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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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!
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).
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
I think you are right there. However everyone has been endlessly told "everyone is equal" (and not just in the eyes of the law of the land) for decades now. So there will be enormous inertia. As Lee Kuan Yew said, "humans are an unequal animal", so there is hope that reality might eventually break-out in their minds.
and thank goodness for that, or we'd rapidly get stuck in local maxima and stagnate. Some of these things are kind of non-intuitive, but if you've studied artificial life you pick up some helpful insights into how populations work.
Ideally, everyone is sustainable. 'equal' is neither possible nor desirable, and naively trying to reward the 'superior' is a path to Hapsburg-ville.
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.
>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.
>
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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")
Yet we've seen how centralising everything has made our world a lot less resilient. Redundancies are good, at least to a certain degree. If more people had a small vegetable patch, we didn't need as many soil-destroying farming mega-corps, and would use less aggressive fertilisers and herbicides, for example.
A lot of the reasons why scaling is necessary come down to reducing marginal costs and maximising profitability. Those are different equations to sustainability.
For example, a big part of an industrial farm's "efficiency" is down to reduction of labour costs and optimisation of logistics, but the actual environmental resource usage does not scale along the same curve.
Many of that "efficiency" is achieved by externalizing costs.
The farm can (must?) produce cheaper (or have bigger margins), by polluting both its environment and the very resources it needs to run on in the long term. It "externalizes" costs to the community around it and to a future.
Pollution, depletion, animal abuse, reduced biodiversity, sped up resistance to antibiotics, etc etc.
This isn't by any means "sustainable" in the literal sense: that it can continue, let alone grow, like this. We're on borrowed time already. It's very clear that the current model also cannot sustain billions. So dismissing alternatives because they cannot sustain billions is a poor argument.
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).
Is it? All my "hobby" needs, is to feed me and my household and some friends and they me. My "hobby" doesn't need to feed the entire world population.
All I want is for it to *reduce* the footprint of five, maybe ten people around me. It does that. And therefore is a net benefit. Ten people with less emissions, less pollution, less animal harm, and more fun. Even if only one in hundred thousand people does this, thats 700000 people with significantly reduced footprint.
I honestly have a problem with the absolutism in such discussions. Something doesn't have to "feed the entire world" in order to help us move forward.
To compare the 700000 figure: Tesla churns out 3 times that amount of cars in a year. If we presume these teslas are bought by people who want to reduce their footprint, and that the reduction of one bought tesla is close to my reduction (its not, its obviously much more complex) just being a bit more self-sustaining would be similar to a third of the win all of Tesla contributes.
And if we agree that "one tesla" equals "some reduction of footprint" (I don't agree, though), every tesla is a win. This isn't only valuable until every car is an EV. It's not absolutes.
> implies you're solving a problem for yourself, not the world.
But I don't have to solve the problem of feeding the entire world sustainably¹. I just have to make sure that my contribution to a more sustainable world is net positive. It is.
The same argument often comes up in "Being vegetarian": my personal choice won't solve animal welfare or carbon emissions of food production. But all the vegetarians in the world do make a large difference.
> 80% of the resources you are buying to support your hobby farm
That's a bold statement to make and one that I know, for a fact, to be untrue. I source most myself. You truly don't need that much to grow 20kg of apples or 10kg of tomatoes in a year. Nearly all of what it needs is provided by "nature" and my direct surroundings. From compost to seeds to sun, water and CO2. I really don't need that much to grow this. Same for keeping bees. Some wood for their hives - less wood per hive than the pallet used for shipping your honey from China into Europe. Some tools and some (reusable) packaging. But non of that compares to what's needed to get that plastic squeezy jar of honey into your cabinet. I'm certain my net emission is far less - per jar, per tomato, per apple than when I'd buy them in a supermarket.
¹ And that ignores the fact that the current model of food production also cannot feed the entire world population on generational timescale. So to argue that my "contribution" won't feed the world is a strange one.
(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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I sort of thought that was the whole point of the show: the humans live in a liberal utopia according to western progressives and the aliens are everyone else in the world they have to get along with.
It let the writers comment on contemporary issues with adjustable knobs for violence, sex, and laser beams, in hopes that the right cocktail could dislodge people from from their instinctive association with a political identity and let them learn something.
It seems to me the assumption of consensus with disagreement coming from small fringe factions mirrored much of the American experience during the TNG era.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
They violate physics by the use of transporters. This is how replicators really store the enormous amounts of resources - otherwise the ships would be full of material storage.
Imagine condensing the food that people need into a compact goo that can later be restructured into real food. That's not so much volume, especially for a large ship with ample recreational rooms and carpeted flooring.
Plus, keep in mind that poop is likely turned back into food. If you have tech to reassemble molecules from one thing to another, this is trivial.
It's still going to take less energy and fewer resources to just grow the food normally and store it, and even just eat the goo directly than to reconstitute it atom by atom into anything else. Star Trek technology is only efficient because the writers don't care about things like thermodynamics or E=MC^2. In the real world a replicator would need to consume ocean-boiling levels of energy to assemble a cup of early grey tea, and because we don't have "Heisenberg compensators" in our reality, it would definitely be at least a little radioactive, and not entirely tea.
> 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.
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.
You seem to have missed the point. AWS is not a greener solution because it fails to solve the primary goal i.e. DIY, decentralisation and self-ownership.
Besides, the environmental cost of AWS is not the power-draw of your VPS, it's the externalities of monopolistic-capitalism. You are not just funding private jets but a fascist oligarchy and giving them control. It's not even scifi doomerism any more. We are watching in real-time as American oligarchs dismantle environmental laws and I expect there will be glowing editorials in AWS owner's newspaper.
In a similar vein, I presume that providing AWS as a publicly owned utility (socialism) would also not achieve their goals of individual self-sufficiency. I presume it's more like prepper0sh than utopian and considers state centralisation too vulnerable to capture by negative regimes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
It's not magic and it's not invisible. And if it's a government for the people, then it's the people that are being authoritarian. Maybe a high-liberties society can only prosper if it protects itself from the outside.
Nations are a social phenomenon and only sometimes line up with borders. States are what define borders (in fact it's part of the definition of a state).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Yeh I loved twiggy for a while there but then he went all in on the hydrogen bullshit, and now those hydrogen projects are getting wound down before completion (aka fumbling the ball).
In general I think the east coast and the national energy market is cooked, I'm not sure how, and when the pioneering spirit died but it did. On the non-fatalistic side EV and rooftop solar uptake are great, so who knows?
