https://reasonstobecheerful.world/solar-device-repair-africa/
"Father Vincent Ngwira is a man who follows the way, the truth and the light.
As a Catholic priest, the 44-year-old Zambian has held congregations across the
south African nation, sharing the good word with rural and urban populations
alike.
But in 2017, Ngwira recognized another beacon worth evangelizing about: solar
power.
“In the past, I have worked in very rural areas with no hope of getting the
electricity network there,” says Ngwira. “Instead people would burn candles and
that led to house fires. I would hear stories of children, and even elders,
dying [in them].”
Safe, free to run, and without the need for expensive energy infrastructure,
solar has helped to power off-the-grid communities across the world.
And in recent years solar has been a game changer across Africa. Since 2014,
for example, Africa’s solar capacity has nearly increased tenfold, from 1.67
gigawatts to 13.48 gigawatts in 2023 — enough to power 100 million lightbulbs.
According to a report by the International Energy Agency, Africa has 60 percent
of the world’s best solar resources, and it is already the cheapest source in
many parts of the continent.
However, as that growing amount of solar equipment has begun to age, it has
also begun to break down.
In fact, according to a report in 2023 by the nonprofit SolarAid, of the 375
million solar energy kits that have been sold and distributed to off-grid
populations around the world since the early 2000s, more than 250 million have
fallen into disrepair.
It estimated that 75 percent of all solar products in sub-Saharan Africa — 110
million lights — no longer work.
Renewable energy experts warn that the solar industry has until now failed to
create a sufficiently circular economy for solar devices to be repaired and
refurbished, even as the size of the global solar market grows at astonishing
rates of over 20 percent.
“Advances in the solar space have been nothing short of amazing,” says Tobias
Hanrath, a professor of engineering and the Croll Chair for Energy Transitions
at Cornell University. “But it’s short-sighted to think all we have to do is
install a bunch of panels and it stops there. We have to look at these products
over their lifetime.”
Hanrath cites the example of plastic, which has been mass produced since the
1950s with very little thought as to how the waste would be processed, creating
the plastic waste crisis that we have today.
But SolarAid is not only shining a light on the problem; it’s already working
on fixing it. More than 90 percent of these broken solar-powered devices in
sub-Saharan Africa can be repaired, the nonprofit estimates, and it has been
training people in Zambia and Malawi, including Father Ngwira, to diagnose and
repair devices."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
