#solarpunk energy transition

[solarpunkbusiness]

Our solarpunk business themes and trends are entering the mundane world under the guise of 'sustainability industry'...

Whatever the name, this pivot at the systems level - the emergence of entirely novel industrial sectors - can only benefit the planet.

However, everything will depend on how the notion of "growth" will be defined and pursued.

The report, titled ‘Turning Challenges into Industrial Solutions: The New Era of Industrial Policy,’ commends Indonesia for pursuing a green industrial policy in manufacturing and services. The country’s achievement is advancing in reducing energy consumption with the support of technical assistance from development partners, including UNIDO.

Green industry encompasses a wide range of sectors and technologies that prioritize environmental sustainability while fostering economic growth. In Indonesia, the potential for green industrial development is vast and diverse, including:

Renewable Energy: Indonesia boasts abundant renewable resources like solar, geothermal, and wind energy. Investing in renewable energy infrastructure, such as solar panels and wind farms, can reduce reliance on fossil fuels and contribute to energy security while mitigating carbon emissions. According to the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, Indonesia aims to achieve a 23% renewable energy mix by 2025.

Sustainable Agriculture: Embracing practices like organic farming, precision agriculture, and water-efficient irrigation systems can significantly reduce environmental impact. This includes exploring technologies like vertical farming and hydroponics to improve agricultural productivity within a smaller footprint.

Circular Economy: Transitioning towards a circular economy, where resources are reused and recycled, offers tremendous potential. This encompasses initiatives like waste-to-energy plants, upcycling and composting facilities, and promoting sustainable product lifecycles.

Green Manufacturing: Implementing eco-friendly practices in manufacturing processes, such as energy-efficient equipment, cleaner production technologies, and waste reduction initiatives, can significantly reduce environmental footprint and resource consumption.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Circular battery self-sufficiency

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

If we are going to survive the climate emergency, we will have to electrify – that is, transition from burning fossil fuels to collecting, storing, transmitting and using renewable energy generated by e.g. the tides, the wind, and (especially) the Sun.

Electrification is a big project, but it's not an insurmountable one. Planning and executing an electric future is like eating the elephant: we do it one step at a time. This is characteristic of big engineering projects, which explains why so many people find it hard to imagine pulling this off.

As a layperson, you are far more likely to be exposed to a work of popular science than you are a work of popular engineering. Pop science is great, but its role is to familiarize you with theory, not practice. Popular engineering is a minuscule and obscure genre, which is a pity, because it's one of my favorites.

Weathering the climate emergency is going to require a lot of politics, to be sure, but it's also going to require a lot of engineering, which is why I'm grateful for the nascent but vital (and growing) field of popular engineering. Not to mention, the practitioners of popular engineering tend to be a lot of fun, like the hosts of the Well That's Your Problem podcast, a superb long-form leftist podcast about engineering disasters (with slides!):

https://www.youtube.com/@welltheresyourproblempodca1465

If you want to get started on popular engineering and the climate, your first stop should be the "Without the Hot Air" series, which tackles sustainable energy, materials, transportation and food as engineering problems. You'll never think about climate the same way again:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

Then there's Saul Griffith's 2021 book Electrify, which is basically a roadmap for carrying out the electrification of America and the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

Griffith's book is inspiring and visionary, but to really get a sense of how fantastic an electrified world can be, it's gotta be Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Chachra is a material scientist who teaches at Olin College, and her book is a hymn to the historical and philosophical underpinnings of infrastructure, but more than anything, it's a popular engineering book about what is possible. For example, if we want to give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder), we would only have to capture 0.4% of the solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface.

Now, this is a gigantic task, but it's a tractable one. Resolving it will require a very careful – and massive – marshaling of materials, particularly copper, but also a large number of conflict minerals and rare earths. It's gonna be hard.

But it's not impossible, let alone inconceivable. Indeed, Chachra's biggest contribution in this book is to make a compelling case for reconceiving our relationship to energy and materials. As a species, we have always treated energy as scarce, trying to wring every erg and therm that we can out of our energy sources. Meanwhile, we've treated materials as abundant, digging them up or chopping them down, using them briefly, then tossing them on a midden or burying them in a pit.

