more environmentally friendly by any measure to deploy on a tiny virtual instance living ephemerally on cloud hosting. Bumping AWS's power consumption up by a tiny fraction vs having a bunch of components shipped to your house.
whearyou
Great example.
In the theory-land of Solarpunk, pretty much all the more fleshed out example I’ve seen imagined also have a similar issue with reality. In particular I’m thinking of KSR’s (otherwise great) novels.
It’s a shame because I think most people would agree some version of “Star Trek” is desirable and working toward a realistic imagining of it helps work toward a path to getting there.
globular-toast
The most likely version of Star Trek is depicted in Wall-E.
lukan
This thread was supposed to maintain some optimism.
benrutter
I think this is an important thought, but climate actions are often more than choosing the path of least emissions, especially since the options available are determined by our current economic system.
Sites like the one you're referencing (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ if I'm correct) don't just exit to be normal sites with less emissions, they're also presenting a vision of the kinds of things our tech world could and should value differently.
ImaCake
It's not quite the right aesthetic but what about having solar panels and an electric car? Or even just an electric bike or scooter. There's definitely a few practical solarpunk-esque tools available to us, probably will be more in the future.
AstralStorm
Where do you get all this lithium and cobalt? :)
Seriously though, high density works for a good reason. Solarpunk mistakes aesthetic that blends into nature with actual efficiency.
nis0s
My criticism of solarpunk is its emphasis on hydro, wind and solar energy instead of more efficient sources like nuclear. But I appreciate the futurist optimism and self-reliance ethos of solarpunk. I am not interested in aspects of solarpunk which sacrifice individuation and individual liberties—I think it’s possible for innovative solutions to respect both individual liberties and the systems which sustain us all.
michaelhoney
> more efficient sources like nuclear
thing is, nuclear is not punk. It requires large-nation-scale financing.
A community cannot build a nuclear power station.
bluefirebrand
A community cannot manufacture solar panels or high capacity batteries either. Like it or not, these things require large supply chains to manufacture in volume
lukan
Well, you can make even solar panels at home.
https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Build-Use-A-Dye-Sensiti...
Same with batteries, but just not in a way to compete with the large scale industrial processes. A wind turbine is far easier here.
Still, with improvement of tools, I can see a future, where even small communities have the capacity to practically make their own solar panels and their own batteries. But also buying it from the next industrial center makes sense to me (not at odds with the solarpunk idea to me).
I also do see small nuclear reactors a possibilitiy for those small communities, but I really don't see humanity advanced enough, to handle so much distributed radioactive material, without having dirty bombs or improvised nuclear bombs going off regulary.
lm28469
You can do a lot with very little if you have realistic goals. Of course if the goal is to keep everything the same you're utterly fucked from the get go.
It's much easier to be sustainable in a small well built rectangular passive house than in the average texan mcmansion atrocity (bad insulation, insanely inefficient shapes, &c.) for example
Wickedflickr
The reason solarpunk aren't hopped up on nuclear is that nuclear is an incredibly slow process that requires governments to fund it, corporations only run it if it's profitable (the Vermont Yankee power plant was shut down due to not being competitive with the price of natural gas even though it was emission free), and there's just too much red tape and delays and lack of public goodwill in comparison to Solar, which in comparison scales down to where individuals can afford it and make a difference RIGHT NOW, without waiting for the stars to align with government funding or cost overruns, licensing, etc.
Solar with battery storage is the cheapest, quickest, and most effective source of power currently on the market, and it can reduce our emissions when time is of the essence.
That's not to say solarpunk would advocate to shut down existing nuclear plants or stop construction of ones already underway, but most in the movement have decided solar and wind as the most expedient and decentralized way of achieving energy independence and emissions reduction.
ViewTrick1002
Not sure how you can call nuclear power more efficient?
It is extremely expensive, boasts a 30% thermal efficiency and uses more raw materials than wind and in line with solar when factoring in the uranium supply chain.
Yes, if we ignore everything but the uranium in the fuel road we can call it efficient. But that would be like measuring solar efficiency based on the weight of the photons.
sien
Nuclear low emissions is too realistic.
It's just France.
There is a thing called 'Atom Punk'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives#Atompunk
But it has a different emphasis.
lukan
"But it has a different emphasis."
Seems like it. The only picture there has "Atomic war!" as the caption.
daemonologist
I'm surprised to hear of the "aspects [...] which sacrifice individuation and individual liberties" - my experience is that the solarpunk aesthetic is often combined with anarchic political views and if anything is too individualistic for my taste. Could you elaborate a little bit on what you're referring to?
nis0s
From what I can tell, some intellectual circles would like solarpunk to be “Communism with solar panels”, which I find uninspiring. I also find that some thinkers in this movement have misguided notions on social justice (like open border policies), which I worry will result in the same cultural pushback we’re currently observing. I think political extremism is the root cause for why any futurist vision turns dystopian.
bee_rider
Are they suggesting authoritarian communism or some sort of sci-fi anarchist communism? (which would be pretty pro-individual-liberty).