On the other hand I'm much more optimistic about WA, they seem to be quietly making the correct decisions as far as I can tell. Expansions in desalination, huge battery projects, green industry (ammonia up in the pilbara [1], and inroads into the lithium supply chain in kiwana).
Let's see how this all shakes out, and hopefully the public rejects the pro fossil fuel / nuclear bullshit.
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 love the Solarpunk aesthetic. I think it still needs a defining work. Like Blade Runner for cyberpunk. The best example I’ve seen is a yogurt commercial.
More power to sponsors putting their money behind hopeful futures. I was recently at a conference where the speaker compared this future visioning with that of blade runner. She was was almost posing it as, why not be hopeful? Theres more to gain and it's more challenging.
It's hard to take that seriously as a vision of the future. As an expression of values and aesthetics completely untethered from reality, sure. It makes a great yogurt commercial.
But realistically, as something to strive for? So much of the technology in it is essentially magic, but there's just enough physical labor to romanticize. It's pretty obvious the physical labor is optional and voluntary. In other words, it's a group of people hanging out in an automated agricultural facility that has been designed to allow them to LARP as old-time farmers.
I mean, either that or the technology just happened, coincidentally, to need exactly an enjoyable and healthy amount of labor to keep it going, and the labor just happened to take the outward form of a romanticized relationship to the land and nature.
But that's too much of a coincidence to take seriously, and the alternative is that the human labor isn't necessary to produce the food, and the humans' place in the process was designed to be enjoyable for them and also not to be compulsory. If the people aren't needed there, presumably they aren't confined to the premises and forced to act out an unnecessary and antiquated form of labor. They come and go, and when nobody is there, the automation takes over. So it's basically farming as glamping. (Glarming?) The people in this vision could drop everything tomorrow and go to a spa, without any consequences for whoever depends on the output of this farm.
Maybe it is actually a sequel to The Matrix. Humans rebelled in the Garden of Eden world because it was too nice, the 90’s world has slightly too much tedious office work, so the next world they made has slightly more fulfilling busywork for the humans.
>It's hard to take that seriously as a vision of the future
I don't think it is really, it's escapism fundamentally. There's a lot of "cozy" aesthetics like this going around, "Cottagecore"[1] is related cousin, Stardew Valley and games like that embraced the pastoral aesthetics, I think you could also even count lofi music in this.
Solarpunk did explicitly start as an activist movement so I think it really does need to ask itself some questions, first I'd pose is how a Solarpunk community defends itself against some less solarpunky and benevolent people. It's a particular irony that defense, rapidly gaining importance in the world, is not exactly suited to be powered by solarpanels
Actually, when you watch the trench warfare in Ukraine a bit, a lot of the bunkers and frontline drone teams run of basically large power banks (eco flow & similar) powering their starlink terminals, running their computers and charging drone batteries.
Those power banks are then charged by various means, from generators (noisy & having a significant heat signature so need to be far from anything importannt) to solar panels (quite big, reflected light might give off their position but are possibly harder to easily destroy remotely than a single generator).
It’s hard to write to an aesthetic that is this utopian. You’d have to be more realistic about it. What would the conflicts be? What would criminality and/or corporate (or other org) malfeasance look like? What sort of culture wars might exist?
But don’t make it a green Aesop. That’d be boring, and the whole point is that those problems are mostly solved. So what are the new problems? Make it an original conflict, maybe something we wouldn’t even imagine.
I agree that its new problems and challenges that will make the genre interesting. Even in a utopia there's a lot of room for conflicts, and not all of them need to be original conflicts, but hopefully we will see some new ways to address old conflicts within a utopian framework.
It's precisely the utopic part that's an issue. All other punks before it like dieselpunk, cyberpunk, atompunk etc are dystopia. To make solarpunk actually interesting, we have to be willing to discard the escapism and consider horrific consequences that we may face if we actually try to implement it.
Sign me up. Solar has come such a long way, and wind gen is so much quieter now. If you happen to have a creek or river running through your property you can even make a hydroelectric generator. With LiFePo batteries being what they are, you could setup a complete off-grid home on 14kw. I’m all for it. Someday, someday. I’m still stuck in the rat race but I would be a solarpunk, totally.
14kW is a lot. On our boat we can live off-grid with 860W of solar and a hydrogenerator for when we're under way. Last time we were connected to shore power was in December when we were in the Canaries...
Admittedly in the time since Canaries we've also burned some 10-15l of diesel for propulsion purposes. And we cook with an alcohol stove, not electric. But we do desalinate all our water with the solar we have.
Approximately 3-4 kW per capita is required to approximate medium European lifestyle. A bit could be optimized, but not all that much.
Anything less and you're making important tradeoffs. Either on heating/cooling, transportation, or hardware capabilities.
Usually making tradeoffs hurts the most disadvantaged and poor.
Remember to also count stuff. Embodied energy is a thing so often forgotten. Trash and other waste disposal is not free either. Growing food requires energy input too.
Future generations will probably look at our current housing and building design as barbaric and primitive. The fact that we build houses and skyscrapers covered in sunlight and place bricks instead of solar panels will dumbfound future generations. They will look at us and think "Man, these idiots really didn't understand free energy was all around them."
Well, you replace bricks every couple hundred years, but solar panels every 10–20, right? Also a 2000W solar panel is like $300 or something and it's half the size of a door.
Unless a building is crowd-funded by the future tenants with the promise of no electrical costs, and also the future tenants expect to live like 100 more years, I can't see how this could happen, short of the eradication of private property and the government constructing these things.
I get where you're coming from, but let me correct some of your numbers for other readers:
> you replace bricks every couple hundred years, but solar panels every 10–20, right?
Old panels perhaps, but modern solar panels come with performance warranties that guarantee they will be producing >85% of their initial output after 30 yrs.
> 2000W solar panel is like $300 or something and it's half the size of a door
2000W solar panels generally don't exist, so I assume that's a typo for 200W? Modern utility scale panels top out at ~700W with dimensions of 2.4 m x 1.3 m, however rooftop panels for commercial buildings are in the 500W range and ~ 2 x 1 m (so yeah about a door). International wholesale prices for these from Tier 1 manufacturers are now < $0.10 USD / W (although from what I understand more expensive in the USA).
Housing co-ops would be incentivized to implement those features. Our society should make it easier for co-op of all types to be created and thrive (such as through taxes), but especially worker owned and housing co-ops.
