Solarpunk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk

by nis0s • 1 year ago

432 269 1 year ago

en.wikipedia.org

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.

autoexec4• 1 year ago

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.

nullstyle• 1 year ago

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

protocolture• 1 year ago

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.

harimau777• 1 year ago

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.

slightwinder• 1 year ago

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.

Wickedflickr6• 1 year ago

Sustainability for large populations is kind've a cornerstone of solarpunk, alongside decentralization and horizontal power to empower individuals and communities against corporation and government control.

There's a lot of discussion on how to implement solarpunk in the here and now over on the fediverse, like Lemmy, but a condensed version of short term goals tends to be:

1. Switch to solar and wind on a mass scale, including personal solar such as the type described in low-tech magazine, combined with reducing energy use as much as is reasonable.

2. Embrace permaculture urbanism, where energy and food production take place in cities. The most well researched proposal put forward is by the Edenicity project.

3. Replace as many cars as possible by implementing more robust and far reaching public transport and bicycle infrastructure in urban and rural areas, more in line with the Netherlands.

4. Build new societal structures that are bottom up through mutual aid, to wean ourselves off corporatism and consumerism, and to develop community independence.

None of those objectives are too far fetched, and would lay the groundwork for even more positive change.

Avicebron• 1 year ago

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.

whearyou3• 1 year ago

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.

roughly2• 1 year ago

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.

AstralStorm6• 1 year ago

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.

BirAdam• 1 year ago

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.

cpitman• 1 year ago

A replicator still cannot give everyone a beachfront villa.

krapp3• 1 year ago

Replicators as depicted in Star Trek cannot exist in the real world because they violate the laws of physics.

ravetcofx• 1 year ago

I wonder if the replicators were made in real life if they' hallucinate generations like Stable Diffusion

koolala• 1 year ago

I miss like any form of social idealism.

sho_hn• 1 year ago

I try to remember that the USA is the same country that made the 90s Star Trek I grew up with a mainstream hit.

dimator• 1 year ago

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

arn3n• 1 year ago

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.

layoric2• 1 year ago

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.

szvsw• 1 year ago

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).

tppiotrowski• 1 year ago

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

toomuchtodo• 1 year ago

Know when to rest, not to quit. Thank you for your service.

aperrien2• 1 year ago

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!

bruce511• 1 year ago

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.

hedora• 1 year ago

You might like H.G. Wells’s utopia “The World Set Free.”

It’s as relevant now as it was when it was written.

torginus3• 1 year ago

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.

lukan13• 1 year ago

"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.

WhyNotHugo4• 1 year ago

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.

tim333• 1 year ago

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?

hnthrowaway03154• 1 year ago

It is a possible future. But it calls for knowledgeable citizens who are not afraid to act.

corimaith• 1 year ago

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.

hnthrowaway03154• 1 year ago

You need knowledgeable citizens who are not afraid to act. They will naturally push back those people who seek more power/status.

sizzle• 1 year ago

Getting Gaudí vibes from that first image on the wiki

davidw2• 1 year ago

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.

GaggiX• 1 year ago

It has never being cheaper to diy your solar installation with 500W solar panels at 100€ and 1Kwh lifepo4 cells at 100-80€.

Wickedflickr6• 1 year ago

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.

kennyadam• 1 year ago

Do you have any product/purchase info and links for that pricing please?

daemonologist2• 1 year ago

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/

bergie2• 1 year ago

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

ragebol• 1 year ago

DIY solar install is much easier than I thought it would be, especially if you use micro-inverters.

untrust• 1 year ago

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."

KPGv2• 1 year ago

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.

Wickedflickr6• 1 year ago

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.

Chilko2• 1 year ago

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).

Tepix• 1 year ago

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!

luqtas• 1 year ago

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

cturner4• 1 year ago

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.

scubbo2• 1 year ago

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...?

adgjlsfhk13• 1 year ago

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.

bee_rider4• 1 year ago

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.

dandellion• 1 year ago

Some past generations would probably also look at our current housing and building design as barbaric and primitive.

roughly2• 1 year ago

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.)

selykg2• 1 year ago

I really didn’t enjoy The Wayfarers. But I absolutely adore the Monk & Robot books. I just wish she would write more. It does not feel finished after two books. That series is my warm blanket on a cold winter day book.

runfaster2000• 1 year ago

I quite enjoyed both series. They are not similar (as you implicitly suggest).

Wayfarer bugged me at first because each book is a massive departure from the next (somewhat like Ender 1 and 2). As much as it pained me to leave the characters of the first book, the following books were more meaningful and stayed with me much longer.