Chachra argues that this is precisely backwards. Our planet gets a fresh supply of energy twice a day, with sunrise (solar) and moonrise (tides). On the other hand, we've only got one Earth's worth of materials, supplemented very sporadically when a meteor survives entry into our atmosphere. Mining asteroids, the Moon and other planets is a losing proposition for the long foreseeable future:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

The promise of marshaling a very large amount of materials is that it will deliver effectively limitless, clean energy. This project will take a lot of time and its benefits will primarily accrue to people who come after its builders, which is why it is infrastructure. As Chachra says, infrastructure is inherently altruistic, a gift to our neighbors and our descendants. If all you want is a place to stick your own poop, you don't need to build a citywide sanitation system.

What's more, we can trade energy for materials. Manufacturing goods so that they gracefully decompose back into the material stream at the end of their lives is energy intensive. Harvesting materials from badly designed goods is also energy intensive. But if once we build out the renewables grid (which will take a lot of materials), we will have all the energy we need (to preserve and re-use our materials).

Our species' historical approach to materials is not (ahem) carved in stone. It is contingent. It has changed. It can change again. It needs to change, because the way we extract materials today is both unjust and unsustainable.

The horrific nature of material extraction under capitalism – and its geopolitics (e.g. "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.") – has many made comrades in the climate fight skeptical (or worse, cynical) about a clean energy transition. They do the back-of-the-envelope math about the material budget for electrification, mentally convert that to the number of wildlife preserves, low-income communities, unspoiled habitat and indigenous lands that we would destroy in the process of gathering those materials, and conclude that the whole thing is a farce.

That analysis is important, but it's incomplete. Yes, marshaling all those materials in the way that we do today would be catastrophic. But the point of a climate transition is that we will transition our approach to our planet, our energy, and our materials. That transition can and should challenge all the assumptions underpinning electrification doomerism.

Take the material bill itself: the assumption that a transition will require a linearly scaled quantity of materials includes the assumption that cleantech won't find substantial efficiencies in its material usage. Thankfully, that's a very bad assumption! Cleantech is just getting started. It's at the stage where we're still uncovering massive improvements to production (unlike fossil fuel technology, whose available efficiencies have been discovered and exploited, so that progress is glacial and negligible).

Take copper: electrification requires a lot of copper. But the amount of copper needed for each part of the cleantech revolution is declining faster than the demand for cleantech is rising. Just one example: between the first and second iteration of the Rivian electric vehicle, designers figured out how to remove 1.6 miles of copper wire from each vehicle:

https://insideevs.com/news/722265/rivian-r1s-r1t-wiring/

That's just one iteration and one technology! And yeah, EVs are only peripheral to a cleantech transition; for one thing, geometry hates cars. We're going to have to build a lot of mass transit, and we're going to be realizing these efficiencies with every generation of train, bus, and tram:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

We have just lived through a massive surge in electrification, with unimaginable quantities of new renewables coming online and a stunning replacement of conventional vehicles with EVs, and throughout that surge, demand for copper remained flat:

https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/copper-wire-price-remains-stable-amidst-surplus-supply-and-expanding-mining-25416#:~:text=Global%20Copper%20wire%20Price%20Remains%20Stable%20Amidst%20Surplus%20Supply%20and%20Expanding%20Mining%20Activities

This isn't to say that cleantech is a solved problem. There are many political aspects to cleantech that remain pernicious, like the fact that so many of the cleantech offerings on the market are built around extractive financial arrangements (like lease-back rooftop solar) and "smart" appliances (like heat pumps and induction tops) that require enshittification-ready apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

There's a quiet struggle going on between cleantech efficiencies and the finance sector's predation, from lease-back to apps to the carbon-credit scam, but many of those conflicts are cashing out in favor of a sustainable future and it doesn't help our cause to ignore those: we should be cheering them on!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

Take "innovation." Silicon Valley's string of pump-and-dump nonsense – cryptocurrency, NFTs, metaverse, web3, and now AI – have made "innovation" into a dirty word. As the AI bubble bursts, the very idea of innovation is turning into a punchline:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/

But cleantech is excitingly, wonderfully innovative. The contrast between the fake innovation of Silicon Valley and the real – and vital – innovation of cleantech couldn't be starker, or more inspiring:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

Like the "battery problem." Whenever the renewables future is raised, there's always a doomer insisting that batteries are an unsolved – and unsolvable – problem, and without massive batteries, there's no sense in trying, because the public won't accept brownouts when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing.