You can get 500W solar panels for less than 40€ these days, so 150€ or so for 2000W. At German electricity prices, they pay for themselves very quickly!
like it's cheap, easy and environmentally friendly to do such installations... just search for the end-of-life management and chemicals used at their production. we have thousands of ways of doing better urbanism or feeling less "barbaric and primitive" than making skyscrapers (which seriously, are built for who?) producing energy
Do you think that of past generations? I don’t. They were limited by what had been invented.
I mean they had things like slavery and gladiator fights, I’m really not very sympathetic to them in general, I think they were quite cruel. But dumb? Nah.
Solar panels are currently very expensive as building material. We could be exploiting passive solar more effectively I think, though.
Solar does not generate continuous supply. If you want to propose putting solar panels on everything you need a solid strategy for storing the energy. This is an unsolved problem in our time, and there is a lot of distraction in wishful thinking - talk of kinetic capture or hydrogen conversion that does not stack up.
> you need a solid strategy for storing the energy. This is an unsolved problem in our time
Earnest question - why isn't this solved by the fact that batteries exist? Are you saying that there is some technical/physical problem at-scale with storing _that much_ energy, or that there is some logistical problem with distributing and managing the batteries (ensuring the right ones are discharging at the right times), or that they are simply too expensive or specialist for us to build quickly enough right now, or...?
Batteries alone are too expensive to solve the problem well. The solution will be a complicated mix of solutions. Current batteries are excelent for short term variation (<1s). New Grid scale battery designs (e.g. flow batteries or molten salt batteries) are likely to make batteries pretty good for the <8 hour range. Hydro is unbeatable in the day to year range. That said, a lot of the solution will also likely come from demand shaping. Hot water tanks can be heated, and homes can be heated and cooled extra when there is excess power, charge EVs during work hours rather than overnight etc. There will be thousands of minor tweaks to take full advantage of solar. The power is cheap enough that it's worth reworking our entire economy around it.
> Would it be fair to describe it as a utopian claim?
In the case of water heating (and water based space heating also) it's already here in terms of technology and availability. Heat pump storage water heaters are now widely available. The problem is that they can only be phased in as fast as existing gas water heaters reach EOL.
Domestic water heating comprises almost 18% of household energy use in the United States.
If you can make 4 hours of power a day completely free, industry shifts massively. Rather than making a $1m, 90% efficient machine that operates 24/7, you can make a $50k, 20% efficient machine that you turn off when there isn't sun.
We are talking about a form of power that is not free. Solar panels and installation have initial costs and refresh costs. Your 90%/20% notes are a hypothetical, and may apply to some settings, but I expect they will be niche. People want to heat their homes, and boil kettles and run webservers.
I have no problem with aesthetics like *punk. But when these aesthetics influence public policy we end up with dysfunction, like countries that have lots of electric vehicles being powered by new coal power plants. The original post said our era will be looked down on for not covering buildings with solar panels. I don’t think that is correct.
solar isn't free but it is the cheapest form of electricity we have (LCOE), and it's cost fell by a factor of 4 in the past decade. people absolutely want to hear their homes and boil water, but both of those are energy demands that are easy to time shift. any reasonably built home in the past decade is insulated well enough that you can only heat it during the day and keep it at a comfortable temperature. similarly, hot water tanks can be heated hours in advance when there's plenty of spare electricity. this obviously doesn't apply to all forms of energy demand, but heating (air and water) is the majority of consumer demand and is easily shiftable.
What tend's to bug me about most now to near future solarpunk depictions that I see is that it tends to assume that we will be all spread out into nothing larger than a small village. I'm not sure that solar/wind/hydro powered suburban sprawl is the way to go. I'd like to see more imaginings of solarpunk urbanism.
[shameless self-promotion] We're building one version of Solarpunk at LightManufacturing. Fun visuals in videos below. Off-grid real-time manufacturing using solar heat, without energy storage, transmission lines, etc.
We've operated out of modified shipping containers since day one, molding durable parts used around the world with heliostat arrays. Coworkers include road runners, western fence lizards, and lots of talent out of CalPoly. :)
Hey now!
house and shop here in Nova Scotia is solar pv, it just works. local old time foundry here built a solar fresnel lense and mirror rig, and did some casting in aluminum and bronze, "Lunenburg Foundry", there is a bit of non technical stuff on the web somewhere.
"Nova Scotia Solar" puts out a manual for passive solar construction that works in Northern areas, and there are many others tinkering, and succeeding with passive and semi passive building.
The main thing about solar is that once its up and running, there is no monthly bill, and if it's time to run outside and hang out with the critters, try and see things there way, it's no biggie.......bring...brrrrrring...."ya what?"....
"um I thought I should call and say I'm feeling great.... ,so I wont be in today"
I could use some optimistic takes on the future. I read the news if I want dystopian. In everyday life, I do some local work to try and make housing more abundant and less impactful, but it's a small piece of the puzzle.
Nice art, but now imagine a large number of very modern nuclear reactors, hidden away in industrial areas like other industry, generating massive amounts of power, consistently. And of course, capturing all its toxic outputs and barreling them up, to be re-enriched at least once. At that point it's a trash handling problem, which pretty much every single other form of energy completely ignores. What happens to old solar panels, old wind turbines, what happens to the exhaust gases and particles from burning coal, etc? What happens to old batteries?
I love solarpunk as an idea. I would love to live in a solarpunk utopia. My biggest problem is its lack of grounding in economics. It's obvious that the people producing solarpunk art and literature comes from a privileged Californian background where the temperature is always suitable for living outside without heating or AC and it's always sunny not too far from the equator and without too much natural disasters. The cost and efficiency of solar panels and wind turbines are never discussed nor compared; which any serious major engineering endeavor should do first to be taken seriously. I think a solarpunk type of society is possible only if the population live near the equator and has a high level of societal sophistication where most people have an engineering degree and contributes positively to advance and maintain a society with the efficiency needed where there is a lower economic availability of energy.
Yup. I'm seeing this as well in trying to write Solarpunk fiction that has near zero hand waving of technical and economic challenges. I've had to rethink a bunch of everyday stuff that today relies on substantial heavy industry behind the scenes (like toothpaste).
Yup, solar panels are ridiculously cheap nowadays. In almost every case I've seen, the hardware to mount the panels has been more expensive than the panels themselves
You can even skip storage in many cases, which brings the cost of an installation down dramatically. Low-tech magazine has a great article on the concept.