I also wish Chambers wrote more. Amazing author.

bbminner• 1 year ago

Same. You can clearly tell how much better of an author she got by the time the Psalm came out. It is a very solid book. The second one in the series seemed more confused, but the first one felt very thought though and intentional.

gggggggoodlord• 1 year ago

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.

tstack• 1 year ago

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.

hinkley• 1 year ago

Braiding Sweetgrass, if you haven’t read it already.

markstock• 1 year ago

If you love this aesthetic and the concepts beneath it, I highly recommend Paolo Soleri's Arcology: The City in the Image of Man.

ghfhghg3• 1 year ago

Would love to see some media based off this concept. I'm so sick of cyberpunk.

arjonagelhout• 1 year ago

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.

smj-edison2• 1 year ago

I'm on your side, but playing devil's advocate: what would the "conflict" be plot-wise in solar punk?

AnonymousPlanet• 1 year ago

The conflict might be against people who want a cyberpunk world.

solanav2• 1 year ago

Interpersonal or community conflicts could work for example

ghfhghg3• 1 year ago

Yeah it's tough. Unfortunately game design is not my strongest attribute. Hopefully someone more creative than I can think of something though!

teamonkey2• 1 year ago

Not exactly solarpunk, but Scavenger's Reign may hit some of those notes

ghfhghg3• 1 year ago

My old boss keeps telling me to watch that. Thanks for the reminder!

october8140• 1 year ago

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.

etrautmann• 1 year ago

Pretty awesome for anyone who hasn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ng5ZvrDm4

FrustratedMonky• 1 year ago

Chobani commercial.

It's nice image. But don't think Chobani is doing much different than any other dairy product manufacturer.

dkarl2• 1 year ago

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.

aEJ04Izw5HYm• 1 year ago

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.

api• 1 year ago

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.

autoexec4• 1 year ago

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.

mcmoor• 1 year ago

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.

bee_rider4• 1 year ago

Maybe people could just write quirky rom-coms set in the setting (not for me, but not everything is!)

ajmurmann• 1 year ago

It's technically biopunk but I nonetheless feel that The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi shares a lot of the same aesthetic.

nsedlet• 1 year ago

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...

mc3301• 1 year ago

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.

renewiltord6• 1 year 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.

autoexec4• 1 year ago

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.

renewiltord6• 1 year ago

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.

CalRobert• 1 year ago

Houten, in the Netherlands, combines both pretty well

kuschku• 1 year ago

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.

renewiltord6• 1 year ago

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.

ltsorry3• 1 year ago

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.

renewiltord6• 1 year ago

I'm sure people can find pockets of believers but name a mainstream environmentalist organization and it's pure NIMBY.

Canada and the US certainly, so you must be describing Mexico which I'm not acquainted with.

They'll always say they just want things to be built "in a sustainable manner" "with renewable materials and local labour" "and be affordable". But the code words are obvious to anyone who tries. Things are just not renewable materials. If steel, because of mining. If wood, because of tree loss. If concrete, because of emissions.

Likewise, each of the other things. The bad faith they act in has characterized them. Everyone knows they're against "evil developers trying to ruin the community character for massive profits" while they have COEXIST stickers on their SUVs and "In this house we believe" on their lawns.

LMSolar• 1 year ago

[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/

metalman• 1 year ago

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"

throwawa14223• 1 year ago

This aesthetic is unpleasant to me in a way I cannot put my finger on. It bothers me the same way Star Trek does.

nis0s3• 1 year ago

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...

reactordev• 1 year ago

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.

bergie2• 1 year ago

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.

pabs3• 1 year ago

Is there much movement towards electric instead of petrol/diesel propulsion on the water when there is no wind?

AstralStorm6• 1 year ago

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.

owenpalmer• 1 year ago

Chobani made a really beautiful ad featuring the solarpunk aesthetic:

https://youtu.be/z-Ng5ZvrDm4?si=BEmNr2kaBblgI64v

People hate on it for different reasons, but I like the vision/aesthetic they're going for.

Note: not affiliated with Chobani

mattvr• 1 year ago

Also check out the unbranded version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqJJktxCY9U

TeeMassive• 1 year ago

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.

akeck2• 1 year ago

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).

morbicer• 1 year ago

I get what you mean in general, but toothpaste isn't a great example as it's not a necessity. My wife goes without it for years and has no cavity or gum issues.