Open borders seem pretty pro-liberty as well. What’s more authoritarian than a government telling you there’s a magic invisible line on the ground and if you cross it, that’s crime?
r00fus
Which is funny because China is the king of solar panels including both production and deployment, specifically in rural areas [1]. I'm very interested the "village level aggregation" which sounds super communal and solarpunk, TBH.
The big difference between China and the west seems to be that in the west, we need to pay a tax to our wealthy by their ownership stake in major companies and private capital that keep enshittifying everything.
[1] https://www.aiib.org/en/news-events/media-center/blog/2024/H...
benrutter
Just adding some context here that I think a lot of other comments miss, but the envivonmental movement is often anti-nuclear because it's seen as not progressing passed our system's current extraction based economy.
Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" probably makes this case most clearly, arguing nuclear uses finite resources, creates waste and is damaging to mine.
I'm not arguing for this case here, but that view is very popular in environmentalist circles and probably explains why nuclear is absent from solarpunk literature.
derduff
Nuclear is neither more cost efficient, nor environmentally better than renewable energy resources.
grumpy-de-sre
Yeh let's completely ignore the impact of yellowcake mining, enrichment, reprocessing, long term storage, and limited deposits.
Nuclear is low carbon, but it's far from an environmental panacea and it's about as far from decentralized production (punk) as you can get.
demaga
I love the term "hopepunk" mentioned in the article! I feel like lately horrors, thrillers, dystopias and such are on the rise in all media. So it's very nice to see creators who are optimistic about the future, at least about fictional one.
danans
Like any aesthetic system built around an ideal, Solarpunk might not be practically realizable for most of us, but there are ways to implement the practical parts of the ideal in your lifestyle.
One of my favorite activities (which I do regularly) is "solar" cooking using an Instant Pot and an air fryer that both run off my domestic battery that is primarily charged with off peak solar power (either from my panels or the grid). This is how I cook 80% of my family's meals.
In my case I have a whole house battery, but in theory you could run an Instant pot off one of the larger capacity portable batteries.
grumpy-de-sre
The idea of Solarpunk has been resonating with me for a while now. I'm not completely sold on some of the community aspects (a little too hippy) but it's an incredible breath of fresh air compared to the cyberpunk dystopian bullshit that we are being force fed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R8GlENvhLI
I'm an Aussie living in the EU, and if anything is going to eventually tempt me to go back it's going to be ridiculously cheap solar energy. I think the odds of building any kind of utopia there are pretty remote but I think massive scale green steel smelters (+ other metals), green ammonia facilities, and expansion of desalination (combined with indoor agriculture). If Aus doesn't completely fumble the ball, I think there's a really good opportunity for another "mining boom".
Had a lot of fun listening to Saul Griffith explaining that solar energy and electrification is inherently deflationary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFr87rZyr3o
dfex
Aussie in AU here - I think about this opportunity a lot too, but sadly it will not be our government that delivers this outcome if the current nuclear vs. solar/wind debate (like these are mutually exclusive outcomes) is anything to go by.
I had high hopes that Andrew Forrest might be the one to pull this off after watching him deliver this [1] Boyer lecture 4 years ago, but as far as I'm aware this none of this has materialised.
owenpalmer
Chobani made a really beautiful ad featuring the solarpunk aesthetic:
https://youtu.be/z-Ng5ZvrDm4?si=BEmNr2kaBblgI64v
People hate on it for different reasons, but I like the vision/aesthetic they're going for.
Note: not affiliated with Chobani
mattvr
Also check out the unbranded version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqJJktxCY9U
koolala
I miss like any form of social idealism.
sho_hn
I try to remember that the USA is the same country that made the 90s Star Trek I grew up with a mainstream hit.
dimator
this makes it all the more heartbreaking for those of us who grew up as teenagers, informed and molded by star Trek's techno optimism. I thought we (society) was on the right track then, at least making progress towards worthwhile things. now, all of that is just a faded memory, and society is turning into a zero sum shitscape
I truly love this aesthetic and it's vision of the future. Clean air, healthy food, empowered communities. Abundance without waste, progress without destruction, and equal opportunity without tyranny. This is the future that we should be developing software to enable. Instead, I'm frequently disappointed by the modern usages of software, which seem to cause excess waste, accelerate the destruction of our planet, and enable authoritarians. Maybe it's time to rethink what we're working towards.