Sometimes, these people are shilling boondoggles like nuclear power (reminder: this is Hiroshima Day):

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Other times, they're just trying to foreclose on the conversation about a renewables transition altogether. But sometimes, these doubts are raised by comrades who really do want a transition and have serious questions about power storage.

If you're one of those people, I have some very good news: battery tech is taking off. Some of that takes the form of wild and cool new approaches. In Finland, a Scottish company is converting a disused copper mine into a gravity battery. During the day, excess renewables hoist a platform piled with tons of rock up a 530m shaft. At night, the platform lowers slowly, driving a turbine and releasing its potential energy. This is incredibly efficient, has a tiny (and sustainable) bill of materials, and it's highly replicable. The world has sufficient abandoned mine-shafts to store 70TWh of power – that's the daily energy budget for the entire planet. What's more, every mine shaft has a beefy connection to the power grid, because you can't run a mine without a lot of power:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Gravity batteries are great for utility-scale storage, but we also need a lot of batteries for things that we can't keep plugged into the wall, like vehicles, personal electronics, etc. There's great news on that score, too! "The Battery Mineral Loop" is a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute that describes the path to "circular battery self-sufficiency":

https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_battery_mineral_loop_report_July.pdf

The big idea: rather than digging up new minerals to make batteries, we can recycle minerals from dead batteries to make new ones. Remember, energy can be traded for materials: we can expend more energy on designs that are optimized to decompose back into their component materials, or we can expend more energy extracting materials from designs that aren't optimized for recycling.

Both things are already happening. From the executive summary:

The chemistry of batteries is rapidly improving: over the past decade, we've reduced per-using demand for lithium, nickle and cobalt by 60-140%, and most lithium batteries are being recycled, not landfilled.

Within a decade, we'll hit peak mineral demand for batteries. By the mid-2030s, the amount of new "virgin minerals" needed to meet our battery demand will stop growing and start declining.

By 2050, we could attain net zero mineral demand for batteries: that is, we could meet all our energy storage needs without digging up any more minerals.

We are on a path to a "one-off" extraction effort. We can already build batteries that work for 10-15 years and whose materials can be recycled with 90-94% efficiency.

The total quantity of minerals we need to extract to permanently satisfy the world's energy storage needs is about 125m tons.

This last point is the one that caught my eye. Extracting 125m tons of anything is a tall order, and depending on how it's done, it could wreak a terrible toll on people and the places they live.

But one question I learned to ask from Tim Harford and BBC More Or Less is "is that a big number?" 125m tons sure feels like a large number, but it is one seventeenth of the amount of fossil fuels we dig up every year just for road transport. In other words, we're talking about spending the next thirty years carefully, sustainably, humanely extracting about 5.8% of the materials we currently pump and dig every year for our cars. Do that, and we satisfy our battery needs more-or-less forever.

This is a big engineering project. We've done those before. Crisscrossing the world with roads, supplying billions of fossil-fuel vehicles, building the infrastructure for refueling them, pumping billions of gallons of oil – all of that was done in living memory. As Robin Sloan wrote:

Did people say, at the dawn of the automobile: are you kidding me? This technology will require a ubiquitous network of refueling stations, one or two at every major intersection … even if there WAS that much gas in the world, how would you move it around at that scale? If everybody buys a car, you’ll need to build highways, HUGE ones — you’ll need to dig up cities! Madness!

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/room-for-everybody/

That big project cost trillions and required bending the productive capacity of many nations to its completion. It produced a ghastly geopolitics that elevated petrostates – a hole in the ground, surrounded by guns – to kingmakers whose autocrats can knock the world on its ass at will.

