Solarpunk technology

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20585117

Ancient practices hold important lessons for farmers facing drying lands, but they were often more complex than modern societies realize. Glacier loss adds to the challenge today.

Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms – what archaeologists call culture – were fundamentally integrated into technological solutions in this part of Peru in ancient times. Isolating and removing the tools from that knowledge made them less effective.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20598636

archived (Wayback Machine)

A UK company has developed a loop system which turns methane gas into hydrogen and graphene. It’s being tested at several farm sites.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20326500

Archived

The pursuit of net zero has relied on Uighur Muslims forced to work in appalling conditions. Experts say Britain should follow other countries and take tougher stance.

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Many of the Chinese workers who are helping us to go green do not want to be at those factories. They do not arrive at work to manually crush silicon and load it into blazing furnaces because of a love of renewables, much less to earn a decent wage.

They are there as part of a mass forced labour programme by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that critics describe as a genocide. A reliance on men and women from the Uighur Muslim minority living in detention centres has helped the Xinjiang region to become the epicentre of the solar industry over the last 15 years.

At its peak, analysts believe that 95 per cent of the world’s solar modules were potentially tainted by forced labour in the region [of Xinjiang, in northwestern China]. This reliance on products partly made through working conditions that would be unfathomable in modern Britain represents what the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns calls an ethical “blind spot”.

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It is not only solar panels that are linked to widespread human rights abuses in the so-called Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region. Fuelled by an abundance of cheap, coal-driven electricity, the region produces vast amounts of everything from cotton to the lithium batteries that are ever more essential to our tech-driven lives.

But as governments across the world invest in solar energy in the race to reach net zero, experts have described a critical opportunity to curtail what has been one of Xinjiang’s champion industries.

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Alan Crawford, a chemical engineer who authored a 2023 report that exposed several companies with ties to forced labour, said that transparency from Chinese producers had decreased as a result. “Transparency has gotten worse because the Chinese know that people like us are looking,” he said.

While the Chinese authorities maintain that the Uighur community is free, images of internment camps have shown razor-wire fences manned by police. Leaked police files revealed a shoot-to-kill policy for escapers.

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The pervasiveness of forced labour across the early stages of the production process makes it difficult to find polysilicon from Xinjiang that has not been contaminated by forced labour. Hoshine Silicon, the dominant MGS producer in Xinjiang and a major supplier to the region’s polysilicon producers, has engaged in “surplus labour” programmes at its factories.

One propaganda account from 2018 details how a married couple were engaged in a “poverty alleviation” scheme in which they were moved 30 miles from their home in the rural Dikan township to work at a Hoshine factory in Shanshan county, leaving behind their children. The couple were described as being “relieved” of their worries by transferring their seven-acre grape farm to the state.

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[Laura] Murphy, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said legislation introduced in the US in 2021 showed how supply chains can be cleaned up. The Uighur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which bans the import of goods linked to the region, has led to thousands of solar panel shipments being stopped by US customs.

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It is for this reason that Murphy believes the UK should mirror the US approach, a strategy already being pursued by the European Union. If the UK’s controls against forced labour are not robust, there is a high probability that the UK will simply become a “dumping ground” for the tainted goods not wanted by the US.

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Andrew Yeh, executive director of the China Strategic Risks Institute, said relying too heavily on China for solar energy products could also leave Britain vulnerable in a geopolitical crisis.

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For Murphy, legislation is the only meaningful response to the issue. [...] She said: “Whatever it is that other countries think they might be doing to discourage it, shy of legislation, shy of enforcement, it is not working.

“We can be morally outraged all we want and we can express our desires not to have forced labour-made goods, even at governmental level. But until we actually put it in law and enforce it, companies will continue to import goods made with forced labour into the UK.”

I am doing some review for farm robotics and I stumbled upon that project, which I thought was pretty cool. I have met the people who are doing it 6 years ago, when they described themselves as "hippies working off the sustainability budget of Sony Research" and looks like now they manage to live off public European funding and open sourced their designs.

I'm part of a group that promotes light electric vehicles (hybrids between electric bikes and cars) and I'm also a huge user of deep learning technologies. As a part of that I am also involved in a fablab, where we often use things that are weirdly cataloged as low-tech despite being high-tech, like DIY electronics. Discussions about what's beneficial, what's compromise, what's something to avoid crop daily and I would like to clear a few points out. I hope it will be useful, and I hope it will bring some interesting discussions here.

Our transition to a sustainable society requires us to make choices, often tech choices, in a way that's aligned with the final objective. There is a general misunderstanding about the different types of accounting you need to do at the individual level, organizational level, national level and global level in order to achieve true sustainability on a global scale.