To get decent prices on solar panels you have to pick up from a local supplier (which at least here in the US is difficult because they cater primarily to professional installers); they're just too expensive to ship. Even then around here the cheapest panels are going to run at least ~$0.35/W, although you might be able to find used ones for less.
Solarpunk being an anarchist adjacent genre/aesthetic makes it very distant from an authoritarian regime that suppresses freedom of speech such as Singapore…
Well, comparing the pictures of solarpunk with my perceived reality I sadly have to disagree.
(solarpunk is about a bit more than having 30% of energy with solar and wind)
Because we are very used to having option of using energy now. Not when it happens to be sunny enough. Or waiting for days potentially when there is heavy overcast for days...
Solarpunk environmentalism is very appealing to me but most environmentalists detest the tall buildings it has because environmentalism to them is about community character: which is an American term for single family sprawl. So we have to break the back of environmentalism to save the planet. And we shall. Once we have destroyed American environmentalism we can get to saving the planet.
I am doing my PhD in sustainable housing. I also help out with quite a few naturalist and political organizations within my community: an unfortunately low-density suburb in a very large city currently suffering from a lack of housing.
All this to say that I consider myself reasonably well versed on both "academic" notions of environmentalism, and on what my left-leaning, SFH-dwelling neighbours consider environmentalism.
That "most environmentalists detest tall buildings" seems untrue, in my anecdotal experience. My environmentalist neighbours are some of the most vocal YIMBYs in the city, and also some of the people that stand to lose the most from changing "community character". YIMBYism is widely associated with both social and environmental sustainability, at least in the North American country I live in.
You can't have solarpunk without urbanism. Any "environmentalists" that pretend otherwise are lying. Neither skyscrapers nor mass single family housing are sustainable.
There's a reason the past 2000 years of urban development have been in rowhouses and smaller multi-story buildings.
The most powerful environmentalists are anti-urbanism. Every major environmental movement supports only single family homes. Environmentalism has as much to do with helping the environment as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democratic republic of the people.
> most environmentalists detest the tall buildings
I've seen it both ways. Some environmentalists hate single family homes and see suburban sprawl as the enemy. They'd rather have everyone packed into dense urban environments where anything a person will ever need in life is just a 15 minute walk/bike ride away from where they live eliminating the need for cars and leaving more land untainted by human interference. They'd be happy to do away with the inefficiencies of getting products, utilities, healthcare, and other resources to rural homes and communities spread out all over the place as well.
Those environmentalists have no power in the environmentalism movement. If you check every large enviro-corp they're all of the "preserving community" approach. Most of them oppose nuclear. And a near majority wind and solar. Some even geothermal.
Usually they fight for golf courses and so on alongside socialists. That is what environmentalism means in the US. It is like the words Democratic People's Republic. They're words. But they mean a different thing.
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.
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.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
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!
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).
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
Capital doesn't "know" its place. It just happened that technological advancement gave it greater returns back then so it went with it.
It has always been the same. Knowledgeable citizens who can push back are the only defence.
It doesn’t in current state of affairs.
There was a time - however brief - that it wasn’t line it is now. Where shareholders and investors didn’t have primacy
How can we change this? I want so desperately to live in a world where capital takes a back seat but have trouble seeing the path to that.
The only thing people love more than money is status. I suggest you start your search there.
I think you are right there. However everyone has been endlessly told "everyone is equal" (and not just in the eyes of the law of the land) for decades now. So there will be enormous inertia. As Lee Kuan Yew said, "humans are an unequal animal", so there is hope that reality might eventually break-out in their minds.
and thank goodness for that, or we'd rapidly get stuck in local maxima and stagnate. Some of these things are kind of non-intuitive, but if you've studied artificial life you pick up some helpful insights into how populations work.
Ideally, everyone is sustainable. 'equal' is neither possible nor desirable, and naively trying to reward the 'superior' is a path to Hapsburg-ville.
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.
>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.
> 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.
Know when to rest, not to quit. Thank you for your service.
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!
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.
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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.
"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.
>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.
https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power
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?
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.
> 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.
It's not only sustainable, but quite resilient
Really? Do you have any examples of these communities?
You might like H.G. Wells’s utopia “The World Set Free.”
It’s as relevant now as it was when it was written.
It is a possible future. But it calls for knowledgeable citizens who are not afraid to act.
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.
You need knowledgeable citizens who are not afraid to act. They will naturally push back those people who seek more power/status.
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.
I'm not sure how many "knowledgeable citizens who are not afraid to act" existed in USSR towards the end.
I don't get it. What do you prefer? The inverse?
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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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
"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.
> 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.
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.
>there's opposing viewpoints that you may not agree with, but are just as valid as yours.
>"Musk's braindead agenda"
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.
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.
> 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")
Yet we've seen how centralising everything has made our world a lot less resilient. Redundancies are good, at least to a certain degree. If more people had a small vegetable patch, we didn't need as many soil-destroying farming mega-corps, and would use less aggressive fertilisers and herbicides, for example.
>Yet we've seen how centralising everything has made our world a lot less resilient.
A lot less resilient compared to what?
A lot of the reasons why scaling is necessary come down to reducing marginal costs and maximising profitability. Those are different equations to sustainability.
For example, a big part of an industrial farm's "efficiency" is down to reduction of labour costs and optimisation of logistics, but the actual environmental resource usage does not scale along the same curve.
Worse even.
Many of that "efficiency" is achieved by externalizing costs.
The farm can (must?) produce cheaper (or have bigger margins), by polluting both its environment and the very resources it needs to run on in the long term. It "externalizes" costs to the community around it and to a future.
Pollution, depletion, animal abuse, reduced biodiversity, sped up resistance to antibiotics, etc etc.
This isn't by any means "sustainable" in the literal sense: that it can continue, let alone grow, like this. We're on borrowed time already. It's very clear that the current model also cannot sustain billions. So dismissing alternatives because they cannot sustain billions is a poor argument.
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).
> That's fine in and of itself, as a hobby.
Is it? All my "hobby" needs, is to feed me and my household and some friends and they me. My "hobby" doesn't need to feed the entire world population.
All I want is for it to *reduce* the footprint of five, maybe ten people around me. It does that. And therefore is a net benefit. Ten people with less emissions, less pollution, less animal harm, and more fun. Even if only one in hundred thousand people does this, thats 700000 people with significantly reduced footprint.
I honestly have a problem with the absolutism in such discussions. Something doesn't have to "feed the entire world" in order to help us move forward.