By contrast, this giant engineering project is relatively modest, and it will upend that global order, yielding energy sovereignty (and its handmaiden, national resliency) to every country on Earth. Doing it well will be hard, and require that we rethink our relationship to energy and materials, but that's a bonus, not a cost. Changing how we use materials and energy will make all our lives better, it will improve the lives of the living things we share the planet with, and it will strip the monsters who currently control our energy supply of their political, economic, and electric power.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

[reasonsforhope]

"Heat stored underground in caverns can be set aside in Finland’s summer months to be re-used during frigid winters thanks to a state-of-the-art ‘seasonal energy’ storage facility.

Slated for construction this summer near Helsinki, it will be the largest in the world by all standards and contain enough thermal energy to heat a medium-sized city all winter.

Thermal exchange heating systems, like those built underground, or domestic heat pumps, are seen as the most effective way available of reducing the climate-impact of home heating and cooling.

Their function relies on natural forces or energy recycling to cool down or heat up water and then using it to radiate hot or cold energy into a dwelling.

In Vantaa, Finland’s fourth largest city neighboring the capital of Helsinki, the ambitious Varanto seasonal energy storage project plans to store cheap and environmental friendly waste heat from datacenters, cooling processes, and waste-to-energy assets in underground caverns where it can be used to heat buildings via the district heating network whenever it is needed.

In Finland and other Nordic countries, the heat consumption varies significantly between seasons. Heat consumption in the summertime is only about one-tenth of the peak load consumption during the cold winter months.

Varanto will utilize underground caverns equal in space to two Maddison Square Gardens—over a million cubic meters—filled with water heated by this waste heat and pressure that will allow the water to reach temperatures of up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit without the water boiling or evaporating.

“The world is undergoing a huge energy transition. Wind and solar power have become vital technologies in the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy,” says Vantaa Energy CEO Jukka Toivonen.

“The biggest challenge of the energy transition so far has been the inability to store these intermittent forms of energy for later use. Unfortunately, small-scale storage solutions, such as batteries or accumulators, are not sufficient; large, industrial-scale storage solutions are needed. Varanto is an excellent example of this, and we are happy to set an example for the rest of the world.” ...

“Two 60-MW electric boilers will be built in conjunction with Varanto,” adds Toivonen. “These boilers will be used to produce heat from renewable electricity when electricity is abundant and cheap. Our heat-producing system will work like a hybrid car: alternating between electricity and other forms of production, depending on what is most advantageous and efficient at the time.”

... Construction of the storage facility’s entrance is expected to start in summer 2024, while it could be operational as early as 2028."

-via Good News Network, April 12, 2024. Video via VantaanEnergia, March 10, 2024

[cognitivejustice]

Botswana is positioning itself to become Africa’s solar energy powerhouse, with ambitions to produce over 8,000 megawatts of power for export, according to Vice President Ndaba Gaolathe.

According to Gaolathe, the country has the potential to generate over 8,000 megawatts of power, which will be pursued under his government.

Botswana has one of the highest solar radiation exposure rates in the world, with 3,200 hours of sunshine per year. Therefore, this proves Botswana’s potential to become a global renewable energy hub, given its abundant solar resources.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

This episode’s guest is Dr Anne Pasek, Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture, and Environment, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University. Dr Pasek is co-founder of the Low Carbon Research Methods Group, and she talks to Ariel all about what Low Carbon Research is (and can look like!), the “carbon footprint” of academic research, new innovative ways for research to respond to the climate crisis, the importance of zines, and even hosting her own solar server in her backyard!

Links:

https://www.annepasek.com/

http://lowcarbonmethods.com/

https://emmlab.info/

http://solarprotocol.net/

[atompowers]

Hello climate-marchers, world-shakers, & changemakers! Here’s you climate headline goodness:

The Good Bright

The Good Cheer

The Good Solar

[justalittlesolarpunk]

Rare Britain W

OMG! Fantastic climate news!

The United Kingdom has officially closed their last coal fired power plant! The UK was the first to build coal power plants, and it's truely historic to see them all closed down!

[solar-sunnyside-up]

Decentializing and Reconnecting

We often speak on decentralizing systems in solarpunk spaces. Food systems, energy systems, transit systems, etc..

Capitalism favors systems in which can be copy and pasted but this is not the recipe for a stable network, rather it creates a system that fails in different ways across different places without any flexability. This leads them to sure their failure and during that failure we are left without the ability to act, us as the people within the system are forced just twiddle our thumbs while someone else fixes it.