- https://advanceddentalartsnyc.com/is-toothpaste-necessary/

- https://www.huffmansmilesdental.com/is-it-okay-to-brush-your...

nis0s3• 1 year ago

My criticism of solarpunk is its emphasis on hydro, wind and solar energy instead of more efficient sources like nuclear. But I appreciate the futurist optimism and self-reliance ethos of solarpunk. I am not interested in aspects of solarpunk which sacrifice individuation and individual liberties—I think it’s possible for innovative solutions to respect both individual liberties and the systems which sustain us all.

michaelhoney• 1 year ago

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.

bluefirebrand2• 1 year ago

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

Deprogrammer9• 1 year ago

It's called SOLARpunk not ATOMpunk,sorry.

selimthegrim• 1 year ago

Atompunk nein danke?

sien• 1 year ago

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.

lukan13• 1 year ago

"But it has a different emphasis."

Seems like it. The only picture there has "Atomic war!" as the caption.

daemonologist2• 1 year ago

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?

nis0s3• 1 year ago

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.

Wickedflickr6• 1 year ago

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.

benrutter2• 1 year ago

Just adding some context here that I think a lot of other comments miss, but the envivonmental movement is often anti-nuclear because it's seen as not progressing passed our system's current extraction based economy.

Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" probably makes this case most clearly, arguing nuclear uses finite resources, creates waste and is damaging to mine.

I'm not arguing for this case here, but that view is very popular in environmentalist circles and probably explains why nuclear is absent from solarpunk literature.

derduff• 1 year ago

Nuclear is neither more cost efficient, nor environmentally better than renewable energy resources.

grumpy-de-sre4• 1 year ago

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.

ViewTrick1002• 1 year ago

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.

adagradschool• 1 year ago

https://youtu.be/Pvnvjqzj1O0?si=-Yq0ikEMpaPSzneQ

If guided meditations and solar punk are your thing, you're not alone

araes2• 1 year ago

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

WhyNotHugo4• 1 year ago

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.

araes2• 1 year ago

Since the link was to the in-progress planning and construction announcement page, here's a link to the finished structure's website and the Google Maps Streetview looking up at the finished structure (completed 2022). The finished website, has a lot of cool aerial views looking down from the upper apartments.

Site: https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/233/valley

Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/3Qcmzu9y7kVTydcL9

woah• 1 year ago

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.

whearyou3• 1 year ago

Great example.

In the theory-land of Solarpunk, pretty much all the more fleshed out example I’ve seen imagined also have a similar issue with reality. In particular I’m thinking of KSR’s (otherwise great) novels.

It’s a shame because I think most people would agree some version of “Star Trek” is desirable and working toward a realistic imagining of it helps work toward a path to getting there.

globular-toast• 1 year ago

The most likely version of Star Trek is depicted in Wall-E.

benrutter2• 1 year ago

I think this is an important thought, but climate actions are often more than choosing the path of least emissions, especially since the options available are determined by our current economic system.

Sites like the one you're referencing (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ if I'm correct) don't just exit to be normal sites with less emissions, they're also presenting a vision of the kinds of things our tech world could and should value differently.

ImaCake• 1 year ago

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.

AstralStorm6• 1 year ago

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.

Fluorescence• 1 year ago

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 handing 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 the 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 prepper-ish than utopian and considers state centralisation too vulnerable to capture by negative regimes.

delta_p_delta_x• 1 year ago

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.

solanav2• 1 year ago

Solarpunk being an anarchist adjacent genre/aesthetic makes it very distant from an authoritarian regime that suppresses freedom of speech such as Singapore…

danans2• 1 year ago

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.

karel-3d• 1 year ago

How do the solar panels get made?

sinuhe69• 1 year ago

I didn't see anything! Does it work with uBlock?

ETH_start2• 1 year ago

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.

lukan13• 1 year ago

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)

ETH_start2• 1 year ago

Where I live there is a lot of green urban spaces, and solar is rapidly expanding, so maybe my experience is different.

lionkor3• 1 year ago

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?

atoav2• 1 year ago

What happens to final nuclear waste products? Is the 10.000 years of storage paid by future generations or paid right now?

lionkor3• 1 year ago

What happens to the products of lithium battery waste, or gases and products of coal mining and burning?

brettermeier• 1 year ago

What happens when we can't cool them down anymore? https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-power-plants-struggling-...

demaga• 1 year ago

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.

Voultapher6• 1 year ago

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.

AstralStorm6• 1 year ago

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.

berkes5• 1 year ago

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.

notarobot123• 1 year ago

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.

lukan13• 1 year ago

"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.

Voultapher6• 1 year ago

Have you heard of this new concept called recycling?

Yes, I have. If you have absurdly good 90% recycling - unheard of in this area - and a cycle period of 10 years, you run through material once entirely in less than 500 years.