To compare the 700000 figure: Tesla churns out 3 times that amount of cars in a year. If we presume these teslas are bought by people who want to reduce their footprint, and that the reduction of one bought tesla is close to my reduction (its not, its obviously much more complex) just being a bit more self-sustaining would be similar to a third of the win all of Tesla contributes.
And if we agree that "one tesla" equals "some reduction of footprint" (I don't agree, though), every tesla is a win. This isn't only valuable until every car is an EV. It's not absolutes.
>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.
> implies you're solving a problem for yourself, not the world.
But I don't have to solve the problem of feeding the entire world sustainably¹. I just have to make sure that my contribution to a more sustainable world is net positive. It is.
The same argument often comes up in "Being vegetarian": my personal choice won't solve animal welfare or carbon emissions of food production. But all the vegetarians in the world do make a large difference.
> 80% of the resources you are buying to support your hobby farm
That's a bold statement to make and one that I know, for a fact, to be untrue. I source most myself. You truly don't need that much to grow 20kg of apples or 10kg of tomatoes in a year. Nearly all of what it needs is provided by "nature" and my direct surroundings. From compost to seeds to sun, water and CO2. I really don't need that much to grow this. Same for keeping bees. Some wood for their hives - less wood per hive than the pallet used for shipping your honey from China into Europe. Some tools and some (reusable) packaging. But non of that compares to what's needed to get that plastic squeezy jar of honey into your cabinet. I'm certain my net emission is far less - per jar, per tomato, per apple than when I'd buy them in a supermarket.
¹ And that ignores the fact that the current model of food production also cannot feed the entire world population on generational timescale. So to argue that my "contribution" won't feed the world is a strange one.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Braiding Sweetgrass, if you haven’t read it already.
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.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/J2BSqS9zhPfxKUJKA
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I sort of thought that was the whole point of the show: the humans live in a liberal utopia according to western progressives and the aliens are everyone else in the world they have to get along with.
It let the writers comment on contemporary issues with adjustable knobs for violence, sex, and laser beams, in hopes that the right cocktail could dislodge people from from their instinctive association with a political identity and let them learn something.
It seems to me the assumption of consensus with disagreement coming from small fringe factions mirrored much of the American experience during the TNG era.
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.
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.
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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
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.
I wonder if the replicators were made in real life if they' hallucinate generations like Stable Diffusion
A replicator still cannot give everyone a beachfront villa.
But a holodeck could
Okay so you get the holodeck villa, and I get the real beach villa (which also has a holodeck inside). Deal?
Ehm, everyone gets a holodeck, a replicator, and an abundance of energy to run them? Deal, take your beach villa, idc.
Replicators as depicted in Star Trek cannot exist in the real world because they violate the laws of physics.
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.
They violate physics by the use of transporters. This is how replicators really store the enormous amounts of resources - otherwise the ships would be full of material storage.
Imagine condensing the food that people need into a compact goo that can later be restructured into real food. That's not so much volume, especially for a large ship with ample recreational rooms and carpeted flooring.
Plus, keep in mind that poop is likely turned back into food. If you have tech to reassemble molecules from one thing to another, this is trivial.
It's still going to take less energy and fewer resources to just grow the food normally and store it, and even just eat the goo directly than to reconstitute it atom by atom into anything else. Star Trek technology is only efficient because the writers don't care about things like thermodynamics or E=MC^2. In the real world a replicator would need to consume ocean-boiling levels of energy to assemble a cup of early grey tea, and because we don't have "Heisenberg compensators" in our reality, it would definitely be at least a little radioactive, and not entirely tea.
> 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.
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.
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.
You seem to have missed the point. AWS is not a greener solution because it fails to solve the primary goal i.e. DIY, decentralisation and self-ownership.
Besides, the environmental cost of AWS is not the power-draw of your VPS, it's the externalities of monopolistic-capitalism. You are not just funding private jets but a fascist oligarchy and giving them control. It's not even scifi doomerism any more. We are watching in real-time as American oligarchs dismantle environmental laws and I expect there will be glowing editorials in AWS owner's newspaper.
In a similar vein, I presume that providing AWS as a publicly owned utility (socialism) would also not achieve their goals of individual self-sufficiency. I presume it's more like prepper0sh than utopian and considers state centralisation too vulnerable to capture by negative regimes.
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.
The most likely version of Star Trek is depicted in Wall-E.
This thread was supposed to maintain some optimism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"But it has a different emphasis."
Seems like it. The only picture there has "Atomic war!" as the caption.
Hehe: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Orthodoxy
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?
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.
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?
Solarpunk is firmly rooted in the anti-authoritarian camp. It's fundamentally inspired by Murray Bookchin's books on ecological anarchism.
It's not magic and it's not invisible. And if it's a government for the people, then it's the people that are being authoritarian. Maybe a high-liberties society can only prosper if it protects itself from the outside.
The birds don't seem much to care about our magic invisible lines...
Sorry, bud, it's just monkey stuff.
Are you saying that borders shouldn’t exist because they’re man made?
Borders are a thing, and birds do care when someone invades their nest.
What is not natural is nations.
Nations are a social phenomenon and only sometimes line up with borders. States are what define borders (in fact it's part of the definition of a state).
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...
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.
It's called SOLARpunk not ATOMpunk,sorry.
Atompunk nein danke?
Nuclear is neither more cost efficient, nor environmentally better than renewable energy resources.
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.
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.
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.
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
Also check out the unbranded version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqJJktxCY9U
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
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwfS3A_IXYc
Yeh I loved twiggy for a while there but then he went all in on the hydrogen bullshit, and now those hydrogen projects are getting wound down before completion (aka fumbling the ball).
In general I think the east coast and the national energy market is cooked, I'm not sure how, and when the pioneering spirit died but it did. On the non-fatalistic side EV and rooftop solar uptake are great, so who knows?
On the other hand I'm much more optimistic about WA, they seem to be quietly making the correct decisions as far as I can tell. Expansions in desalination, huge battery projects, green industry (ammonia up in the pilbara [1], and inroads into the lithium supply chain in kiwana).
Let's see how this all shakes out, and hopefully the public rejects the pro fossil fuel / nuclear bullshit.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYY9miC2Y2A
I miss like any form of social idealism.
I try to remember that the USA is the same country that made the 90s Star Trek I grew up with a mainstream hit.
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 love the Solarpunk aesthetic. I think it still needs a defining work. Like Blade Runner for cyberpunk. The best example I’ve seen is a yogurt commercial.