When we dismantle these systems, we then replace them with ones that put the work load onto ourselves.

Yet, despite the extra work given to us, it isn't any more difficult. The workload itself typically actually gets easier per person. Despite the constant speaking point of capitalism to "offload the work elsewhere to make it easier for yourself" but this speaking point actually does the opposite by creating more work for ourselves in the long run. Also it gives the impression that somehow the lack of that work is beneficial because Work is Bad. But work is only harmful when it's forced upon someone. We've seen it a million different ways, people love work they enjoy but when you make it "Do It or Die" they start to not only hate the work they do a worse job at it.

In removing our direct involvment from the ability to work, it removes the autonomy within the community itself, the inovation, the flexability decentalized systems have in secpializing themselves to certain areas. This also erases community culture and uniqueness which robs us of our collective stories.

So when thinking of ways to decentalize certain systems keep in mind there will never ever be a one fits all solution, and that they will require work. But work isn't a dirty awful thing, your just burnt out and not allowed to do what you enjoy.

[solarpunkani]

Hi! For a project in mz school were doingf an activity where we make a utopia. i wanted mine to be inspired by your blog and stuff like accessibility, solar engery, things like that. any things you could give me for ideas?

I cannot emphasize enough how absolutely honored I am that you're looking to my blog for inspiration on this project! I hope I can be helpful!

If you want a fantastic wellspring of cool imagery and inspiration, check out the @solarpunkaestheticweek blog! It was an event held over the summer, and a lot of people participated and did art for it! Like this one that I really love! There's also lots of talk about fashion, architecture, and general aesthetic inspiration too! The queue is also continually running with other cool stuff the other mods and I find! We've also got a pinterest board you can rifle through for more inspo! IDK when this project is due, but we're planning to host another event for the Winter Solstice, which should bring out another burst of cool stuff to be inspired by!

Other cool things that could be fun for a utopia... I go on a bit of a ramble below!

The Dear Alice animation is a great source of inspiration, honestly! The imagery in this video are vivid!

Community fridges, little free pantries, little free libraries, and the like are also super fun for a utopia! Here's a pinterest board I made while I was working on my solarpowered fridge concept project this summer!

You could always go for fun shaped and fun-colored solar panels! I've seen talk of solar panels made to look like terra cotta roof tiles, and of colorful solar glass, so either one of these could be cool to draw inspiration from! The imagery of a stained glass window but its all solar voltaic is... prominent, in my head. While I was rifling through my blog, I found another post about more people doing this (or at least something similar)!

I've been in love with this concept art of fish-shaped wind turbines for the longest while! Clean energy can be clean and fun!

Regarding accessibility--I won't claim its something I know a lot about, but I did go on a bit of a ramble about it at the behest of another asker once. Long and the short of it, I'd definitely encourage looking into talks about walkable cities and accessible cities, see what some other bloggers who are More Knowledgeable Than Me have to say about it! Here's another post I've reblogged about accessibility and solarpunk!

It could be fun to imagine how current structures in cities could be reused in a more solarpunk society! I did this a bit earlier with big parking garages, and the replies and reblogs also have some interesting ideas too!

I guess if you were to ask me what I'd like to see in an imagining of a solarpunk future/more utopian kind of vibe... I'd imagine tight-knit communities, clean energy, expansive transit systems and bike accessibility, large paths for traveling by foot, lots of gardens and greenhouses, big sunny windows, bright colors in buildings and fashion, lots of reuse of clothing and visible mending and the like, personalization, and Good Vibes. There's probably a lot more detail and specifics one would need to go to when it comes to making one, but when I think of Solarpunk those tend to be some of the first things that come to mind.

Aaaand here's a few solarpunk blogs I tend to look to for inspiration, if that's helpful to you at all!

I hope this helps! If anyone else happens across this post and wants to chime in, feel free!