CO2-equivalent accounting (which is by the way not the only metric that matters, but is still a crucial one) is generally divided into 3 scopes:

• Scope 1 is the CO2 that's directly emitted by the subject. You burn fuel in a generator or in a thermal engine, that's scope 1 emissions.
• Scope 2 is the CO2 that's emitted by the energy that you are using, mostly electricity, but can be heat and cooling.
• Scope 3 is the CO2 that's emitted by your production chain. In other words, that's CO2 that you don't directly emit, but that through your activity, you make others emit. For instance, you're asking for the delivery of something. The CO2 emitted by the truck that brings it is scope 3.

Note that CO2 that's accounted in your scope 2 & 3 is actually somewhere in the scope 1 of someone.

If you on a personal level or on an organizational level you want to minimize your impact on global CO2 emissions you need to have all three into account and 1, 2, 3 is kind of a good priority order.

The tricky part is that as soon as you have a higher point of view, be it at the regional, national or global level, you should not add these different scopes because that makes you count emissions several times depending on the length of your supply chain.

Consider a paperclip factory. Let's say that extracting material to make one paperclip emits one gram of CO2, that the transport of the raw material to the factory emits another gram, and that the transformation uses electricity that emits one more gram. If we consider it's the same company that does the mining, the transport, the electricity production, and the transformation, it has a scope 1 of 3 grams of CO2. That is the actual real number of gas emitted.

Now imagine if the mining, the transport, the electricity production and the manufacturing factory are actually separated entities:

• Mining: 1g CO2 in scope1
• Transport: 1g CO2 in scope1
• Electricity produciton: 1g CO2 in scope1
• Transformation: 0g in scope1, 1g in scope2, 2g in scope3

Add all of this, through the magic of accounting, we have twice the amount of emissions! Now my point is not to debate whether this exists as a genuine tool to reach carbon neutrality or as a greenwashing tool to make fake savings easier. I think it has a purpose and a use but it needs to be used carefully, because a naive reading of that would be that we can cut CO2 total emissions by just concentrating companies into a few zaibatsus.

Especially when you are trying to decide if a specific technology could be part of a sustainable society on the longer term, only scope 1 actually matters: a sustainable society is a society where all scope 1 are at 0, which means it will automatically make all scope 2 and 3 at zero too. In a transitional period, sustainable tech will need to deploy with some scope 2 & 3 emissions, it is unavoidable but as long as it diminishes the total sum of scope 1 out there, it is a net benefit.

As an engineer, scope 1 is usually what I'm looking at. But it also often makes me blind to other paths of action. When I am looking at the above example, I'm thinking that the transformation step is non-problematic and that we should focus on the other three sectors (mining, transport, electricity) in order to have a sustainable society. Thing is, this example is an oversimplified reality. As a company or individual, you usually have a choice between several alternatives, especially when it comes to electricity production or transport. And you can decide to pay more for something that emits less. So there is a point into pressuring organizations to reduce their scope 2 and scope 3 levels as well.

However, when it comes to evaluate not a company, but a technology, one should only look at its scope 1. We can produce electricity, transport things and mine materials without emitting CO2. Therefore, if your production only uses electricity, raw materials and transport, it can be part of a sustainable society, at least from the CO2 point of view. It does not mean that the companies producing/deploying that tech will automatically be carbon-neutral (scope 1,2,3 = 0), especially if we demand them to optimize their costs in the current industrial ecosystem, but then it is the business/industrial practices that need to be attacked.

This is a paradox that is present in electric vehicles and basically anything that mostly consumes electricity for use or production. If you make the accounting on a personal or organizational level, you can't dismiss the fact that the production of your electric vehicles will have emitted a lot of CO2 during production (scope 2 and 3). However, it is often missed that the most important part of making an EV switch is that it brings down your own scope 1 dramatically. Your scope 2 and scope 3 emissions are usually more than offset by the savings your scope 1 brings into other people's scope 3.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30157869

The European Solar Manufacturing Council (ESMC) has submitted its official feedback to the European Commission regarding three critical aspects of the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA): the regulations on renewable energy auctions, the selection criteria for net-zero strategic projects, and the list of essential components for net-zero technologies. ESMC strongly supports the ambition of the NZIA to strengthen European clean energy manufacturing but urges improvements to ensure the effectiveness and resilience of the policy framework.

[...]