Sure the Si part is readily available, but what about the metal used for building the thing that transports the thing to the other thing that transports your solar panels for recycling? What about waste products of smelting when recycling? What about the ground water use? And here is the real killer, what about the cost? Show me a design that scales to even 1 billion people, without forcing the rest into slave like conditions.

Our technology, is not sustainable period. Practically none of it is. That thought does not bring joy to me. I used to subscribe to the technology and ingenuity will fix it mindset. But the harsh reality is, 999/1000 needles point in one direction. It's desperation to cling to that one last little maybe, the verdict has been reached. Physics doesn't care about our sentiments or arguments, our politicians can't reason with physics or bribe it.

In Tom Murphy's words:

Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.

grumpy-de-sre4• 1 year ago

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.

lm284693• 1 year ago

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

pjc502• 1 year ago

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.

9dev4• 1 year ago

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.

itsoktocry5• 1 year ago

there's opposing viewpoints that you may not agree with, but are just as valid as yours.
"Musk's braindead agenda"

Voultapher6• 1 year ago

I'm a little torn, I see your point. I don't get to choose by myself how language and symbols are co-opted and used - see the whole "all lives matter" debacle that had many well meaning ignorant people spouting off racist garbage. On the other hand, do I really want to let an egotistical asshole - the very one actually fallen prey to the thing he claims so many others are victims of - dictate how I use language? There is a movement to reclaim words - or maybe not let them be misused - in a way that doesn't just roll over, hading over parts of the language, whenever fascistic assholes decide to appropriate them.

dkarl2• 1 year ago

I agree that it's fluffy and empty. Utopia in art isn't worth much except for advertising. However...

Concepts like "Abundance without waste" are like saying "Humane torture", sorry that's an oxymoron

Sustainable abundance isn't a logical contradiction, even if we haven't figured it out yet. "Waste" is unavoidable, and as a word and an idea, it tends to take on moral dimensions that overshadow the practical.

aa-jv2• 1 year ago

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 ..

Ekaros• 1 year ago

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...

aa-jv2• 1 year ago

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.

jdboyd• 1 year ago

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.

grumpy-de-sre4• 1 year ago

The idea of Solarpunk has been resonating with me for a while now. I'm not completely sold on some of the community aspects (a little too hippy) but it's an incredible breath of fresh air compared to the cyberpunk dystopian bullshit that we are being force fed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R8GlENvhLI

I'm an Aussie living in the EU, and if anything is going to eventually tempt me to go back it's going to be ridiculously cheap solar energy. I think the odds of building any kind of utopia there are pretty remote but I think massive scale green steel smelters (+ other metals), green ammonia facilities, and expansion of desalination (combined with indoor agriculture). If Aus doesn't completely fumble the ball, I think there's a really good opportunity for another "mining boom".

Had a lot of fun listening to Saul Griffith explaining that solar energy and electrification is inherently deflationary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFr87rZyr3o

dfex• 1 year ago

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

grumpy-de-sre4• 1 year ago

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

sirodoht• 1 year ago

London School of Solarpunk for people in England: https://www.instagram.com/solarpunkldn/

hofrogs• 1 year ago

For those interested I recommend this channel, Andrew here has a lot of videos exploring various ideas/concepts of how things might function in a solarpunk society: https://www.youtube.com/c/Andrewism

torginus3• 1 year ago

I just thought a bit on this and this idea sounds very much another chapter in the 'left'-leaning 1%er rich socialite tradition of romanticizing poverty.

The actual grounded reality of solar power is that small scale solar powerplants are mostly popping up in the southern hemisphere, and their existence is justified by true need, note some first-world champagne socialist's desire for a green economy.

Countries in the southern hemisphere tend to be poorer, have lesser quality governments and infrastructure, meaning the continuous supply of electricity is not a given. At the same time, these places get a lot more sunlight, and need constantly running ACs, as in sweltering hot weather, having an air conditioner can be a life or death decision.

I'm pretty sure the availablity of reliable power and constant tolerable indoor temperatures has been a godsend to these places and will show up as a major economic booster in the years to come.

Thus the recently falling prices and rising availablity (of mainly Chinese) panels, inverters, and batteries has been a godsend for these places. If you look on youtube, there's an absolute ton of videos showcasing solar installs in places like the Middle East and Africa, which would satisfy the definiton of 'solarpunk', as in, communities only weakly tied to central infrastructure.

Meanwhile, places like the US or Europe, don't suffer from energy scarcity, comparatively get less sunlight and have expensive, and overly complex permitting processes.

Solarpunk

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