Pretty awesome for anyone who hasn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ng5ZvrDm4
More power to sponsors putting their money behind hopeful futures. I was recently at a conference where the speaker compared this future visioning with that of blade runner. She was was almost posing it as, why not be hopeful? Theres more to gain and it's more challenging.
It's hard to take that seriously as a vision of the future. As an expression of values and aesthetics completely untethered from reality, sure. It makes a great yogurt commercial.
But realistically, as something to strive for? So much of the technology in it is essentially magic, but there's just enough physical labor to romanticize. It's pretty obvious the physical labor is optional and voluntary. In other words, it's a group of people hanging out in an automated agricultural facility that has been designed to allow them to LARP as old-time farmers.
I mean, either that or the technology just happened, coincidentally, to need exactly an enjoyable and healthy amount of labor to keep it going, and the labor just happened to take the outward form of a romanticized relationship to the land and nature.
But that's too much of a coincidence to take seriously, and the alternative is that the human labor isn't necessary to produce the food, and the humans' place in the process was designed to be enjoyable for them and also not to be compulsory. If the people aren't needed there, presumably they aren't confined to the premises and forced to act out an unnecessary and antiquated form of labor. They come and go, and when nobody is there, the automation takes over. So it's basically farming as glamping. (Glarming?) The people in this vision could drop everything tomorrow and go to a spa, without any consequences for whoever depends on the output of this farm.
Maybe it is actually a sequel to The Matrix. Humans rebelled in the Garden of Eden world because it was too nice, the 90’s world has slightly too much tedious office work, so the next world they made has slightly more fulfilling busywork for the humans.
>It's hard to take that seriously as a vision of the future
I don't think it is really, it's escapism fundamentally. There's a lot of "cozy" aesthetics like this going around, "Cottagecore"[1] is related cousin, Stardew Valley and games like that embraced the pastoral aesthetics, I think you could also even count lofi music in this.
Solarpunk did explicitly start as an activist movement so I think it really does need to ask itself some questions, first I'd pose is how a Solarpunk community defends itself against some less solarpunky and benevolent people. It's a particular irony that defense, rapidly gaining importance in the world, is not exactly suited to be powered by solarpanels
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottagecore
Actually, when you watch the trench warfare in Ukraine a bit, a lot of the bunkers and frontline drone teams run of basically large power banks (eco flow & similar) powering their starlink terminals, running their computers and charging drone batteries.
Those power banks are then charged by various means, from generators (noisy & having a significant heat signature so need to be far from anything importannt) to solar panels (quite big, reflected light might give off their position but are possibly harder to easily destroy remotely than a single generator).
Chobani commercial.
It's nice image. But don't think Chobani is doing much different than any other dairy product manufacturer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqJJktxCY9U The decommodified version is also a good watch
It's technically biopunk but I nonetheless feel that The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi shares a lot of the same aesthetic.
It’s hard to write to an aesthetic that is this utopian. You’d have to be more realistic about it. What would the conflicts be? What would criminality and/or corporate (or other org) malfeasance look like? What sort of culture wars might exist?
But don’t make it a green Aesop. That’d be boring, and the whole point is that those problems are mostly solved. So what are the new problems? Make it an original conflict, maybe something we wouldn’t even imagine.
I agree that its new problems and challenges that will make the genre interesting. Even in a utopia there's a lot of room for conflicts, and not all of them need to be original conflicts, but hopefully we will see some new ways to address old conflicts within a utopian framework.
It's precisely the utopic part that's an issue. All other punks before it like dieselpunk, cyberpunk, atompunk etc are dystopia. To make solarpunk actually interesting, we have to be willing to discard the escapism and consider horrific consequences that we may face if we actually try to implement it.
Maybe people could just write quirky rom-coms set in the setting (not for me, but not everything is!)
Sign me up. Solar has come such a long way, and wind gen is so much quieter now. If you happen to have a creek or river running through your property you can even make a hydroelectric generator. With LiFePo batteries being what they are, you could setup a complete off-grid home on 14kw. I’m all for it. Someday, someday. I’m still stuck in the rat race but I would be a solarpunk, totally.
14kW is a lot. On our boat we can live off-grid with 860W of solar and a hydrogenerator for when we're under way. Last time we were connected to shore power was in December when we were in the Canaries...
Here's a short summary of our energy setup (and other notes on the Atlantic crossing) https://lille-oe.de/2025-01-24/
Admittedly in the time since Canaries we've also burned some 10-15l of diesel for propulsion purposes. And we cook with an alcohol stove, not electric. But we do desalinate all our water with the solar we have.
Approximately 3-4 kW per capita is required to approximate medium European lifestyle. A bit could be optimized, but not all that much.
Anything less and you're making important tradeoffs. Either on heating/cooling, transportation, or hardware capabilities. Usually making tradeoffs hurts the most disadvantaged and poor.
Remember to also count stuff. Embodied energy is a thing so often forgotten. Trash and other waste disposal is not free either. Growing food requires energy input too.
Is there much movement towards electric instead of petrol/diesel propulsion on the water when there is no wind?
Future generations will probably look at our current housing and building design as barbaric and primitive. The fact that we build houses and skyscrapers covered in sunlight and place bricks instead of solar panels will dumbfound future generations. They will look at us and think "Man, these idiots really didn't understand free energy was all around them."
Well, you replace bricks every couple hundred years, but solar panels every 10–20, right? Also a 2000W solar panel is like $300 or something and it's half the size of a door.
Unless a building is crowd-funded by the future tenants with the promise of no electrical costs, and also the future tenants expect to live like 100 more years, I can't see how this could happen, short of the eradication of private property and the government constructing these things.
I get where you're coming from, but let me correct some of your numbers for other readers:
> you replace bricks every couple hundred years, but solar panels every 10–20, right?
Old panels perhaps, but modern solar panels come with performance warranties that guarantee they will be producing >85% of their initial output after 30 yrs.
> 2000W solar panel is like $300 or something and it's half the size of a door
2000W solar panels generally don't exist, so I assume that's a typo for 200W? Modern utility scale panels top out at ~700W with dimensions of 2.4 m x 1.3 m, however rooftop panels for commercial buildings are in the 500W range and ~ 2 x 1 m (so yeah about a door). International wholesale prices for these from Tier 1 manufacturers are now < $0.10 USD / W (although from what I understand more expensive in the USA).
Housing co-ops would be incentivized to implement those features. Our society should make it easier for co-op of all types to be created and thrive (such as through taxes), but especially worker owned and housing co-ops.