[definitely-not-an-alb]

Continuing my thoughts on bits and pieces, basically, Solarpunk & co is mostly about envisioning objects, architecture and spaces that don't exist yet (as opposed to stuff like cottagecore which is highly fotography focused, staging and framing existing reality in a certain way) after certain design principles and rendering those. The central question of Solarpunk is "what if chair but climate change". But people are hyperfocused on narrative analysis (I blame that scourge of the earth "what story does this picture tell" kind of analysis, too, here) so they don't talk about the main body of work (visual pieces of objects, fashion, architecture and so forth) and instead hyperfocus on the few narrative pieces incorporating the design philosophy in an attempt to enhance similar themes and also like. The story they made up in their head about these pictures bc they are bad at art theory.

And the problem with those stories is that they are. Well a lot of them are not great? There's a coming together here of several aspects, among them that the majority of everything will be middling to bad, but also that the core aspects of Solarpunk these narrative artists are borrowing or trying to hold themselves to are not great for the way we currently tell stories. Solarpunk presents an endpoint of a process transitioning into a utopic, static status quo, which is great for Design and bad for narrative, because it results in a lot of static stories where there's little room for conflict because the status quo can't change (so there can be no active conflict) and the philosophy of the movement largely rejects reactionary/reactive (that is, structure that defends the status quo, not right wingers whining) story structure but the kind of stories you could tell in this are largely unpopular rn BC no one takes questing for the holy grail of renewable energy serious atm and discovery stories are considered uncool bc of the coloniallist mindset associated (but not necessary to!) them usw usw.

Note that I am naming common problems I see in the genre, not absolute truths about it. Also the first person to whine about how stories DoN't NeEd CoNfLiCt gets spritzed with a water pistol.

Back to the thought at hand: so a lot of the fiction coming out of this corner is kind of meh, and people take that and turn around and go "the genre sucks" when it's not a genre! The vast majority of it is for going "object+climate change+utopia=picture"! The stories are largely incidental.

[solarpunkbusiness]

Despite “historic” federal investments, many community members feel weary from bearing the disproportionate impact of the climate crisis, persistent discrimination within environmental nonprofits, and inadequate infrastructure to access federal resources. Whether the promises of Justice40 or the IRA are realized is not just about communities receiving grants but whether they can secure their futures by securing ownership over critical resources, such as renewable energy generation.

[...]

The cooperative efforts referenced here are only a few examples of communities coming together to address climate change impacts locally. Coalitions of communities committed to equity are best positioned to identify federal investment opportunities, collaborate to submit successful applications, and cooperatively share not only the environmental but also the economic benefits this moment demands.

The bottom line: Economic justice and environmental justice advocates cannot afford to merely tinker at the edges of energy, environmental, and wealth inequities. Instead, it is vital to lean into our interdependence to create and replicate successful models of accessible community ownership of the new energy system. Our survival may very well depend on the collective actions taken today.

[a-girl-called-bob]

I originally wrote a whole thing about how the lack of founding texts makes it hard to pin down what types of stories Are Told in a Solarpunk setting, but I got to a point where I had to look up some other recent/lesser known 'punks to form a more coherent argument and uh, Solarpunk is actually kind of unique in its lack of founding texts. Most of the 'punks people talk about exist largely because one or two works of fiction had some really striking aesthetics and then someone published a tabletop RPG or something, but Solarpunk is not really like that.

Cutting here because I ended up rambling for a long time. Read more if you want to hear my critique of the origins of Solarpunk, a bit of discussion around social media ephemera, and a few thoughts on the kinds of stories that Solarpunk allows.

From what I can tell, Solarpunk was kind of made whole cloth on Tumblr. The original post actually turned ten years old like, a week ago, and it's. This is not to be mean, I do like it quite a bit. But it's exactly what I'd expect from something on 2014 Tumblr. It's mostly aesthetic touchstones, with the interest in renewable energy and a better relationship to nature less as an ideological line and more as a guide for the aesthetic. There are some interesting things with how the touchstones include a lot of public transit and community-centered things, but there are also a fair amount of things that just, don't seem very thought out. Just to pick at one thing, if one of the core focuses is 'Less corporate capitalism, and more small businesses' (which, the small businesses line is already just, so 2014 liberal), if we take that at face value, then quick question: who the fuck is making all of these solar panels and streetcars?