ESMC welcomes the European Commission’s proposal to establish pre-qualification and award criteria for renewable energy auctions under NZIA Article 26. These criteria aim to promote European solar PV manufacturing capacity and align with the EU’s target of achieving 30 GW of solar PV production across the full value chain by 2030. However, ESMC highlights several risks and potential loopholes that could undermine these objectives:

• The proposed criteria must include a robust “Made in Europe” clause to ensure that European manufacturers benefit from the auctions.
• A comprehensive carbon footprint assessment methodology should be implemented, preventing greenwashing and ensuring transparent sustainability standards.
• Stronger cybersecurity and data security measures are needed to prevent foreign control over critical solar PV infrastructure.
• Provisions against the use of forced labour should be explicitly incorporated, with clear references to EU legislation such as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and the Forced Labour Regulation

[...]

Cross posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/2019930

A new framework aimed at increasing the competitiveness of European industry is targeting lower energy costs and stronger purchase incentives for local and sustainable products, according to a leaked early draft of the measures.

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EUROPE FOCUS “European preference criteria” are set to become a prominent factor in public and private procurement, according to the draft text, as well as new labelling for industrial products to more clearly delineate greener products from fossil-based ones.

The new measures could set out “minimum local content” requirements along with more robust sustainability criteria for public procurement, as well as exploring options for embedding similar “non-cost criteria” into product legislation.

CIRCULARITY, HYDROGEN The Commission could be set to limit the export of waste raw materials deemed critical for circular production, and is expected to ease restrictions on movement of raw materials across the region in the Circular Economy Act, expected next year.

Policymakers are also looking to clarify rules on low-carbon hydrogen production, and are set to launch a third call for projects through the Hydrogen Bank, the auction house set up to incentivise projects and investment, in the third quarter 2025.

CBAM REFORMS, DECARBONISATION TARGETS With a targeted package for the chemicals sector, which the draft text refers to as the “industry of industries”, expected towards the end of the year, the Commissions’ review of the proposed carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) continues.

Intended to levy fees on the CO2 emissions of energy-intensive goods imports such as steel and fertilizers, the Commission is proposing to simplify the framework ahead of its roll-out next year, and reduce the administrative burden on businesses.

[...]

I recall seeing elsewhere (I think the solarpunk subreddit?) a few years ago that someone made a non-electric washing machine using a bicycle. Are there any tutorials anywhere someone could recommend me? I’d love to try and make one someday.

Note: I'm new to Lemmy and mistakenly posted this under "meta." Still getting used to communities and figuring out the cross-posting thing!

Here is the link to the study.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, say their solar-powered reactor could be used to make fuel to power cars and planes, or the many chemicals and pharmaceuticals products we rely on. It could also be used to generate fuel in remote or off-grid locations.

Unlike most carbon capture technologies, the reactor developed by the Cambridge researchers does not require fossil-fuel-based power, or the transport and storage of carbon dioxide, but instead converts atmospheric CO2 into something useful using sunlight. The results are reported in the journal Nature Energy.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has been touted as a possible solution to the climate crisis, and has recently received £22bn in funding from the UK government. However, CCS is energy-intensive and there are concerns about the long-term safety of storing pressurised CO2 deep underground, although safety studies are currently being carried out.

This article has some more details.

About three years ago I bought a new otoscope and ophthalmoscope set from Welch Allyn. (An otoscope is the thing doctors and other healthcare workers use to look in your ears, and an ophthalmoscope is the same but for eyes.) They're fairly simple devices conceptually, just a light source plus various lenses and filters. Welch Allyn is probably the best-known manufacturer of these and generally considered a reliable brand. You'll find their diagnostic sets on the walls of many hospitals. Like most reputable medical manufacturers they charge a premium price; I think my set cost about $600 Australian dollars, and it was one of the cheapest available.

Within two years the switches on both devices were flaky. They wouldn't turn on at all, or would only turn on when I pressed and moved the switch in just the right way with just the right pressure, or they would flicker. Supremely frustrating when trying to examine a patient under time pressure, and galling that I paid so much money for a product less reliable than a torch I could buy at the local supermarket.

I needed a replacement and I was determined not to give a cent more to Welch Allyn, but I was struggling to find an alternative that wasn't just 'give $1000 to a different supposedly reputable big corporation and hope they have better quality control'. Then I found some forum posts from doctors in the UK that mentioned the Arclight. I'd never heard of it but it looked interesting and was only $102, so I bought one to try it out.