You can get 500W solar panels for less than 40€ these days, so 150€ or so for 2000W. At German electricity prices, they pay for themselves very quickly!
> bricks instead of solar panels
like it's cheap, easy and environmentally friendly to do such installations... just search for the end-of-life management and chemicals used at their production. we have thousands of ways of doing better urbanism or feeling less "barbaric and primitive" than making skyscrapers (which seriously, are built for who?) producing energy
Do you think that of past generations? I don’t. They were limited by what had been invented.
I mean they had things like slavery and gladiator fights, I’m really not very sympathetic to them in general, I think they were quite cruel. But dumb? Nah.
Solar panels are currently very expensive as building material. We could be exploiting passive solar more effectively I think, though.
Solar does not generate continuous supply. If you want to propose putting solar panels on everything you need a solid strategy for storing the energy. This is an unsolved problem in our time, and there is a lot of distraction in wishful thinking - talk of kinetic capture or hydrogen conversion that does not stack up.
> you need a solid strategy for storing the energy. This is an unsolved problem in our time
Earnest question - why isn't this solved by the fact that batteries exist? Are you saying that there is some technical/physical problem at-scale with storing _that much_ energy, or that there is some logistical problem with distributing and managing the batteries (ensuring the right ones are discharging at the right times), or that they are simply too expensive or specialist for us to build quickly enough right now, or...?
Batteries alone are too expensive to solve the problem well. The solution will be a complicated mix of solutions. Current batteries are excelent for short term variation (<1s). New Grid scale battery designs (e.g. flow batteries or molten salt batteries) are likely to make batteries pretty good for the <8 hour range. Hydro is unbeatable in the day to year range. That said, a lot of the solution will also likely come from demand shaping. Hot water tanks can be heated, and homes can be heated and cooled extra when there is excess power, charge EVs during work hours rather than overnight etc. There will be thousands of minor tweaks to take full advantage of solar. The power is cheap enough that it's worth reworking our entire economy around it.
Agree that (pumped) hydro is good where it is practical.
You make a claim about reworking our economy,
> The power is cheap enough that it's worth reworking our entire economy around it.
Can you substantiate this? Would it be fair to describe it as a utopian claim?
> Would it be fair to describe it as a utopian claim?
In the case of water heating (and water based space heating also) it's already here in terms of technology and availability. Heat pump storage water heaters are now widely available. The problem is that they can only be phased in as fast as existing gas water heaters reach EOL.
Domestic water heating comprises almost 18% of household energy use in the United States.
Combination of all the points you make, yes.
If you can make 4 hours of power a day completely free, industry shifts massively. Rather than making a $1m, 90% efficient machine that operates 24/7, you can make a $50k, 20% efficient machine that you turn off when there isn't sun.
We are talking about a form of power that is not free. Solar panels and installation have initial costs and refresh costs. Your 90%/20% notes are a hypothetical, and may apply to some settings, but I expect they will be niche. People want to heat their homes, and boil kettles and run webservers.
I have no problem with aesthetics like *punk. But when these aesthetics influence public policy we end up with dysfunction, like countries that have lots of electric vehicles being powered by new coal power plants. The original post said our era will be looked down on for not covering buildings with solar panels. I don’t think that is correct.
solar isn't free but it is the cheapest form of electricity we have (LCOE), and it's cost fell by a factor of 4 in the past decade. people absolutely want to hear their homes and boil water, but both of those are energy demands that are easy to time shift. any reasonably built home in the past decade is insulated well enough that you can only heat it during the day and keep it at a comfortable temperature. similarly, hot water tanks can be heated hours in advance when there's plenty of spare electricity. this obviously doesn't apply to all forms of energy demand, but heating (air and water) is the majority of consumer demand and is easily shiftable.
London School of Solarpunk for people in England: https://www.instagram.com/solarpunkldn/
This 1967 poem is often mentioned in the context of Solarpunk as having a similar vision https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving...
What tend's to bug me about most now to near future solarpunk depictions that I see is that it tends to assume that we will be all spread out into nothing larger than a small village. I'm not sure that solar/wind/hydro powered suburban sprawl is the way to go. I'd like to see more imaginings of solarpunk urbanism.
[shameless self-promotion] We're building one version of Solarpunk at LightManufacturing. Fun visuals in videos below. Off-grid real-time manufacturing using solar heat, without energy storage, transmission lines, etc. We've operated out of modified shipping containers since day one, molding durable parts used around the world with heliostat arrays. Coworkers include road runners, western fence lizards, and lots of talent out of CalPoly. :)
https://lm.solar/video/videos/
Hey now! house and shop here in Nova Scotia is solar pv, it just works. local old time foundry here built a solar fresnel lense and mirror rig, and did some casting in aluminum and bronze, "Lunenburg Foundry", there is a bit of non technical stuff on the web somewhere. "Nova Scotia Solar" puts out a manual for passive solar construction that works in Northern areas, and there are many others tinkering, and succeeding with passive and semi passive building. The main thing about solar is that once its up and running, there is no monthly bill, and if it's time to run outside and hang out with the critters, try and see things there way, it's no biggie.......bring...brrrrrring...."ya what?".... "um I thought I should call and say I'm feeling great.... ,so I wont be in today"
If you love this aesthetic and the concepts beneath it, I highly recommend Paolo Soleri's Arcology: The City in the Image of Man.
I could use some optimistic takes on the future. I read the news if I want dystopian. In everyday life, I do some local work to try and make housing more abundant and less impactful, but it's a small piece of the puzzle.
Nice art, but now imagine a large number of very modern nuclear reactors, hidden away in industrial areas like other industry, generating massive amounts of power, consistently. And of course, capturing all its toxic outputs and barreling them up, to be re-enriched at least once. At that point it's a trash handling problem, which pretty much every single other form of energy completely ignores. What happens to old solar panels, old wind turbines, what happens to the exhaust gases and particles from burning coal, etc? What happens to old batteries?
What happens when we can't cool them down anymore? https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-power-plants-struggling-...
What happens to final nuclear waste products? Is the 10.000 years of storage paid by future generations or paid right now?
What happens to the products of lithium battery waste, or gases and products of coal mining and burning?
https://youtu.be/Pvnvjqzj1O0?si=-Yq0ikEMpaPSzneQ
If guided meditations and solar punk are your thing, you're not alone
I love solarpunk as an idea. I would love to live in a solarpunk utopia. My biggest problem is its lack of grounding in economics. It's obvious that the people producing solarpunk art and literature comes from a privileged Californian background where the temperature is always suitable for living outside without heating or AC and it's always sunny not too far from the equator and without too much natural disasters. The cost and efficiency of solar panels and wind turbines are never discussed nor compared; which any serious major engineering endeavor should do first to be taken seriously. I think a solarpunk type of society is possible only if the population live near the equator and has a high level of societal sophistication where most people have an engineering degree and contributes positively to advance and maintain a society with the efficiency needed where there is a lower economic availability of energy.