And I mean, to be clear, 'plot holes' in a few-hundred-word aesthetic post aren't a reason to throw out the entire thing - if anything, answering those questions could lead to some interesting storytelling. The original post wasn't meant to be anything in entirety, I think it was meant to invite others to play in the aesthetic space and use some of the elements to craft their own settings.

One of my more direct criticisms of that original post, though, is the way that it pulls on Steampunk aesthetics. I have a number of issues with General Steampunk Aesthetics that I'm not going to get into here; my issue has more to do with how it, kind of doesn't really mesh well with the rest of the Solarpunk vibe? Like, if we've got solar panels baked into every window and electric cars and such, is there any non-aesthetic reason why we're still using airships? The art nouveau revival stuff is like, it's fine if you aren't a giant nerd who thinks about things like the cultural influences behind art movements, and old cars do have a certain look to them, for sure, but like, the rest of the aesthetic is so grounded in (2014) contemporary desires for a utopian society that all of the retrofuturism stuff pulled from Steampunk feels a bit out of place.

Despite my quibbles with the original post, the core concept of an optimistic speculative future based in renewable energy and the creation of communities is overall very appealing, and the aesthetics that people who like that concept have honed in on are definitely neat. I think it says something that a cursory scroll through the Solarpunk tag is almost exclusively like, things in the world now that folks think could bring us closer to that idealized future, developments in clean energy and degrowth and all that good stuff. People have mostly latched on to the parts that make sense for current contemporary futurism and left the parts that are more based in retrofuturism behind.

On the other hand though, the Solarpunk tag doesn't have a ton of like, Solarpunk fiction in it. There's the occasional bit of art or comic page, but like, people aren't in the Solarpunk tag talking about movies and books much. The most common example people give of Solarpunk media is Pokemon, and like. I love Pokemon, don't get me wrong, but there are only some parts of the setting that are really Like That, like earlier gens had stuff like Sunyshore City and all but Gen 8 was basically about an exploitative megacorp that doesn't change at all after you fight its CEO.

Of course, that's a pretty limited slice of what people have written and said about Solarpunk. A cursory scroll in the tag is not rigorous reading. The thing is, though, it's kind of hard to track down the origins of many of the later ideas in Solarpunk because most of it comes from other Tumblr posts, and Tumblr's search function is... notoriously broken. Most of the criticisms I'm laying (and will continue to lay) on Solarpunk based on a small subset of people in the space have probably already been answered by someone or another, but the issue is that there isn't really any kind of unified canon in the way of Cyberpunk. And this, once again, goes back to how the foundational texts of the genre are almost entirely contained in blog posts and social media ephemera.

So, what do we do? How do we tell stories in this space that has essentially become the past decade's idea of an actually possible idyllic future? Well, I hate to say it, but the best way I can think of to write in this space is to drill in on its flaws. Solarpunk's ideas of what a good future looks like are deeply liberal, deeply middle-class, deeply first-world. It imagines an urbanist utopia of perfect little clean cities, poverty eradicated through means best left as an exercise to the reader. Some individual folks have more global perspectives on what that looks like, but at its core within our current systems a mass solar transition for the first world is built on the back of exploitation of the third world. Fundamentally, it imagines solutions to the problems of today that allow us to mostly live undisturbed consumer lives. Tackling and addressing these criticisms could be the thematic driver for stories in a solarpunk setting.

It always comes back to the age-old question: utopia for who? If the eventual end state is 'utopia for ALL', then the story of how we get there, how we tackle the complicated problems, how it's just plain not as simple as 'everyone has clean energy and the climate is saved', that's where the story is, at least in my opinion.

Or, we could actually lean *more* into the less futurist and more speculative/fantastical aspects of the setting. Solarpunk has largely morphed into a genre that wants to explore the near future of today, but like. The alternate history Solarpunk novel where Al Gore became president in 2001 and that didn't fix everything but it sure did move the needle on the climate would be interesting. Solarpunk would work pretty well as a basis for some kind of noblebright urban fantasy as well; imperfect utopia, utopia at the fringes, burgeoning or in decline, there are stories to tell here. It's a bit harder to find things to tell stories about at the height of a proper utopia, but like. A villain can be anywhere. Solarpunk would have its opposition, does have its opposition. It's not terribly hard to imagine what types of internal threats might challenge the utopia.