The Arclight was invented by an ophthalmologist who trying to find a way to get health services in developing countries easier access to essential equipment like ophthalmoscopes, and an optometrist 'tinkerer' who was experimenting with simplifying the traditional ophthalmoscope design. It combines a radically simplified ophthalmoscope and an otoscope into a single device, which can also act as a light source and loupe (magnifier) for general examination. It uses LEDs for a reliable and low-energy light source, and can be charged by both USB-C and an integrated solar cell. Every spare surface of the Arclight has useful features crammed onto it, too many to list them all: a pocket clip and a lanyard loop, a ruler, visual references for examining different parts of the eye. Even the specula – the pointy plastic bits that go inside your ear while it is being examined, usually a single-use consumable – have been carefully designed: cheap enough to be single-use, but also easy to sterilise and re-use. If all of this wasn't enough, the Arclight actually has better optics than my old Welch Allyn set: better magnification, bigger field of view, light sources that have been carefully considered to deliver different colour temperatures depending on their function and with adjustable brightness.

It's hard to put into words how good it feels to use the Arclight. I'm so used to products designed to make a profit, to reduce manufacturing costs, to steal my attention, to impress my neighbours, to harvest my data, to create friction that makes me want to upgrade or accessorise, to make me buy cartridges or refills or other consumables, to make me buy a subscription, to look good on a billboard, to satisfy the marketing department, to satisfy the shareholders, to satisfy the purchasing department because it ticks boxes on a feature list or because 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM'. The Arclight is designed purely to be a tool that helps me get my job done: pragmatic, simple, reliable, beholden to no interest other than the task at hand. It's incredibly cheap compared to the alternatives, and the Arclight project charges higher prices to customers in developed countries so they can subsidise them for developing countries. Even if the switch breaks after two years and I have to replace it, I'll still have the satisfaction of knowing I'm getting excellent value for money while helping out people who need it.

I don't believe that everything should be designed like the Arclight. There's room for ornamentation, for form over function, for luxury, for sturdier and more durable materials and build quality at accordingly higher prices. I do however wish very strongly that more of the things I use every day were like the Arclight, or at least had an alternative like it that I could choose if I wanted.

Archived

As the world races to decarbonise its energy systems, Europe faces mounting challenges in competing with global powerhouses like China and the US in PV manufacturing. To address these challenges, the European Technology and Innovation Platform for Photovoltaics (ETIP PV) has emerged as a key player in fostering collaboration, innovation and strategic policymaking among European countries.

“PV is a global technology,” Rutger Schlattmann, chair of ETIP PV and head of the Solar Energy division at Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, tells PV Tech Premium. “The technology is developed worldwide, and some of the effort should be done across countries because these challenges are bigger than what individual countries – especially the smaller ones – can afford.”

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Meanwhile, the EU sets a new record for renewable energy use in 2024.

In the European Union (EU), 47% of electricity now comes from renewable sources like wind and solar, a new record according to a report from the think tank Ember. This is a far higher percentage than in other countries, including the United States and China, where about two-thirds of energy comes from fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and gas.

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The share of electricity produced by renewables jumped to 47% last year compared to 34% in 2019, in large part due to strong growth in solar and wind energy. In 2024, 11% of the EU’s electricity came from solar power, 17% from wind, and 24% from nuclear. The share produced by traditional fossil fuels dropped from 39% in 2019 to 29% in 2024.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/177389

Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18000579

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18000578

Archived link

Ed Miliband is facing demands to introduce new measures to stop Britain using solar panels made by the Uighurs, an oppressed Muslim minority in western China, as part of his race towards net zero.

A cross-party group of peers has called for the energy secretary to introduce safeguards that prevent UK renewable energy companies from importing Chinese components made by slave labour.

It comes as the House of Lords debates Labour’s flagship legislation to establish Great British Energy, a publicly-owned company that will help deliver the government’s green transition.

Senior parliamentarians are concerned about the supply chains of renewable energy companies, many of which rely on products from China. In particular, there are questions around solar panels, which often contain polysilicon. Nearly half of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon is produced in the Xinjiang region of China where more than 2.6 million people, mostly from the Uighur ethnic group, have been subjected to forced labour in detention camps.

Academics, politicians and human rights groups have long warned that forced labour is rife there, including in the sourcing of polysilicon, with 11 companies in the region identified as being engaged in forced labour transfers.

[...]

To prevent UK energy supply chains being tainted by forced labour, a group of peers has now tabled an amendment to the bill, which, if approved, would prevent any public funds being given to companies involved with GB Energy where there is “credible evidence of modern slavery in the supply chain”.

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Luke de Pulford, the executive director of Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said: “Labour has gone from an admirably strong position on the persecution of Uighurs to energy policies which facilitate it. It’s an absolute 180 in policy terms. Now the chancellor is in Beijing meeting with China’s génocidaires.

“Whatever the economic imperative, the consciences of politicians across both Houses should not permit the rush to net zero to be achieved on the back of Uighur slavery.”

[...]