Yup. I'm seeing this as well in trying to write Solarpunk fiction that has near zero hand waving of technical and economic challenges. I've had to rethink a bunch of everyday stuff that today relies on substantial heavy industry behind the scenes (like toothpaste).
How do the solar panels get made?
This aesthetic is unpleasant to me in a way I cannot put my finger on. It bothers me the same way Star Trek does.
There’s more than one way of thinking of it, the key emphasis is on intermingling Nature in its design elements. See this [1] or [2], for example.
[1] https://newintrigue.com/2025/01/29/solarpunk-a-vision-for-a-...
[2] https://hackernoon.com/what-is-the-solarpunk-aesthetic-and-m...
I didn't see anything! Does it work with uBlock?
It has never being cheaper to diy your solar installation with 500W solar panels at 100€ and 1Kwh lifepo4 cells at 100-80€.
Yup, solar panels are ridiculously cheap nowadays. In almost every case I've seen, the hardware to mount the panels has been more expensive than the panels themselves
DIY solar install is much easier than I thought it would be, especially if you use micro-inverters.
You can even skip storage in many cases, which brings the cost of an installation down dramatically. Low-tech magazine has a great article on the concept.
Do you have any product/purchase info and links for that pricing please?
To get decent prices on solar panels you have to pick up from a local supplier (which at least here in the US is difficult because they cater primarily to professional installers); they're just too expensive to ship. Even then around here the cheapest panels are going to run at least ~$0.35/W, although you might be able to find used ones for less.
Batteries are a little easier. For used in the US I'd take a look at https://batteryhookup.com/
Would love to see some media based off this concept. I'm so sick of cyberpunk.
Not exactly solarpunk, but Scavenger's Reign may hit some of those notes
My old boss keeps telling me to watch that. Thanks for the reminder!
I'm on your side, but playing devil's advocate: what would the "conflict" be plot-wise in solar punk?
Interpersonal or community conflicts could work for example
Yeah it's tough. Unfortunately game design is not my strongest attribute. Hopefully someone more creative than I can think of something though!
The conflict might be against people who want a cyberpunk world.
I still have the dream to build a game that has this aesthetic / idealistic worldview, but haven’t figured out the game play and mechanics.
This is basically Singapore.
But even Singapore isn't perfect—way too hot and humid, somewhat car-centric road planning, and for many Western people, too authoritarian.
Solarpunk being an anarchist adjacent genre/aesthetic makes it very distant from an authoritarian regime that suppresses freedom of speech such as Singapore…
Solarpunk is largely our reality.
• Solar and wind hit 30% of global electricity in 2023 (up from 19% in 2000), with solar growing 22% yearly since 2010.
• Vertical farming is proliferating, and projected to increase by 25% annually through 2030.
• Urban greening is spreading with, for example, New York, seeing an increase of 100,000 trees between 2005 and 2015.
Well, comparing the pictures of solarpunk with my perceived reality I sadly have to disagree. (solarpunk is about a bit more than having 30% of energy with solar and wind)
Where I live there is a lot of green urban spaces, and solar is rapidly expanding, so maybe my experience is different.
I live quite rural, so I also see green and solar, but all in all I see way too many dirty old tech and concrete.
I will buy my first solar oven this year and I often wonder why we don't harness the suns power more often, more locally, in our daily lives.
It seems to me that a parabolic reflector has the power to do a lot of good things - recharging batteries, powering pumps, etc.
I just wonder - why isn't it more widespread as a solution? There is a lot of energy out there - we just don't seem to be harnessing it ..
Because we are very used to having option of using energy now. Not when it happens to be sunny enough. Or waiting for days potentially when there is heavy overcast for days...
Still seems to me to be an under-appreciated resource.
Although, I admit, I've been waiting until Spring to buy a solar oven, so I guess I'm manifesting this reality.
I highly recommend this game: https://thefuture.wtf/
Not affiliated with it, I simply found out about it through the "srsly wrong" podcast a few years ago.
Solarpunk environmentalism is very appealing to me but most environmentalists detest the tall buildings it has because environmentalism to them is about community character: which is an American term for single family sprawl. So we have to break the back of environmentalism to save the planet. And we shall. Once we have destroyed American environmentalism we can get to saving the planet.
I am doing my PhD in sustainable housing. I also help out with quite a few naturalist and political organizations within my community: an unfortunately low-density suburb in a very large city currently suffering from a lack of housing.
All this to say that I consider myself reasonably well versed on both "academic" notions of environmentalism, and on what my left-leaning, SFH-dwelling neighbours consider environmentalism.
That "most environmentalists detest tall buildings" seems untrue, in my anecdotal experience. My environmentalist neighbours are some of the most vocal YIMBYs in the city, and also some of the people that stand to lose the most from changing "community character". YIMBYism is widely associated with both social and environmental sustainability, at least in the North American country I live in.
You can't have solarpunk without urbanism. Any "environmentalists" that pretend otherwise are lying. Neither skyscrapers nor mass single family housing are sustainable.
There's a reason the past 2000 years of urban development have been in rowhouses and smaller multi-story buildings.
The most powerful environmentalists are anti-urbanism. Every major environmental movement supports only single family homes. Environmentalism has as much to do with helping the environment as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democratic republic of the people.
> most environmentalists detest the tall buildings
I've seen it both ways. Some environmentalists hate single family homes and see suburban sprawl as the enemy. They'd rather have everyone packed into dense urban environments where anything a person will ever need in life is just a 15 minute walk/bike ride away from where they live eliminating the need for cars and leaving more land untainted by human interference. They'd be happy to do away with the inefficiencies of getting products, utilities, healthcare, and other resources to rural homes and communities spread out all over the place as well.
Houten, in the Netherlands, combines both pretty well
Those environmentalists have no power in the environmentalism movement. If you check every large enviro-corp they're all of the "preserving community" approach. Most of them oppose nuclear. And a near majority wind and solar. Some even geothermal.
Usually they fight for golf courses and so on alongside socialists. That is what environmentalism means in the US. It is like the words Democratic People's Republic. They're words. But they mean a different thing.