And like, I'm not a terribly creative person, and I came up with this shit just spitballin'. There are stories to be told here. In my opinion, the most interesting ones would be challenging some of the setting's core assumptions and resolving the challenges in a way that still maintains the core optimism, but like, that's not the only way to tell the story by a long shot.

I think a lot of the reason there's not been a ton of big solarpunk-style media is because it's inherently utopian and that leads to a real lack of conflict. Which is a shame that there's not a lot, because I LOVE how Solarpunk looks! But A lot of it is very big-scale from what I've seen; theorizing about ways man can integrate technology with nature, but not really what man is actually doing after that. What are the kinds of lives people would live in a solarpunk city? Surely actual human stories don't simply end because a lot of our needs are met. There's gotta be something!!

[cognitivejustice]

“The more we go for clean energy, the more resistant we are to global conflicts because nobody can take solar or wind as a hostage,”

International Energy Agency boss Dr Fatih Birol

According to Dr Birol, we are entering “the age of electricity”, and the majority of it is produced from clean energy. 

Solar, wind, hydropower and nuclear make up a big part of Europe’s clean mix but Dr Birol suggests geothermal energy should become a more important ingredient in the bloc’s energy cocktail. 

“This can help us to generate electricity without interruption,” Dr Birol explained, adding that, unlike wind or solar, it’s available 24/7. 

“We are working hard to bring the cost of geothermal energy down so that it also complements solar and wind.”

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

In today’s episode, Ariel chats with Heather MacKenzie, Executive Director of Solar Alberta, about transitioning to renewable energy deep in the heart of oil and gas country - in a just and sustainable way. Join us to learn about the history of the Solar Alberta organization, from its grassroots beginnings in neighbourhood solar projects, to dealing with (government-funded!) trolls online, all the way up to being the leading non-profit solar organization in Alberta and providing worker upskilling in a unique market.

You can go to https://solaralberta.ca to learn more, or connect with and follow them on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Connect with Solarpunk Magazine at solarpunkmagazine.com and on Twitter @solarpunklitmag

Connect with Solarpunk Presents Podcast on Twitter @SolarpunkP, Mastodon @solarpunkpresents@climatejustice.rocks, or at our blog https://solarpunkpresents.com/

Connect with Ariel at her blog, on Twitter at @arielletje, and on Mastodon @arielkroon@wandering.shop

Connect with Christina at her blog, on Twitter @xtinadlr, and on Mastodon @xtinadlr@wandering.shop

[13thpythagoras]

I wonder what the shelf life of a sugar battery is

I aso wonder how to "DIY" a sugar battery

consider that hemp-based plastic is more ecologically friendly and that hemp-based fiberglass is more impact-resistant than steel. Wood and bamboo also compare well to steel pound for pound

Considering a way to turn around an impoverished oil-strangled place like Haiti, which could instead farm sugar and hemp to make their own rechargeable batteries and electric vehicles that run on local clean energy, free of the shackles of having to import dirty foreign fossil fuel energy. Fuck the monopolist oppressors and oil crapitalists, power to the people always and much love to Haiti and all oppressed nations and people. White supremacy is a mafia and its front business is big oil, defunding and replacing big oil is to defund and replace white supremacy.

[solarpunks]

2040 is a hybrid feature documentary that looks to the future, but is vitally important NOW!

The 2040 journey began with award-winning director Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film). Motivated by concerns about the planet his 4-year-old daughter would inherit, Damon embarked on a global journey to meet innovators and changemakers in the areas of economics, technology, civil society, agriculture, education and sustainability. Drawing on their expertise, he sought to identify the best solutions, available to us now, that would help improve the health of our planet and the societies that operate within it. From marine permaculture to decentralised renewable energy projects, he discovered that people all over the world are taking matters into their own hands.

This journey is the central premise for the documentary ‘2040’, a story of hope that looks at the very real possibility that humanity could reverse global warming and improve the lives of every living thing in the process. It is a positive vision of what ‘could be’, instead of the dystopian future we are so often presented.

This film looks absolutely fantastic. Can’t wait to watch it.